A Crown for Cold Silver

by Alex Marshall

  Fast and hard as it had come, the dizzying sense of déjà vu passed. Glancing up to see one of her archers slit the throat of the wailing kid whose groin she’d shot, she straightened up from the tree, shook out her limbs, spit. It wasn’t nice, it wasn’t clean, but it had to be done. The bright-eyed young Imperials who had helped that asshole Hjortt murder her husband and village probably hadn’t shed any tears, and neither would she. If someone was worth hanging her head over, it was Pao Cowherd, the boy Choplicker had dragged all the way up the mountains over Kypck just to die by her fire, not these well-armed scum.

  “Thanks!” said Sullen, seeming relieved. Well, why shouldn’t he be? He was alive. “That’s one we owe you.”

  “My pleasure,” said Zosia, trying to mean it.

  “I know you didn’t come all the way up here to stick a handful of dastards,” said the bloodied old man. He looked like a vampire out of the songs, clinging to his victim. “So where’s the hunt?”

  “Huh.” Zosia straightened up, trying to get it together. There were people here who were depending on her to keep them safe. If that wasn’t the biggest joke of all… “See the crest on that one’s tabard? A one-handed man with a greatsword is the seal of Myura. Your uncle’s scouting party saw over two thousand of them in the mountains, and then saw their banners again when they brought the horned wolves down on the Imperial camp.”

  “I haven’t heard that song!” said Ruthless. “Maroto did what with horned wolves?”

  “Let him tell it,” said Zosia. “Later. This is just a few of ’em, is the point, scouts sent ahead to secure the hump. Which means—”

  “Yoo-hoo!” a high voice came down the mountain, and everyone ate dirt save Zosia, who recognized the greeting, and Sullen, who stepped behind a tree. Following the voice, Zosia saw that beyond the trees the Lark’s Tongue resumed its steep grade up to another, higher hump, and beyond that, the peak. There was a cluster of red shapes on the upper ridge, but as she watched they began marching down the faint hunting trail that linked the two plateaus.

  “It’s all right,” Zosia called to her troops, then to her whining, nervous devil added, “I think.”

  As the Cobalts watched them with ready bows, the Myuran regiment came down in single file from the upper hump, and even when they slipped and fell on the steep descent not a one removed hands from head. Zosia counted just shy of three hundred surrendered Imperials, and as the first shivering Myuran prisoner reached the pines, a lumbering figure took up the rear of the train.

  “Line ’em up on the edge of the scarp back there,” Zosia told her perplexed soldiers. “If they run down to camp, shoot ’em. Anyone without a bow waits here and escorts prisoners over to the archers.”

  “Is that…” Sullen didn’t look so relieved anymore.

  “Oi, that’s him,” said his grandfather, spitting over Sullen’s shoulder. “If it’s no harm to you, Zosia, we’ll be headed back down to the real fight now.”

  “Sure. I don’t like him much, either,” said Zosia. “Good thing the Imperials weren’t the only ones to cozy onto the notion of an ambush from the rear, or we’d have been in real trouble. I’ve learned every devil has its uses.”

  Ruthless nodded his agreement at that as his grandson carried him off, but the look Sullen gave her over his shoulder left a lot open to interpretation. Sometime soon she’d have to pry him open, one way or another, and see if the boy held a pearl for her, or something less pleasant.

  “The wolves didn’t wait for me?” said Hoartrap as he brought his last prisoner in, the Myurans looking ecstatic to be handed off to hard-bitten enemy soldiers. “Well, I’ll catch up with them another time.”

  “A few thousand Myurans against one old greasebag?” said Zosia, ambling back across the saddle with her miserable devil, the misery-inducing sorcerer, and the final haunted-looking Imperial, a young man with iron on his chest but none in his step. “What happened to the rest?”

  “I’m innocent, I swear!” said Hoartrap, the stumbling prisoner shuddering at this but not turning to refute the claim. “They lost most of their party getting this far; treacherous river crossings, sheer passes, and something involving an avalanche, is that right, Wheatley?”

  The captured officer nodded curtly.

  “I may have had a hand in the last, I admit it,” Hoartrap stage-whispered loud enough for Wheatley to hear. Zosia rolled her eyes—if he was claiming responsibility, then he probably hadn’t been involved. “We did lose a few coming around that last pass, to the saddle above, but I’m sure Cold Zosia will be fair in her dealings with the surrendered Myuran regiment.”

  This finally got Wheatley to look back at them. She hadn’t thought it possible for him to look more frightened, but there it was. “You… you’re her?”

  “Hjortt tell you about me?” Zosia asked.

  He nodded once, eyes growing even bigger.

  “Good,” said Zosia, the last traces of her temporary weakness flushed out in one heaving sigh of relief that Ji-hyeon’s intelligence had been correct and Colonel Hjortt still led the Fifteenth. She quickened her step, eager to get down to the main event now. Hoartrap picked up the pace, too, forcing Wheatley to step lively indeed as they came up to the edge of the plateau where the rest of the prisoners sat, still cupping their heads in their hands.

  “If I could ask one thing—” began Wheatley, but Zosia cut him off, looking out over the Cobalt camp and the battlefield beyond.

  “You cannot. I’m a busy woman, and I’m sure Hjortt cautioned you against getting on my bad side.”

  “That’s… interesting,” said Hoartrap, and, glancing over at him, Zosia was unhappy to see that he was as confounded by the sight as she was, sausagey fingers drumming on his lips.

  “Interesting?” Zosia looked back to the battlefield. The ragged front line still held, if only by a few sturdy threads, but beyond it, in the massed Crimson infantry, the soldiers were aflutter with activity. Weird activity. It almost looked like they were… “That’s really not your doing?”

  “I’d be a lot happier if it were. We’d better get down there and pull our people back,” said Hoartrap, a rare tremble of anxiety in his voice as he started down the mountain. “Or things will get a lot more interesting very soon. And not the good kind of interesting, like you want.”

  In another rare turn, Choplicker’s mood improved immediately, despite the presence of the hated sorcerer. Of the two portents, Zosia wasn’t sure which was more disquieting, and, ordering her people to bring the prisoners back to camp, she hurried down to see just what in all the fucking hells was happening out there.

  CHAPTER

  25

  Such language!” Wan tsk-tsked in Domingo’s ear. After delivering them to a small grassy hump partway down the last foothill before the Lark’s Tongue, Wan had unhitched the horse to graze and crawled back into the wagon bed beside Domingo, so they lay shoulder to shoulder against the back of the cart, overlooking the valley. There was supposed to be a battle taking place, but instead… instead there was all this.

  Domingo lowered the heavy hawkglass, hand shaking, mouth dry, lame arm and shattered leg forgotten. His thumb traced the etching of his son’s name on the silver band set in the brass instrument, and most of the fight left him then. Until he’d seen the battlefield he’d held out hope of Shea or some other officer riding back to report, of managing to draw his saber despite his awkward position sprawled out in the back of the wagon, of anything… But the anathema had outfoxed and outfenced him at every juncture, and not a one of the Azgarothians he had brought to this place was going to come rescue him, because they were all too busy losing their minds and dying in droves.

  “I’ll tell you one last secret, Colonel,” Wan said, throwing his spindly arm around Hjortt and giving him a comradely squeeze. “I had my doubts anything would happen. Or it would go halfway, and then… poof, nothing. That smoke, though, you can see that even without your glass, that means the ritual is proceeding just like Her Grace said
it would.”

  “This… this is the pope’s weapon?” Domingo tried to remember the particulars of the ceremony he had done his devil’s best to ignore while it was taking place. “All that chanting about sacrifice, the Fallen Mother’s kingdom ascendant… You fucking poisoned my people.”

  “Poisoned them? We saved them, Domingo—I may have told a fib or two to convince you to go ahead with the ritual, but I spoke true when I said it was the highest honor to be marked by the Fallen Mother. They will be the martyrs who end this war.”

  “I… I did this to them. I let you…” Domingo could say no more, his tongue as heavy as his heart. His soldiers had trusted him, and he had doomed them all.

  “You did the right thing,” said Wan, in the same patronizing good-for-you tone Domingo’s wife had used when Efrain so much as pissed in the right pot. “Even after you agreed to take me and the oil along, there was initially some concern that you would raise… secular objections to the anointment of your soldiers, which was why I proposed using it as a poison for their blades instead. It seemed much more in line with your pragmatically disciplined bloodlust. I didn’t know how to proceed when you declined both a blessing and a poison, but then those rebels brought their monsters down onto your smug shoulders, and a wolf’s tongue convinced you of what my own could not.”

  “You smeared the same shit on my regiment’s foreheads as you did on their weapons?” Domingo was still shaking, but no longer from fear and revulsion at what was happening to his people, at what they were doing to each other, or to see the earth smoking beneath the feet of his soldiers. He trembled because he had never wanted to kill anyone or anything as much as he wanted to kill the anathema that reclined beside him.

  “Actually, most of it ended up on their brows, not their swords. We couldn’t bring nearly enough of it for both, and if you can only consecrate one weapon, well… It’s taken years to store up enough oil from the Chain’s hives to make another go of it. The last time there wasn’t enough, or something went wrong. I don’t know. It was before my time, back when Shanatu was still pope, and a young one at that.”

  “Windhand,” breathed Domingo, clenching the hawkglass in his fist.

  “Oh, you were there?” Wan took his arm back from around Domingo’s shoulder and sat up, all ears. “What was it like? Did it happen like this? What was different?”

  “I wasn’t there—it was the Fourth, out of Boleskine. But I heard stories,” said Domingo, not afraid of dying, not afraid of much, but revolted to find the world was an even worse hell than he’d always thought. Soldiers he’d marched with for years were down there in that vale, and plenty of new blood that had flowed in during Efrain’s short command, and now they were…

  “What stories?” said Wan, desperate for it. Domingo sneered at his enemy, here at last some small victory he could claim. But then the anathema climbed on top of his legs like a child demanding a bedtime song from his parent, and the weight of even the slight monk on his broken leg caught Domingo’s breath in his chest. “Quick about it, old man, I want to be able to watch when it happens. For all their gossip at the table before they sent me off, not even the pontiff and cardinals know for sure how it will transpire here, or what exactly happened at Windhand. We lost everyone there.”

  “Soldiers turning on one another,” Domingo gasped through the pain in his leg. “Killing each other. Worse. Eating each other alive. Worse. Like… like they’re doing out there.”

  “Oh,” said Wan, disappointed. “Well, this time it’s going to work—we have lit the beacons and prepared the offerings, and back in Diadem the Holy See will have worked stronger rites yet. She will bestow us with her bounty. The Day of Becoming is upon us, oh wretched doubter, and I’ll even allow you to bear witness. She cares about you that much, Domingo—even after all your childish blasphemies, even though you refused her mark, you still get to be a martyr for the Burnished Chain. Saint or sinner, pureborn or anathema, the Fallen Mother loves us all!”

  Despite her training, despite her youth, despite her skill, despite even her devil, Ji-hyeon was a dead woman, dead as her horse, dead as her bodyguards—the only time she found one of them in the churning flood of clashing metal was when she tripped over a familiar corpse. She could barely raise the one sword she’d managed to hold on to, and though Fellwing could eat well in such a place, the devil was exhausted, too, reeling drunkenly just above the melee. If not for whatever trick Hoartrap must have pulled to drive the Crimson soldiers mad she would have already fallen, but even with the wild-eyed infantry murdering one another as readily as they attacked her, there were too many of them.

  The mob had thinned out substantially, but she was still surrounded by the enemy on all sides, and as she cut down one woman, a second looked up from where she squatted over a fallen comrade. Blood ran down this woman’s chin, and from the gory chunk she clutched in her hand—Ji-hyeon staggered backward, realizing what the woman was doing but unable to accept it.

  A hand knotted in the hair that flowed down from the back of her helm, yanking her off balance. She tried turning, stabbing behind her, but the hand held her too tight, and then something heavy slammed into the small of her back, popping links in her hauberk, a clump of her hair coming out by the roots as she fell facedown in the trodden turf. All her friends were gone, and if Fellwing could no longer protect her, that could only mean she had lost her devil, too… and it was entirely her fault.

  She wanted to roll away and spring to her feet, to put her sword between her and her foes, but her body seemed done with the whole affair, scalp burning, ears ringing, head swimming, the world reduced to a tiny window between the steel jaws of her helm. Two men locked in an embrace tripped over her back and went down beside her, mouths snapping at one another’s faces. From the black, bloodied soil between her and the wrestling soldiers, steam began to rise… no, black smoke, curling into phantasmal shapes as it rose, the earth warming the metal of her armor, and Ji-hyeon watched the fumes thicken, knowing she had to get up but wanting to stay down just a little longer.

  This was why Fennec and all her other advisors save Zosia had tried to talk her out of leading a charge. What in all the Isles had she been thinking, ignoring everyone but a notorious madwoman? The front wasn’t where you went to give orders, or intimidate your enemies, or rally your army. The front was where you went to die. A screaming wildborn war nun fell to the smoking earth just in front of her, and then the woman’s bestial face exploded as a mace muted her forever. Ji-hyeon closed her eyes, just needing to rest, just needing to muster her moxie, and then, and then she would go back to the war…

  She felt herself begin to melt into the black earth, and it made her skin prickle and her mouth water just like when she’d gone through the Gate, her body coming alive in a way it never had before nor since.

  Then someone pulled her glove off her left hand, the chill air feeling so refreshing on her skin after being baked in her armor that Ji-hyeon moaned. She tried to look and see who was helping her out of her gear, but the helm was so heavy she couldn’t lift her neck. Then a mouth closed lovingly around her middle and index fingers, sucking on the sweaty digits. It felt nice, letting her know the dream she was embarking on was shaping up to be a good one. Then the teeth closed, hard, crushing the bones as they chewed her fingers. Ji-hyeon screamed, rolling over and surprising the Imperial cannibal into scrambling to her feet. She took both of Ji-hyeon’s fingers with her. That fucking settled it; Ji-hyeon tightened her grip on her sword and jabbed it up through the woman’s groin, into her belly. The cannibal fell and Ji-hyeon rose, her heavy boots now feeling light as silk slippers as she kicked in the woman’s horrible, thieving face.

  “Take my fingers?” She shook the throbbing wet wreckage of her hand at the cannibal as she stomped her. “Take my fucking fingers! I’ll give you my fucking toes, too!”

  A man burst from the miasma at her side like an eagle diving at a trout, and Ji-hyeon pivoted out of his path, her backhanded swipe opening his th
roat as he passed.

  “Fucking eating people?” Ji-hyeon demanded of the crowd. “Fucking eating me? Do you want to die?”

  A woman glanced up from feeding to catch Ji-hyeon’s blade across the temple, her skull splitting like a dropped pumpkin.

  “Come on, then! Come take a bite!”

  Two screaming soldiers covered in so much blood Ji-hyeon couldn’t tell which side they fought for ran past her, flailing their weapons around but failing to cut more than the haze around her head. She sheared through one’s ankle as they fled back into the chaos, then poked him through the back as he fell. Poked him again, harder, black ooze welling out of the holes she’d punched in his thin leather jack as she looked up for the next challenger, the world at last beginning to make sense again through the jagged mouth of her wolfish helm.

  “I’ll! Kill! You! All!”

  Forms shimmied all around her in the cloud of smoke, the incense-rich fumes condensing, and then a dark silhouette came low at her. She brought her blade down, a wild cry on her lips—

  Then twisted her sword away at the last moment when she recognized Keun-ju. In the dimness she had almost hacked his head off when he stumbled out of the haze. He was drenched in blood, a spear broken off in his left shoulder, but he still held the four-tiger sword she had given him: Keun-ju was alive, and he was here… And then Choi appeared through the smoke after him, the wildborn looking even worse off than Keun-ju, bleeding from every limb. In the crook of her arm she carried Fellwing, the owlbat shivering.

  Ji-hyeon tried to greet them, but only a horrible laugh emerged from the canine mask of her helm.

  “We have to go!” Keun-ju shouted in her face, as though Ji-hyeon were deaf, but then that was a sentiment that deserved an emphatic delivery. Her feet warming through the soles of her boots, Ji-hyeon, her Virtue Guard, and her Martial Guard cut their way through smoke and flesh as if they were the same.