A Crown for Cold Silver

by Alex Marshall

Purna helped Maroto to a drink as Hoartrap blathered at the petrified ponces. The ale was sour as tart cider, but cool on his ragged throat and feverish brow. As Maroto watched the game, Hoartrap pulled out the curved black pipe Zosia had carved for the sorcerer way back when they were all on an endless campaign against King Kaldruut, before she’d stolen his crown with little more than some well-spent silver and a whole lot of angry peasants.

  What would a pipe like that be worth, Maroto wondered, hand-carved by the Stricken Queen before she conquered Samoth? Probably a whole devil-load more than he had pawned his for, back when he was suckling on the honeyed stinger—like so much from those days, he couldn’t remember how he’d parted with it, only the day where he’d reached for it and found it gone, so he’d reached for another graveworm or scorpion instead. After all these months on her trail, he still harbored a tenderness over not being invited back to the Company, inventing countless scenarios for why she hadn’t been able to find him… but all cards being down, it might could be she just knew what an inconstant son of a centipede he was, and thought herself better served by his absence.

  “Care for a dip in my pouch?” Hoartrap said, and Maroto realized he’d been staring covetously at the sorcerer’s pipe.

  “Nah, I’m good.” The tambo-stick Hoartrap had shaved into flakes and stuffed into his bowl was putting off a column of harsh dark smoke that smelled more like poison than tubāq, and even if he’d had his old briar there was no chance Maroto would have ghosted his bowl with that nastiness. “Looks like the duchess bluffed you, old man. You ought to pay more attention.”

  “Rare is the game that is made more enjoyable by being played more seriously,” said Hoartrap. “A philosophy I have found applicable in literally all aspects of my existence. Ah, a worthy call, Count Hassan, a worthy call!”

  Many hands later, somebody tried the door. Diggelby stood, Prince growling softly from his post under the table, but Hoartrap waved him back down without even looking up from his cards. Maroto’s heart felt like he’d just provoked a bite out of a thunder wasp as he stared at the door, said aloud what he knew Hoartrap was also thinking: “If it’s her, she’ll force it.”

  The door shook again. Wood groaned. Metal began biting into it. The nobles stared along with Maroto, but Hoartrap coaxed Hassan back to the table by raising the already substantial pot three dinars.

  Then the door gave. It was bright inside the tavern, Hoartrap having waved the lamps alight when the sun had set beyond the oilcloth-covered windows, but outside it was dark as a stinghouse basement, and the woman who stood before a crowd of heavily armed soldiers was silhouetted in the splintered doorway.

  Maroto didn’t stand so much as float to his feet, the one thing that could banish the agony in his battered skull at last before him. His vision tightened, his good ear pricked, and every inch of him tingled the way it did in the heat of battle, when all distractions fell away and the fight became everything. Zosia.

  She strode into the room, imperious as was her due, and behind her came Fennec, the old crook. His fox helm sparkled, unblemished even after all these years, even after all the action it had seen, but Maroto’s eyes passed over this in a twinkling to focus on Zosia’s. It stopped his heart. A devil dog, snarling, with the twisted tendrils of a silver crown rising from the steel mask. How many hours had he spent helping her bend those tines back into shape after a battle, how many spikes had he helped replace after a close encounter with sword, ax, or hammer?

  Zosia came to him, and Maroto gulped her down like a reformed drunkard tasting soju after a decade of sobriety. This was not the Zosia he remembered, this was Zosia from the portraits she had begrudgingly sat for in the Crimson Throne Room… just before their world had fallen apart.

  Midnight blue riding boots came up to her knees, their cuffs banded with silver. Bare, dirtied, and perfect skin followed, her thighs shining with sweat despite the coolness of the night, nothing shielding her from assault or his eyes but a sheer loincloth of polished chainmail. Then her sculpted navel, her solid flanks, and another strip of silver links, her breasts barely constrained by the small outposts of armor. Beyond her helm and this briefest of defenses, so modest as to mock the dangers of combat rather than to offer any actual protection, she wore but a deep red cloak. Onto this burgundy cape spilled cobalt blue hair, the helm designed to let it flow wild—again, the spectacle was everything, her attire a laughing defiance of the suggestion that this woman had anything to fear in all the Star.

  This was Zosia as Maroto had envisioned her ten thousand times, Zosia as she lived in his dreams long after all swore she had perished at Diadem. This was Zosia as he had always wanted her, how he had begged her to be.

  In other words, whoever this masked, half-naked, blue-haired woman was, she definitely wasn’t Zosia. He had let himself pretend for the last blessed months that his beloved was alive, but now, truly, he knew she was dead. Like so many others, he had been fooled by an impostor, taken in by an impossible dream. Maroto let the floor take him, as he had so many times before.

  CHAPTER

  26

  Diadem was built before the Haunted Sea swallowed the Sunken Kingdom and shadows devoured Emeritus. More than just the capital of the province of Samoth, more, even, than serving as seat of the entire Crimson Empire and anchor of the Burnished Chain, Diadem was the last stronghold built before the Age of Wonders ended, a monument to the ingenuity of mortals and the ability of the devils they bound. Even if all the world should plunge into darkness, Diadem’s radiance would continue to shine from the crown of the Star, a beacon for mortals from every corner of the Empire, from every Arm and every isle, forever and ever.

  So the Chain Canticles said, anyway. Sister Portolés had come to Diadem kicking and hissing, not even an anathema then, simply a young monster in desperate need of salvation. She had received it, Fallen Mother be praised, but even after they made her nearly human, even after she learned to pray for her exterminated family instead of weeping for them, she had never seen much of Diadem beyond the Dens built into the walls of the dead volcano that enveloped the city. Even when she had ridden out to war against or beside the Imperials, she had only ever passed through a tiny section of the city.

  Now she had permission to go anywhere, to see everything, and before she left the capital on her mission she decided to get her feet wet closer to home. The expectation of simply wandering Diadem with impunity filled her with as much dread as it did joy, and the prospect of visiting the Office of Answers in particular made her squirm—but that was the only place the queen expressly suggested she investigate before departing.

  According to the gatekeeper who gave Portolés directions, the most direct route from the warrenlike confines of the Dens to the smoother, orderly halls of the Office of Answers took one on a tour of the capital’s tunnel system, traversing steeply arched bridges over ice-rimed sewer canals and causeways that dipped low through fungal gardens. Upon leaving the Upper Chainhouse, one descended five hundred and one steps, and while crossing the Forest of Eternal Sin replaced no fewer than thirteen of the candles that had invariably burned to nubs on the countless stalactites. Then a climb of precisely five hundred steps to the black rattan gate that separated the Papal territories of Castle Diadem from the Imperial.

  Sister Portolés opted to deviate from this course at the first opportunity, offering the necessary salutes and signals for the wardens to let her pass out of the surrounding walls and into the city. This exchange of time-honored gestures was more or less a formality, as the wardens’ purpose was to prevent citizens from getting into the citadel, rather than to forestall officers of church or state from leaving it. The outer door opened, and beyond it lay the bursting city of Diadem.

  Wide as the caldera stretched, the five-hundred-year-old settlement had quickly spread from its heart to crowd the whole expanse, until there was nowhere left to build but up. Risky business, that, both practically and socially—climb too high too quickly and your better-born neighbor
s might sabotage your foundations in the night. No wonder even the fickle serfs here in the capital had rallied behind the Stricken Queen, after she’d opened up the dry, spacious caverns of Castle Diadem for public use. That reform had outlived the doomed despot for all of a week, before Queen Indsorith and Pope Shanatu ran them back outside into the gloomy city. According to the older anathemas in the Dens who had lived through those tumultuous times, it had taken months for the stink of false hope and abject poverty to fade from the interior.

  Stepping down the black stairs into the black mud of the streets, Portolés smiled up into the black rain that fell onto the black cloth mask her kind wore when interacting with the pureborn. In the capital, anyway; the army put a stop to that practice as soon as they were a dozen miles outside Diadem’s walls—allowing masked figures free range of your camp was asking for trouble.

  Even after all these hallowed centuries since the first frame was raised, the walls of every tall, teetering building bled black in the rain, the ash of this sacred ground permeating every timber, brick, and shingle. The only color to be seen in the whole place was the steel blue scraps of storm cloud Portolés made out through chinks in the tightly clustered eaves far above her. From down here it was impossible to see the gay garments the upper classes supposedly wore to spite the grey heavens as they traversed their covered catwalks, and down here the hunched citizens thronging the narrow streets she passed through were draped in dark oilcloth robes not dissimilar from her habit. None but Portolés wore the mask of the witchborn, though, and passersby gave her a wide berth in even the tightest alley between listing estates that stretched close to a hundred feet into the air, the structures rocking ever so slightly in the keening wind. It was dimmer here, now, at midday beneath the open sky, than it ever got in the candlelit grottos of the Dens.

  Portolés meandered through the ghettos of Raniputri and Usban, ate a flatfish tsire handpie she purchased from a Flintlander’s cart, nodded her curt approval to a gaggle of shriven and branded Immaculate converts praying in the muck beside a line of penitents waiting to be admitted to the West Cathedral. Ashy mud plastered her sandaled feet until they resembled boots. At last, stuck to an announcement board on the covered porch of a condemned tavern, she found what she had sought: a bill printed on a drab sheet of rag paper. Two words that made the sister run hot then cold, her eyes flitting all about the dreary backstreet in nervous guilt, as though she had been the one to stick up the flyer.

  ZOSIA LIVES!

  There were several bundled figures lying on the porch, and once she was sure they were truly asleep Portolés reached for the bill with shaking fingers, as though it might scald her. It peeled back from the soft, damp board like an almost-ripe scab coming loose under a persistent fingernail. Folding and slipping the bill down her habit so that it was lodged in the binding that held her sweaty left breast, she hurried away. This was the sort of thing the queen had suggested she retrieve from the Office of Answers, but before she braved that dread department she had wanted to see for herself if the revolutionary propaganda was as prevalent in the wild as Her Majesty had suggested… And lo, it had taken only a bit of wandering around until she’d stumbled onto the bill, the search nowhere near so arduous as she’d expected.

  Not that Portolés had possessed any cause to disbelieve Queen Indsorith on this matter, or any other, but ever since Kypck the war nun had been unable to stop herself from doubting virtually everything. This pervasive uncertainty was part of why she had agreed to honor the vows she had made to her queen, instead of those she had made to her church—Queen Indsorith alone had agreed with her that it was a sin to have executed those villagers and the disobedient soldiers, no matter who gave the order. Prior to this surprisingly liberating confirmation of Portolés’s culpability, every single superior she had confessed to was primarily concerned that one of the Chain’s anathemas had let an Imperial colonel die under her watch. Everything was backward, the Queen of Samoth quietly reflecting on spiritual matters while the Pope of the Burnished Chain raged over military failings.

  In the end it was her doubt that propelled Portolés into the decisions she had made, decisions that had seemed so easy at the time but now stunned her with their enormity. Did her loyalty to her queen make her a traitor to her church? To the Fallen Mother? It was an unnerving experience, to trust in her intuition, as the queen had urged her, when all her life she had been taught that her impulses were not her own, that they came from the Deceiver to ensnare her soul. Yet here she had taken a first faltering step down that road, beginning her search out in the muddy streets instead of where the queen had suggested, and by giving in to her instinct she now had one less doubt to tax her cluttered skull. Curiosity, it seemed, might have its uses, despite how fervently the Chain derided that sin above all others.

  She realized she had become lost, the anonymous streets giving up no hint as to which direction she stomped, and she paused at a mucky intersection. As soon as the panic of not knowing tightened her chest, though, she blew it out like so much bad air—Diadem was a ring, albeit an enormous one, and so long as she plodded forward she would find her way back to the castle in time. As if that wasn’t the heaviest symbol ever to be wrought in stained glass, she thought with a smile.

  Far in as she’d come, it took some time for her to get back out to the edge of town and reenter the castle. Several times as she passed higher and higher into Diadem’s flanks she touched the bill that rested atop her heart; when offering the queen’s writ to the guards who frequently barred her way she imagined giving them the flyer instead. She couldn’t decide if those two words printed upon it were simply treason, or outright heresy.

  When she was at last admitted to the open floor of the Office of Answers’ Truth Chamber, the dozens of people undergoing questioning caused her stair-winded breath to catch in her tight chest. Considering there were far more individuals strapped to gurneys and chairs than there were Askers to tend them, the Office must be a bit understaffed at present.

  “Raided a cell in Lower Leviathania,” supplied the sweaty young clerk charged with chaperoning Portolés. “Usually we don’t cram them in like this, but the holding pens are overfull, so we’re making do.”

  Like all in the Office of Answers, he went naked while in the stiflingly warm Truth Chamber. The Askers had nothing to hide from their guests. By the light of the azure-flamed braziers reflecting off the polished floor of volcanic glass, Portolés eyed him for signs of deviltry, though she knew witchborn were forbidden from serving in the Office. That was not the way the state conducted itself. Portolés, on a real roll with thoughts both heretical and treasonous, wondered briefly if the Office would feel the same if those anathemas who could supposedly peek into minds could do so with strangers instead of only those with whom they were already intimate.

  Regardless, everyone seemed to be predicting Portolés’s thoughts of late, and it was making her paranoid. She jumped when an old woman’s scream choked off into a gurgle as her tongue was removed with burnished shears that looked much like those used by the Papal barbers to heal the witchborn. Looking around at the other instruments in use or laid out on tables, and the dark swirling pools flowing into the numerous floor grates, she found much to compare with the operating theater where she had been rendered as pure as the church could make her. Bad memories surged up in her gorge… or maybe it was just the peanuty flatfish she’d eaten.

  “They were all caught in the act?” she asked.

  “A few ringleaders, and a lot of folk just looking for easy work or a dry bed.” The clerk sighed. “It’s always like this. Don’t worry, sister, most of them will be turned over to your people soon enough.”

  “And all this was found in their quarters?” Portolés’s heart tapped at the bill resting above it as she surveyed the table piled high with identical leaflets and several aged, weatherworn folios. “Propaganda?”

  “That’s one word for it,” said the clerk. “I’m sure you’d call it something else. Was
there someone in particular we could help you find? Even if they are not here we could have them to you in hours, I assure you.”

  Portolés picked up one of the folios, flipped through it, tossed it down, and picked up another. Beneath the mask that limply clung to her sweaty face she could feel her cheeks burn from more than the heat. The name of the Stricken Queen, appearing over and over, on every page… Surely the authors had known their words could land them here, and yet the text spoke to their fearlessness. Fearlessness, or a need to put it down in ink, regardless of the cost. The vellum folio in her hands was only half written, waiting to be completed in the cramped yet precise script—did the author still have her fingers, or were they already in a vise?

  “I’m taking this,” she said, as much to herself as to the clerk. “Do you need to make note of that before I take my leave?”

  “Revered Sister, you can’t—” the clerk began, then amended himself when she glanced up from the book. “That is, the Office, under direct orders of the queen, has immediate need of it. I will personally copy its contents for you and—”

  “Do I need to show you my writ again, boy?” said Portolés, flushing anew with the overconfident words.

  “No, Revered Sister,” said the clerk, looking at his bare feet.

  This was the extent of the power her queen had granted Portolés. It was staggering. She might die on the morrow, but for today she, an anathema, had authority unrivaled by any save the Crimson Queen or the Black Pope. By any means necessary meant by any means she wished, and pity the pureborn who questioned her will. Out of habit she tried to choke down her smile, but then reminded herself she was entitled to grin from ear to ear.

  “I also wish to speak with the author. Someone here wrote it, yes?”

  “We won’t know that unless we are permitted to use it in our questioning, will we?” said the clerk with a bit more attitude than Portolés expected. It was a fair point, though.