A War in Crimson Embers

by Alex Marshall

  “Uh-huh,” said Purna, looking down at the old hound that stood transfixed in the pentagram. She and her mentor had argued at length about the nature of devils, and while Hoartrap’s explanation jibed more with her preconceptions of such entities than Maroto’s reverential view, the Touch’s casual talk of exploitation made her feel icky. She felt bad about offering up a dying dog to lure in a spirit of the First Dark, obviously, but what about whatever poor devil took the bait, only to be turned over to a warlock that would eat it alive, or worse, employing it to further ambitions it could never understand? It must just be her Ugrakari roots wiggling to the surface, but sometimes it seemed like this misery was all it meant to be mortal, a never-ending cycle of abuse against every other living thing …

  “And you’re sure we can’t use the devils to go to Othean first?” asked Keun-ju. “Just to quickly report in with the general before going on to the Sunken Kingdom?”

  “If we had an actual Gate at our disposal it would certainly be feasible.” Hoartrap rolled up the sleeves of his robe and started slathering on black grease from the pot he had tucked under one armpit. “We do not, however, and simple as I may make it appear, neither the conjuring of devils nor the employment of them to facilitate passage through the First Dark is an easy business. It’s hard work, it’s dangerous work, and it’s not the sort of thing I do just so lovesick boys can rendezvous with lovesick girls.”

  The old Keun-ju would have jumped at the bait, but his time with Purna and Digs had apparently inured him against the warlock’s insinuations. “You had anticipated making this journey to Jex Toth some time ago, before our need for recuperation delayed us. I simply think it prudent to ensure that the situation has not changed at Othean.”

  “You let me worry about Othean,” said Hoartrap, bending down and hiking up his hem so he could liberally apply the ebon lard to his elephantine knees. “One of my little friends is keeping an eye on the place for me, and if the armies of Jex Toth drive that far south into the Isles I’ll be the first to know about it. In the meantime I am not in a massive hurry to go there myself, owing to a minor disagreement between myself and the Court of the Dreaming Priests. The empress may have offered amnesty to Ji-hyeon and all who follow the Cobalt flag, but even if I trusted the Immaculate sovereign as much as our general does I’m disinclined to see how strictly her pet magicians obey her orders.”

  Seeing Keun-ju’s bug-eyed reaction to the mysterious outfit, Purna asked, “What’s the Court of the Dreaming Priests?”

  “It is forbidden to even speak their name,” said Keun-ju.

  “Yes, well, that prohibition may have been the start of our quarrel but it’s gone far beyond that now, yes it has,” said Hoartrap, putting his grease pot down and going over to daub some from his fingers onto Keun-ju’s forehead. “Come on over, Best, it’s time to make like your ancestors and reach into the abyss for a prize.”

  “The soldiers are coming,” said Maroto’s scary-ass sister as she turned away from the doorway. “Fifty torches, at least, on the road from town.”

  “They might not be able to see the church from the road?” said Purna, trying to stay positive in the face of an overwhelmingly depressing night.

  “Unless those bounty hunters decided it might be safest if you weren’t around after all,” said Keun-ju. “They have your face already, so perhaps they tipped off the mob from the tavern to hedge their bets that you never return.”

  “If you sold your face I hope you got a decent price for it,” said Hoartrap, coming around to loom over Purna with his ooze-wet hands. Smearing a triangle on her forehead and a pair of dots on each cheek, he clucked his tongue. “No no, not a word, I see from your expression you gave away the farm. And to hoodrat bounty hunters at that! Would that you had come to me with your concerns, my runaway rug rustler, we would have taken care of all your problems long ago.”

  “Wait, you knew about me, too?” said Purna, her nose wrinkling at the rotten vegetal smell of the ointment.

  “There’s not much I don’t know,” said Hoartrap, turning to Best. “Except how a girl as busy as you finds the time to keep her braids so tight. Not a hair out of place.”

  “Your teeth shall be out of place if you continue to provoke me,” said the woman, looking him in the eye as he anointed her. With her horned helm she was as tall as the Touch, though if she was a thick oak he was a trim mountain. “I tell you a warband marches upon your blood ritual and you speak of … grooming.”

  “I don’t know why you’d think we would have time to call down devils if we don’t even have time to be civil to one another,” sniffed Hoartrap, finishing up Best’s markings and stowing the jar back in his pack. “Fortunately I believe we have time for both, as I’ve gotten my deviltry down to a science, though the sooner we start the better. It will be no good for anyone if some Eyvindian with a bone to pick shoots me through the tongue as I’m trying to reseal the window I’ve opened into the First Dark. Can you imagine?”

  “I would rather not,” said Keun-ju, glancing nervously at the open doorway.

  “Nor I,” said Best, her hand going to the sun-knife on her low-slung belt as she glared down at the badger at her feet, as though it had done her some deep personal injury. “Shall I sacrifice this beast now or must you first speak your wizard-lies?”

  “Yes, first the wizard-lies,” said Hoartrap, returning to the far end of the pentagram on the floor; were it a map of the Star he’d be standing to the south, Best to the east and Keun-ju to the west, and Purna to the north. “No blood need be spilled, however; the act of delivering these scavengers to me was the sacrifice. That’s one of the secrets of the First Dark, so obvious most people overlook it entirely—it’s not death that devils want, it’s life, always life.”

  “Maroto wouldn’t tell me what happened when you did this before,” gulped Purna, her face burning where Hoartrap had greased her up. It had been ages since she smoked, but she felt the saam harder than ever. Or perhaps it was just the thickness of the air in the church, the scent of burning sugar rising from the black candle on the great bird skull in the center of the pentagram … “But he said it was the worst thing he ever did.”

  “Maroto said that?” Hoartrap made a skeptical duckface, then shrugged. “Well, it was prettttty bad—I was a much younger Touch back then, and not knowing just how little it takes to attract a hungry devil, erred on the side of the grandiose, offering-wise. It was a different age, I tell you, we were all just making it up as we went along. Don’t tell them I told you this, but in retrospect it’s a wonder any of us made it out of Emeritus alive! In this world, anyway, I might have brought us all … well, it doesn’t bear lingering on, especially not now. This little séance of ours will be a promenade in the park by comparison, or a stroll in the snow, if you prefer, Best. Why, you can even keep your clothes on!”

  “My brother, willingly summoning devils with a witch,” said Best scornfully.

  “Hey, happens to the best of us,” said Purna.

  “I do not know if I can do this,” said Keun-ju.

  “Too late now!” crowed Hoartrap, and emitting an ear-piercing shriek, he tossed a small hunk of metal he’d cupped in his hand out over the pentagram. It was a bronze pyramid, and instead of flying through the pungent air it floated slow and clumsily as a coin sinking in a wishing well. Then it just stopped, hanging in place directly above the black candle, whose green flame jetted higher and higher, turning paler with each pulse … and it wasn’t just the flame that lost its color with each guttering blast toward the hovering pyramid, but the candle itself, the black wax turning grey. “To your knees, to your knees! Hold on to your sacrifices, but don’t disturb the border!”

  “Huh?” Purna shook her head. Even more disturbing than realizing she’d slipped into a trance as she stared at the floating pyramid was coming out of the reverie now, and finding herself in the midst of a profane ritual with no fucking idea of what to do next. She’d just assumed it would all make sense once they got st
arted, that she’d go through the motions without overthinking them … but while it had started to go that way for a hot minute now she was right back in the moment, high and anxious and also really really high?

  “Kneel, Purna! Kneel!” Hoartrap’s voice wobbled as it slowly crawled through the air … or voices, really, because the words seemed to split to go around the edge of the pentagram and hit her separately, one in each ear. “Hold on to your dog!”

  Blinking down, Purna reeled in place at the sudden gulf that loomed beneath her. The skull and the candle were still there, as were the sandy ridges that made up the outlines of the symbol on the floor. That just made the sight even more disorienting, because everything else was gone. What should have been the dirt floor of the church was darkest nothing, a bottomless pit … Except no, it wasn’t. It was a pool of black oil, the head of the dog she had brought to this unholy place breaking the still surface at her feet and issuing a scream unlike any she had ever heard in all her battles with mortals and monsters.

  “Grab it, Purna!” Hoartrap sounded ecstatic, and she didn’t dare look away from where her sacrifice had appeared, for as soon as it had risen it sank again. Purna dropped to her knees on the edge of the pentagram. Something churned in the First Dark, and without a thought for her own safety she thrust her hands into the cold, lightless reaches, desperate to save the poor animal from the fate she had condemned it to. She was a thoroughly modern woman and didn’t believe in good and evil or any of that fairy-tale shorthand, a moral relativist through and true … but this was wrong. This was wrong wrong wrong, this was evil, and evil of her own making, and she was sobbing out words she didn’t understand as her hands passed through nothing, and everything, and nothing … And then she felt fur. “Pull them out, pull them out!”

  Purna dug in her fingers, felt wet flank and the hot skin beneath it, the dog still alive, and pulled as hard as she could. The First Dark held on, trying to wrest the hound from her grasp, but Purna would not be denied. She had made a mistake, but she was fixing it, she was fixing it, she would carry the dog out under the stars and let it die a clean death breathing the air of the world that had cradled it, she would—

  She tumbled backward onto her ass as the dog came free, an oily blur of the same stinking grease Hoartrap had daubed her with. She held its heat to her chest, jubilant even as the mass of fur and bone shifted in her arms, cracking and snapping and snarling, and she ceased her frantic chanting to press her lips to its small slimy skull. Hoartrap’s screams were growing louder and louder, distracting her from the prize that lapped its warm tongue against her warm cheeks, and then there was a great whomp like a snowbank dropping off the roof of the barn back home on a sunny winter afternoon. The light went out of the world, and with it went all the warmth, the thing squirming in Purna’s arms as cold as the First Dark had been, its tongue wet dead leather, and she thrust it away from her, because whatever the fuck it was it wasn’t the three-legged dog she had found in the alley.

  “Purna …” A voice growled in the dizzying darkness, her own name ringing in her ears. “Purna, you fucking imbecile, what was the one thing I told you not to do?”

  There was a bolt of lightning in the distance, and then another. The third time Hoartrap flicked the coalstick in his shaking, smoking hand it caught the pitch and a torch lit up the church. She didn’t even realize he carried one, the Touch always making such a big deal out of how he wasn’t even making a big deal of being able to light his pipe or the campfire with an easy snap of his fingers.

  In the glare of the torch and the Touch she saw Hoartrap standing over the wreckage in the pentagram, the skull in the center splintered into a thousand shards. What she initially thought was the end of the candle turned out to be a melted blob of bronze that he prodded with his toe. Squinting in the gloom, she saw Keun-ju still on his knees to her left, cuddling something in his hands, and Best backed up all the way to the far wall, staring down with what might have otherwise been comic alarm at the small black badger sitting at her feet, looking up at her. Steeling herself for a peek at her own devil, telling herself it couldn’t be as bad as she’d thought, Purna sat up … but instead of an animal at her feet she saw something far stranger. When she’d toppled backward with the devil in her arms her right boot had flopped out just to the edge of the pentagram, but her left had plowed through the line of sand altogether, and she belatedly dragged it back over the broken barrier.

  “What … oh.” Purna was about to ask what trouble this minor bit of clumsiness might have caused, but then she followed Hoartrap’s gaze, looking behind her to see his torchlight shining on a heaving flank of smoldering meat that covered the doorway to the church … no, that was the doorway to the church. As she stared the fuming mass fizzed with bubbles of fat, and as each one burst a long-petaled white blossom spilled out, until the whole lintel of the church door was a steaming, dripping flower bed. “Um … did I …”

  “Yes, you did, and no, I don’t know what the fuck it is,” said Hoartrap, and gave a small, joyless chuckle. “But I caught it before it escaped, so that’s another favor you owe me, Purna. You and the rest of the fucking world. As if I’ll ever collect from you bums.”

  “Make it go away,” said Best, her voice low and calm but strained in a way Purna had never heard. “How do I make it go away?”

  “Aren’t you even going to give it a name first?” asked Hoartrap, wiping the sheen of grey sweat from his greased-up face with his still faintly smoking hand. “Not necessary, but tradition is—”

  “No,” breathed Best, the badger at her feet giving an unhappy huff as it looked up at its reluctant mistress. “Tell me the wizard-lies to release it, to make our debts paid.”

  “Poor little fellow probably knows you’d feed him better than I will,” said Hoartrap, finding his good humor now that the intense conclusion of the ritual was past and he could go back to focusing on being dreadful to everyone and everything. “All you have to do is tell it you release it from its bond, on the condition it serves me as it would have served you. Using our full names, if you please.”

  “I release you from your bond, on the condition you serve Hoartrap the Touch as you would have served Best of the Horned Wolf Clan,” said the huntress. Uptight as she already looked about the situation, Best nearly leaped out of her skin altogether when the badger responded by hissing and snapping its teeth at her … but then it turned and waddled over to Hoartrap. It looked about as displeased at being turned over to the sorcerer as Purna would have.

  “Yes, you’ll do nicely,” said Hoartrap as he jammed the torch in the broken floorboards of the raised pulpit and scooped up the badger. It looked no bigger than a marten in his arm, and carrying the docile devil over to his pack, he removed a plain-looking burlap sack and nudged the creature inside. It gave a final ugly snarl at Best, then disappeared inside. “Come on then, Keun-ju, you next.”

  “I’m sorry,” Keun-ju whispered to the rodent in his hands, and then, offering the same terms Best had, he placed the devil in the open sack Hoartrap jutted in his face.

  “Yes, yes, we’re all so very sorry,” said Hoartrap, turning to Purna. “And you, gheefingers, and you—if those Eyvindians didn’t know where we were before they certainly do now, and as much fun as it would be to remind them of what happens when they get on the Cobalt Company’s bad side, time’s a-wasting.”

  “And me what?” asked Purna, finally picking herself up off the ground and looking around the dim church. “I thought you said it was dead.”

  “What’s dead?”

  “My devil,” said Purna, looking back at the fleshy garden sprouting from the temple doorway.

  “That’s not your devil,” said Hoartrap, “I told you, I don’t know what the fuck that is. Your devil took off outside as soon as I fried that weirdness. That’s what comes of using dogs, the devils they attract always seem a bit smarter, which is to say, a bit more likely to misbehave. So call it back and hand it over and let’s get out of here.”


  “How do I …” But Purna thought she had some idea before she even finished, and feeling a little jolt of some strange emotion in her chest, she whistled. It was damned hard, on account of her big fat monster tongue, but that had been one of the first things she’d relearned on the long march up here to the Haunted Forest.

  And sure enough it did the trick, the devil trotting back inside on its little legs, the dead flowers drifting down overhead to land in its fur like confetti. Its four little legs, not its three long ones. Its ivory fur, nothing like the chestnut coat of the hound. It was …

  “Well, I’ll be a Maroto’s uncle,” breathed Hoartrap. “I’ve never even heard of one doing something like that before.”

  Friendly as the shuffle-stepping pup appeared, Purna couldn’t help but treat it differently than she had before. Back in the Wastes she would have snatched the little bastard up in her arms, growling right back in his face when he acted all tough, but it wasn’t like she could just go back to pretending he was nothing more than what he looked like. Prince was not just some spaniel, and noticing the patch of missing fur on his rear haunch and the too-human tongue lolling from his mouth she supposed he wasn’t just some devil, either.

  “It’s not uncommon for them to warp the flesh a little this way or that, to make it more comfortable, but a whole different breed?” Hoartrap shook his head, and the open sack in Purna’s direction. “Well, far be it from me to be dogscriminatory, and lapdogs spend just as well as mutts where we’re going. Pass it over, Purna, and—”

  “This is one devil you don’t touch, Hoartrap,” said Purna, seizing Prince up after all and giving him such a hug. Glaring at the warlock over the decidedly unique sensation of the little dog licking her chin with her own tongue, she said, “I don’t care if it means you three go on ahead while I walk all the way to Othean, there is no fucking way he’s going anywhere but into Diggelby’s arms.” Giving the devil who had saved her life another squeeze, she added, “Or mine, in the meantime.”