The rocks came up to meet Maroto, and he made his final bounce off a granite springboard, this last bound taking him directly on top of the horned wolf… which suddenly jerked its enormous head and released Choi, flinging the bloodied woman directly into Maroto’s path. Just before they collided he saw the horned wolf tense, and then Maroto and Choi crashed into one another. Something cracked in his right elbow as he landed on the merciless slope, pain jolting him alert even as his left knee was flensed near to the bone by a sharp stone edge. They tumbled a bit, Choi tangled in his arms, the mace dropped lest he bludgeon one of them in their slide, a soft whine coming from either him or the woman, he couldn’t tell which. Snarling drowned out the whine, and he slapped out the one hand that was still doing as he asked, wedging his fingers in a rocky crack to arrest their slide and loosening a few fingernails in the process.
His plan was to roll away from Choi, dividing the horned wolf’s attention, but even as they jerked to a stop the woman sprang away first. Well, shit. Just lifting his surprisingly heavy head took more work than he’d expected, and when the swirling mountain slowed its orbit in front of his vision he saw that neither Choi nor himself were in immediate danger: the horned wolf had mounted the saddle after the nobles, rather than following Maroto and Choi down the mountain. From here he couldn’t see anything but the lip of the ridge and hear the screams. That explained why the horned wolf hadn’t charged them from the first, then; from just a short ways down the slope one couldn’t see much of the summit.
“You can move,” said Choi, hunched over him. It didn’t sound much like a question. Looking up at the weirdborn, he saw that her whole face was bloodied and raw, and one of her horns had snapped off near the tip, marrow and blood running down its length. One arm hung limp, while the other caught his good elbow and helped him up. Putting weight on his skinned knee, he felt queasy and terrible, but he didn’t fall over or pass out, so it wasn’t shattered. Hopefully. “Move!”
Move they did, though not nearly as fast as either of them probably wanted. Retrieving his mace and using it as a short, clumsy cane, Maroto hobbled after the limping weirdborn. They both left bloody tracks as they scaled the saddle for the second time that day, Maroto glancing behind them every few steps and thanking the old gods and the new every time he saw nothing but a lonely mountainside at their backs. Choi strafed to the side, plucking her chipped sword out of the rocks. Then, a dozen feet beneath the summit, a tooth-rattling howl overpowered the screams and grunts of the nobles. It trailed off, and when it was gone not even the low groans of the dying lordlings could be heard. Choi and Maroto both stopped, braced themselves for the inevitable attack.
“Not a bad death,” he told himself, and though he wasn’t sure he’d even said it aloud, the weirdborn seemed to hear him.
“None of them are,” she said, and, glancing over at the battered barbarian, grinned at him despite the oozing sockets where her sharp teeth had been knocked out. Maroto saluted her with his mace. Worse ways to go, certainly.
“That,” came Diggelby’s voice from the saddle above, “is definitely not a goat.”
“Maroto! Choi!” Purna appeared like one of the Burnished Chain’s angels, shining from on high. “They’re alive!”
“More than can be said for me,” said Hassan, stumbling into view and dropping his bloody sword with a shudder. “I think it’s killed me.”
“Get down there and help them,” said Din, for once following her own counsel and nimbly climbing down to Choi. “They’ve had the worst of it.”
“Where’s Prince?” said Diggelby. “Prince? Priiiiiiiince!”
“Shut it,” Maroto gasped. Every time he thought he was done for, too tired to move, these nobles did something so idiotic it pumped him full of nervous energy. As the fop’s voice echoed out behind them, Maroto staggered on with newfound strength. “For the love of devils, shut the fuck up!”
“Don’t worry, boss, it didn’t get away,” Purna said smugly as she helped him the rest of the way up. She was a hard one, all right: the horned wolf had taken a mouthful out of her forearm, her leather gauntlet sheared through as though it were silk and a dark bandage already leaking. “Put one in the brain, just like you always say.”
“No such thing…” he panted, teetering on the edge of the saddle even with her support and then collapsing onto the summit. He stared at the limp mountain of fur and horns splayed out in the dusty pass, rivulets of blood extending in a mandala around it. “No such thing… as…”
“As a carnivorous goat?” said Hassan. “I would have agreed, if not for our little fete with this fellow. We appreciate your softening him up for us, Choi. Diggelby never could have laid him out if not for your opening salvo.”
“I could, too!” said Diggelby. “But more important, where’s my dog?”
“The other side,” said Choi, all action even after tangling with a monster. “Go and spy. Now. The Imperials will have heard Purna’s attention-getter.”
“Run,” said Maroto, waving them all away before it was too late. “Go. Down the other side. Hoof it, you fucking fools, hoof it!”
“But the Imperial camp—” began Hassan, when Din, having heeded Choi’s order, called from the other end of the boulder:
“Are coming up, maybe a dozen of them! They’re just at the meadow now, but as soon as we take a step down they’ll see us.”
“Retreat, or dig in?” asked Purna. “But if we stay and take these ones out, the main body will still know something’s afoot, won’t they?”
“Retreat,” said Choi, crouching over a pack and rooting through it with her good hand. “Even wounded we’ll be back down before they’re up. You, help me tie a sling, and you, bandage Maroto’s knee. Then we retreat.”
“But Prince!” protested Diggelby.
“Fuck your stupid dog,” said Hassan, retrieving his sword and wiping it off on his friend’s exposed back. “Pack us up while I tend to our wounded heroes.”
“No,” said Maroto, shaking his head and feeling his brains slosh around, as though his skull were so swollen the grey stuff had more room to breathe. “Straight down on top of them. Two of you put on those scouts’ uniforms, might buy us some time until they’re close enough to see you’re impostors.”
“Why—” Purna started, but then a distant howl silenced her. Followed by another, and then another, and then a dozen more. From back down the way they’d come. Far off, but not nearly far enough.
“Because there’s no such thing as a lone horned wolf,” said Maroto, flopping back on the coarse stones and staring at the clouds. They were tinted with red now that the sun was brushing the far peaks. “A pack’ll have a dozen of the monsters, maybe even two. And that one you killed? Either a pup or a runt. His parents will be bigger, faster, smarter, meaner. We’re all dead.”
Nobody had anything to say, which was nice—he could hear the howling of the horned wolves better this way. Then Purna crouched beside him, slapped a bandage on his seeping, grit-stubbled knee, and began wrapping it tight. Hassan came to his other side with one of Din’s bolts, broke off the head, and set to strapping it against his sore, pulsing elbow.
“I’ll see to myself,” he heard Choi tell Din. “You and Diggelby put on those dead women’s uniforms. Fast. We’re going down.”
“Better to make a stand here,” said Maroto, sitting up as best he could. “You don’t know horned wolves, weirdborn. They’ll be on us—”
“Her name’s Choi,” said Purna, cinching the bandage painfully in place. “Don’t be an asshole, Maroto, you know better than to call her anything but her name. Now, if you want to be soft as a firstborn royal and wait up here for the easiest death you can find, you’re welcome to it, but the rest of us are going to bring hell down on those Imperials before we go. The least we can do is lead a pack of pissed-off goats straight to their camp.”
Looking around, Maroto saw Choi nod, lick blood off her lips, smile at him in a way what got him eager to stand, if only to be the closer
to a fit woman with red smears on her cheeks and a red sword in her hand. Saw the fucking ponces he’d led both ways across the worst desert of the Star watching him, crazed grins playing on faces painted with grime and blood instead of makeup. Hassan put one hand under the armpit of his jacked-up arm, and Purna took his other. Together they hoisted him up.
“So what’s it going to be?” asked Purna, as if it was even a fucking question.
Maroto put his head back and howled like the horned wolf he was.
“That’s more like it,” sniffed Diggelby. “Now let’s find Prince!”
CHAPTER
6
Zosia lived, all right, as a saddle sore on the thigh of every rider in the Imperial regiments tasked with pursuing the Cobalt Company. The timing was right for it to be the mayoress that Sister Portolés had met, the Cobalts showing up in regional complaints and then official reports just a few months after the massacre at Kypck. Depending on who you talked to, they were a band of mercenaries hired to stir up trouble, unusually effective revolutionaries, or bandits who’d gotten organized. Considering they had gone from raiding outposts and border garrisons to sacking whole castles and pillaging provinces, the threat the Cobalt Company posed to the newly won tranquility of the Crimson Empire would have been immediate and severe regardless of their leader, but if it was truly the Stricken Queen returned, well, Fallen Mother have mercy on them all.
Portolés did her best to keep her mind on these more practical, definitive problems, rather than on the slippery questions of why the story Queen Indsorith sang her in the throne room was so different from everything she had grown up believing. That she was sworn to secrecy on the truth of how Cold Cobalt lost her crown, even where her superiors in the church were concerned, did little to relax her worries. Nor, for that matter, did all the finer points in Heretic’s propaganda that supported some of what Queen Indsorith had told her. Baiting her companion into sharing even more minutiae on Blue Zosia turned out to be as simple as not beating him silent whenever he opened his mouth, which was often.
“… which makes a lot of sense, when you put it all together,” he said as their boat bobbed across the waves toward the gleaming cliffs of Hwabun. “You can just murder a woman, but then you make her a martyr. But by concocting a version of events where she’s meeting your marionette in a fair fight, and loses, then you’ve stripped her of one of her key strengths: her skill in combat.”
“So you don’t think it was a fair fight?” asked Portolés, fanning him on. “That Indsorith, what, poisoned Zosia before the duel?”
“That the duel never even happened!” said Heretic. “Whose word do we have that it did? The letters signed by Zosia that confirm it are just that, letters, easily forged. Open your eyes, sister, you’ve been duped, just like the rest of the Chain, the rest of the Empire.”
The Immaculate escort they had been assigned at the border didn’t even try to conceal his amusement as he directed the two sailors to bring them into Hwabun’s harbor. Let Heretic and this infidel have their smiles. Portolés was discovering that by checking her pride she was gaining far more insight into popular sentiments than she ever would have by checking his cheek. With any luck, she was about to discover a lot more about the Stricken Queen.
Hwabun. The Immaculate Isle where Kang-ho had fled two decades past was the sensible first stop on their search. According to Queen Insdorith, she and Zosia had agreed that the plot could only work if not a single other soul knew the truth, and so even her most trusted captains thought their Cobalt general dead. Upon coming out of hiding she would likely reveal herself to her Five Villains in hope of enlisting their aid—if nobody suspected Zosia was alive, how could she have raised an army so soon after the attack on her village without the help of some old friends? The timing was too close for Zosia to have done everything on her own.
Most of the other Villains would be hard to find, if they were even still alive; Chevaleresse Singh bounced around the Raniputri Dominions, and the rest could be anywhere. Kang-ho was the easy one, having settled down here, and if Queen Indsorith knew that, it was a safe bet that Zosia did, too. Not that Portolés expected to get the truth out of any of the Stricken Queen’s cohorts, but considering the Cobalt Company would be as tough to catch up to as any of the other Villains, she might as well start close to home.
If the woman from Kypck had been Zosia, of course, and if the same woman was indeed leading the mercenary company that currently terrorized the southern end of the Empire… but Queen Indsorith had been convinced by Portolés’s description of the woman and the concurrent appearance of a new Cobalt Company. Convinced enough to risk her throne by bringing Portolés into her confidence. When the queen had asked Portolés if the mayoress had a scar on her chin, the war nun had remembered that detail, vivid as she remembered the first time she had convinced Brother Wan to touch her… but now the old worm of doubt was gnawing at her, making her question if she had actually remembered the telltale scar, or if she just thought she had, prompted by Queen Indsorith’s obvious need for the suspected woman to have had such a mark. If she had the scar, and a strange dog, and had seemed far too educated for a country mayoress in the Kutumbans, then she might be Zosia, and that possibility was too dire for Queen Indsorith to dismiss out of hand. That Portolés was the only person who would be able to recognize Kypck’s mayoress at a glance made her the only candidate for hunting her down before the Crimson Empire found itself embroiled in a second Cobalt War.
Portolés would soon find out if it was truly Zosia, or at least have more to go on than the speculation of a lone woman. Even if said lone woman was the Crimson Queen, one of the most powerful individuals on the Star, a little corroborating evidence never hurt.
As Portolés, Heretic, and their Immaculate escort were led across the isle and into the manse by a coterie of servants, the first thing the war nun noticed was all the white lanterns and candles—the family was in mourning according to her guide. Her request for an audience with Kang-ho was met with less surprise and stalling from the majordomo than she might have expected a foreign cleric to garner, even with all her diplomatic writs, but the gentleman who came out to greet her was regally attired in Ugrakari fashion, not Immaculate. Kang-ho’s husband, King Jun-hwan Bong.
“To what do we owe the pleasure of this visitation?” he asked straightaway, cocking his high-domed skullcap at the road-weary Imperial nun and her scuzzy assistant. The glossy bird-of-paradise feathers set in the hat were probably worth more than the heavy silver bracelets around his wrists. “Surely my husband did not anticipate your arrival, or he should have made himself available.”
“My name is Sister Portolés, and I seek an audience with you, King Jun-hwan,” said Portolés, and, knowing every lie goes down smoother with a dollop of truth on top, added, “Your husband is not expecting me.”
“I see.” This monarch’s sovereign nation might be a single island that was substantially smaller than the Queen of Samoth’s summer castle, but he was still a king, and if he decided to send them away there wasn’t a thing Portolés could do about it… “Shall we take kaldi? I have business this evening, I am afraid, but can certainly spare an hour for a representative of our Chainite friends.”
“An hour is fine,” said Portolés, trying not to reveal her relief. “If your servants can entertain my escort and keep an eye on my prisoner here I would be obliged.”
Eyebrows went up all around at that, and Heretic laughed, shaking his manacled wrists at them. “That’s right, I’m a desperate criminal. These irons won’t hold me for long, so mind a tight watch or I’ll plunder your pockets to the seams.”
“This way, Sister Portolés,” said Jun-hwan, and she followed him through several corridors vaulted with delicately painted rafters until they emerged on a long balcony. From up here the crashing waves sounded faint as a whispered chant, and off to the north, Portolés saw the spectral fogbank that must mark the farthest extremity of the Haunted Sea. To think, during the Age of Wonders she
could have looked from this very spot and gazed upon Jex Toth, before it became the Sunken Kingdom. As distant as she now felt from the church itself, its teachings would always be at the front of her mind, and she felt a joyful tremor at beholding such a hallowed place. Some said there was a maelstrom at the heart of the Haunted Sea, others spoke of a leviathan that patrolled its depths. Neither seemed beyond the realm of the possible to Portolés—you wrap your kingdom up in devil worship and black magic, and you could hardly claim surprise when the ocean swallowed you whole, belching up further darkness where your land had once been.
Yet even the foulest pit could nurture a seed of goodness, like a rosebush springing from a midden heap; who knew that better than Portolés? And just as the Fallen Mother found purchase in the corrupted flesh of an anathema, so, too, would she transform the iniquitous Sunken Kingdom into a garden of the blessed, once the Star had proven itself worthy of the honor. When that happened, the storms would cease and the fog would clear and the Haunted Sea would part, a host of angels raising the Sunken Kingdom back to the surface, the holy land scrubbed free of its ancient sins and ready to welcome those deserving of its bounty. The Chain Canticles said on that Day of Becoming, the faithful pureborn would be called home, the few deserving anathemas would be healed, and all the sinners and devils would inherit the ruined Star. On that day, even a monster might finally see the face of the Fallen Mother, but even if she was deemed unworthy, she now knew there was a place upon the Star where the damned could look out upon the habitation of the saved and reflect upon their fate…
Then again, the Chain had foretold the return of the Sunken Kingdom for over a hundred years, and here was proof with her own eyes that nothing lay out there but rough seas and bad weather.
“What does the Burnished Chain believe happened there?” King Jun-hwan asked, following Portolés’s gaze. “Witchcraft? A ritual gone awry? The wrath of the gods?”
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