A Crown for Cold Silver

by Alex Marshall

  Singh fought like a devil, but Zosia fought like a witch trying to bind one. After Zosia’s sucker punch failed to drop her, Singh tried to keep her at a distance, pummeling the older woman with her longer limbs. Zosia careened through the onslaught, deflecting what she could with her ropy forearms and shrugging off what she couldn’t. She got in close, firing a chain of punches right into Singh’s stomach, chest, and throat. It felt like hitting a shield, only harder.

  Singh popped her knee up between them, uppercutting Zosia’s left breast. Then she tackled Zosia to the ground, legs and arms coiling around her like a funnel python’s rubbery tentacles and locking into place. The crook of Singh’s elbow choked her, and through watering eyes Zosia looked for Choplicker. This was it. Her devil was nowhere to be seen, and no matter how she contorted herself or how viciously she jabbed with her elbows, Singh only bore down harder.

  Zosia panicked. This sort of end had always been a possibility, and she’d always imagined herself going with dignity, maybe a wry last word to her executioner, but now that it was really happening she couldn’t help herself. The more the strength went out of her the harder she raged, choking herself even worse in the process. What a way to go—throttled by one of your best friends, universally reviled to such a degree that even the devil bound to you would rather suffer an eternity of imprisonment over your grave than intervene to save you. Perhaps Choplicker knew she would never set him free, even if he helped her now, and so sought to get it over with rather than prolonging the inevitable…

  Zosia realized these were dream musings, that her throat no longer burned, that she had floated away from Singh, from the stinghouse, from the Star. Untethered, she drifted through a moonless, starless sky… or the depths of a lightless sea. As soon as it occurred to her that she was dying, or maybe even already dead, the Diadem Gate appeared before her, the alabaster rim luminous even without sun or moon to reflect upon its etched surface. Beyond that border a deeper darkness rippled, and something colder and more primal than even the fear of death filled her lungs, stopped her heart, and caused her to impotently claw and kick the void around her as she floated inexorably toward the Gate.

  Singh slapped her awake, gently-like. “Ups time, Queenie. This isn’t that sort of fairy tale.”

  “Buh!” Zosia rasped, sitting up and shivering. They were still in the bugroom, Singh’s lined face highlighted by the chaotic dimming and brightening of the firewings in the terrarium above Zosia’s pillowy bower. Keun-ju and Singh’s guards had left, but Choplicker remained, the furry piece of shit lying on the far side of the room, watching them. She spit blood at him, and said, “Didn’t think it was possible you could hate me as much as I hate you.”

  Singh followed her gaze. “Devils see further and farther than mortals, you of all people know this. He wouldn’t have let me kill you. No devil is that stubborn.”

  “That’s what you say,” said Zosia, blinking the cup in Singh’s hand into focus and taking it in her own shaking fingers. Honeyed water. Warmer than she liked, and it hurt to swallow, but it soothed her raw throat. “You ever heard of a devil turning down its freedom?”

  “Never,” said Singh. “But they are not gods, Zosia—if a devil cannot fulfill a wish, it cannot fulfill a wish. Have you thought about why it might not have been attainable?”

  “If I knew why, I’d be long shy of him,” Zosia said darkly, raising her voice to make sure he heard. “Whatever his reasons, I don’t think my wish was asking much at all, powerful as Hoartrap said he was. I’m starting to think the fucker’s got a high opinion of himself, is holding out for a request worthy of his regard. Joke’s on him, because the more I think on it the more I’ve come to realize the thing I want most in the whole wide world is to pay him back for all the heartache he’s given me. I hope he’s there when I go, so I can look him in the eye before leaving his worthless hide to rot for all time in a hell of his own making.”

  The silence stretched on after this pronouncement, kept stretching as if it might extend forever. Singh broke it by reaching over and hugging Zosia, saying, “Oh, sister, how I’ve missed you. I wore white for the week after I heard about Leib and your people, and had my sons prepare them a banquet in the Kitchen of the Gods. I am overjoyed to see you alive and hale, but would have preferred to think you dead, so long as you and yours were living happy lives.”

  “Thanks,” said Zosia, wincing as she straightened up on the pillows. Singh had really nailed her in the tit. “Good to be missed, especially if this is the welcome I get when I visit.”

  “You struck me, Zosia, and in front of my children—I should have taken it, thanked you, and asked to kiss your bottom?” Singh stood and went to one of the terrariums built into the walls. “I’ll get you something for the pain.”

  “No thanks,” said Zosia. “You said Kang-ho sent you to kill me, Singh, what should I have done? Next time, open with ‘I’m not going to do it, but here’s what’s up.’ Save us both some bruises.”

  “I’m not bruised,” said Singh, shuddering on a long, fine-mailed glove and sliding open a panel above the glass cage. “And I would have hoped you’d trust me, after all we’ve been through. I owe you my life, General, a dozen times over.”

  “So does Kang-ho, and he still tried to get me dead. Maybe to his thinking if you did the backstabbing for him it wouldn’t count.” Talk Singh into helping, track down Fennec and Princess Ji-hyeon, ransom the girl back to Hwabun, screw Kang-ho over in the process, and then hit Samoth and its evil queen with everything she had. That order. Oh, and Bang—that punkass pirate needed to get hers, too. “I told you I don’t want any bugs, Singh, don’t make this weird.”

  Singh had reached into a narrow terrarium and, tapping her mailed pinky on the leaves of a nettle, enticed a sinuous insect from its hiding place on the plant’s stem. The centipede darted forward, burying its head in the mail and coiling itself around the finger. Singh cautiously raised her hand from the glass cage and held the centipede-wrapped pinky up to her pursed lips. She slowly brushed the creature’s downy back against her mouth, her lips puffing out in bright magenta blooms as she returned the insect to its enclosure and gently thumbed it off its perch. “Mmmmmm. That’s much better.”

  “And here I’d heard Maroto was the one who’d gone buggy.”

  “Oh gods, Maroto! That’s a tragic case, all right—Kang-ho told you what happened to him, then?”

  “Only that he didn’t stay on with the new queen,” said Zosia, still marveling that of all her Villains Maroto had been the one to ignore her will and thrown down in her memory. “Kang-ho said you and Hoartrap were the only ones who followed orders on that count.”

  “Don’t remind me,” said Singh, swaying back over to where Zosia sat and plopping down in the cushions beside her. She rooted around and retrieved a pillow that turned out to be a thickly padded pipe-purse. “You want to borrow one of mine? I sent your things off with your boy, and I’m guessing you don’t want him listening in, if he’s one of Kang-ho’s.”

  “Definitely. On the pipe, I mean, not so sure about the boy working for Kang-ho,” said Zosia. “Whatever you’re puffing is good—too much to hope you still have that devil I whittled you?”

  “Keśi rides,” said Singh, passing over the pipe Zosia had carved her during the Siege of Rondio. Whereas most of the pieces Zosia crafted aspired to beauty, Singh had expressly asked her to carve an eyesore; a pretty pipe was both provocation to pride and a target for thieves, but a beater would invite no such attention. Zosia obliged the knight, first shaping the finest billiard she had ever wrestled from the briar, and then scuffing and scratching and chipping away at it until it looked like an animal had chewed it. Instead of leaving it natural or giving it a traditional stain, she colored it sickly yellow, highlighted with splotches of green and white. The finishing touch was a short, slightly crooked stem whittled from the tusk of a devil horse they had brought down together in the acid-dripping jungles of the Forsaken Empire.

  “I made
the walls too thin,” said Zosia, inspecting the pipe. “This must smoke hotter than a devil’s fart.”

  “Reminds me to pace myself,” said Singh, retrieving a handsome meerschaum pipe from the purse for herself. The bowl was intricately carved in the shape of a woman’s face. Peering closer, Zosia saw it was modeled after Singh right down to the mustache. Heavy usage had darkened the white clay, browning it like good toast and making the resemblance uncanny. So much for chivalric humility. Singh waved it at her. “Outlandish, isn’t it? The kids got it for me when I turned fifty, and I’m ashamed to say I’ve been relying on it of late. You don’t have to rest it like briar, so on days when I need a few bowls to see me through she’s a welcome sister.”

  Singh sliced medallions off a tawny rope of palm-wine-infused tubāq and tossed two of them to Zosia, who rubbed hers out before packing Keśi. Singh simply folded hers into the meerschaum bowl. If Zosia had been smoking with any of the other Villains she would have insisted they switch pipes now, given the trick Kang-ho had pulled on her, but Singh would never stoop to such treachery. Not if she didn’t have to, anyway, and if she’d wanted to drug Zosia she could have shoved her nose full of icebees while she was choked out.

  Zosia gladly accepted the glass lamp and whangee tamp Singh offered, and once they both had their pipes well lit they relaxed back in their pillow piles and smoked in contented silence. Zosia knew sooner or later they would talk, and when they did she might not like what Singh had to say, so it was better to prolong this rare happiness as long as possible. The back of her mind roiled with a dozen questions, a hundred suspicious, but she shut them out to again bask in the companionable quiet she and Singh always found together. Not even the throbbing ache in her breast could detract from the experience. When her thirst got the better of her and she sat up to ask her host to send for a draught, Singh seemed to read her thoughts and before she could speak tugged on a bell rope. They grinned at one another through the spicy fog, it becoming a competition to see who would crack first, but it wasn’t until a turbaned woman brought in a low table and a bareheaded, bun-wearing man followed with a laden tea tray that Zosia broke the silence.

  “Thank you both, truly.” Looking to Singh, she asked, “Yours?”

  “Sriram, my second son, and Udbala, my third daughter.”

  “You honor me, Mahārājñī Zosia,” the two said in unison, each taking a knee.

  “Your kids, all right,” said Zosia. “Enough of that, you two, no bowing to me. Not unless your mother does first.”

  The son looked confused by this, the daughter looked insulted, but Singh just waved them off. “Make sure our other guest is being looked after. And if I see you chewing betel in my house again, Udbala, I’ll really make that mouth red.”

  Zosia waited until the children had left before saying, “I thought your teeth looked pretty clean.”

  “Quit gnawing that trash years ago,” said Singh, pouring the chai and retrieving the pipe from where she had propped it against the tray. “Even now, though, I see them spit and I get the old craving. Hard to believe I used to have more spittoons than pipes.”

  “Good-looking kids—there were four girls in here when Keun-ju and I arrived; they all yours?”

  “Only Udbala, the other three are nieces. My twins aren’t speaking to me right now—I wouldn’t support a harebrained campaign they were launching against a nearby Dominion. Even though I tried to talk them out of it they blame me for their failure. It’s just too stupid for words.”

  “Free counsel can be pretty expensive, if you don’t heed it,” said Zosia.

  “Hmmm,” said Singh, relighting her pipe while Zosia sipped the buttery tea. “That sounds like a wise saying, but I’m not sure it actually makes much sense. Anyway, the girls are good, other than being brats. I also have a pair of sons who haven’t done anything too idiotic of late. My eldest, Masood, is fomenting a rebellion in Thantifax, the capital of the next Dominion over. That’s another reason Umhur and Urbar are mad at me; they think I’m playing favorites by casting my lot with him but not them. Ugh. This stinghouse belongs to the other one you just met, Sriram. It’s a cover to launder money for the Dull Kriss, a revolutionary faction that we’re steering away from Zygnema by offering them stakes in Thantifax.”

  “The nut doesn’t fall far from the bush, I guess,” said Zosia, biting into a biscuit. “Five kids sounds like a lot. How do you find time to work?”

  “The grandchildren are where things get complicated,” said Singh. “When it was just my brood, it was easy—I rode an elephant into Daar with a twin on each tit, and their father looked after them when I rappelled down the side to accept a challenge from the raja we were unseating. It’s a hassle to duel with a big belly and your dugs all sore and leaking, to be sure, but it’s better than fighting with a broken leg or arm, and we’ve both done that well enough. The grandchildren, though, for some reason I get nervous around them, more nervous than I ever was with mine. They stay with a nurse rather than riding with us into battle, and the whole blessed time I’m worrying about what might go wrong back at home—what if the nanny doesn’t let the milk cool, that sort of thing. Stop smiling, it’s embarrassing!”

  “I’m glad you’ve done so well for yourself,” said Zosia, and though she meant it with all her heart there came hot on its heels another thought, a darker one. Why were Singh and Kang-ho allowed to start over, in plain sight and with any riches they’d plundered from the Crimson Empire, when she and Leib had forsaken everything, even her name, and were still punished absolutely?

  This wasn’t a rhetorical question—woe is Zosia, where is the justice in the world, that kind of shit. Zosia had been queen for a full year before becoming so depressed with her ineffectuality that she preferred to fake her own death rather than continue to rule, so she would never begrudge the devils for her ill fortune, or an old friend for her better luck. No, the question of why Kang-ho and Singh were doing so well, living under their own names, demanded an answer. If Zosia had been in Indsorith’s position, she would have targeted each of the Five Villains first, and only when they had all been brought down would she have gone after their leader. The captains would be easier to find, for one thing, and if the assassination of their general failed, as it had, she would not have been able to fall back on her Villains for aid. It was so obvious an oversight that it gave her pause, until she remembered what Kang-ho had said about the aftermath of her abdication—Singh and Hoartrap had helped Indsorith solidify her rule. Odds were Kang-ho had been less than forthcoming about his own involvement in aiding Indsorith…

  “Kang-ho wants me dead,” said Zosia, grimacing at the thought. If she couldn’t trust him, how could she trust any of the Villains? Other than Maroto, anyway—it sounded like he had kept the faith… but even if he hadn’t fallen off the way the others claimed, she would prefer to go it alone than waste time hunting him down for dubious reward. And really, if Singh was working the same angles as Kang-ho, Zosia would already be dead. “Chevaleresse, give me your word of honor you’re not working for Queen Indsorith.”

  “Given,” said Singh. “I left her employ some fifteen years past, and only stayed on as long as I did because it was the dying wish of my fearless leader that I do so. Remember?”

  “Oh, I remember, all right,” said Zosia. “But Kang-ho’s working for her, that seems obvious now. I wonder if he even has a daughter—maybe everyone from Hwabun has been playing me, even the Virtue Guard.”

  “Zosia, Zosia, Zosia,” said Singh. “You sound paranoid. The daughter’s real, I assure you, although I will remind you that just a few minutes ago I cautioned against trusting the Virtue Guard. As for Kang-ho, he made off with a substantial portion of Diadem’s treasury shortly after your fall—the queen must hate him even more than she hates Fennec and Maroto. I cannot imagine she is terribly pleased with Hoartrap or myself, either, considering how we left things with her. So the queen found out you were alive and went after you—that’s a bad break, no question, but I
wouldn’t make the matter worse by imagining conspiracies.”

  “All right then, Singh, did Brother Kang-ho give you any other motive for ordering my assassination?” Choplicker had picked himself up and padded over to beg for a biscuit. He’d be begging for a while.

  “I’m sure it has something to do with this,” said Singh, hopping up from the pillows with enviable ease and retrieving a large piece of parchment from a drawer in the base of a terrarium. She shot out her hand, launching the paper through the air, and Zosia snatched it as it floated down to her. The chai curdled in her mouth as she saw what it said, and she crumpled the bill in her fist.

  “What the devils is this? Kang-ho sent it?”

  “No, that one I found down at the customs house—there’s a board out front for flyers. They’re less common in the Dominions, but I hear in the Empire they’re showing up on every corner.”

  “What’s the angle?” said Zosia, unballing the poster to make sure she hadn’t missed anything. She hadn’t—hard to miss much in two little words. “I don’t get it. The queen’s the only one who knew, so why… this? She wouldn’t put them up; a bounty poster, maybe. Who’s announcing my return, and why?”

  “Oh, those have been around for years,” explained Singh, digging through the drawer for something else. “You’ve heard that Indsorith banished your name, likeness, and everything else, yes? The Stricken Queen is how you’re referred to, when bringing you up at all is completely unavoidable. So that was a popular slogan for your supporters when Indsorith took over, a petty defiance. Graffiti, nothing more. Over the last year, though, it’s become something quite a bit different. A rallying cry.”