A War in Crimson Embers

by Alex Marshall

“The dead cannot speak, but sleepers often do,” said Choi decisively. “I have been attempting to do more than share pleasant dreams with him, and now we may have discovered a means. I will tell him what has befallen our general and our army, and will find out where he is and what has happened to him. I suspect we exchange this intelligence anew each time we meet, only to lose it again on waking. Perhaps the secret is not to try to carry it with us along our treks back to our flesh, but to set it sailing with our words as loudly as we can, while we are still at our sharpest in the heart of the dream. This must be why ancient oracles required a witness—to catch the wisdom they would not recall upon waking from their reveries.”

  “I would be lying if I said that didn’t sound like utter balderdash,” said Domingo, picking up his post-prandial cigar from its silver tray. It was admittedly civilized of the Immaculates to provide him with a stubby stick at every meal … and downright infuriating that these Endonian cigars they offered their prisoners of war were the equal of the very best in his humidor back home in Cockspar.

  “Balderdash?” asked Choi as Domingo used the provided shears to snip off the end of his cigar and lit it on the tea candle.

  “Never … mind,” Domingo said around preliminary puffs. Once the woody cigar was good and going he sent a satisfied plume sailing over the ornamental waves carved into the windowsill, out to Othean Bay. “Tell you what, Choi—I’ll humor you and play awestruck scribe to your midnight oracle, in exchange for a favor owed. Agreed?”

  “I do not agree to terms that have not been named,” said Choi. “A favor can mean many things, some which would be fair and others which would not.”

  “Quite so, quite so,” said Domingo. “But those are my terms. You’ve got all day to mull it over, as I assume your nighttime sojourns are just that, but be aware I am intractable on this matter. A favor owed for my service, and nothing less.”

  “Then I agree,” snapped Choi, more fired up than he’d seen her since the disastrous morning of their arrival at Othean. “It is that vital.”

  “Apparently so,” said Domingo, setting down his teacup with a careless clatter on the saucer and reaching out to bump her waiting fist. “Just so I know what to do, though, what happens in the event that you aren’t able to remember your mission? What if instead of interrogating Maroto’s dream soul or whatever it is and passing along the word to me, you two just, well, have the same sort of encounter you did last night?”

  “Then you go away,” said Choi, gazing out to the windswept blue sea as she at long last seemed to feel a touch of the embarrassment Domingo would have harbored from the first, had their roles been reversed. Then she looked back at him, imperious as ever, and said, “And if my maneuver does succeed and I do pass along information, I do not expect it to take all night, and so you may wish to excuse yourself at a certain juncture regardless. I will do as you requested and attempt to be quiet, but I do not know how many more nights either of us has left, and I intend to savor each one.”

  “Yes, well,” said Domingo, ruffled all over again. “What do you say for now we change the topic to something more pleasant, like all my military failures or the human rights of the weird, er, wildborn, or virtually anything else at all?”

  “If we do, is the favor I owe you paid?” she asked, and looking at the witchborn’s sharp smile he supposed she had more of a sense of humor than she’d previously let on.

  “For the small matter of my eavesdropping on your dreamy rendezvous with one of my most hated enemies?” said Domingo, feeling a bit puckish himself in response to her wry smile. “Not even close, Captain, but it’s a start, it’s a start.”

  And so it was, right up until the Samjok-o Guard arrived to interrogate the captured Crimson colonel as to why the Imperial navy, while flying Chainite flags, had barged past an Immaculate blockade in the Haunted Sea only to come zipping back out again, and was now seeking asylum at Othean instead of sailing back to Diadem.

  Domingo and Choi exchanged a long and meaningful look after she had translated, and clearing his throat, Domingo announced that he might have some ideas, but as a senior officer of the Crimson Empire he could only share his intelligence with the empress herself.

  CHAPTER

  10

  Ji-hyeon’s first year on the far side of the First Dark was actually worse than the second. Not because the dangers were initially greater; on the contrary, the harshness of the terrain and the frequency and ferocity of the monsters she encountered only increased the longer she wandered, and the closer she came to the black sun that hung low in the dull heavens, forever brooding over the far horizon. Or what she called the black sun, anyway; the shiny ebon disc was the only definite celestial object in the vast emptiness of the sky, and it seemed to emit both a prickling warmth and the constant purplish glare that lit this realm.

  So it wasn’t anything external that made the first year of Ji-hyeon’s banishment to the sort of hell she had never really believed in so much harder than the second. What made the first year so exhaustingly terrible was simply that it was her first year.

  A year. And a brutal one, even if she had been born to this world of perpetual twilight and snowy ash where the worst horrors walked on two legs but there was also plenty of badness stalking her on four or five or six or more. She ate some of what she killed but could only keep down a fraction of that. The rest of her diet consisted of the grey grubs and grub-shaped roots and grub-tasting lichens she excavated from the too-soft earth or pulled from the crumbling rock formations. She had no way of knowing what kept making her sick, the food she foraged or the opaque water she drank from streams and springs and lakes, which sometimes tasted of copper and other times of vinegar and still others of nothing but the ash that coated everything everything everything in this desolate place, from the low mountains she initially crossed to the ravine-fractured plains beyond to the cloud-spearing range of peaks on their far side.

  Over it all presided the black sun. It never rose or set from its position, fixed in the cloud-webbed sky like a hole burned through a map. Most curious of all, instead of remaining the size of a coin it had slowly grown as big as a dinner plate over the course of Ji-hyeon’s journey to the west.

  Or what she called west, anyway. She had to apply some shape to this place and some direction to her quest, otherwise she would have gone mad. For all she knew the distant beacon wasn’t stationary at all, and every time she awoke or it came back into sight after being obscured by the landscape it had actually moved to what would be a different point on a compass or star chart or map, in a world with compasses and star charts and maps, and people to agree on what they meant. She had asked Fellwing to lead them in the right direction, and the little owlbat always flew toward the black sun, but perhaps the devil was just as disoriented as her mistress.

  Fellwing. Every day Ji-hyeon awoke with the thought that she should release the devil in exchange for passage home, and every day she balked anew. Part of her trepidation was the sad fact that the little fiend was all that Ji-hyeon had left—the empress had taken her family, her army, everything, and if she were to have any hope of revenge she couldn’t trade away the one advantage she still retained. She would need far more than just a bound devil to take on the full might of the Immaculate Isles, obviously, but keeping Fellwing was at least a start. Returning to the Star now, without even her devil, would mean abandoning any chance of making good on her oath to destroy Empress Ryuki. Buying her miserable life in such a fashion would mean sacrificing not just her own honor but that of the entire murdered Bong family.

  Try as Ji-hyeon did to convince herself this was the only reason she hesitated to wish herself home, there was another, deeper, darker motive. Even more than the shame of loosing her devil at the expense of her revenge was the fear that Fellwing wasn’t actually powerful enough to transport her back to the Star, that she would finally commit herself only to have the owlbat sadly shrug her wings in defeat. Ji-hyeon had survived much, but wasn’t sure if she could survive
the heartbreaking confirmation that she truly had no hope of escaping this place. It made her sick to even think about it.

  Sick. As if she were ever anything but sick. Even when her stomach wasn’t punishing her for trying to stay alive against all odds she was ill, had been since her first week here. Too hot on the high mountain passes where the dirty snow was actually that instead of more drifts of ash, and too cold on the shores of the ivory ocean that lay on its far side, despite how warm the black sun’s rays felt reflected off the creamy waves that rose and fell with nauseating slowness, the tides that lapped the shore coming and going as slowly as rice syrup being rolled from one side of a jar to the other. A year of sickness, marching sick, fighting sick, until like so much else she ceased to notice it, her rattling cough and perpetual fatigue as mundane a part of her existence as the thinning white hair that had grown out enough to keep getting in her right eye.

  A year of keeping her left eye hidden behind an iron patch. Or her left eyes, to be strictly accurate. She had known something had changed during her final trip through the First Dark, but it wasn’t until she lay panting beside the steaming corpse of a wyrm and saw her sweaty face reflected in a puddle of its silvery blood that she discovered just what had happened. Tentatively pulling aside the crude blindfold she kept over the left side of her face to block out the distracting assault of indescribable colors and phantasmal impressions, she winced and blinked the neglected orb awake … and in the mirror of metallic blood saw that a grey second iris now crowded the white of her left eye, the pupil of this new addition a horizontal black dash like the eye of a goat, or an octopus. She had blinked at her reflection, a reflection that began to take on terrible alterations as her devilish eye was again able to focus after its long banishment behind the blindfold, and then she had rushed to tie the raggedy patch back in place.

  Yet as if seeing itself reflected in the lifeblood of its demonic kin had given it strength, the eye began to see through the stained cloth of the blindfold, and more disconcerting still, through her very skin when Ji-hyeon scrunched her left eyelid shut. It was as if the new eye wanted to see more, refusing to be shut out—and while at times it felt like it wished to warn her of things she might otherwise miss, like the spectral parasites swarming through the meat of a fresh kill, at others Ji-hyeon had the unsettling impression that it wasn’t her eye at all, but that it belonged to something else, something that was using her to look out into this world after eons of blind darkness … But after many disconcerting days of being unable to shut out the unearthly images, she discovered that the eye’s vision couldn’t penetrate the rusted armor of a roving mutant. After murdering the squealing beast she wrapped a small scrap of its platemail in a rawhide pouch, and this makeshift eye patch finally darkened the devil-eye again.

  It was far easier to adjust to only using one eye than it had been to try to adapt to having three, and she especially hated the way her Gate-shifted vision made her devil look like something far less cute than an owlbat. Despite all this she still found herself compelled to lift the rim of the patch when even Fellwing seemed uncertain of the path before them, or when the water source was especially questionable, or because she was so crippled by depression that without a fleeting ripple of color in the monochromatic wastes she couldn’t muster the strength to get up and start moving again. The eye tempted her, encouraged her to interpret its sights, but if she looked for too long she felt her thoughts begin to quiet, her ambitions sapping away, her feet thoughtlessly carrying her off course until Fellwing ferociously flapped in front of her face enough to snap Ji-hyeon back to the moment and realize she had wandered perilously close to the bone-strewn entrance of an immense lair. Then the eye would be punished with another exile behind the iron patch.

  A year of this shit! A year of keeping careful track of the days despite her exile in a land without night. She had brought very little with her through the Othean Gate, having not exactly thrown an overnight bag over her shoulder when she went to meet the empress, but many of the inhuman things she killed carried equipment, and over time she acquired an incomplete set of crude and decaying gear. Each time she awoke from fitful rest she scratched another mark in the haft of a spear she had taken from a monster she had killed within her first ten minutes of arriving here, and while the head of the weapon had long since broken off in the carapace of a dire centipede, she kept the pole as a walking stick, and more importantly, a calendar.

  A year of slowly confirming that while there had once been great civilizations here, now there was little left but desecrated tombs, every city a cemetery long picked clean by the scavengers who seemed as mad as they were monstrous. The bizarrely shaped buildings were worn smooth as beach glass from the dusty wind, hollow caves with no remaining trace of door or casement, only their bleached stone sockets. She could not even find a skeleton that wasn’t twisted into something bestial and wrong, Ji-hyeon the last human shape left in this forlorn world. Or the first; who could say, who could say …

  A year of singing to Fellwing until her voice was hoarse. Of counting her steps and the solemn pillars of the petrified forests and the few standing columns of the ancient ruins, just to prove to herself that there was order here, even if its only name was Ji-hyeon Bong. She marked her passing by scratching a simple message in High Immaculate into whatever rock or ruin seemed most prominent when she made camp, those times when she could find something that wouldn’t crumble under her writ. It read: Ji-hyeon Was Here. She Walks To The Black Sun.

  A year of knowing that even if her first father and her sisters and the rest of their house had indeed come to this hostile land their odds of survival were far longer than even her own. Of knowing that the only eyes that would ever see her messages were not human, and if she were lucky, could not read High Immaculate.

  A week of walking a blasted shore where the bones of dead things washed in by the stagnant sea crunched under her every step, and where she almost collapsed from thirst before finding a brackish stream that flowed into the ocean and following it far enough inland that she was able to drink, and every day of that week knowing her family was probably dead, that the Empress Ryuki’s judgment had been far crueler than simple execution. Because the not knowing was worse, and the hope Ji-hyeon clung to was so cruel it turned Fellwing fat as a tiny pumpkin and black as a mamba before they’d even come down from the first mountain range.

  A year of wondering every day where Sullen and Keun-ju were. If they were, anymore. Of hating herself for not cherishing every moment with them, and securing countless more by keeping them close, to hell with letting them leave to find Maroto, to hell with trying to save the world. Of hating herself for not forgiving Keun-ju, and of hating him all over again for forcing her to push him away … and then finally forgiving him completely, and hating herself for not doing so when it had mattered. Compared to what the Empress Ryuki had done to those who trusted her, Keun-ju’s betrayal of Ji-hyeon’s plan to run away from home was laughably mild. Or would have been, if Ji-hyeon ever laughed.

  A year of wondering every day about the Cobalt Company, captured by a petty, vengeful empress, of Choi and Fennec and even Hoartrap. Of wondering if Chevaleresse Singh and her children were now back home in the Raniputri Dominions, their desertion on the eve of the Company’s passage through the Lark’s Tongue Gate the sagest military decision anyone had made all campaign. She wondered about Colonel Hjortt, though not for long. And one day, deep into her journey, she wondered about Zosia, waiting nervously in the middle of Diadem for reinforcements that would never come, and at long last Ji-hyeon laughed, laughed until muddy tears ran down her ash-dusted cheeks, kept laughing until she was sick. But really, she was going to throw up anyway.

  A year of that, and she could survive anything. It helped that she had given up all hope for her family, for her house. No one could survive here who didn’t have a devil, Ji-hyeon realized, to protect them from the toxicity of the very food and water and perhaps even the air; only Fellwing knew how much s
he truly shielded her mistress from. That was why no matter how debilitated Ji-hyeon might be when the horrors came for her she always found her strength in time, her fever breaking just long enough to stagger up and draw her thirsty black sword and strike down her foes … but not even her devil could fully insulate her from the poison of this realm.

  Here at last, though, their relationship was completely symbiotic, for while the owlbat spent her every moment preserving her mistress, so, too, did Ji-hyeon spend her every moment feeding her devil with a never-ending torrent of the darkest emotions to ever bubble up from a mortal heart. They fed off each other, a vampiric circuit, like the clasp on one of her first father’s scrolls made in the likeness of two serpents eating each other’s tails. A symbol for eternity, he had told her, but if this was eternity, then all the hell scrolls she had ever scoffed at had only hinted at the true horror of existence.

  Hope did not fail her completely, though, and in her second year it grew and grew, because by pulling her eye patch aside and squinting her devil-eye she had finally been able to see the black sun for what it truly was. A Gate, letting in a little feeble light and warmth from the world of mortals. From the Star. And as it slowly but surely grew on the horizon she knew that while it might take many more years to actually reach it, once she did she would crawl back up from hell and avenge herself not just on Empress Ryuki herself but on all of Othean.

  Twenty thousand Immaculate soldiers had stood by and done nothing as her second father was executed for one of the few crimes he had not actually committed in a lifetime of roguery. A dozen dozen archers carrying out the murder without hesitation. And how many more evil mortals had carried her sisters and her first father and every single other member of their household up the steps of the Temple of Pentacles and cast them into this nightmare? How many more had labored to destroy her home, desecrating Hwabun just as the Black Pope’s war bishops had destroyed pagan shrines in the hinterlands of the Crimson Empire, a practice all civilized people condemned?