A Crown for Cold Silver

by Alex Marshall

  Keun-ju and Singh ducked back around the ruined doors as the loyalists launched their missiles, but with Choplicker at her side Zosia stood proud, raising her arms in a shameless display of bravado. Well, what was the point of putting up with a devil if you couldn’t show off? The chakram aimed at Singh and Keun-ju embedded in the doorframe or flew into the temple, but even as Zosia heard them bouncing through the building the ones thrown at her continued to float slowly toward her, their speed undone by Choplicker. All but one abruptly dropped to the street, but the final chakram drifted into Zosia’s reach. Jaws dropped, as well they fucking might. Passing her hammer to her off hand, she plucked the deadly, lazily spinning circular blade out of the air with her right… yet as she closed her hand on it, Choplicker released it from his wiles, and it sped up enough to cut her palm before she’d held it fast. Dirty fucking devil.

  “That’s right, children,” Zosia said, hefting the familiar weight. “You’ve gone and fucked the pooch but good this time.”

  Zosia pitched it back into the crowd, and Choplicker must have put some extra spin on it, as it took off the forearm of the girl who raised a hand to shield herself and carried past her, bisecting the face of a man behind her. Then Singh and Keun-ju were following Zosia as she led the charge, a pair of sensible girls in the back turning tail before the trio even reached the front-runners. Steel met steel, and steel met flesh, and pretty soon all parties were sliding around on the bloody cobblestones. The bravest of the bunch came at Zosia with a whip-sword, and would have made short work of her light armor if Choplicker hadn’t repelled the weapon back on its wielder, the three lithe blades winding around his throat and digging in. An obstinate chunk of his spine kept him from being decapitated, but just barely.

  “Damn,” said Zosia, as they cleaned their weapons on the corpses after. “I’d almost forgotten how much fun this could be.”

  “Almost?” asked Singh.

  “Almost.” Zosia smiled.

  “Blurgh,” said Keun-ju, hunching over and vomiting onto the street.

  “Come on,” said Zosia, patting Choplicker’s head with her wounded palm. “There’s plenty more where these came from.”

  They’d dragged in tables from all over the palace, setting them up in the courtyard so there’d be enough room for everyone, from Singh’s family all the way down to the formerly untouchable weirdborn who had planted the bombs under the barracks and guardhouses. It was just like the long march on Diadem, royalty and ragamuffins sharing food and drink beneath the stars. Except they were eating a hell of a lot better this time around, with hundreds of piping-hot dishes set out on the scuffed boards. Apparently the revolution was popular in the royal kitchens.

  “I take back everything I said about Raniputri cooking,” said Keun-ju, piling his third plate of coconut rice with nothing but pickles. “Everything, except I wish there was some fish, squid, something.”

  “Yeah, well, nobody’s pickier than a beggar,” said Zosia, sipping on her mahua. The flower wine reminded her of the early days with Singh, nothing to their names but the swords at their sides and a small bottle to share along the dusty road. Beside her, Singh’s elder son, Masood, drained a Flintlander horn of Samothan red and clapped her on the back.

  “No beggars tonight, madam, only mahārājñīs and mahārājas of a new Raniputri dynasty!”

  “Uh-huh,” said Zosia, eyeing his mother across the table. “And what about tomorrow?”

  “We’re all beggars when the sun rises,” said Masood, punctuating his wisdom with a burp. “It’s what we are when night falls that counts.”

  Thank you, Singh mouthed, and, watching her old comrade mend fences with her family, Zosia was glad she’d agreed to stay and help carry the day instead of holding Singh to her word that they’d head out as soon as the fighting started. The chevaleresse threw an arm around one of her twins, Zosia had already forgotten which one. “You remind your brother of his sagacity when next his luck changes, and he goes to bed in an alley with only his fat tongue for a pillow.”

  “I’ll remind him now that the city never would have fallen if not for my soldiers,” said the girl, squirming away from her mother’s embrace, but not earnestly enough to fool Zosia. “What, dear Masood, do you have to say on that matter?”

  “Dearest Urbar,” Masood said, sloshing wine onto the table and his dhoti as he gestured roughly in her direction, “I say I would rather fight a dozen Thantifax armies by myself than get on your bad side by pointing out what a peacock you are, wearing diamonds to a war!”

  They bickered on, though good-naturedly, and when a warm jug of bhang replaced Zosia’s liquor, she drank deeply of the draught, and soon floated above the table. The stuff used to provide escape, but now it imprisoned her in her own heart, the droning laughter of the Raniputri and Keun-ju drowned out by the chiding in her mind. Why hadn’t she and Leib taken this road, hiding in the open where friends could watch their backs, instead of fleeing to the mountains and pretending they were different people?

  They had come to believe the lie as much as those they told it to, a small-town boy returning to the tranquil hamlet of his birth and bringing a foreign bride with him. Working the modest fields of their neighbors, tending their animals, harvesting roots for the pot-stills. Becoming joint mayors when the old mayoress passed away and insisted they take on her duties. Passing the years with songs and mundane sorrows and the annual pilgrimage down to the jade-tinged foothills to offer alms to the Empire, instead of actually living the lives they were born to—lives tinged not green but red, bloodshed in the ruddy dawn, and dark wine spilling everywhere by the evening…

  Perhaps there was a table like this in some hell or another, where she would rejoin her husband and all the others whose lives had ended violently on her behalf. Perhaps she would someday fill Leib’s cup with congealed blood, and they would eat ashes among the tombs. Perhaps many things, in the grave, to go on Choplicker’s knowing glance from the shadows at her ankle. He was fatter than he’d been that morning, his coat lustrous, his teeth again white as the ivory stud in Singh’s nose.

  The courtyard echoed with songs and boasts and jests and even a dance or three until dawn finally intruded over the palace walls, but Zosia neither sang nor bragged, nor laughed again that night, and kept counsel only with the sated devil at her feet, silently staring back into his dark eyes until her head hit the table.

  They traversed twilit deserts and beside bright rivers, through cool forests and over blazing hills where the red-tipped grass waved like a sea of burning silk. Once they spied the ruins of a tower atop a spire of white rock in the midst of a black jungle; based on Choplicker’s keening insistence they investigate it, Zosia presumed it was devil haunted, but wasn’t about to go close enough to confirm it. They rode on, over creaking bridges built when the Empire was young and through passes in the mountains hewed by the very gods, to believe Singh… or strong winds, to believe her children. Her daughter Udbala and her son Sriram accompanied them, with a hundred and one riders each, and their passage from the tip of the Raniputri Dominions to the Heart of the Star was as easy a ride as Zosia could remember. Stampeding through the pickets at the understaffed garrison of the Imperial border outside Azgaroth, she dared hope it could all be as easy as this: a whoop and a cry and a pell-mell race past slack-mouthed young fools, to victory!

  As if life were ever so easy. Half a day later they discovered why the border station was so lightly patrolled; an Imperial regiment, recently bulked up from the garrison, sat camped in the middle of the road. Judging by the prodigious dustcloud that chased them when they cut across the foothills to ride up and over the northern Pass of Blodtørst, the regiment had a sizable cavalry to boot. No Azgarothian stallion could match the Thantifax mares, but even without risk of immediate engagement Zosia’s jaw set and her eyes narrowed: the Crimson Empire was already mustering for something, and she could imagine what. Or, rather, whom. Cobalt Company indeed, as if any army had a right to that name without her lead
ership—this Princess Ji-hyeon had some bloody nerve, if Singh’s account of the girl’s plan was remotely accurate.

  The village of Blodtørst lay on the edges of a mirror-still pond three days’ ride up the treacherous trails of the western Kutumbans. It was a pilgrimage site for both the Burnished Chain and Ugrakari worshippers, and each summer the town of several hundred swelled to the thousands. Stupas lined the western banks, inverted wooden crosses the east. The Raniputri cavalry arrived at nightfall and were given a hero’s welcome, as Blodtørstians, being sensible people, welcomed all marching armies, regardless of their pennants.

  “Girl, get over here,” Singh said, beckoning Zosia to the shrine wall in the common room of the headwoman’s hostel, once they were all settled into their shanty rooms for the night. “There’s something you don’t see as much down in the Dominions.”

  The hostel was as simple as everything else in Blodtørst, its neatly stacked stone walls unadorned by windows or even tapestries, but early winter being a full season out from any major Chainite pilgrimages, the proprietor had the curtains pulled back from her shrine. It consisted of several plain wooden shelves cluttered with idols, the Ugrakari having almost as many gods and devils as the Flintland tribes had legendary ancestors. Singh was meaningfully eyeballing one of the small statues.

  The feminine figure sat on the upper shelf, beside the ferocious wargod of the Ugrakari and an ursine fellow Zosia almost remembered the name of, but not quite. Unlike her neighbors, she was decidedly human in shape, with neither extra limbs nor animal features. In fact, with that hammer and sword she looked almost like…

  “No fucking way,” whispered Zosia, a funny feeling spreading through her chest as she picked up the idol. It was crafted of heavy wood, briar or she was no pipe-carver, and the hair… the hair was painted robin’s egg blue. “You’re having me on. This is…”

  “Cold Cobalt,” said the headwoman, setting her tea tray down on a table and bustling over. “Please, respectfully, put her back. She is wroth to be touched.”

  “Oh is she ever,” said Singh, putting her palms in the air and stepping back to further implicate Zosia for the crime. “Better be careful, friend, or you’ll get a curse, disrespecting the Blue Queen that way.”

  “I don’t believe it,” said Zosia, looking down at the statue before remembering her manners and putting the figurine back in its place. “I mean, sorry, I meant no disrespect to your shrine.”

  “Doesn’t bother me,” said the headwoman, pushing a few errant grey hairs back under her head scarf. “The queen, though, can be testy, especially to foreigners.”

  “Really?” asked Zosia, relieved that Choplicker had obeyed her order to stay in their room. She never would’ve lived it down, if he’d been here for this. Keun-ju, too, for that matter—good that he was already sleeping off the day’s ride. “You don’t… I mean, you pray to her?”

  “Pray?” The headwoman barked a laugh, rubbing her gnarled wrists as she stared at the statue. “She doesn’t listen. But that’s all the more reason to stay on her good side, eh?”

  “She’s…” Zosia tried not to smile. “Do you… she’s not a god of your village, your people?”

  “Bah,” said the headwoman, probably a little freer with her tongue since they’d all drunk chaang together during the communal dinner. “Of course not! Just a woman, like all of us. Only a fool would bow to her… and only a damn fool would call her a devil, like the Imperials do. They say she’s back, you know, and the Cobalt Company is big as it ever was, but I don’t believe it’s her. Can’t be. That’s the one truth of this world, the dead stay dead, praise the mercy of gods and weakness of devils.”

  “Well, I say she—” But whatever Singh was going to say was cut off by Zosia’s glare.

  “I knew her,” said the old woman sadly, and Zosia felt a stab of shame at still having no bloody idea who this woman was, until she said, “Well, not to speak to, as we are. But I was with her, as a girl. The Cobalts came through, quick quick quick, but not quick enough for my mother to keep me from running away with them. Ah, what an adventure!”

  As a girl? Zosia chided herself for thinking this woman old—she must be a few years her junior, so what did that make Zosia? Singh was giving her a look, prodding her with her eyes to take a bow, but fuck that. Instead, Zosia said, “How many folk died on that adventure, do you think? I’ve heard thousands starved or got weatherbit into the grave, not counting the actual fighting.”

  “Thousands?” said the headwoman, sitting down on a bench at the low table and pouring herself yak butter tea. She nudged the cast-iron pot in the direction of her still-standing guests. She wasn’t smiling anymore. “More like tens of thousands. Maybe as many as half our number. I don’t know. People I’d known from the cribhouse dropping all around me. I was lucky to only lose a few toes. And we who weren’t stout enough for war with the Imperials were charged with foraging supplies. You know what that meant? Robbing farms that wouldn’t donate everything they had. Storming towns not too different from this one, hoping the locals wouldn’t join up so we could steal enough to feed ourselves. We fought as hard as any soldier, I tell you true, with rocks and sticks! Not even her Villains were fierce as us, farmgirls, village boys, and plenty of others, all drunk on a dream…”

  “Some adventure,” said Zosia, sitting down on the opposite bench with a groan. Her ass and thighs certainly hadn’t missed the saddle, even if the rest of her had.

  “Ah, but it was!” said the headwoman, blowing on her tea. “I met my wife on the Long March, made friends who still pilgrimage here from year to year. Maybe Cobalt was a devil, as the Imperials say, and it was a ruthless business, no mistake. But she fought for us. Me, you, and most of all the Imperials themselves, though many were too blind to see it. She wanted to remake the world, to liberate the poor, to—”

  “Bullshit,” said Zosia with more venom than she thought she had in her. “She was a killer and a coward, same as every king or queen before her, and same as every one since.”

  “You’re wrong,” said the headwoman. “She was a killer, true, but she tried, she did—if you’d but heard her speak to us, you would believe it was more than lust for power or wealth that spurred her. She would have brought change, too, if not for the assassins of Samoth. Things would be different.”

  “I noticed you didn’t have a statue of Queen Indsorith on your wall.” Singh smirked as she sat down beside Zosia and poured herself a cup of the rich tea.

  “Do not mistake one thing for another,” said the headwoman, as though they were contrary children. “I keep the Crimson Queen in my heart, and her idol above my bed. Less… ambitious than Queen Zosia? Yes, yes, yes. But her soldiers are well behaved when they pass through, and it was she who designated Lake Blodtørst a holy site, not those… clerics of the Burnished Chain. Things are not so good as they would be had Zosia lived, but are not as bad as they could be.”

  “I think I’d better lie down,” said Zosia, rising from her seat. “I feel like I’m already dreaming. Thank you for your hospitality, madam, and for sharing your tales with us.”

  “We’re riding early, of course,” said Singh. “I’ll give the knock when it’s time.”

  “May your time with the devils pass swiftly,” the headwoman called after her, and Zosia walked stiffly to her room. Glancing back down the dark corridor, to where only a tea candle lit the room where Singh and the headwoman still sat, she let out a long, sad sigh. They would be gone before the sun rose, but if the Imperial cavalry still pursued them they would arrive in this village ere the moon next rose. When that happened, would they be as respectful as the headwoman supposed, or would they punish the helpless populace for aiding and abetting a crew of border-jumpers? Would they all be wiped out as an example, the way Kypck had? Had she damned another village just by setting foot in it? And how many more villages would she pass through on her ride to Diadem? How many more poor fools who bought into her myth would die with idiot grins on their faces, in wa
r or crueler deaths, believing they martyred themselves for something other than a selfish woman’s ambition, her conviction that she alone knew what the world deserved?

  Choplicker nosed the door open and snuffled her hand in the dark hallway. She pushed him back into the black room and shut the door behind them.

  They caught sight of the would-be Cobalt Company within a week of leaving Blodtørst, as they crested one of the Kutumban range’s seemingly infinite passes. They were miles off, caravans crossing the Bridge of Grails, which spanned the Trench of Mordlust. From up here, they looked like an enormous mass of maggots swarming over the exposed ribs of the mountains. Yet this vantage also showed another force, albeit a smaller one: the same Imperial regiment they had eluded by the border. It looked to be just the infantry; even on foot, the Imperials had made much better time than Zosia’s crew by taking the Black Tar Pass directly over the front range. The mass of soldiers marched between Zosia’s Raniputri riders and the distant Cobalt Company, winding along the main road through the mountains. Even after Singh watched the dips and rises of the remote road for half an hour through her hawkglass, not a rider of the heavy Imperial cavalry appeared… which meant they were probably still in pursuit, coming up through Blodtørst Pass after them. Not only were Zosia and her warriors cut off from the Cobalt Company, they were being scissored between the Imperial riders and their main force.

  “So close,” said Keun-ju wistfully, staring out over the ocean of air to where his beloved led her army over the four bridges. “Why don’t we… I mean, couldn’t we…”

  “Lead the Imperial riders all over the devil-kissed mountains until we find a way to go around their infantry?” said Singh, spitting a ruby that splattered on the rocks. Not a full season on campaign and she was already back on the betel. “Won’t be the first time, what?”