A Crown for Cold Silver

by Alex Marshall

  “Don’t get comfortable,” he called to Diggelby and Hassan as they collapsed onto the harsh brown summit of the saddle. “Soon as Choi shows herself we’re moving out, and fast. Too exposed up here.”

  “They need a rest, Maroto,” said Purna, her own face ruddy and sleek with sweat. The fops had learned to leave the makeup in its case on mornings that started with a steady climb up an exposed mountainside. “Look at them. You think we’re going slow now, wait until someone snaps an ankle because you’re pushing them too hard.”

  “Take it up with Choi,” said Maroto, eyeing the alpine meadows into which the slope poured its talus like a waterfall of sharp stones. Somewhere down there the weirdborn was creeping around, and as soon as they got her signal they could—

  “Stay here until dark,” came Choi’s voice from above them. Except for her modest horns, which were mostly hidden by her mesh hat, the white-haired weirdborn looked enough like a normal woman, sitting around camp with the rest of the crew… but nobody watching her melt down the sheer peak beside them could mistake her for human. Too fast, too surefooted, too damn devilish. “There’s a regiment nesting in the next meadow, and they will have more scouts down there watching the descent from this pass. If we come down now we will be witnessed.”

  Duchess Din whistled appreciatively. “So much for Maroto’s assessment of the Imperial colonels being, what was it, ‘too damn thick to cover their front, let alone their arse’? I’ve lost track of how many times you’ve proven him wrong, Choi.”

  “Things have changed,” grumbled Maroto. Which was true enough, whether it referred to the Imperial brass sharpening up or Maroto growing dull from neglect. “A lot.”

  “Since the days when you were one of said colonels, you mean?” asked Purna, and even though Diggelby and Hassan were too far away to hear what she was saying, the contrary bastards tittered right on cue. Then again, they both had two working ears, so maybe they heard her perfectly.

  “Get down from there, move around back,” said Choi, walking past them and squatting down on the far end of the boulder, overlooking the way they’d come. “If a change of guard comes we do not want them to see us until they reach the top.”

  Maroto joined Purna and Din in groaning theatrically as they clambered down from their sunny perch and dug in against the cold backside of rock. Quick as Maroto’s good humor had been restored, it was gone again. He’d felt like a dead man, wandering the Cobalt camp like an unwelcome ghost after meeting General Ji-hyeon and Fennec in Myura, unwilling to take the oaths of fealty that the rest were falling over themselves to swear. Well, not so much unwilling as unable—that was the thing about oaths, you swear one and all of a sudden it becomes a lot harder to swear any more—but in the end he’d found a sort of compromise. He hadn’t relented out of any long-dormant loyalty to his old comrades and their ascendant offspring, but due solely to Purna’s pestering—she wanted to offer her services to General Ji-hyeon, but wouldn’t until Maroto agreed to do the same.

  “Here’s the rub,” he’d told her. “I can’t raise a sword against the Queen of Samoth.”

  “Whaaaaaaat?” she’d said. “Why the devils not? You hate the Crimson Empire, you’ve said it a hundred times! And you dragged us all over the Star looking for this army, who are obviously at war with the Empire, and you can’t be at war with an empire without also being at war with its capital providence, can you? ‘Fighting the good fight,’ you said it a thousand times! Now, I know the Cobalt leader isn’t who you expected, but we’re here, and we can help, and what else would you do—go back to hosting hunting parties in the Panteran Wastes?”

  “I swore an oath,” said Maroto, as unhappy about the situation as he’d ever been. More so, probably. “Long ago, to Queen Indsorith, and I won’t break a vow, not even one I regret. I came here chasing a dream, Purna, and now it’s time to wake up.”

  “So swear a new oath,” Purna had said, knowing him well enough not to dig at subjects he didn’t want dredged. “To help me! If you’re defending me from Imperial swords, that’s hardly the same as, um, raising a blade against the queen.”

  “Hmmm,” Maroto had said, because he had no intention of going along with any more of her brilliant plans but knew her well enough not to say no outright.

  And yet here he was, weeks into a scouting expedition ordered by General Ji-hyeon. Maroto’s insider knowledge of the Imperial military made him an obvious choice, and anywhere he went there went Purna, and wherever Purna went there went Din, Hassan, and Diggelby. Choi had been assigned to the mission because General Ji-hyeon evidently had the sense not to trust any of her new recruits further than she could have them shot, and so the weirdborn was put in charge of their band. Maroto hadn’t thought anything could reduce the nobles from a merry band to the regular kind, but the sharp-toothed Choi had done wonders to dampen everyone’s spirits: no fires, no feasts, no fighting, if they could help it, and, cruelest of all, no singing. It had been a long, joyless slog through the mountains, and while they had gained quite a bit of information on the Imperial forces moving in to surround the Cobalt Company, Maroto hadn’t been properly drunk since leaving Myura. Worse things than not drinking, though—he could barely remember the last time he’d gotten laid, to think of one. It’d been before he’d taken on the lordlings; devils’ delight, what had happened to the Mighty Maroto, that he’d go the better part of a year without so much as a suck? Getting old beat getting dead, but not much else, and not by much.

  And at last they were almost back to the Cobalts, but of all the idiot fates, another Imperial contingent was smack between them and a proper drink, and if Maroto was lucky, a roll with a campwhore. Not that he was all that lucky, these days…

  “Hey look, a goat!” said Purna, spoiling Maroto’s nap. You’d think an Ugrakari girl would be long over the novelty of seeing the animals universally regarded as the second-biggest arseholes on the mountain, but apparently not. “What a beard! He must be older than Maroto!”

  “Not as horny, though,” said Hassan, leaving Diggelby and his dog to doze on the smaller, sharper stones while he climbed the last dozen yards up the slope to join Maroto, Purna, and Din in the lee of the boulder. Now that the flurry had blown over, the afternoon brightness of the mountain sun made Maroto’s eyes water, and every bone in his arse ached as he sat up straighter and wiped drool from his stubbly chin.

  “Choi keeping an eye on the other side of the pass?” he asked. “Or did she run off again and you clowns decided we didn’t need a lookout of our own?”

  “What’s to watch for, at the top of a bloody mountain?” grumbled Din, whetting the ornately hooked heads of her crossbow bolts.

  “That’s probably what the last scouts to hold this post thought,” said Maroto, jerking a thumb in the direction of Lukash the Nearly Noseless Scout and the other corpses. “Don’t all volunteer at once.”

  “Man, that old boy is making straight for Diggelby,” said Purna. “I’ve got five dinars that says it’s on top of him before he wakes up!”

  “I’ll pledge six thousand rupees that Prince wakes up first,” said Hassan.

  “No fool’s taking that bet,” said Din. “The dog wakes before Diggelby, whatever else the outcome… but I see Prince waking and rousing his master before the goat is within pissing distance. So I take your wager, Purna.”

  “Damn,” said Purna. “Hadn’t thought about the dog. As far as a goat can spit, or as far as a person?”

  “As we determined in the Wastes, dromedaries can spit some distance indeed,” said Hassan. “But I am unversed in the range of goats.”

  “Where’s an avalanche when you need one?” said Maroto, his joints popping as he rose to a crouch. “I’ll take first watch, then, so as…”

  Idly glancing down the mountainside they had earlier scaled, he saw the so-called goat in question. Maroto felt his guts turn to iron, the weight threatening to rip out through his taint. He blinked, licked his lips, willed his suddenly trembling legs to be still. They
ignored him. For the first time since waking he noticed that the wind had died completely, and the sun now buried its face in a tuft of cottony cloud. In the stillness it must have picked up the scent of their trail, and in the shade the creature’s eyes would be as sharp as its teeth. And it was only a hundred yards down the steep slope, clip-clopping straight toward the snoozing Diggelby.

  “… five that it wakes the dog from the distance of a practiced human spitter for Hassan, then, and five for Din that it’s a camel’s range before—”

  “Shut your fucking mouths,” said Maroto, dead calm in the way he only got in the heat of a battle and other mortal-fucking-circumstances. “Crawl around the rock. Now. Purna, you open up the belly of one of those dead scouts. Then you all go down the other side, quiet as you can. Now.”

  “Are you serious?” asked Din. “Is he serious? What is it?”

  “Fucking go,” growled Maroto. “I’ll crawl down and grab Diggelby. Be right behind you.”

  “Is it Choi?” asked Purna, looking everywhere but at the beast meandering up the mountain.

  “What are we looking for?” asked Hassan. “Is it near the goat?”

  “That’s not a goat, damn your eyes,” said Maroto, shuddering. “It’s a horned wolf.”

  The other three went quiet, and Maroto snatched up a sizable pebble. Shying this off Diggelby would be safer than crawling out in the open, but just as he flicked the stone at his target, Din and Hassan burst out laughing. His missile went wide, clattering loudly across the stones. Their guffaws would echo, he knew, and the horned wolf went stock-still, cocking its snout in the air.

  “You had me, Mar—” Din began, but Maroto lunged over and clapped a hand over her mouth.

  “Maroto, have you ever actually seen a goat before?” whispered Purna, pointing at the creature. “Because I’m telling you, that is a goat.”

  A bark brought them up short, but then Hassan was snickering again as they all realized it was just Prince. Diggelby’s dog scrambled up in a cloud of dust as though he’d been stung by a bee, yipping in earnest now. His nominal master groaned and swatted at him but didn’t rise. Then Prince stopped yapping, took a big sniff in the direction of the horned wolf, and turned tail on master and monster, his leash bouncing along after him.

  “Prince! Prince!” hissed Din, but the dog ignored her, shooting past their boulder and disappearing down the other side of the pass. The horned wolf had stopped moving when Din and Hassan had made their racket, and had stayed rooted to the mountain the whole time Prince yapped at it, but now it was on the move again, dropping its belly close to the ground and quickly slinking up the mountain in a decidedly uncaprine fashion, its legs now splayed out at right angles like the scuttling appendages of a spider. That must have got Din to appreciate the severity of their situation, as she carefully set down the bolt she’d been sharpening and started to string her crossbow with equally deliberate slowness.

  Purna had also come around, although to predictable outcome: “Oh devils yes, let’s take this beast! Should we flank it, or—”

  “Shhhhh,” whispered Maroto. “I told you, we run. He’s too fat to be sick and too fast to be old, and that means he has a pack laid up in some cave around here. We go, now, and hope the dead scouts keep him happy.”

  “Diggelby,” said Hassan. “We can’t just leave him.”

  “If you’d listened to me, I would’ve had him over my shoulder already,” said Maroto, the bottom threatening to drop out of his bowels as he watched the horned wolf slither up the steep mountainside. There was no way he could grab the dozing noble in time.

  “Sacrifice,” said Purna, which even Maroto thought was harsh. “No time to talk, come on. Trust me.”

  Purna squirmed around the edge of the boulder, Din and Hassan following tight on her heels. The horned wolf was close enough now that Maroto could see it had two pairs of horns, one going out and up and the other curving in and down. This was no mere animal, this was a monster out of legend. Sacrifice, Purna had said, but while he knew he’d saved Diggelby’s hams a dozen times over since meeting the callow twerp, he couldn’t shake the memory of throwing open the cell door when he and Purna were locked up in Myura and seeing that chump on the other side…

  So maybe it was gratitude that took Maroto to his feet, or maybe it was a deep-seated refusal to just hand this rich kid the best death a warrior could ask for, while he snuck away to find an inferior demise. Craven, they had called him, when he’d guiltily returned to the clan after all his adventures with Zosia, and a different Maroto had deserved that name… but he was no longer the sort of Horned Wolf who turned tail rather than bearing fangs at the avatar of his people. This was it, then—it was time for him to come home. It was enough to drip glacier water down a man’s crack; as far as he’d journeyed, from the Frozen Savannahs and back and then away again, to here on the southwest edge of the Crimson Empire, it still came down to a horned wolf catching his scent on a still day.

  For just a moment, Maroto let himself pretend this monster was Dad, returned from the dead in the guise of the Old Watchers to retrieve the son who had abandoned him twice. The first time he’d forsaken his father Maroto had been but a boy, so desperate to hide his shame at fleeing from a horned wolf he’d seen by the fields that he’d kept running until he reached Samoth. The second time had been even worse, with his wee nephew there, watching him go…

  But no, the past is a trap as sharp as a horned wolf’s tooth, and Maroto shook himself free of the guilt that had stalked him for years. Going back to the Frozen Savannahs after Zosia’s death had been a mistake; he would not compound the error by revisiting it in his mind. All tolls would be paid in the end.

  He stepped out of the shadows of the boulder, the great big world spread out as far as the eye could see. Mace up, head down, he made his peace, such as it was, with whatever invisible ears still cocked in his direction, be they divine or infernal, so long as they were listening. Then he pursed his lips to whistle a challenge, when clattering rocks to his side made him spin around—he’d been flanked by the monster’s pack-mate!

  No, it was Purna, Din, and Hassan crabwalking across the saddle, the body of Lukash the Almost Noseless Scout in their arms. Before Maroto could step forward to help, they had stumbled past him, and with a muttered “heave!” they did just that, launching the corpse over the lip of the ridgeline. He landed a short way down with a snap and a crunch, but slid to a stop on the jagged earth rather than picking up momentum and rolling on. The horned wolf stopped in its tracks, looking not at the broken body that had landed a scant dozen feet from where it crouched, but at the humans who had thrown him one of their kind.

  It was so quiet on the mountain that they could hear a distant wheeze from the creature’s throat, the patter of its drool landing on the rocks. This close, it was easy to see why Maroto’s heathen ancestors had thought these beasts were devils, if not outright gods: there was a regal bearing in its pale woolly shoulders, something otherworldly in the twin rows of black teeth gleaming in its nightmarishly long mouth. Finally, those disturbingly bright eyes looked away from the four breathless people standing above it, passed over the sleeping shape of their comrade, and settled on the offering. It extended one sharp, splayed hoof toward the corpse…

  “Will you shut up!” said Diggelby, sitting straight up from his rocky bed. “Oh, a goat!”

  The horned wolf’s hackles flew up and it ducked back into a crouch, growling low in its throat, eyes fixed on Diggelby. All of Maroto’s relief rushed out of him in a cold sweat. The wind came back, now that it couldn’t help them by smearing their scent, and Diggelby scrambled to his feet in a foolishly hasty fashion.

  “What do you want, goat? I don’t have any old cans, if—” Diggelby began, but then the horned wolf was flying up the rocks toward him, and his chiding rose to a panicked, “—Eeeeep!”

  Usually time didn’t seem to slow and then crystallize, like honey settling at the bottom of a jug, until Maroto was in the thick
of a fight, with a few blows already traded. This time, though, everything was already in focus, the action blocked even before he swung. Purna’s hands were fluttering up, pistol and kakuri a second away from being useful; Din was dropping to a knee before shooting her crossbow, but her foot was on loose rocks and it would take her a moment to stabilize before firing; Hassan’s saw-toothed sword was cocked back, but in taking a wide charge to not interfere with the girls’ shots he would never reach Diggelby in time. None of them would… but Maroto launched himself anyway, bounding over and down, his only hope that the beast would see him coming and redirect its attack toward the bigger threat…

  It did, but not at him. Choi appeared like a devil in a summoning circle, shoving past Diggelby and down to meet the beast’s charge, her limbs too quick for even Maroto’s eye to track. Yet not too quick for the horned wolf, the creature dipping to the side to avoid her jabbing sword and then slamming its skull into her wheeling legs. One of its upper horns gored her thigh, upending her even as its slavering mouth closed on her ankle. It caught her out of the air and flipped her onto her back, more like a Raniputri wrestler than an animal.

  Maroto smelled Purna’s gunpowder, and then the report rattled the stones beneath his floating feet, and a tiny puff of white hair bloomed on the creature’s arched back where the ball grazed it. Din’s missile fared better, a quarrel gliding softly into the horned wolf’s haunch as it furiously banged Choi against the rocks by her bloodied boot. It didn’t take notice of the bolt quivering in its flesh, even when the red began to pulse out and stain its leg. Choi must be dead, she must be, but even as Maroto watched her limp body flop up off the steep ground she reared forward, as though trying to touch her toes, and stuck the creature in the muzzle with the sword she still clung to. It slammed her back down even harder, and the sword clattered away down the mountainside.