A War in Crimson Embers

by Alex Marshall

  “But for now we play it cool, right, see if we can get in on an audience with the Holy See and the Empress of the Isles and convince them to work together … right?” asked Maroto, the withered nub of his better nature jostling his sense of self-interest out of the way. He had to try, damn it. He knew it was just the old devil of his guilt rising back up in his heart, trying to eat him alive just as so many other monsters had attempted … but there was no more sense dwelling on who or what might have eaten you than on whom or what you might have eaten.

  “How do you suggest you get the ears of the most powerful people in this corner of the Star, exactly?” asked Bang. “After all the effort you went through to sell the Holy See on that simple-shipwrecked-sailors-of-a-merchant-vessel line, they haven’t taken much of an interest in us. Convincing them we’re as stupid as we are harmless was good for lying low, but lying low doesn’t translate to an invitation to the captain’s table.”

  “No,” said Maroto, his palms damp on the railing as he looked at the fabulous, intimidating megalopolis that from here seemed to fill all of Othean Isle. “But once we put in I might just have to take on my most ambitious role yet.”

  “And who might that be?” asked Bang, looking up at him and shielding her eyes with her hand to protect her from the halo that must be enveloping Maroto’s head as he adopted a gallant pose.

  “Why, that of the man who once brought the Crimson Empire to its knees, and who returned to challenge Queen Indsorith herself. The man who cheated death a hundred times, who led mortals and monsters alike into combat against odds so long not even Pasha Diggelby would dare lay a wager. The first man captured by the armies of Jex Toth, the first to meet with their leaders, and the first to be released! The man—”

  “You,” said Bang, smacking her lips just as Maroto was getting good and into it, too. “You’re talking about you.”

  “You’re fucking right I am, Cap’n,” said Maroto with a grin so big he knew Purna and Choi and Diggelby and Da and Sullen and Zosia and fusty old Hoartrap and everyone else would see it flashing in the distance, whatever side of the First Dark they might be on these days. “I’ll admit I know more about wrecking the world than saving it, but that’s what’s great about the stage—one ham can get hung on many hooks, and you never know which cut is tastiest till you try them all.”

  CHAPTER

  17

  This Imperial meadhall was not so different from those in the Savannahs, except back home each clan had their own, whereas here in Black Moth the entire Crimson Empire seemed packed into the one. There were more people in this sweltering, smoky room than there were named hunters of the Horned Wolf Clan. Yet Best must give these Outlanders the little tribute they were due: most of them were clearly hardened killers, with steel at their belts and furs on their backs. Their blatant display of weaponry also gave her further cause to be annoyed with the one called Diggelby. He had goaded her into coming here but also insisted she leave her spear back at the church, lest she breach something he called a social contract … only to see her son arrive carrying his own.

  Her annoyance grew along with the noise in the room, and when Sullen wandered off again without even offering her a word of greeting she decided she’d had enough of this place. The strong drink had dulled her aching injuries but also sharpened the barbs hooked into her troubled spirit. This plan to conjure devils and trip through the First Dark seemed bound to cost Best her soul if not her life, and she would rather spend what little time she had left roaming beneath the stars instead of sitting on her arse in a hellish meadhall. Prayer always came more naturally when she was moving.

  “I am leaving, Brother Rýt,” she told the monk, her lips beside his ear to be heard, and he flinched at her voice. Just as he always had, even before he went blind. “I go to carry out the order of the poison oracle and Father Turisa. They bid me bring justice to my family, but to learn what shape justice must take I shall journey to Jex Toth, to the very threshold of Old Black’s Meadhall, and there I shall test my son and his claims. Either the Deceiver speaks through him and he shall be killed, or he speaks true and by joining his fight I am serving the Fallen Mother. But Nemi of the Bitter Sighs tells me you have asked to ride to Diadem with her, instead of seeing our quest through together—is this true?”

  “The … the Fallen Mother has other plans for me?” squeaked the monk. “Everything happens, after all, and Father Turisa did order me to return to the Holy City …”

  “Where I told you I would take you, once we had rescued the Star from the catastrophe that threatens it,” said Best, hardly expecting him to grow the courage to accompany her now but as a true Chainite obliged to offer him the opportunity. “I do not think Father Turisa should wish you to run away with a witch instead of raising arms against the First Dark.”

  “Whatever you may think, Huntress Best, I know he would not condone the summoning of devils for any purpose.” Brother Rýt suddenly sounded almost authoritative. “The Fallen Mother calls me to Diadem, and I must answer.”

  He had never before taken such a tone with her, and while it was not the exact sort of bravery she had sought to stir in his breast it was at least an honorable emotion. Then again, this Crimson ryefire had provoked uncommon sentimentality in her own bosom, so perhaps it had helped him find his pluck as well. She nodded her approval, and then remembering he could not see it, said, “If you return to the Clan before I do, or if I do not return at all …”

  But then she trailed off, seeing his incredulous expression. She knew what that look meant. It was the same one Sullen had worn after his epic song, when she suggested that if the Star truly was beset by monsters and they drove them back together he could then return to the village with her. It was the mien of someone who was never going anywhere near the Frozen Savannahs or another Horned Wolf ever again, so long as he had any say in the matter.

  “Good hunting then, Brother Rýt,” she told him, for unlike her son this foreign boy was without a doubt guided by the hand of the Fallen Mother, and thus beyond reproach. “And may safe roads guide you to her breast.”

  “Safe havens keep you at your rest,” said the monk automatically, and then gave a little bow of his tonsured head. “And … and good hunting to you, Best of the Horned Wolf Clan.”

  Coming from the mouth of a monk, even this one, the words carried the weight of a blessing.

  Best exchanged a terse farewell with Nemi of the Bitter Sighs and was in the midst of a completely unnecessary and protracted goodbye with the Diggelby creature when over his flashing turban she saw Sullen approach. As if tripping over her gaze he clumsily bounced into a shorter figure, and then, right there in the middle of the crowd, the little person attacked her son. Sullen looked surprised, as well he might to be jabbed in the gut by someone half his size over so slight a slight as bumping into a stranger in a busy meadhall. And instead of doing something about it Sullen just stood there gawping down at his assailant, who in turn began screaming his head off as though he’d been the one to get stuck.

  For as hard as these people looked everyone seemed shocked by the scream and nobody did anything except stumble back from the fight. Everybody save Best, that was, who was already moving. The Immaculate whose arm she had taken off stood holding Sullen’s spear, and by the time he’d noticed what was happening to his lover, Best had snatched the weapon out of his hand. As she darted across the floor she lowered the blade to jab it into the back of Sullen’s diminutive attacker, but at last her simple son did what he should have from the first and defended himself. In doing so he saved Best the journey of half a dozen steps, kneeing the little man so hard in the sternum he went flying backward. The thug nearly pulled the spear out of Best’s hands as the point punched through his back and out through his ribs. He didn’t weigh much, though, and sliding into a low stance Best was able to hold on to the weapon and keep him spitted, his short legs kicking in the air, until she was sure he was no longer a threat.

  “No!” Over the shoulder of th
e speared man Best saw her son cry out and stagger toward her, a bloody hand holding his bloody stomach. “No, Ma, no!”

  Well, this was just like Sullen—the one time in his whole life she had come to his defense and he was mad about it. Oh, how he had cried and cried when he was five and Oryxdoom and Yaw Thrim had worked him over. He hadn’t shed a tear while they were at it, but afterward, when she was picking the pebbles out of his face, he’d blubbered the whole time, asking why she’d just stood by and watched. After what he’d ended up doing to One-arm Yaw years later she had assumed he had learned how to stand up for himself, but apparently not … At least he had grown out of wanting her help.

  “Put ’im down! Put ’im down!” Sullen was crying as he reached her, and seeing that the spasming body on her spear had dropped his knife she acquiesced, flipping him down on his face and yanking the weapon free. The spear had a perfect heft to it, and while the blade scraped against a rib on its way out there was no resistance at all, and she smiled at the healthy gout of blood from the wound. Her father was in this spear all right, biting hard and deep.

  “Fuuuck!” Sullen foolishly took his hand off his own wound and clapped it on the man’s back, rolling him over to put his other palm on the hole in his chest. No, not a man, a boy, she saw now, his lips bubbling with crimson foam and his eyes rolled back in his small skull. There were angry mutters from the crowd and Sullen sobbed again, which didn’t make any sense at all—this boy was probably twice as old as Sullen had been when he first went to war, and had drawn first blood over nothing greater than a bump in a bar.

  “Somebody help!” Sullen yowled. “Nemi! Nemi, help him!”

  “What the fuck you do that for?” a big woman in ringmail demanded of Best, as though she were the one in the wrong here. Not owing her any answer and insulted by the implication, Best whipped the spear down so hard that most of the blood spattered down on the floorboards at the woman’s boots.

  “I let you go!” Sullen was shouting in the dead boy’s face. Was her son such a weak hunter he couldn’t see when the life had left the dying? “I let you go! I wasn’t here for you! I wasn’t! I let you go!”

  “You’re pretty good at using that on kids, Flintlander, how about someone a little bigger?” said the armored woman, taking a step toward Best and putting her hand on the pommel of her sword. Best smiled at her stupid question. The larger the game, the easier it was to hit her target.

  “It was an accident, we all saw, and the boy struck first besides,” said a much darker Outlander with a tattooed face and a curious beard, stepping between the two women with a palm raised at each of them.

  “We didn’t see shit, Raniput, except these savages double-team a ten-year-old,” said a grizzled man behind the big woman. He already had an ax in hand, and several more helmeted heads in the crowd nodded at this.

  “I wasn’t … after you …” Sullen’s hand slipped off the boy’s wounds, and sitting back on his knees, he raised his slick red hands in front of his face as though seeing them for the first time.

  “Look at that and tell me he wasn’t provoked,” said the tattooed man, gesturing at Sullen’s gut, and that seemed to diffuse some of the violence in the smoky air. The torn front of Sullen’s tunic burped out blood, and Best realized the wound was far worse than she’d thought. She was about to kneel and help him when his friends pushed through the crowd and gathered around, Keun-ju crying out and Purna cursing and Nemi muttering and Diggelby flapping his arms in distress. The whole meadhall pressed inward around them, more angry voices rising up—Best’s Crimson had come a long way since first being saddled with Brother Rýt, and she wasn’t pleased by what she parsed of the crowd’s angry voices.

  “Who knows the kid?”

  “What happened?”

  “Was it murder?”

  “Who murdered the kid?”

  The tattooed Outlander who had intervened was trying hard to look nonchalant, but there was definite worry in his voice when he addressed them. “You’ll want to get your friend out of here. Now.”

  “He shouldn’t be moved,” said Nemi as she stood back up from her quick examination, her hands now as bloody as Sullen’s. He was still on his knees but looked on the verge of blacking out, his lips moving as if in silent prayer, his glassy eyes staring at nothing. Diggelby and Purna eased him down to the ground as Keun-ju kept his hand pressed to the wound, his pale veil spattered with red drops.

  “Should or shouldn’t, he has to go,” hissed the Outlander, his voice almost eaten by the angry murmurs of the crowd. “My crew can help you carry him somewhere, anywhere but here.”

  “I’ll fetch my vardo,” said Nemi with a nod at the stranger. “Riding in the wagon will be better than being carried. Take him outside if you must but not farther. If he tears any wider he’ll die.”

  “Hurry!” called Keun-ju as the witch wove away through the crowd, as if that weren’t obvious enough.

  “What happened?” Purna asked, looking up from Best’s limp, ashen-faced son. “What the fuck happened?”

  Best just shook her head, unsure herself, the spear vibrating in her hand like a dowsing rod. Maybe it was, of a sort, but not for water … Yet looking down she saw it wasn’t the spear that was shaking, but her hand. Purna posed an important question—what had happened? Sullen had just lost more blood from a single blow than she had taken from him during their entire duel, and more leaked out around Keun-ju’s hand, the entire room buzzing like an angry icebee hive. Her son might be about to die right here, over something she didn’t even understand.

  “Serves him fucking right, picking a fight with a kid,” came a voice from the mob.

  “That what happened?”

  “Seen it! He came at the kid, kid drew on him, and that other fucker stabbed him in the back!” This last sounded like it came from the first woman to run her mouth, who had crept back into the crowd.

  “And that’s our cue,” said Purna, wrapping her small arms around one of Sullen’s beefy shoulders as Best shook off her unexpected torpor and went to his other side. “Let’s get him outside, steady as we can.”

  Big as her boy had grown it was going to be hard, but then the helpful Outlander elbowed his way back through the increasingly ugly mob, calling over his shoulder, “Come, my leopards, work to be done!”

  In a flash there were too many hands instead of not enough, but while Sullen rose into the air the crowd showed no signs of parting.

  “We just gonna let them leave?”

  “We owe the kid better than that!”

  “Was the kid one of ours?”

  “The kid was one of ours!”

  At this last Best felt the mood make the final fatal shift from angry to violent.

  “Put the killer back on the floor!” called an older man who had clambered onto a nearby table, swaying from simple drunkenness or the thickness of the smoke up there, Best couldn’t guess which. “I’m Captain Crosstau of Eyvind’s Rangers, and I’ll have justice for … for the kid!”

  “Annnnd you’re on your own,” the tattooed Outlander told them, signaling his crew to lower Sullen. “Sorry.”

  “Not as sorry as they’re going to be,” growled Best, her heart growing light as a windblown leaf floating over the Savannahs. Not even a Horned Wolf could escape a trap like this, surrounded by a hundred hostile hunters. The Fallen Mother was calling her home, and with her son at her side—she just had to earn enough valor for the both of them before they crossed over from this meadhall to that of Old Black. Seeing the bigmouthed woman in ringmail begin to draw her sword, Best didn’t think she’d have any trouble on that count, and drawing back the spear of her son, the spear of her father, she—

  “Where the fuck is my sandwich?!” Best couldn’t see the door to the tavern behind the wall of the mob, but she recognized the voice.

  The captain on the table slowly turned to the doorway. “Piss off, you old coot, before you get strung up along with the barbarians. You and your fucking sandwich.”

>   There were a few laughs from the crowd as he turned back to Best and her surrounded pack … and then his short hair burst into flames, a blinding column of fire shooting up so high it blasted the ceiling beams. The heat instantly blackened his face, and then his skull exploded.

  Best blinked, unable to believe what she had just seen even as hair and bone and brain pelted the crowd. The headless body fell over. Sorcery. Insane, incomprehensible sorcery.

  Pandemonium. Understandable, utter pandemonium. And in that pandemonium Sullen’s friends and the helpful Outlanders hustled his limp body out the front door where Hoartrap stood scowling. His lips were wet with blood and bristly with fur, Best recognizing his expression for that of a predator whose first meal had only been large enough to make his hunger more severe. The rest of the crowd stampeded toward the back of the common room, flames licking across the ceiling. Only when the small party had carried Sullen a few blocks in the direction from whence Nemi would be bringing her cart did Best remember they had forgotten something in the burning tavern, and jogged back to collect Brother Rýt.

  CHAPTER

  18

  Thousands of candles lit the Upper Chainhouse, and through the ingenious construction of the echo chamber the soft voice of the cardinal at the Onyx Pulpit reached all the way to the velvet-padded pews in the far back. These seats must be a novelty even to those in the audience who had attended sermons in the past, for they had always done so in the Lower Chainhouse where there was only the cold obsidian floor to kneel on. That immense cathedral had ten times as many in attendance as this far smaller facility, and the Middle Chainhouse was likewise crammed to capacity. The cardinal spoke into the open mouth of the graven angel whose six blazing wings formed the lectern, and his words carried down through the pipes, amplifying along the way to the countless ears below. Even the three largest Chainhouses in the Star weren’t nearly big enough to house all of Diadem’s citizens who might be interested in attending the first assembly of the burgeoning parliament, but that was just the way of government, and the rest could be filled in the same as they always had: via gossip and the distribution of tracts.