He wasn’t taking his time anymore, hurling the roasted kudzu root off into the wood as hard as he could, carrying his spear like a warrior instead of an old man. The moon wasn’t up yet but now that he’d moved away from the firelight the dark forest concealed no secrets from the eyes he’d been so blessed to be born with, just as Grandfather had always told him. These wildborn eyes of his had always shown him a little something more than others could see, and as he strode up to the familiar shape of his seated mother he saw her more clearly than he ever had before; not just her mortal frame, ankles and wrists manacled around an exposed elbow of the mighty rowan roots, but the true nature of the woman he had so long refused to see. She was his mother, yes, but she was a Horned Wolf first, and always had been.
She watched his approach, flashing her teeth at him in warning or cold greeting. He rolled up on her just as silent as she had run up on him and Keun-ju, the spear made from her father gripped in both hands. She didn’t flinch as he thrust the weapon toward her, but her eyes grew wide, her mean smile turned generous, and that right there was the most fucked-up thing of all—she wanted him to take her life. She wanted a son who would skewer his own mother rather than keeping her as a prisoner, or worst of all, freeing her.
Which was too fucking bad for her, because Sullen wasn’t ever granting another Horned Wolf’s wish. The leaf-shaped spearhead easily sank to the haft in the clay-rich earth just beside his mother, but as her sick pride melted into an expression of disgust Sullen got right in her fucking face, bending down so low his overgrown heap of hair would have fallen in his eyes if it hadn’t bumped into his mom’s braids.
“You listen to me, Ma,” Sullen growled. “Talk or keep that screwface hushed, I don’t give a fuck, but you listen.”
Her lip started to curl into that devildamned sneer and Sullen knocked his forehead into hers before he even thought about it. Not hard, mind, but it must have surprised her as much as it surprised himself, the scabbing wound she’d opened up on his scalp aching from the impact. Keeping his mug right up in hers, he said it again.
“You listen. Now. Because this right here, Ma? This is the end of the fucking song.”
“The end of the song.” The first words she’d spoken to him since they’d fought it out, and she was imitating him, mocking him through her split lip. “I prayed every day you’d grow out of your songs. Did you know that? Every day. To the Fallen Mother, Old Black, Silvereye, and every other mask our maker wears—all I wanted for you was to stop living in songs and start living a life.”
“No, you didn’t,” said Sullen, her hypocrisy whetting his anger and resentment into something sharp that could cut through his clan’s bullshit. “You just wanted me to believe in yours, in the Chainite Hymn of the reformed Horned Wolf Clan. But you know what, Ma? That song is shit. It’s too small, and it’s too ugly, and I grew the fuck out of it.”
“Life isn’t a fucking song!” He’d never heard his mother’s voice break before, but instead of flinching away from the hurt he heard in her words he fed on it, the way a good Horned Wolf feasts on the pain of its foes.
“Thing is, Ma, I didn’t think it was, either. Not really.” He leaned forward so that their foreheads touched again, but gentler, rocking his brow against hers. “But then I went on a quest. I met witches. I fought monsters. I got mixed up in a quarrel between a forgotten god and a warrior of legend. I fell in love with a princess and her suitor. And even after all that, I told myself I was being stupid when I looked to our old sagas for strength or wisdom. I told myself I was a baby and a fool. And all the time I was living a song the likes of which I wouldn’t have believed, not really, if I’d heard it as a pup at Witmouth’s knee. And … and I want to sing it for you, Ma, and have you actually fucking listen for once. Because this song isn’t just about you and me and if we ought to kill each other over some old tribal bullshit, it’s about the whole world being in danger. About the First Dark flooding back into the Star, right fucking now, and everyone from Flintland to the Raniputri Dominions being overrun if we don’t stop it. So please … will you let me sing to you?”
Something he’d said had caught her off guard, or more than that, struck some chord, because she swallowed heavily, and leaned back from his forehead, looking up at where Silvereye was just climbing up the trees of the Haunted Forest. And maybe it was the keenness of his eyes or perhaps the acuity of a hopeful son, but he was sure that his mother did want to hear him out, that she wanted him to tell her something to counteract whatever crazy Horned Wolf nonsense had set her after him. But then the softness of her features tightened, and narrowing her eyes she said, “I will listen to your song, Sullen, but if I am not convinced I will again demand you meet me in combat to determine—”
“You don’t get to demand shit!” Sullen straightened back up, so fucking mad at her way of thinking he couldn’t see straight. “I sing you my song, and then I fucking leave, Ma. I journey beyond the Star to war with an ancient evil, and you either come along to help or you get left tied to a fucking tree!”
As usual, she got caught up on the wrong detail entirely. “If you flee like your uncle a second time, my son, there will be no hole deep enough to hide you from my wrath.”
“Well, when that happens you’ll get fucking dealt with!” Sullen snatched his spear out of the dirt and waggled it in her face. “I’ll use Fa to take away your ruddy legs, and I will leave you a third time, because you haven’t done squat to earn a death at my hand, you crazy fucking savage! Fuck!”
In the panting pause that followed he glared at his mother, and she glared back up at him with a barely perceptible smile and nod of her chin. She’d never looked that way at him before, and Sullen realized she must be proud of him. Horned Wolves, man, what the actual fuck.
“Did my father die well?” she asked, looking at the spear, and though she tried to conceal her worry from him Sullen was far more acquainted to hearing that note in her voice.
“He did one better, Ma—he lived correct,” said Sullen, twisting the spear in his hand so the blade could drink the moonlight. “And he went to Old Black’s Meadhall with a bushel more kills to his name than if he’d died back on the Savannahs all them years ago, when you abandoned us.”
His mother shook her head. “I did no such thing. The Clan does not carry those who cannot carry themselves. You knew this but you chose to stay with your grandfather. He was the one who—”
“You left us,” said Sullen, the words catching in his throat. Maybe he was simple, after all, that he only now saw which way the glacier faulted. Even after he’d left the Savannahs, hells, even after he’d lost his grandfather and set out from the Cobalt camp in search of his uncle, he’d kept making excuses for her, and kept his anger focused on the wrong kinfolk. “You hate your brother for turning his tail on his people, but what about you? What about you turning your fucking back on me and Fa when we needed you most?”
“You know the difference, even if it doesn’t suit your song,” said his mother. “Your uncle Craven betrayed everything—”
“Fucking right he did! And so did your son, and so did your dad, and goons that we were, none of us saw we were all doing it for the same reason.” It was so damn obvious Sullen had to laugh: a short, mean bark. “You know what I was doing out here in this wood when you finally caught me, Ma? Hunting down Maroto, for the same reason you were hunting down me. ’Cause we caught him once, me and Fa, and he cut out again, and we Horned Wolves can’t abide someone running off ’fore we’re done with ’em, can we? Drives us blood simple, someone not staying to fight and maybe die when and where we tell ’em to. I been focused so hard on putting a sun-knife in my uncle’s face I didn’t take the time to think if maybe I shouldn’t tap his fist instead, for leading by example.”
“You follow his example too much already.”
“Yeah, ’cause excusing yourself from a bad scene is such a disgrace,” said Sullen, and now he wasn’t even mad at his mom, he just felt sorry for her crazy arse.
“Took you almost doing for me the way I would’ve done for him to appreciate it, but now it’s all I can see—refusing to fight is its own kinda battle, and a better one at that. How much less sorrow and death would there be in this sorry world if every time we disagreed with someone we left them to their business instead of coming to blows over it? My uncle didn’t leave the Horned Wolves because he didn’t care about us, he left because he knew that way wouldn’t ever be his, and instead of making a stink he just walked away.”
“Yet you tell me you and Father caught him, only for him to flee and lead you on another hunt,” said his mother, trying to talk down at him the way she used to but it wasn’t working now, and wouldn’t ever again. “What noble purpose does his newest desertion serve, Sullen? Go on and tell me, I’m sure the Deceiver has provided all the excuses your uncle needs.”
“He’s gone ahead to scout out Jex Toth,” said Sullen, leaving off any lingering skepticism he might harbor about Hoartrap having told them the whole truth where his uncle was concerned. “And that’s exactly what I’m on about, how we always think the worst when someone goes away without our knowing why, instead of waiting till we see what’s up to judge ’em. I figured he was just being a coward, running off to get himself safe, but I come to learn he’s actually been in the most danger of anyone, all by himself in a perilous land, and doing it selfless-like. Being a fucking hero, you want to get right down to it, risking his life to try and help the rest of us mortals get a leg up on whatever monsters are out there preparing to invade our lands.”
“Craven the Hero,” said his mother, sounding like she believed that as much as Sullen did … which was to say, not nearly as much as he wanted to. “So long as you keep me snared to this tree I can’t stop you from singing, but I shall never believe such a song until I see my brother prove his honor with my own eyes.”
“That’s fair, Ma,” said Sullen, trying to meet her in the middle here. He wasn’t so innocent as to think he could change his mom’s mind all at once, right, but maybe, just maybe, this could be the start of some understanding. “Rakehell knows there’s plenty I seen myself that I still barely believe. So that’s all the more reason for you to come with us, raise your spear against the First Dark for a change, instead of your fellow mortals. Just hear me out—by the end I promise we’ll meet my uncle again, and see what we make of him once we’ve got a chance to judge him by his deeds instead of his absence.”
There was a pause as they appraised each other in the unseasonable mugginess of the winter night, the light of the crescent moon splashing off the clustered ivory flowers of the sprawling rowan and shining on the scars of his mother’s cheeks. Sullen remembered Hoartrap’s warning of devils in the wood overhearing his secrets, but even if there was any truth in the Touch’s tale he didn’t regret a word. So long as his mother actually listened to him, all the lesser evils of this world were welcome to eavesdrop, too, and quake at the coming of a hero such as Sullen …
“Sing me your song, then,” she said at last, the same words in the same resigned tone he had heard a hundred times in his childhood, when he’d finally worn her down enough that she’d sit back on her grass mat in their hut and listen to the newest saga he’d learned. He just had to hope she stayed awake better now than she usually had back then … and that if he somehow convinced her, and they somehow managed to reach Jex Toth, and then somehow found Maroto, that his uncle would indeed prove to be fighting the good fight for a change, instead of sitting it out on his saggy old arse.
CHAPTER
6
Maroto, enchained. But not in actual chains, oh no, that would have been far too boring for his mute captors. Instead of more traditional manacles his hands had been enveloped in thick, tacky webbing. A sticky noose of the same material encircled his neck and rose from his nape up into the close air of the caverns, tethering him to the pale, bloated thing that had spun his shackles. It crawled upside down on the ceiling of the tunnels, keeping pace with the prisoner and his guards as they led him deeper and deeper into their grotesque realm of pulsing, fleshy walls and shiny outcroppings of bone.
When they first took Maroto, he thought that beneath their spiny black armor the Tothans might have been human, or something similar—wildborn, maybe. As their squid-dragon carried him away over the treetops he had even let himself indulge in fantasies where the Tothans were fun-loving freaks of comely cast who would welcome him to their revels, once he explained how he and Bang hadn’t actually been spying on their army but were marooned on Jex Toth completely by accident. He gave up on that particular fancy as soon as they flew into the cave system where rock and earth gave way to gleaming musculature and soft, oozing stalactites. Nothing remotely human would choose to dwell in such a foul hell, and whatever parties went on down here he’d sooner sit out.
After the monstrosity released him from its tentacles he splashed down in a warm pool of gelatinous slime teeming with thankfully unseen creatures that ate away the net-like web they had first bound him in. As soon as he slipped free of the disintegrating lattice he was hauled out of the goo by more of the Tothans, and before he could recover from the shock of it all, fresh webbing was applied to hands and throat by the fat white arachnid that drew its silk from a grinning human mouth in the base of its furry abdomen. When it rappelled back to the ceiling of the meat-cave, tightening Maroto’s noose as it did, he decided that here at last was an occasion so profoundly terrible that he had no fucking time to spare for self-doubt or self-pity or self-loathing. Up until the moment he escaped this nightmare—or bit off his own tongue to bleed to death, if all else failed—his every thought and action would be dedicated to self-preservation.
And so the Mighty Maroto marched obediently forward, trying to keep his cool and think rationally even in this hellscape that looked like the insides of a giant animal and smelled like an overfull terrarium in a low-rent bughouse. The funk to this place definitely had an insect origin, or at least that was the closest touchstone to the cloying, oily stench that made Maroto’s eyes water. Not surprising, that, between the spiderbeast they had used to bind him and the beetle-like cast of their armor—now that he was able to take a good look at the Tothans’ ridged, thorny black plate he was guessing it wasn’t just made to look like bug shell but had actually come off some heretofore unknown species of giant insect. It was a fleet look, he had to admit, the pieces locking together so tightly he couldn’t see a hint of chain or leather between the chinks, nor even an eye-slit in the blank, sharp crowned faceplates, yet the pair of guards moved twice as gracefully as Maroto would have in armor half as bulky. They carried neither weapons nor equipment—at least, none that he could see—but sharp as their clawed gauntlets looked he wasn’t in a hurry to tangle with them.
Faceless soldiers armored in grotesque chitin, stinking of a rancid earwig nest. A domesticated spider-thing the size of a small dog, but Maroto was the one on the leash. He had assumed bugs would be the end of him, yet never in his wildest stingdreams had he imagined such a dramatically literal finale. Here in the bowels of this manifest nightmare he remembered something his old friend Carla Rossi had told him one night when they were both whacked out of their wigs on black centipede meat, following some long-forgotten production in some never-remembered town:
“Hell ain’t going to hold no fresh horrors for the likes of us,” she’d slurred through electric-blue lips, tears in her eyes from sentiment or her smeared greasepaint or some combination of the twain. “No, if the gods are cruel, as we well and fucking truly know they are, then hell’s going to be nuthin’ more than coming right back to where you started—only this time, you can’t leave.”
In the moment he’d figured the drag clown was referring to her shitty hometown on the Imperial frontier, but given the current insect overtones to Maroto’s fate he had to wonder if Carla wouldn’t have been better off reading fortunes than working the stage. He didn’t know if you’d call it irony or poetic justice or what, but there was undeniably a certain drama
tic something to Carla’s sloppy mouth predicting this over-the-top twist half a lifetime ago. The worst part was Maroto had finally kicked the bugs once and for all, too, only to wind up here! Now granted, he’d thought he was clean and clear a few times before only to step back in that familiar antbed, but looking around this insectoid inferno one thing was for certain—if he managed to escape his captors he was never, ever banging another bug so long as he lived. Never.
The ribbed passage they escorted him down was dark as clotted blood, but where his bare feet struck the membranous floor it gave off pulses of black light that illuminated the shaft in front of them. Glancing back he saw three glowing trails of footprints on the floor, and a smaller, fainter track on the ceiling. Weird. Also worth keeping in mind—even if he somehow slipped free of both these guards and the arachnid overhead he’d leave an unmistakable trail wherever he went, so long as he was down in these caverns. The more he saw of this subterranean horror show and the more turns they took in the labyrinth of softly contracting tunnels, the more obvious it became that the only way he was getting free of this place was if they escorted him back out again.
“So, uh, real nice digs you’ve got here,” Maroto said in Immaculate, trying one last time to engage his captors. “I know y’all didn’t say you spoke Crimson or Immaculate or whatever when I asked before, but you didn’t say you didn’t, neither, so how about just a nod or something? Figure you’ve got your orders not to talk to prisoners, and I respect that, but it’d be nice to know if you hear anything I’m saying, yeah?”
If they did they still weren’t giving any indication, neither of the guards so much as turning their helmets in his direction. Their continued silence had gone from rude to downright creepy, but presumably someone down here would be able to understand him, otherwise why keep a potentially hostile prisoner alive? Actually, that was a question he was happier not contemplating at present …
A War in Crimson Embers Page 5