A Crown for Cold Silver

by Alex Marshall

  “Yeah, all right,” said Sullen, settling on his own way, since there was no one here to give him a better idea. “Grandfather there? You carry him up that hill. On your back. To the hump at the top. You make him a bed of tree branches and grass. Lay him on it. Feet toward the plains, head toward the mountain. Then you stay there until I come for you. Do that, I won’t kill you.”

  The kid jerked his head up and down.

  “If you don’t, if I get up to that hump and find the both of you aren’t waiting…” Sullen was going to leave it unsaid, but seeing that this fucking piece of shit was too thick not to murder honest folk volunteering to help out his own army, he spelled it out for him. “If you don’t do all that, I’m going to run you down, anywhere you hide, and I’m going to murder you just as dead as Fa there. Only it won’t be fast. It won’t be easy. You’ll be begging your gods for me to finish it, to let you go on and die. Yeah?”

  The kid nodded fit to snap his own neck and save Sullen the bother.

  “All right then.” And because he couldn’t help the living if he watched the dead, Sullen launched himself down through camp without sparing a backward glance for the kid or the flesh his grandfather had worn. He tried not to notice how light and free he felt, how nimbly he moved, without the weight of the old man on his back.

  “Holy… holy,” said Purna, staring agog into the wavering smoke. They had turned to face another snarling Imperial soldier, only to see him pulled wailing into the earth, along with most of the thick cloud. Maroto had hoped this was just the last hurrah of his worms, giving him a few last visuals, but apparently not. “What… what.”

  “Fucking bugnuts,” he said, squinting into the foul mists and seeing that ahead of them there was not a single other person, not upright, not dead on the ground. After the clangor of an epic battle, the eerie silence of the vale fairly roared in his good ear, like he’d put it up to a hermit spider shell. “So that happened, huh?”

  “What…” Purna said it again, maybe hoping for a better answer. “What?”

  Maroto got a squirmy, cold feeling in his belly, staring at where all those people, living and dead, had just up and vanished, like the whole world had gone to bugs. To either side and behind them there were still corpses aplenty, and he knew from long experience that it was always better to take your chances with the mundane dead than the devilishly mysterious. Tossing away one of his battered shields and wiping the sweat and grime from his face, he said, “Fight’s over, one way or another. Let’s move.”

  Booking it away through the thinning waves of smoke, he kept a close watch for their friends, both among the other dazed figures lurching through the haze, and at their feet. Just before they got separated in the press he’d seen Hassan take a bad hammer to the back, but then the man had been swallowed by the blurring clash. He hadn’t seen what happened to Din or Diggelby… But speak of the devils and watch them rise, here came Diggelby swaying through the smoke!

  “Digs!” called Purna hoarsely. “Did you fucking see that shit?”

  “The smoke?”

  “No, dummy, the fucking Imperials!” said Purna.

  “What about them?”

  “They’re gone!” Purna’s voice had the ragged edge of someone who’d just seen their first true devil. Then again, Maroto had seen a lot of devils in his day, and whatever had happened back there definitely still bugged him right the fuck out. “Like, all of them! Or at least all the ones back there—they just… went, right in front of us, and far as we could see the whole fucking army got took!”

  “Sorcery,” said Diggelby, in a tone that said it was so passé. He waved them over. “Take a look.”

  Joining their friend, Maroto saw that Diggelby’s armored caftan had lost most of its padding, the garment shredded to the skin in places, but other than a lot of blood caked on his person, he seemed to have come out all right. He held a flask in one shaking hand, and Prince was cupped in his other arm. The spaniel looked even worse than his master, a bloodied foreleg spasming, a cut on his snout, and his collar missing.

  “A war monk?” said Purna, looking down at the half-dead man in robes curled at Diggelby’s feet, his breath coming in shuddering gasps, a javelin jutting from his abdomen. “What does that prove?”

  “We’ll put a few questions to him,” said Diggelby, passing the flask to a grateful Maroto. “See what’s what. They call them ‘Chainwitches,’ so maybe he knows something about all this obvious witchery.”

  “Nah,” said Maroto, both to Diggelby’s suggestion and Purna’s snatching the flask from his hand before he could take a second pull. “Why the devils would they do something that wiped out their folk ’stead of ours? Purna and me were right there when the crazy went down, and the Crimsons got the worst of it by a country league.”

  “Can’t hurt to ask,” said Purna, tossing Diggelby the flask and putting a boot onto the war monk to roll him onto his back.

  “Careful there, weirdborn—” Thinking of Choi’s sharp smile, Maroto amended himself. “Shit, I mean wildborn, wildborn can be—”

  “Maroto,” said Diggelby peevishly, as if noticing him for the first time. “Maroto, where is my other shield?”

  “Huh?” Maroto looked at the one shield he had left, which was no longer in any condition to be mounted in the nobleman’s den once the war was won. “Oh balls, Diggelby, I totally forgot and—”

  “Fucking bastard!” Purna yelped, staggering back from the prone Chainite, who had jabbed at her with a dagger. She gasped when her weight came down on her left leg.

  “Told you to be careful,” said Maroto, kicking the knife from the war monk’s hand and snatching Diggelby’s flask. “You tend that one and I’ll see to Purna. Come on, girl, where’d he tag you?”

  “I’m fine, I’m fine,” said Purna, wobbling, trying to look at the back of her leg, and then she fell over. Maroto heard Diggelby grumbling as he drew his crystalline sword, a grunt and gurgle from the war monk, but didn’t look back, his full notice on just how much red stuff was coming out of the back of Purna’s thigh, leaking through the padded legging between the edge of her mail skirt and the steel cop protecting her knee. He fell to his knees beside her, rolling her on her side and slapping his hand on the narrow cut… But hot as her blood felt against his palm, ice began to spread through his chest—the pressure under his hand was bad, as bad as bad could get. She’d been stabbed, not slashed, and if her artery was nicked the girl would be dead in minutes. Maybe sooner.

  “Diggelby!” he cried, trying to keep the terror out of his voice lest she catch it. “Your belt, Diggelby, right fucking now!”

  “I’m fine, really,” said Purna, trying to sit up on her elbow and slumping back down, blood flowing faster between Maroto’s fingers. “Fucking jerk just… damn.”

  “Always talking me out of my belt, barbarian…” Diggelby started, but shut up as soon as he saw what had happened, stayed dead quiet as he slid down on the other side of Purna. A quiet Diggelby was not a reassuring portent. The fop fed his belt around her upper thigh with a junkie’s steadiness, cinched it for all he was worth. The pressure barely lessened.

  “I can get up,” said Purna, voice quavering as she tried to see what they were doing. “I’m… fine.”

  Purna was dying fast, and there wasn’t a fucking thing they could do to help.

  “Hey, what’s happened?” Zosia called, Choplicker having led her straight to a break in the smoke-choked valley. Given her devil’s keen interest in sniffing the butt of a hurt spaniel that was inexplicably hanging out on the ruined battlefield, maybe he’d had ulterior motives. Beyond the wounded dog and the thing that pretended to be a dog, Maroto and one of his noble friends, Diggelby, kneeled over a fallen comrade. Purna, Maroto’s cute, scrappy disciple—she hadn’t recognized her at first, the girl too pale from all the blood covering her and her friends. “Shit, anything I can do to help?”

  Maroto looked up at Zosia, obviously frightened out of his wits, and then, as though realizing thi
s was all a nightmare and he would soon awake to find his friend unharmed, a rowdy grin lit up his dark, haunted face. Closing the last few feet of trampled grass, Zosia didn’t see how the hells he could find any succor in her presence; she was worse at field surgery than he was, and the shuddering girl he held would soon be as dead as the countless unknown bodies she had stepped over in the course of getting to them.

  “Zosia!” he said, sounding as close to broken as she’d ever heard him, which was saying something indeed. “Oh, thank every devil! Here, hold this, Diggelby, everything’s going to be fine.”

  “Maroto, what the fuck!” Diggelby struggled to press his far smaller hands against Purna’s slick red thigh as Maroto abandoned his post, lurching up and seizing Zosia’s shoulders with his bloody hands. His face was right in hers, pupils filling his teary eyes, and he spoke with the measured composure of a bug veteran trying to convince a straitlaced stranger to lend him some silver.

  “Shit, Zosia, Purna’s real bad, you can see that…” He licked his chapped lips, gently squeezed her shoulders. “I know it’s asking a lot, a whole lot, more than me or anyone’s got any right to ask, yeah, but she’s going to die, Zee, she’s going to fucking die right here if you don’t help her…”

  Zosia’s stomach dropped as she understood what he was driving at; even with Maroto managing to keep his eyes on hers instead of Choplicker, there wasn’t a whole lot else he could possibly want from her.

  “… and I swear, I fucking swear I’ll do anything to make it up to you, break my vow to the queen, help you bind another, bind twenty more if you want, Hoartrap would help, I know it, so if you’d just—”

  “I wish I could,” said Zosia, making her words as precise as possible. “I can’t.”

  Just like that, he got dangerous, friendly hands on her shoulders tightening down, fake smile turning into a genuine snarl. “Zee, I know it’s asking a lot, and she’s just one of thousands to get got today, yes, of course, but you need to do this. Please. I’m fucking begging you.”

  “And I’m telling you, it’s not that I won’t, it’s that I can’t,” said Zosia, trying to keep her cool in the face of the heat he was throwing off. “He won’t go. I offered him a way out, a long time ago, but he turned me down. He’s not like other devils, he—”

  “Try again, then, try it now,” said Maroto, voice cracking. “Tell him you’ll set him free if he saves her. Can’t hurt to try, right? Maybe he couldn’t before, but now, but now…”

  Wouldn’t that be a joke to wake the sleeping gods of the Sunken Kingdom with her laughter, if Choplicker refused to keep Zosia and Leib safe in exchange for his freedom, but took her offer now, for the life of some saucebox Zosia had spoken to once in her life? His very suggestion was absurd; even if Choplicker accepted and carried through, the world would be richer one smart-mouthed punk who’d get herself killed again soon enough, one way or another, and Zosia would have lost the greatest power known to mortals. If used wisely, a devil’s wish could change the fates of empires, and Maroto expected her to dump hers on account of one girl he fancied?

  “I’m sorry, Maroto, if I could help your girlfriend—”

  “Try it!” he screamed, and then, realizing he’d shaken her, let go of Zosia’s shoulders, tried to brush off the blood he’d smeared on her tunic. “Please, Zosia, she’s not my girl, nothing like that, she’s… she’s my friend. She’s my only real friend.”

  Maroto was blubbering now, and Zosia looked at the fallen girl, the fop trying to stanch her wound, and then her wicked devil, who was now giving the lapdog a look like he might eat it, if he thought nobody was paying attention. Quietly, Zosia said, “I’m your friend, Maroto, and I know how hard it is to let go—”

  “You think you’re still my friend?” He sneered. “You let me throw my life away on your account. Let me think my friend had been murdered. Let me think my friend needed someone to avenge her, keep her memory warm. You were a better friend dead than you ever were alive!”

  Some of that stung, and some of it was horseshit for all kinds of reasons, but before she could stop herself the words were out of her mouth. Maybe she said it because she was his friend, for all his problems, or maybe because she just wanted to prove to him that she’d been telling the truth. “Choplicker. You save Tapai Purna there, make her healthy and whole again, with no kinds of sinister twists to the deal, and I release you from your bond. Onetime offer, take it or leave it.”

  Choplicker glanced over, and Zosia held her breath…

  And then the devil yawned, and turned back to acting all stiff and tough with the lapdog. It was an odd feeling, to be disappointed and relieved all at once, and hating yourself for your uncontrollable emotions in the bargain.

  “See?” Zosia reached for Maroto’s shoulder. “I wish I could—”

  “What a load of shit,” said Maroto, flinching away from her touch, uglier than she’d ever seen him. “You have to want it, Zee.”

  “Excuse me?” Now Zosia was feeling her fire, too—he was in a place, obviously, but there were limits to how much she’d let go.

  “You didn’t want it, so it didn’t work,” said Maroto. “Everyone knows you have to want it, especially the devils. So why don’t you want to save her?”

  “I do want it,” said Zosia, hoping she meant it but not so sure anymore—what if Choplicker had sensed her reservations and taken that into consideration? What if he’d seen into her selfish heart, and knew this wasn’t her one true wish? What if when she’d asked him to watch over her husband he had sensed some similar doubt? What if this was all her fault, instead of his?

  “Liar. You fucking liar.” Maroto shook his head, snot and tears on his grubby face, and he poked her in the chest, his eyes black as Gates and just as warm. “We’re fucking done, you and me. I gave up my life to help you, and you won’t give up a fucking dog to help my friend? Fair enough, Cold Zosia, but after I bury Purna I’m coming for you, and not even that devil of yours will be able to help. You’re a fucking dead woman.”

  Maroto wasn’t in his right mind, and he’d made some fair points, shitty as it was to admit, but the day some asshole talked to her that way after she’d tried loosing her devil to help him was the day she was fit for the grave. She bit her lip, nodded like she was considering his threat, then hurled herself forward, headbutting him in the chin. He stumbled backward and nearly tripped over his dying friend, then launched himself back at Zosia—only to be swept off his feet by a figure who came barreling out of the smoke, one of the few people to make the Flintlander look modestly proportioned. Hoartrap actually lifted Maroto, clenching him in a bear hug, and, looking at Zosia, called:

  “I’ll help him back to camp, you mind the children here.”

  “Fuckingfuckbastard!” Maroto thrashed to no avail as Hoartrap clumsily carried him off into the smoke. Zosia scowled at Choplicker; now that Maroto was but an angry echo in the miasma, she realized she had never seen him that unhinged before, and all her wrath fled, leaving her as hollow as she’d ever felt. All she could do for her old friend was watch someone he cared about bleed to death in the dirt for no good reason at all, so that was what she did.

  What she tried to do, anyway, but looking back at Purna’s blanched body, she saw that Diggelby had turned away, his red hands stroking his lapdog rather than fighting the inevitable. The blood still trickled out from Purna’s thigh, and her chest fluttered, but she was going fast. Then Diggelby jerked his hands back with a little scream, falling backward on his ass as his dog started having a fit. Choplicker licked Zosia’s hand, then plopped down at her feet with a whine, watching Diggelby’s lapdog shake and shudder.

  “What the fuck did you do to his mutt?” Zosia demanded, about at the end of her patience with her devil, but then Diggelby yelped again, and the worst stench imaginable overpowered the perfume of blood, metal, shit, and incense that permeated the ghostly battlefield. The fop’s lapdog burst into green flames, and as it shook, burning hair came loose in stinking clumps, f
loating in the air like foul embers. What Zosia had thought was the poor animal squealing was its blackened skin roasting from the inside out, its boiling vitals whistling like a teakettle, and then the whole dreadful mass melted into the earth, giving off fluorescent vapors… vapors that snaked through the air, and plunged into Purna’s nostril and mouth.

  The effect was instantaneous, Purna’s back arching and an earsplitting shriek blasting from her mouth, her eyes rolling back in her head. The blood on her leg began to sizzle, and black ichors bubbled up from the ground beneath her, climbing her thigh in serpentine streams and plugging the wound. No, not plugging it shut—flowing into it, the current increasing as she bucked on the ground. The stench of burned hair now mingled with that of wet dog, and as Purna screamed again it turned into a howl, an impossibly long, black tongue curling out of her mouth.

  Then she went limp, shivering, but her chest was rising and falling in orderly fashion, the color had returned to her skin, and when Diggelby cautiously approached her to remove his makeshift tourniquet, they saw that the wound had healed, and instead of a scab or scar there blossomed a patch of snow-white fur.

  “You saved her,” said Zosia, hardly believing it even having seen it. “That dog of yours was a devil?”

  “I guess so,” said Diggelby sadly, looking at the toxic stain on the flattened grass where it had disappeared from the world of mortals, back to the First Dark. “My father, he bought Prince for me. He always said he was a devil, but I never really believed it; Prince was such an angel! And Baba is easily taken in by bold claims, so I just thought… But when I heard you two fighting about devils and wishes, I thought why not give it a go and—say!” He brightened, pointed at Choplicker. “Will you sell me yours? I’ll give you a more than fair price, and since I suddenly find myself on the market…”

  “Not a bad idea, actually,” said Zosia, earning a reproachful glance from Choplicker. “But I’d get the better end of the deal—in case you didn’t notice, he’s defective. Now, let’s get miracle girl here back to camp before Maroto goes any crazier.”