A Crown for Cold Silver

by Alex Marshall

  “You see it?” Sullen asked Grandfather as they reached the upper edge of camp, the column of devils still hovering over the battlefield. He hoped they were just wild devils, anyway, and not something more material… an angry god, for example. Smoke was rising to join the swarm, but as they entered the maze of tents Sullen lost sight of the valley altogether, and couldn’t tell if the black vapors were caused by a fire or something even less welcome.

  “What?” said Grandfather, which was answer enough. “The smoke?”

  “Nah, Fa, I—” Sullen began, but as they rounded a tent they nearly ran over a boy in a blue headband. The kid yelped, stumbling backward and firing his crossbow at them. The bolt went high, praise Rakehell for the luck he stole for his descendants, and Sullen skidded to a stop in front of the lad. “Ruddy hell, child, we’re on your side! You could put a real hurt on someone, shooting off weakbows willy-nilly!”

  The boy was still staring up in dread, and, following the kid’s eye back over his shoulder, Sullen saw the line of Myuran prisoners coming down the mountain. That explained it, then; this runt thought the camp was being ambushed and had jumped at the first big shadow. “We captured them, kid, we took…”

  But the kid wasn’t looking at the hill behind them. The kid was looking up at Grandfather, who’d been too silent in the face of such bullshit, and then the first warm drops soaked through Sullen’s hair, tickling his scalp.

  “Ah, no, no, no,” Sullen moaned, fumbling with the straps of the harness, but he knew before he even got them loose that Grandfather was too limp, an arm flopping against Sullen’s face as he swung the old man down. Sullen had known it was coming for as long as he’d known what death was, but it wasn’t supposed to happen this way, not for the man who’d taught him everything worth knowing, and a few more things besides. “Oh, Fa.”

  A few feathers jutted out of Grandfather’s open mouth, the rest of the quarrel lodged in his palate and skull, the glistening arrowhead punched through the top of his head. Already he smelled like he’d been dead for weeks.

  Brought down by one of the weakbows he so despised. Brought down by a boy whose life they had just bought back on the plateau, before Grandfather had even had the chance to sing for his son.

  “I’m sorry,” the kid squeaked, and, looking up, Sullen saw the boy was crying almost as hard as he was. He dropped the bow as Sullen rose to his full height, then turned to run, but not fast enough. Sullen pounced on the boy, whipped him to the ground, and crouched over him, hand tight around his throat. He squeezed, the kid pissing his pants, and Sullen wanted to stop, wanted to let the kid go, was even more scared of what he was doing to him than he was heartsick about Grandfather, but his hand just tightened as he whispered:

  “I’m sorry, too.”

  Just when Maroto thought the worms were wearing off, the shit got all intense and crazy again, the Crimson infantry looking a mite more human now, but behaving even more devilish. As Purna wrenched her kakuri knife out of a soldier’s collarbone and Maroto deflected a thrust from another who would have stabbed his ward, he saw that the soldiers farther in had stopped fighting and started eating the dead. Of all the lousy times for a Windhand flashback… Nothing seemed funny anymore, not the good kind of funny, anyway, and Maroto told himself he’d never sting again. Just like he usually did at this point in a bug-out, when things turned scary. Smoke seemed to be pouring from the ground wherever he took a step, the smell like burning hair and pungent semen, and he barely got his shield up in time to block a pike that would’ve plugged Purna.

  “Gotta fall back,” she panted. “We’ll never find General Ji-hyeon in this mist. You see the others?”

  “Nah,” said Maroto, his tongue working normal again now that he’d sweated out some of the scorpion. Three furious Imperials blasted out of the smoke at them, and Maroto performed the trickiest dance of his life; it would’ve been easy enough, if he could brain them with a shield in clear conscience, but he didn’t want to push his oath any more than he already had. So instead he put himself between Purna and the raging soldiers, shield up, shield over, shield down, the girl darting through his openings and tagging the soldiers. In all the excitement he caught a few shallow slashes and scrapes, but credit where due, when he rolled out of the way and Purna leaped forward to hack into the last man’s face with her curved blade, he saw she didn’t have a scratch on her. Then he started snickering again, kept laughing as he clambered back up and they shuffled through the curtains of smoke to take the stage, because he had finally figured out what role he was playing in this strange new drama.

  He was Purna’s devil.

  Zosia wheezed along after Hoartrap through the camp, a stitch in her side the size of the Agrimonia Trench. Even the camp followers who usually laid low during the fighting lest they catch a stray arrow had come out to watch the baffling scene below, and a few had loaded heavy packs and were fleeing away up the slope, cutting out before things got any weirder. Zosia sympathized; she’d never seen Choplicker so happy, or Hoartrap so anxious. As the tents thinned out on the lower end of camp and they squeezed past the pickets, she saw that the black column of smoke rising from the battlefield was perfectly cylindrical, and extended as high as her eye could follow. Ripples of light began to appear in the heart of the pillar, and Zosia pinpointed the scent in the air she’d been trying to place the whole way down from the plateau: camping with Leib a dozen years before, they’d been caught out in the high country by a thunderstorm, and a bolt of lightning had blasted the stones close enough they could feel its energy tingling on their tongues and smell its hot tang.

  The cylindrical cloud covered most of the valley, extending far enough outward to envelop the front lines, and Zosia saw that the Cobalt infantry in the rear were staring up at the black pillar in awe, weapons held limp when they were held at all. Hoartrap was cursing to wake the devils, and Zosia would have, too, if she’d had the breath—this was the worst deviltry she’d ever seen in thirty years of raising hell, the Chainwitches of the Imperial army calling up something that no mortal could hope to put down again… and she was running straight for it.

  Then Hoartrap stopped so abruptly she almost bowled into him, the sorcerer drawing up short just at the base of the Lark’s Tongue. The slack shoulders of the rear guard and barber surgeons and officers and the rest of the remaining Cobalt Company were lined up between them and the swirling column. Choplicker sat back and howled for all he was worth, tail beating the dust around them, and…

  Pop. Not a loud one, either, like some firearms made, but more like the sound and sensation Zosia felt when she came down to the lowlands after a long spell in the mountains. And just like that, the wavering pillar of inky darkness and flickering light sucked down into the battlefield, like smoke drawn through a pipe. As the crown of the column plummeted down from the heavens, though, something must have changed upon the field, for instead of being pulled back into the earth with the rest of it, the remaining smoke billowed out across the valley, stinging Zosia’s eyes and making Hoartrap cough.

  “That’s gone and done it,” the sorcerer managed. “There’s not a devil in my bag that’s going to escape my wrath for this oversight. Someone in there knew this was coming, mark my words, someone smelled it on the wind but kept quiet.”

  “What was that?” Zosia asked, Choplicker barking happily in response, headbutting her bottom to get her moving.

  “I’ve got a pretty good idea,” said Hoartrap. “But let’s find out.”

  “Fucking devils,” said Zosia, looking down at Choplicker. “First let’s go find our friends. You willing to take me to Maroto and the rest?”

  Choplicker strutted into the heavy clouds of smoke puffing up from the valley, and Zosia followed him down. No better guide for a tour of some new hell than your own personal devil.

  “Look. At. That,” breathed Brother Wan, still straddling Domingo but staring back at where the tower of blackness had collapsed to earth.

  Domingo smelled it even bef
ore the wave of smoke rolling up the side of the valley reached them, his eyes watering as his nose recognized the orange sage oil Concilia had added to Efrain’s bathwater when he was a child, when Domingo could still look at his wife with something other than desperation and his son with something more than disappointment. The grey shroud muffled the world, even the anathema atop him seeming remote and harmless as a memory of past failures.

  “And the war’s over,” Wan said softly. “That which was prophesied in the Canticles has come to pass.”

  “What did you do?” Domingo asked just as softly, and because the hour was far too late for self-deception, he amended himself. “What did we do?”

  “We’ve saved the Star, Domingo.” Milky tears ran off Wan’s chin and landed on Domingo’s red uniform. “You saved the Star, by putting your faith in the Chain. Her Grace called it a weapon, because that was the only way you could understand it, but it was never a weapon. It was a gift, a gift to all mortals.”

  “I asked you what the fuck I did, you wretched monster!” Domingo’s voice broke. “Stop talking Chainite madness and tell me. Please. What did I do?”

  “Madness?” The fleeting softness of Wan’s face set and his cheeks dried. “You still doubt her, even after all you’ve seen. All you’ve done.”

  “I just want to know,” said Domingo, slumping back into his sweaty pillows, the monster that straddled him gazing down in scorn. “I just want to know.”

  “No you don’t,” said Wan. “You’ve never wanted to know. You’ve spent your whole existence denying the truth with one breath and demanding answers with the next. I was going to show you, I was going to take you through with me… But you’re not worthy.”

  “You don’t know, do you?” Domingo must be as mad as Wan, because it was so hard not to burst out laughing at this crazy, sad little monster who thought he had the whole game figured out. “You won’t tell me because you don’t even know what it is you’ve done!”

  “I’ve saved the world, and now I’m going to pass through to my reward,” said Wan. “But first I’m going to spare you from further pain. It will be… unpleasant, for the sinners left behind, and I think you have suffered enough in this life. You may despise me, Domingo, but I have nothing but pity for you.”

  Domingo groaned as the gaunt witchborn shifted his weight, sending more currents of grief through the colonel’s broken leg. From his cassock Brother Wan had drawn the black knife Domingo had declined back on the Azgarothian border, when he’d dispatched the Immaculate prince. What a long time ago that seemed, back when the Immaculates’ conquest of Linkensterne had seemed a crime worth killing over, back when Domingo still had ambitions beyond dying better than he was probably going to, now that his time was up. He wondered if the foreign prince’s family would respond to the news of their child’s cruel death the same way Domingo had, with fury instead of grief…

  “Safe roads guide you to her breast,” said Brother Wan, clumsy enough with his dagger that Domingo didn’t hold much hope for a quick end to this. “Time to let the angels take you, Colonel.”

  “I doubt either of us will be seeing any angels,” said Domingo, tensing every fiber of his broken body as Brother Wan leaned down to slit his throat.

  The witchborn came in, close as a lover, and Domingo clobbered his soft temple with the brass hawkglass. Wan reeled to the side, lashing blindly with the dagger and clipping Domingo’s cheek. The blade ran back along the bone and nicked his ear. That was just the bit of extra incentive Domingo needed, and he cracked the anathema a second time, harder still, the glass set in the brass tube exploding out in a bloom of crystals, and Brother Wan slumped on top of him, their foreheads knocking painfully together.

  “A wise general never leaves the battlefield,” Domingo told the limp monk. “And I never gave the boy anything he couldn’t use as a weapon.”

  Brother Wan had dropped his knife over the edge of the wagon when he blacked out, and so it required a bit more time and commitment for the broken-legged, lame-armed colonel to do what needed doing, especially with the crick in his neck. One wouldn’t think it, but that was the worst, like a thousand thorns jabbing into his spine as he rolled the anathema off him and then dragged himself upright in the wagon bed. The fumes were thicker now, like he’d snuck into the steamy bathhouse to steal a kiss from Concilia while Efrain splashed around the tub, laughing the bright, sharp laughter of children, a sound that had never agreed with Domingo.

  He should rip up this bedding, use it to bind Brother Wan before he woke up. Interrogate him when he came to, using methods reserved only for traitors to the Crown. Get a straight answer out of the crooked man. But there was an awful lot of blood running off Domingo’s flayed face, and who knew how long he’d be able to stay awake. Who knew how long he’d be alive. So Colonel Domingo Hjortt did the only judicious thing he could think of, and bashed away at the back of Brother Wan’s head until he had no more strength to lift the broken hawkglass. Then he slumped back in the bloodied, befouled wagon bed, hissing at the songs his ruined body sang for him, and stared up into the hazy sky, hoping the smoke would clear and he could see the sun one final time before he went into what the superstitious called the First Dark, but what Domingo knew was nothing more nor less than the cold, cold ground.

  CHAPTER

  26

  Sullen held a boy of less than a dozen thaws to the ground, and choked him to death with one hand. Sullen smelled piss and shit, blood and old age, but that last was growing fainter by the breath, and as it faded he squeezed harder. The kid’s eyes were bugging out, his legs flopping, feeble fingers latched onto Sullen’s wrist. It was a dark task, but it needed doing, with Grandfather killed for no reason at all, murdered in a way to shame the ancestors. Vengeance had to be paid, and Sullen tightened his grip and looked away, for he took no pleasure in it.

  “No.” He dropped the boy as though he’d seized a snake and sat back on his haunches in the dusty lane between tents. The boy gasped, a dry, ugly noise that sounded like it hurt. And Sullen said it again, louder, trying to make it stick. “No!”

  The whole reason they’d left the Savannahs was to find something better than the old ways, wasn’t it? When you killed someone back home, you paid their family or you fought whoever came looking for revenge. Simple… but nothing seemed simple anymore. What good would come of killing this fool boy? What good would come of any of it?

  “Sorry,” the boy said it again, coughing on the word as he crawled backward on his arse, trying to get away, and, hearing that worthless word, Sullen wanted to jam it back down his neck. Hopping to his feet and advancing on him, he said:

  “You think I give a fuck if you’re sorry? You killed my grandfather! I drag him all the way here, talk him into helping you, your people, and that’s how you repay him? Fucking weakbow?” He raised his foot to stomp the cowering boy before he caught himself again, stamped the earth instead. “What the fuck do I do now, huh? Leave him here, after all he did for me? Let you run away, after what you did for him?”

  “Plee… plee… please,” the kid stammered.

  “I’m asking you a fucking question!” Sullen bellowed, feeling like his brain was going to boil out of his ears. He had been mad, once or twice, and always to bad result, but he’d never had the devils in him like this. “I don’t have anyone else to ask! ’Cause you killed him! So what do I do now?”

  “Ca-ca-crimson, or… Immmmmaculate?” said the kid, and Sullen realized he’d been ranting in the true tongue, and wherever this child came from, it wasn’t the Noreast Arm. That was just as well, Sullen could rage in other languages than his own, though fishing around for the right words made him lose some of his momentum.

  “You murdered my grandfather,” he said in Immaculate. “You murdered him because… because you’re a stupid fucking arsehole. So what do I do now? How can I let you go, when you did that to him? How can I face him, my other ancestors, when I stand at the door of Old Black’s Meadhall? How?”

  “P
lease,” was all the kid managed, making Sullen wonder if the barrier hadn’t been language, if this boy was just simpleminded. He looked back at Grandfather’s limp form in the dust, hoping that even in death he could provide wisdom, but all he offered was an appetizing meal to the flies buzzing around his bloody mouth.

  “All right,” said Sullen, closing his eyes, telling himself he knew this hour would come… But predicting something and being ready for it aren’t the same, not by a stretch. He’d always imagined Grandfather dying to save him, or some worthier person still, the old man sacrificing himself to great honor. Taking on a hundred enemies and making them pay dearly for one grey wolf that couldn’t even stand on his own legs. Using his last breath to boast or crack a joke or maybe just say farewell to his grandson. That’s how it would have happened in the sagas. Not like this. What kind of sad, disappointing song would this make?

  The thing was, there was more going on right now than just what had happened to Grandfather. A lot more. This wasn’t a fucking song, with Grandfather’s death the dramatic end to a night’s entertainment; wars didn’t stop for one old man… Or did they? All that ruckus down in the valley had gone quiet, now that he pricked his ears that way, and the faint whiff of charcoal mixed with sweet rice reached his nose just before a grey cloud of smoke flooded up through the camp on the breeze. Craning his neck, he couldn’t see any of the ghostly devils that had gathered over the battlefield, couldn’t see the valley at all. Ji-hyeon was down there somewhere, and so was Uncle Maroto, and while his motives for wanting them alive couldn’t be more different, want them alive Sullen surely did.

  “All right.”

  “Alllll right?” The kid tried to get up but was shaking too badly.