A War in Crimson Embers

by Alex Marshall

  No, Ji-hyeon knew the real reason they were so fucked was that she had lied to her people, otherwise they never would have followed her back home to the Star. Long before she had even arrived in the outer lands her father King Jun-hwan had prophesized a weapon that could win any war, the ultimate treasure of the legendary Hell King, and after reuniting with her father and once more taking on the burden of command Ji-hyeon had spent seven long years searching for this enigmatic prize. At the end of the brutal hunt Ji-hyeon and her sisters had stormed the highest citadel of the Hell King, and when she triumphantly returned to her army she informed them that the Forebear of Demons had been impressed by her valor and bequeathed her the mighty relic foretold by her father. This weapon, she had claimed, would utterly destroy their enemies, but at such cost it should not be used unless the odds were otherwise insurmountable.

  In reality the final citadel had been little different from the first: overrun with the spectral monsters that had infested the rest of the abandoned estate, and while there was an impressive throne cast from blades and bones and skulls and all the other usual grim heraldry, it was as dusty as the rest of the place, and without anyone or anything that might be mistaken for the Hell King—assuming he had ever been here at all, the godlike beast of legend hadn’t been home in quite some time. But she and her sisters had agreed a little deception on this count would be in the best interest of the campaign to return to the Star, for the people needed the prophecy their father had given them. Besides, even without some great and powerful weapon surely their army was strong enough to overcome Tothans and Immaculates alike …

  Just not at the same time, apparently, and not with most of her formerly ferocious soldiers panting and wheezing and even collapsing before they’d even been hit. She remembered how sick certain regions of the outer lands had made her and other refugees from the Star, and cursed herself for not having considered this possibility. The irony of it was she’d planned to let the Tothans soften up the Immaculates for her before sweeping in and taking them both out, but all they’d actually accomplished was drawing some of the heat off the Immaculates. Instead of continuing to press into Othean’s broken outer wall, the first Tothan army had turned to confront the Cobalts at their rear, and their reinforcements to the north were almost upon them.

  Under any normal circumstances Ji-hyeon would have ordered an immediate and hasty retreat before they could be assaulted by both armies at the same time, but Yunjin had expressly warned her that once they came through the Gate there could be no going back. Opening such portals was taxing work, and keeping them open all the more so—even with her coven of battle witches to aid her, Ji-hyeon’s sister was too exhausted to facilitate an escape back through the Gate. They were trapped, had nowhere left to run …

  On the other, three-fingered hand, it was liberating to have her course decided for her—weighing the merits of half a dozen potential tactics had its time and place, but good command was all about responding swiftly to unexpected developments. Up until now Ji-hyeon had held most of her soldiers back, not wanting to overextend her forces while the steady flow of Cobalts came through the Gate, but now that the last were through they had to act. They couldn’t win a two-front battle, but if they drilled straight through the first Tothan army they might be able to slip inside Othean’s breached walls before the second regiment arrived.

  As fast as the monstrous reinforcements were coming down from the north, such a plan seemed doomed from the start, but they didn’t have any alternatives. And hells, if they pushed fast enough and deep enough into the first army they would be so surrounded by enemy soldiers that those in the second regiment wouldn’t even be able to reach them. Sort of like covering yourself in ants before raiding a beehive so you’d be insulated from stings.

  That was the play, then. Telling Yunjin to get ready to move out, Ji-hyeon left her sister and the rest of the modest coven on the steps of the Temple of Pentacles. The battle witches continued the chanting that would hopefully help with the wildborns’ unexpected sickness. Ji-hyeon mounted Shagrath and rode back out into the chaotic mass of Cobalt archers, war machines and their operators, and the increasing number of the wounded who were limping back from the front. From the vantage of her dire pangolin’s back she could see that the northern regiment had begun their charge.

  “Forward! Forward! Into the Autumn Palace!” She shouted the order over and over until she tasted blood in her throat, and then shouted some more. She was still giving the command when a team of four glowing-eyed horse-things overwhelmed the press of soldiers just in front of her. They dragged an enormous inverted tortoise shell behind them like a chariot, an ebon-plated Tothan soldier standing at the reins and a great grey bladder filling the rest of the vehicle. It bounced wildly through the muck, the heavy shell crushing Cobalts under its bulk and mangling any who were brushed by its jagged sides.

  Her black sword held high, Ji-hyeon altered her course to intercept the demonic chariot before it could careen through her archers. The Tothan who steered the vehicle failed to notice her approach on its flank until it was almost too late, but as Shagrath closed the final gap the driver snapped its horned helm in her direction … and then let go of the reins, falling backward onto the sloshing bladder that filled the rest of the shell.

  An explosion. Liquid fire. Driver and horse demons were enveloped in an instant, and Ji-hyeon was thrown from Shagrath’s back as the pangolin instinctively went into a roll, drawing itself into a tight bundle of scales.

  Darkness devoured light. Silence consumed noise. Stillness arrested motion.

  Then the world returned, though it was quieter than Ji-hyeon had left it, and too bright to take in all at once. She heaved herself to her knees, and from her knees to her feet. She was bruised but not broken. She was scorched, but not much worse than a bad sunburn. She was deafened, but the intrusion of a distant ringing told her it was only temporary. Her eye patch had torn free but in the madness of the battlefield her devil-eye became a boon instead of a burden, enabling her to see through the curtains of smoke and rain. Fellwing must be well fed wherever she flapped through the storm, to have kept her mistress in such good stead.

  The ringing in her ears became a shriek, and then shrieks. The shimmering brightness of her vision cooled, her watery eyes focusing on a smoking crater. Cobalt soldiers screamed and screamed, running around on fire. She staggered through the chaos and fumes that stank of boiling fat, looking for her pangolin.

  A Tothan emerged from out of nowhere, hooked blade coming down, but Ji-hyeon’s black steel cut through sword and sword arm alike. The limb dropped but the soldier didn’t until Ji-hyeon punched through its faceplate with the tip of her sword. Their armor meant nothing to her black blade.

  Another came and another fell, and she felt herself beginning to slip, the way the sword and her devil-eye always wanted her to. To have any hope of survival the Cobalts needed to push deep into the Tothans’ ranks, but instead the Tothans were pushing into theirs. The lines were breached and the battle lost, Ji-hyeon knew it, and now all that remained was to take down as many as she could. She fought the rage at her own failure, tried to cast it out of her sword arm by hacking the next Tothan she found nearly in half from the helm down, but that just made it worse. As the lightning crashed and the monstrous army overran the lines of the Cobalt Company here in the barren pumpkin fields where all her adventures had started, Ji-hyeon threw back her head and howled into the black heavens.

  They came tumbling down the rain-slick steps all in a rush. Hoartrap had initially refused to even consider taking them through the Othean Gate, claiming the whole place was crawling with Tothans, but after obliging to take a peek just to make sure, he had looked up from the Diadem Gate and admitted he’d been wrong. Tothans weren’t surrounding the Temple of Pentacles, the Cobalt Company was. Yet as Sullen staggered to a seat on the bottom step, his stomach cramping and his head swimming from the trip through the First Gate, he realized Hoartrap had been wrong on every coun
t.

  The place was crawling with Tothans—at least, that’s who he assumed the formidable black-armored warriors were. And the soldiers they fought in the muddy fields might be a Cobalt company but they weren’t the Cobalt Company—there were more wildborn here than he had ever seen in his life, let alone in one place, and all wore cobalt tabards or other blue heraldry. Hoartrap joined Sullen, carrying Indsorith in his arms, and then set the weakened queen down between them on the step. The stained and dirty militia gear she’d donned before coming through had to be a bit warmer than just the rags she’d had on before, but she still shivered in the rain, her formerly auburn hair now as white as his. Sullen wondered if her injuries were feeling any better than his stomach—Hoartrap had claimed Gate-travel was the best medicine for any ailment, but Sullen’s guts throbbed worse than ever. Pulling up the hem of his tunic he saw that the cut Nemi had sewn shut with her own impossibly strong hair had begun to pull back apart after his exertions on the rim of Diadem Gate, lymph oozing along the swollen lip and around the fine stitches.

  “Ah, that’s too bad,” said Hoartrap, leaning around Indsorith to peer into the ragged wound. “I was worried that might happen—you wildborn don’t seem to suffer the usual mutative effects of passing through the Gates, so I suppose it’s only fair you don’t reap the benefits, either. Too much of the First Dark in your blood already for a dip in the primordial pool to make any difference.”

  “Whatever, I’ll be fine,” said Sullen, though with his agitated injury and the cold sweat slathering him despite the warm rain he didn’t know if that was exactly honest … especially considering he was expected to shake it off and plunge into the insane melee that raged but a short distance away.

  “I’m sure you’ll be as fine as this beautiful morning—I’m so glad we came!” said the Touch. He used the toe of his sandal to poke the wreckage of a rattan chair that lay crushed and partially buried in the terra-cotta gravel at the base of the stairs. “I mean, really, I know I promised you front row seats to the apocalypse, but this … this … oh. No, no no, you old fool …”

  Hoartrap’s face fell and he staggered up from his seat on the temple steps, kicking aside a broken wooden wheel and unearthing a dirty scabbard from the wet gravel. He held up the engraved sheath as though it were the evilest portent he’d ever witnessed in a lifetime of deviltry. It was a strange thing, to see the gruesome witch who found mirth in every misfortune so obviously distraught over a shattered chair, a stray sheath. He looked out into the drizzly battle going down on all sides of this small sanctuary, clutching the scabbard to his chest, and though no sound left his lips it almost looked like Hoartrap said … he was sorry?

  Before the awkward silence could die of natural causes they were accosted by a handful of folk who’d been doing some ritual off to the side when Sullen had first fallen out of the Gate.

  “Who are you?” demanded a middle-aged Immaculate woman whose conical red hat was taller than any of her fellows’. She shook a rosary of teeth at them. “What are you doing here?”

  “Who are we?” sneered Hoartrap, flinging the scabbard away and turning to face her. “We’re the Cobalt cavalry, come to save the day—the better question is who are you, hedgewitch? I would have noticed your kind skulking around the Company if you’d been with us before.”

  The woman did not seem to take kindly to the epithet, but before she could respond Sullen asked the all-important question. “Where’s Ji-hyeon?”

  That got the woman’s attention off Hoartrap, if only for the moment. She squinted at Sullen, then Indsorith, and back at the Touch. Then she said, “You’re Sullen. And you, you’re Hoartrap. And you’re Zosia. Yes?”

  “Two out of three,” said Hoartrap. “Though one Crimson Queen’s as good as another these days, I suppose, isn’t that right, Indsorith?”

  “Get stuffed,” said the woman, using Sullen’s shoulder to clamber to her feet. Her sword-arm was the only steady part of her. “The fate of the Star’s being fought a hundred feet away and the greatest warlock of the age wants to chew the fat and talk the shit.”

  “She’s still sore over a falling out we had, what, eighteen years ago?” said Hoartrap, so quick to gossip with this random old Immaculate woman and her coterie it would have been funny, under less dire circumstances. “We’ll join the fracas, Indsorith, just as soon as we determine who our new friends are, and—”

  “Blurgh!” The final member of their haggard band came stumbling down the wet stairs with her devilish familiar. Nemi hadn’t blown her cover the way Sullen and Diggelby had, but must have stuck around with the mob of spectators on the far side of Diadem Gate when everything went to shit. Just as Hoartrap was working his magic to bring them through the portal to Othean, Sullen had seen Nemi step out of the crowd on the far side, and now she’d followed them through. Interestingly enough, her brown hair hadn’t turned white, nor had the black patches on her cockatrice; the covering had slipped to the side of its cage and Sullen saw that the temperamental little monster looked as content as he’d ever seen it. Nemi, not so much. “Oh dear, I’m going to be sick.”

  “Who are you?” the Immaculate shaman asked the shaky-legged Outlander witch, talking over Hoartrap. “And how many more of you are coming out of there, eh?”

  “Nemi’s the last, now tell me of Ji-hyeon,” said Sullen, rising with a hiss. His guts felt like they were trying to wriggle out of the wound in his belly again, and this time they might succeed. “Where is she?”

  “She rode to meet our other sister,” said the Immaculate, and as she pointed into the rainy, smoky haze, a howl cut through the air. “Ah, that would be her. She gets that way, sometimes, when—”

  But Sullen would find out for himself what way she got, sometimes, already moving off into the field toward the sound. He was so exhausted it hurt to walk, to even breathe, and it hurt worse to hoist Grandfather’s spear, but somehow when the first Tothan monster came silently swinging its scythe and Sullen jabbed the blade of his weapon through the creature’s helm it didn’t hurt at all. Come to think it, that was how it had been back in Diadem, too, fighting the guards—only when the spear was drinking deeply was he able to forget the misery in his stomach.

  Soon he barely remembered his pain or his fatigue at all, more and more of the soldiers emerging to be spitted and slashed. He had tried so hard to go easy on those mortal militia members back in Diadem, and felt so bad when he inadvertently mutilated one after another. He felt no such remorse as he cleared his way through the black-shelled warriors that stood between him and the last place he’d heard Ji-hyeon. He darted and weaved as he hunted his beloved through the battle, shrugging off deep cuts and hard blows, dimly aware that one of the stitches in his stomach had popped open, trusting in his gut even as it betrayed him.

  An enormous winged monster swooped down just in front of him, trailing spiny tendrils that raked through Cobalts and Tothans alike. It jerked several soldiers off their feet and carried them away, disappearing into the smoke as quickly as it had appeared. As if following the noxious scent of the flying demon, an even fouler monster writhed through the throng in its wake, something like a serpent composed of countless maggots, or a giant worm composed of writhing snakes. It was dying, Sullen could tell; it had probably been dying ever since it had been unnaturally birthed into this world. Yet in its death throes its component parts slithered in all directions, ensnaring the ankles of both friend and foe, wrapping so tight around everything they touched that armor bent inward and blood welled forth.

  Sullen gave the disintegrating worm and its idiot brood of frantically constricting children a wide berth. The smoke was thicker here and he almost stumbled straight into the kicking pikes of some long-legged horror. Its slavering, sideways mouth snapped down to bite off his head but swallowed black steel instead. Then, dodging a Tothan soldier’s spear and showing it how a true warrior wielded one, he found her.

  Except no, it must be Ji-hyeon’s other sister, the one the old woman on the step
s had mentioned. While this blood-spattered warrior was the spitting image of his beloved, she was about ten years too old. She fought well, and after she beheaded a Tothan with her black sword they were both momentarily free to catch their breath, and she caught his eyes, and—

  It was her. He knew it as soon as their eyes locked through the rain, before his tired head even processed that the hand that held her black blade was indeed missing two fingers. Every night since he’d left her he’d imagined this moment, when they found each other again, and always in his head she gave up nothing more than that secret, fleeting smirk he’d practically overlooked the first few times she’d offered it. Now, though, she smiled wider than he had ever seen, grinning as she came to him, his name on her lips … and then another huge monster reared out of the smoke directly behind her, too swift for even Sullen to stop.

  There he was. The handsome Flintlander was exactly as she had remembered him, right down to the sly grin on his face—a grin that turned into a grimace, his spear flying up, and if she hadn’t already been holding her sword aloft she never would have brought it across in time to deflect his jab. They both reeled back from the connection of the black steel blades, Shagrath just as confused as Sullen, and likewise inclined to go after the stranger getting too close to his mistress. She called him off, relieved to see that other than some blackened scales her pangolin looked all right—better than Sullen did, anyway, his arms and legs weeping red from a dozen gashes, the front of his tunic leaking through despite there not being a rent in the sweaty cloth.