A War in Crimson Embers

by Alex Marshall

  He wasn’t paying any more attention to his wounds than she was to her pangolin, now, the two crossing the last few steps that stood between them … but looking around the whole time to make sure they weren’t about to be attacked. The Cobalts had reclaimed this patch of mud for now, all the figures moving through the rain and the smoke wearing blue, and then Sullen planted his spear at her feet and threw his arms around her.

  It was the best hug she’d ever experienced, everything that had led to this seeming worth it, at least in the moment, and then the careful, cautious-to-a-fault Flintlander she had missed so much boldly gave her a kiss that was even better. She gave as good as she got, groaning into his mouth from the ache of it—and then pulling away before she got carried away, anxiously scanning for the enemy. Shagrath had protectively curled his tail around the two lovers, but that low fence wouldn’t keep out an arrow or spear …

  “I missed you,” he told her, his fingers brushing her cheek as if he wasn’t even sure she was real and needed to keep making sure. She knew how he felt, seeing him for the first time with her devil-eye yet still liking what she saw.

  “I’ve missed you, too, Sullen, more than you can imagine!” The coast clear for now, she stole another rainy kiss … then froze, their lips still touching. “Where … where’s Keun-ju? Is he here?”

  “No, but Hoartrap says he’s safe?” said Sullen, noticing her altered left eye with obvious surprise. “What happened to—no, it can wait, important thing is Keun-ju’s okay. I hope. He and Hoartrap were together last I seen him, but that wasn’t my fault, us getting separated, and—”

  Ji-hyeon shut him up with her mouth, her heart soaring at the news that both of her men still drew breath … and then plummeting as she remembered where they were, how tragic this romance really was. She kissed him harder even as she wished he had never come back, tasting his tongue for what must be the last time. The one bright spot of their looming deaths was that she wouldn’t be burdened with untangling the romantic knot she’d gotten them all snarled up in; wherever he was, she hoped Keun-ju was safer than she and Sullen, and that he knew she loved him.

  As if sensing that her thoughts had drifted to his rival, Sullen broke the kiss. Brushing away her tears with a blood-sticky hand, he said, “Hate to say it, but we better save any more of that for after the battle, General.”

  “Oh, Sullen …” She shook her head. “I fear there’s not going to be an afterward, not for us. You shouldn’t be here. The battle’s already lost. We’re all going to die.”

  “Then I got here just in time,” he said with another one of his crafty smiles. She knew she had to look away from his rain-slick face, his beautiful blue snow lion eyes, she had to return to the fight … but for just a moment longer she lingered. He’d paid his life to see her one last time, she owed it to him. She owed it to herself.

  Shagrath huffed in warning, battering a Tothan soldier with his tail as he uncoiled from his protective posture around his mistress and her lover. The moment was officially ruined. Wars had a way of doing that.

  She was just about to tell Sullen their only hope was to break through the Tothan army and storm Othean when she realized the rain had stopped striking them, even as it poured down on all sides. It was the last thing she noticed before being jerked from her feet and slammed into Shagrath’s plated flank.

  The monster had them before Sullen even saw it, hurling them both into Ji-hyeon’s steed. The world was batted away, a blur of earth and sky, dull black scales and translucent grey hide. A fat white snake curled around Sullen’s arm, its sticky skin burning his flesh. Ji-hyeon falling through the air just beside him, her body limp, more of the twisting white snakes crawling all over them. Pain. Such unbelievable pain.

  The speed of the spinning slowed. They had stopped rolling, they were still, but Sullen’s skull hadn’t caught up with the rest of him yet. He reached for the sliding image of Ji-hyeon, her face too serene, too motionless, but he couldn’t find her, the coiling snakes tightening around his limbs, locking him in place.

  Not snakes. The tendrils of the giant flying monster he had seen swooping the battlefield before he’d found Ji-hyeon. The thing that snatched soldiers off the ground and carried them away. He tried again to get an arm free, but it was impossible—there was no give whatsoever, and the more he struggled the tighter the corrosive tentacles held him. The titan had them, and when it was high enough it would let them go, dropping them to—

  No. The coils of the beast shifted over them, and turning his neck he saw they weren’t airborne at all. The flying jellyfish-thing had grabbed them but Ji-hyeon’s scaled steed had grabbed it back, dragging it down to the ground. Now the two monsters were locked together in the cratered mud, pale tendrils enveloping the big armadillo even as it bit the flying horror’s bat-like wing. The more Ji-hyeon’s beast chewed on the grounded horror the tighter it squeezed the coils that enveloped them all, and Sullen moaned despite his efforts to stay quiet. He didn’t want to wake Ji-hyeon. Not to this.

  Then he saw her. An armored woman, her glistening helm crowned in cascading black quills. She stood atop the convulsing white behemoth, gazing down at the mortals caught in the death struggle between a monster of the sky and a beast of the earth. Then she leaped down from its side, landing lightly in the mud. Ducked under its broken wing. Stood over Sullen, and as the corded tendrils closed off his throat he realized who this must be.

  This was Death.

  Not his. Ji-Hyeon’s. Everyone had their own, after all, and this must be the Death of the Immaculates. Through the slits in her helm he saw cold black eyes watching him, and he gave a final pitiful struggle to reach Ji-hyeon. He didn’t want her to go with this cruel emissary, to some foreign afterworld where he couldn’t follow her—it wasn’t fair, not after they’d died together. Not with Old Black stepping up behind this Immaculate goddess, waiting her turn to collect behind a blurry veil of rain—why not just let them go down together to the Meadhall? Hadn’t they earned that?

  As if in answer, Old Black raised her arms—in one hand she held Sullen’s black spear, and in the other Ji-hyeon’s black sword.

  The white skull Sullen’s ancestor always painted over her face before collecting souls gleamed like ivory in the rain.

  His last thought was that in the songs Old Black was always so beautiful, but now that she came into focus through the downpour he saw she was anything but.

  CHAPTER

  25

  Maroto had stuck with Fennec and his guards as they plowed through the press of Tothans, following Fellwing as the devilish owlbat bobbed overhead. As soon as he saw a squid-dragon crash down a short distance ahead, though, he was off like a damn cannonball through the warring mobs of Tothans and Cobalts. Something he’d learned on Jex Toth was that while the Tothan grunts could ride the monsters they didn’t have the brains or the proper stink glands or whatever to control their mounts themselves. They needed to have someone from the Vex Assembly aboard or at least in close enough proximity to guide the flocks of squid-dragons, which meant that one of the enemy command might have just crashed into snatching range. He didn’t know how exactly he could snatch one of the ancient fuckers, what with their spooky speed and witchy powers, but he’d figure that out once he had it cornered. The fact that he and Fennec had actually made it out of Othean and led their troops across the contested field was proof enough that sometimes mortals could accomplish the impossible, if they were too brave or too stupid to play it safe.

  Not that it hadn’t been nearly impossible to get this far, and this was the easy part—pulling back inside Othean was where the titty got tough. At least now that Fennec’s soldiers and Maroto’s Chainites had pressed deep enough into the invading army to meet Ji-hyeon’s Cobalts in the middle it was possible to take three steps without meeting a Tothan. You might have to take as many as five or six, and even then they were often as not already fighting one of Ji-hyeon’s heavies. Even with all the good guys wearing similar shades of blue heraldry
it was still easy to tell the new Cobalts from the old, because the soldiers Maroto and Fennec had led out of Othean were mostly human with a few wildborn here and there.

  These new Cobalts, though, they were something else. Wilderborn, you might say, with pelts as thick as chainmail and stabbing horns and stomping hooves and great crude clubs that blasted the Tothans’ armor into gooey clouds. For all their differences, though, these soldiers bled just as easily as their more human counterparts, the enemy’s cruel weaponry cutting them down just as quick. The Tothans’ spiny armor packed a nasty sting, if you bumped into their barbs, and their jagged swords and spears were plenty firm until they pierced flesh but broke apart as they were pulled free, filling their victims with bone splinters. Then there were all the horsey things trampling everyone under their spear-legs, and abominations the likes of which he hadn’t even glimpsed during his tenure on Jex Toth …

  A flash of white through the hordes of inhuman combatants. Maroto ducked under a demonic stallion that had been lassoed by a wildborn, breaking one of the monster’s long legs as a courtesy as he came out the other side. The downed squid-dragon was just ahead now, the biggest one he’d ever seen just lying there in the middle of the battlefield, but between him and his quarry half a dozen Tothans had surrounded a ten-foot-tall, ox-faced wildborn laden with iron platemail, blue streamers flying from its horns. Its only weapon was a tower shield it wore like a buckler, smashing back at the ring of hollow soldiers, but there were too many of them …

  Until the Mighty Maroto evened up the odds, swinging his mace as hard as he could. He bashed in the back of one Tothan’s helm and clipped the top off another, knocking them both to the ground. One of the others brought its barbed blades in his direction but you didn’t ever want to turn your back on a bull-headed barbarian, that was just common sense. The wildborn decapitated it with the edge of its rectangular shield, and between the two of them Maroto and the beast took out the rest in a matter of moments.

  Moments that drained Maroto of his breath, to be sure, leaving him panting as he struggled to hold his mace aloft after going so hard with it. This whole wading-into-war-without-the-benefit-of-bugs thing was a hell of a lot harder than he remembered. Steaming monster juice and broken bodies at their feet, he and the Cobalt minotaur exchanged nods, and Maroto hoisted his mace at it. He’d only meant it as a gesture of solidarity, but the damn cow either mistook his meaning or was just an arsehole, because with its free hand it wrenched the weapon out of Maroto’s grasp and lumbered off with it to find more things to kill. Fucking minotaurs.

  Good thing on a battlefield this busy there were plenty of loose weapons lying about. Some of them still had hands attached to them, but no matter, no matter. Striding up behind the fallen squid-dragon he found a spear planted in the earth, and a black-bladed sword just beside it. He settled on the spear, in part because it looked like a Flintlander weapon and in part because the sword’s handle had some weird rings built into the hilt that made it look unwieldy as all get-out.

  As soon as he seized the spear and started on toward the giant white monster his earlobe stung like an icebee had bit it, but when he clapped his hand to his head there was nothing there. Hurt like a hot coal, though, and the pain gave him a random-arsed surge of nostalgia—it felt just like Da had flicked it, the obnoxious way he was always doing anytime Maroto wasn’t paying attention to one of his interminable lectures. The hesitation turned out to be a godsend, though, because just then a Tothan in the craziest armor he’d yet witnessed rose from the back of the beached squid-dragon and jumped down to the ground, its back to Maroto as it went around to the front where the monster’s tentacles were all wrapped up in something. With a porcupine helm like that it had to be someone special, obviously one of the Vex Assembly, and Maroto leaned down and snatched up the weird-handled sword after all. Seemed prudent to have as many weapons as he had hands before facing one of the powerful priests—he could always throw the damn sword at it, if nothing else.

  Slinking after the Tothan as it ducked under one of the monster’s broken wings, Maroto watched it draw a sickle-sword, the gleaming metal crescent only a little less outlandish than the bone weapons of its infantry. Creeping closer still, he saw the Tothan meant to behead the enormous sloth monster that must have grounded its steed. The scaly critter was all tangled up in the squid-dragon’s tentacles, reduced to biting its wing since its heavy paws were caught in white coils along with a couple of human corpses. The Tothan raised its blade, and Maroto raised both of his, and—

  Fuck, the bastard was fast. Instead of chopping into the scaled sloth the Tothan was about to open up Maroto, sensing his ambush despite how softly he’d been stalking. He parried its slashing sword with his own, already jabbing with his spear. He was going to skewer the Tothan through the belly, armor or no, but somehow the human-shaped monster flew backward a dozen feet before he could connect. Its mane of quills stood erect, a halo of venom-dripping needles, and then it flew straight at Maroto so fast he barely had time to hear his departed Da chastise him for being such a damn fool before its curved sword hacked straight across at his face, severing his—

  Y’Homa had seen this mortal before. Or rather, her angel had. Down in the underdocks, scraping barnacle-rats off the leviathans. Her holy half shivered with delight at dueling one who had looked upon them with such terror back on Jex Toth, here at last a victim who knew the full extent of his doom. It begged her to take her time, to take the skull-painted mortal apart slowly, but she knew she had to end it quickly if she had any hope of freeing her mount from the monster that had brought it down. Her angel, innocent that it was, simply reveled in all the pain and fear of the current conflict, but Y’Homa was burdened with responsibility and knew unless she quickly removed the threat to their steed it would die, leaving them stranded on the battlefield. First she would kill this mortal man, then she would kill the scaled creature that had attacked their mount, and then they would return to the skies.

  It wasn’t a fair fight. It wasn’t a fight at all. Y’Homa hadn’t bothered with martial training in her youth, but since she had been reborn her skill in combat was, like everything else about her, supreme. After dodging the sinner’s clumsy spear thrust she fell upon him with her ancient Tothan sword, leaping straight in and hacking off the top of his head. One strike was all it took—her angel was an angel of death.

  There wasn’t even any resistance as her blade ended this interruption; she might as well have been cutting the air …

  Which was about all she had actually accomplished, apparently. He ignored the blow and came at her hard, but the angel in her bones danced her away from his spear and his sword, the man faster than ever. It was as if the tall column of curly hair she’d taken off the top of his head had been slowing him down, that or the minuscule amount of scalp she’d shaved off when he ducked her high attack.

  Y’Homa parried spear, parried sword, and when he somehow managed to evade her jab she whipped him with the quilled train of her helm. The needles tattooed half his white face red, popping his left eye like a tiny wineskin. He screamed but didn’t falter, his spear tagging her off hand. It only opened a small rent in the living gauntlet but her armored swarm fell off all the way up to her elbow, smoking as they died. Clearly hers weren’t the only envenomed weapons, and she dropped back again to let the poison in his face do its work.

  She had to wonder if her angel was rebelling against her will, allowing the battle to persist so it might glut itself on the mortal’s stinking emotions. Ever since her foe had noticed the pair of sinners and their pet entangled in her mount’s tendrils he had been putting off a powerful reek of fury and heartbreak. This must be why her angel had let him live this long, prolonging his suffering. As if the man could read her uncertainty as well as she could read his, he took advantage of her hesitation … and turned his back on her. She did not squander her advantage, the wretch’s cowardice costing him his life as she came reaping with her heavenly sword.

  Sullen.
The blueness of his face contrasted the whiteness of the coils enveloping him. Crazy how Maroto hadn’t even recognized the boy until this Tothan monster put out his eye, but now his nephew was all he could see even as he faced the greatest opponent he had ever fought. It fell back from his furious onslaught, paused, and in that instant Maroto threw himself into his final gambit.

  Sullen was already dead, dead as Maroto would be if he showed his back to this devil-ridden reaver. The squid-dragon had crushed the life from the boy, no doubt about it—he’d probably been dead before Maroto had even arrived. Throwing his own life away couldn’t bring his nephew back. Nothing could, short of Old Black’s intervention, and the thing about the Old Watchers was they only ever watched, never interceded on behalf of their heirs. Sullen was gone, he was with Da now, down at the Meadhall, and—

  Maroto hacked into the tentacles with his sword, with his spear, tears streaming from his right eye, gore from his left. He carved his nephew free, knowing the Tothan’s next blow would take off a lot more than just his flattop. Grey slime gouted into the air, the squid-dragon’s coils retracting from Sullen and the Immaculate woman beside him as Maroto chopped more and more of the tendrils, only spinning back to look his death in the eye when he’d severed the cord around Sullen’s neck.

  The Tothan was right on top of him, too close to dodge. All the quills on its helm stood straight up, some oozing white venom and others beaded with blood. Maroto’s blood.