“You forgot wretched,” said Bang. “Wretched architect of the apocalypse, and lousy lay.”
“Don’t bear false witness in front of the cardinal, Cap’n,” said Maroto, willing to own his past but unable to sacrifice his one point of pride just because Bang was still testy. “We both know I’m the devildamned best there is, bottom, top, or monkey in the middle.”
“Muzzle their filthy mouths,” said the cardinal, and once the guards had fitted Maroto’s braided strap in place he looked over his shoulder at Bang to remind her how dashing he looked with a gag in place. It certainly suited him better than it did her, the pirate looking as though she might bite through the leather at any moment, or burn it off with the heat from her blazing eyes. He tried pleading with his, and perhaps she took pity on him at last, because when the call to bow went out she lowered herself down instead of forcing their captors to dole out more grief.
Turning back to the commotion ahead of them, Maroto tried to make himself comfortable kneeling in his rags on the hot flagstones because they were without a doubt going to be here all day. No matter how far in advance the Imperial fleet had exchanged messages with this Imperial city, Dong-won was right: any cooperation between Azgaroth and the Burnished Chain would not come naturally for either party. Hells, even if the two powers had been on friendly terms, marching an army of this size into any city would require plenty of pomp and ritual from the civic authorities. Add to that the Chain’s flair for stretching the matter of a moment into the spectacle of an age and they would be lucky if they were admitted into Darnielle Bay before next week.
The Holy See had brought their comfy chairs all the way from Diadem, apparently, and while the rest of the blessed army knelt on the brine-dusted stones of the seafront these cardinals made their roost just ahead of the prisoners in the small open area that remained between here and the high walls. The cardinal who held their chain lifted a black glove, and a polyphonic hymn rose from the surrounding Chainites. Either they’d planted a chorus in the front rows or golden pipes were one of the Fallen Mother’s blessings for all her chosen children.
Squinting at the hundred-foot gate and seeing that what he had assumed was simply bumpy white stone was actually formed from countless human skulls, Maroto supposed it didn’t get much worse than being kept waiting for your own execution. When he was a younger barbarian he’d figured being obsessed with death was one of the hallmarks of old age, that it wasn’t until your sand really started running out that you stopped being able to focus on life. He hated to think he’d turned into the very sort of morbid fogey he’d found so annoying, but really now, everywhere you looked were grim reminders of mortality. How could you miss them?
And here was a better question—fired up as he’d gotten at the prospect of redressing his wrongs and uniting the Star to beat back the monstrous hordes, what had he even been thinking? Everyone was going to die once the Tothans attacked, sure, but they were going to do that anyway, sooner or later, so why try to prolong the inevitable for strangers when all it got him was a fast track to his own end?
This right here served him right. He’d gotten so caught up with the idea of redeeming himself, in swanning back onto the stage to play the hero for the ghost of Purna and everyone else he cared about but who were also probably already dead, that he’d thrown away his life on yet another profitless gambit. If he hadn’t just betrayed the whole damn Star to keep himself alive you would think Maroto didn’t value his own skin, quick as he always was to volunteer it for some grand gesture. As always, it was only after his ambitions had all come to ashes that it occurred to him he really ought to have just minded his own back for a change.
And that was what pinched his pouch so bad, not fear over his current dire predicament but the self-resentment that came from knowing that even if he did somehow manage to defy the odds and slip free from yet another attempt on his life, he’d just find some other bold-hearted and hollow-headed bind to embroil himself in. Listening to the rising chorus of the Chainites and reflecting on it all, Maroto wondered if quite without his noticing he’d actually become a suicidal maniac with delusions of grandeur. Funny how those little changes slip past undetected as you age; you bemoan the fatigue and the breathlessness and the lingering aches and pains and the occasional case of jelly-bone, but somehow the spoilage of your brainfruits escapes your notice …
Except if that were all true he would have died fighting back on Jex Toth, instead of collaborating with the enemies of mortalkind. If it were true he would have stayed with his injured father and six-year-old nephew back on a Flintland battlefield, instead of abandoning them. He would have fought Queen Indsorith to the death in their duel, instead of accepting her mercy after she disarmed him. Truth be told, he would have lived a very different life if his selfless heroism hadn’t conveniently dozed off whenever the going got rough … and he could have died one of a hundred different deaths, if he’d stuck to the courage of his convictions any of those many, many times when he’d been tested and found wanting. Any one of those bloody fates would have been preferable to the one awaiting him here, and he relived them now, one by one, as he had so many times before.
Some ungodly number of paeans later bells tolled from beyond the wall of Darnielle Bay, and the spike-crowned, skull-studded gate at last creaked outward. A procession emerged from the city, some in the elegant purple Azgarothian robes of state and others in Crimson parade dress. These soldiers must be either retired or officers in strictly ceremonial uniforms, since from what Maroto had overheard in the hold of the galleon the entire Fifteenth Regiment had fallen at the Battle of the Lark’s Tongue. That would explain the legion of mourners who filled out the rest of the Darnielle Bay delegation, black lace everything from their heels to their headdresses, the lot of them making a discordant caterwauling as the city’s representatives greeted the Holy See.
Even with both ears working again Maroto couldn’t hear everything that was being said between the two parties, but he made out enough canned phrases to read between the lines and get the gist of the Chain’s pitch.
The Crimson Queen and the Black Pope have both fallen before their own ambitions. Meaning: so what do Chainites and Imperials have to fight about anymore?
Diadem is doomed. Meaning: ’cause we’re sure as shit not going back there.
Jex Toth declares war upon all the Star, but the Immaculates refuse to rally to the common cause of all sane peoples. Meaning: you’re not going to be like them, are you?
The Burnished Chain has risked everything to come warn Azgaroth. Meaning: we got booted from Othean, and Darnielle Bay is the strongest, most defensible Imperial port, so please let us in?
Imperials of all creeds bleed crimson. Meaning: we can put a cork in the religious talk and focus on good old-fashioned nationalism if that helps.
We deliver unto your justice the Villain Maroto… Meaning: never was that popular in Azgaroth, and everybody likes a public execution.
… One of the wretched architects of the apocalypse, who worked with the rest of the Cobalt Company to summon Jex Toth back from hell. Meaning: hey wait a tic—
Through the sacrifice of the valiant Fifteenth Regiment at the Battle of the Lark’s Tongue they conspired to sell our world to the devils of the First Dark. Meaning: what the fuck, now!
The problem with them getting Maroto’s dander all up with this bullshit was now he couldn’t hear them over the sound of his own angry heartbeat. Yet as if they’d read his mental objections at not being able to hear just how exactly these Chainite berks were scapegoating him, several members of the Holy See and the Darnielle Bay delegation turned their heads toward him. The lead mourner was an age-shrunken old woman in a tremendous cloud of jet lace, her blocky headdress housing a clock in the shape of a coffin, and while he couldn’t make out her hissing voice or clearly see her face through her black pearl veil, the accusatory finger she pointed at him didn’t make Maroto think she was advising a full pardon.
“Certainly,” s
aid the cardinal who held the prisoner’s chain, every syllable hitting Maroto’s ears now that the rest of the wailing mourners had gone silent. “The Holy See applauds your decision to execute these war criminals immediately, and are pleased to accept your invitation to witness the justice of Azgaroth being carried out. Let the death of one who sought to tear the Crimson Empire asunder be the first act of its unification.”
Everyone had a good clap about that, Chainites and Azgarothians alike, and Maroto put his own palms together. The cardinal was a miserable fucking liar, of course, but he’d given a far better performance than Maroto had expected. He’d also given the weary Villain something he’d never been able to achieve for himself: an honest-to-the-gods martyrdom. Sure, once they had him lined up for an impaling he’d probably lose his enthusiasm, but for now Maroto was just relieved that his decision to reveal his identity to the Holy See had indeed helped unify the armies of mortalkind against Jex Toth. A pity his relief was destined to be so short-lived.
CHAPTER
4
They went down into the netherworld together. The general and her four faithful captains. The princess and her four loyal handmaids. The chosen one and her four old friends. They traveled across regions unseen by mortal eyes, unimagined by waking minds, down through impossible geographies that would confound the ambitions of staid cartographers and exuberant artists alike. As befitted their fabulist descent into the catacombs of the First Dark, phantoms awaited them at the end of their arduous journey, but Ji-hyeon knew that reaching the spirit world was only ever half of the adventure, and coming back to the world of the living was a quest unto itself.
The setup was familiar from more than one of Keun-ju’s tragic sonnets on doomed lovers, and given all of Sullen’s invocations to Old Black’s Meadhall deep beneath the earth she suspected her song would sound familiar to his ear, too. On her delirious trek through the poisoned world above she had clung as tight as she could to her memories of the two men, and her dreams for what she might have shared with them, but even so they had slipped further and further into the grey fog that numbed her mind. Like so much else, the thought of them had become a burden instead of a balm, another iron weight dragging down her skull, her heart, her feet.
But with each league her elderly Cobalt escort took Ji-hyeon away from the sickening ash of the washed-out wastes she felt … well, she felt. Bad things as well as good, and sometimes she woke herself up around their small campfires with her own cries, but when she did she would warm her hands over the coals, basking not only in the heat but the very idea of it. She hadn’t lit a fire for two years—any wood she found either turned to stone or so rotten it crumbled beneath her fingers—yet here in the vast subterranean forests they rarely went without. Unless she pulled her eye patch to the side there was no more color in this nocturnal realm than there had been in the nightless world above, but there was life, and where there was life there was hope.
On those occasions when she did let her devil-eye look out upon these new territories, that hope faltered, as if she were peeking under a veil at something no mortal was ever meant to glimpse, and so she warred with herself to keep the eye patch in place.
They marched on through days lit by pulsing lichens that covered vegetable, mineral, and even animal outcroppings of the landscape, and rested beside burbling streams beneath the ever-burning constellations of glowing worms that punctuated the ceilings of the endless caverns. Ji-hyeon heard many songs from her companions, and they heard hers, and in the digestive silences that often fell over them they listened to the trilling cries of animals that were neither bird nor beast nor bug but something altogether different. The mortals were attacked only a few times, and never by anything beyond their ability to repel or slay. The predators that stalked the deep forests took many shapes, but none were remotely human.
They traversed bubbling bogs, climbing along the sticky grotto walls to avoid swirling vortices of quick mud, and crept through perfectly preserved palaces of ice. They hiked through putrefying fungal cities where giants once dwelt, camping amid titanic tombstones and jumping at every tiny noise. They passed through lands of shadow and lands of light, through dead worlds and worse, worlds of teeming life that ought to have never existed. Stranger than all these sprawling realms, though, were the pockets of the First Dark they used to cross from one fantastic landscape to the next. They were Gates but so small you might have missed them if you did not have a guide to direct you into this crevasse or through that hollow tree, and the transition from one place to another was so instantaneous she didn’t even feel the inquisitive touch of the First Dark, let alone undergo further “improvements.”
Beyond hearing the songs of what her friends knew or believed to be true about this chaotic realm beyond the Star, Ji-hyeon also heard their wildest theories, because in close to fifty years of exploring the world that had claimed them they only ever acquired more questions. Duchess Din supposed each place they explored was akin to an island in the First Dark, wholly unique and separate and never meant to mingle. Chevaleresse Sasamaso thought that everywhere from the center of the Star to the farthest reach of this place was all one single land, with curtains of the First Dark fluttering between them. Count Hassan thought that was an academic sort of quibble, and Shea confessed she wasn’t convinced that they hadn’t indeed fallen into some Chainite hell, while the Star persisted above and apart as the one true world. And when they at last stepped beyond a cataract of black oil that roared down an ivory cliffside and emerged in the permanent Cobalt camp in the ruins of another nameless city, Ji-hyeon discovered that her first father had some theories of his own.
“Hey, Papa, I … I …” said Ji-hyeon, nervously rubbing the finger stumps of her off hand with the thumb of her good one as she struggled to reconcile the shrunken, ancient figure in the net-draped bed with the hale and handsome father she remembered. Sasamaso and the others had been a shock, to say the very least, but this just seemed so fucking wrong she was crying before she’d even finished saying hello. “I …”
“I know,” he said, waving her over with a hand so frail and thin it practically glowed in the lamplight. Instead of the barren, sterile tomb she had imagined when she’d looked up at the crumbling tower from outside, it was a tidy space with screens and scrolls and the nice warm rock bed he reclined on. If not for the faint, damp stink of things washed up from the sea only to bake in the sun they might have been back in his quarters on Hwabun. “Come to me, daughter, I know.”
Ji-hyeon had been unable to pay any attention during the whirlwind tour of the camp the old-timers had given her on the way to see her first father, too flustered trying to imagine what she could possibly say to her family. The relief and excitement that had carried her all this way evaporated, leaving her afraid and ashamed. She wouldn’t have known how to handle a reunion with her father even if her teenage scheme had actually gone off without a hitch and the worst that came of everything was a hit to his pride as she claimed Linkensterne for her own as a rogue princess. Seeing as how she had actually set into motion the events that led to him and his whole house being exiled to this alien realm where they scrabbled to survive for a literal lifetime, it was going to be an extremely awkward conversation.
Except it wasn’t. After hovering at the doorway for but a moment, she flew across the chamber and crouched at his bedside, holding his hand as hard as she dared without fear of breaking it. He smiled that ever-so-faint smile of his, and while he’d lost most of his teeth and hair and every familiar feature of his face had been warped by time, that smile was eternal, and sunken though they were, the eyes above it were sharp as ever.
“You always were the troublemaker,” he said, squeezing her hand so faintly she barely felt it, and then frowning at her missing fingers. “Took after your other father from the very first.”
“I’m sorry,” she managed, realizing that on top of everything else she had to tell him his husband was dead. “He … Kang-ho …”
“I know,�
�� he said softly. “I dreamed it, as I dreamed of your coming.”
“It’s my fault,” said Ji-hyeon, barely able to get the words out of her grief-locked lips, tears darkening the hem of her father’s nightshirt. “All of it. I made you take sides. I drove you apart.”
“You are responsible for many things, daughter, but not my estrangement from my husband,” he said in that matter-of-fact way of his that meant there was to be no further discussion of the subject. She was crying so hard she couldn’t make out the old man naked of even his wigs, but it was really him, her first father, King Jun-hwan.
“I’m so sorry, Papa,” she said, “for everything.”
“An apology affects nothing,” he said. “You cannot redeem yourself with I’m sorrys, nor can you save the Star with your regrets. Only your deeds can do this, and pure or ill, the emotions that stir you to action are less important than the consequences … But I know your heart, Ji-hyeon, as I knew Kang-ho’s, and I was not surprised to see both of you act with more honor and love for your homeland than the empress herself.”
“I got him killed, and you and everyone banished here, and where are Yunjin and Hyori? Are they … are they …”
“You will find your sisters,” said her father, his shaky hand patting her cheeks dry with the hem of his sheets. “I have dreamed this as well. They have already begun swimming the stream you must follow. Together … together you three sisters will find the lost citadel of the Hell King, and you will take from it the weapon to win all wars, and then you shall open the road home and save the Star.”
“Sasamaso and the others, they warned me about this prophecy business,” Ji-hyeon sniffled. “Nothing about a Hell King, which sounds like an awfully important detail to leave out … but that you’ve been trapped here, waiting for me to return, and all that stuff about needing to find a mystical weapon? And the Star really being in danger from Jex Toth? That can’t all be true, can it?”
A War in Crimson Embers Page 29