A War in Crimson Embers

by Alex Marshall

  The sickle-sword in its clawed gauntlet was laced with blood, too … but not as much as the blade protruding from its chitinous breastplate.

  Cracks spread out across the living armor, smoke rising from the fissures. The sword slipped from its hand, it slipped to its knees, and the white-haired woman behind it wrenched her own sword free, then brought it straight across, biting through the back of the Tothan’s quilled helm and into its neck. It took several more blows to take the head off entirely, and about that much time for Maroto to recognize the woman who wielded a black blade of her own.

  It was the weary smirk she offered Maroto when the dying helm fell free from the severed head that brought recognition to his overtaxed brain—she’d offered him the same look when she had disarmed him in her throne room twenty years before. He would have bowed if he’d thought he could pull it off without falling over, his face on fire with venom, his eye a smoldering pit that burned almost as bright as his broken heart.

  “Your Majesty,” he managed as a woman carrying a giant birdcage limped up behind Queen Indsorith, leaning heavily on a feathered staff.

  “This is bad,” this new arrival said. “He’ll die if we don’t act fast.”

  “Dying?” That was the best news Maroto had heard all day. He tried to turn back toward Sullen when his shaky legs gave out on him altogether and he fell over in the mud. Weakly pointing at where his nephew, the Immaculate woman, and the giant scaly animal lay in the retracting bed of splattered tentacles, he said, “Help. Help him.”

  “He’s bad, but you’re worse,” said a familiar voice, the only one that could have given Maroto the strength to raise his head just then, and only because of how badly he wanted to bite the fucker’s head off. Hoartrap the stinking Touch knelt down over Sullen and began giving him mouth-to-mouth, Indsorith went to the prone Immaculate, and the woman with the birdcage flopped down in the mud next to Maroto, fiddling with an iron-bound holster on her belt.

  “Open your mouth,” the girl said, offering Maroto a silver egg. As if he could even think about eating at a time like this, the nettle-stinging agony of his face burning worse and worse, his one eye getting all filmy, his stomach cramping along with the rest of him as the venom did its job. He tried to tell her to sod off and let him die in peace but when he opened his mouth she shoved the egg inside, and as the shell cracked on his teeth he felt a heat as if he’d swallowed the devildamned sun.

  Only, like, in a nice way.

  He instantly felt better, and was about to say as much when the girl jerked backward onto her feet, snatched another egg from a belt compartment, and hurled it away. A moment later the warmth wasn’t just inside his happy mouth or tingling throat but all over his aching body as an explosion shook the mire around his knees, smoke and heat enveloping him in a familiar blanket.

  Weird, yes, but it could be a lot worse. This lady could have gotten her eggs mixed up.

  It all seemed like such a bad dream. Enduring endless torture at the instruments of the Burnished Chain, only to be saved by the last woman Indsorith would have ever expected …

  And then the wheel turned again, replacing hope with despair, succor with further torment from the very people the two queens had sought to save. Then a second chance at salvation, there on the cusp of death, on the cusp of Diadem Gate. A journey across the Star, and the surprising truth that the First Dark was no place of horrors and suffering, but a healing balm that restored her strength. Her countless wounds vanished as if she had not recently been tortured twice over … but only so that she might quest forth into this unreal combat against the monsters she had glimpsed in profane visions and the nightmares that followed. Dreams sprang from the First Dark, and feeling vitality coursing through limbs she had barely been able to move on the other side of the Gates, Indsorith recognized that she had fallen into the last one she would ever have.

  Liberated by the lucidity, she had plunged into the battle without a second thought, struggling to keep up with Zosia’s young Flintlander friend. Indsorith hadn’t been able to follow everything they’d said, but had heard enough to recognize that when Hoartrap tried to goad Zosia into unimaginable darkness Sullen had begged her to spare Diadem. Unlike herself the boy obviously hadn’t been mended by their sojourn between the Gates, his wound dragging him down, and she wanted to be able to protect him when his strength failed. She wanted to be able to protect someone who deserved it, just once, before the end.

  Inhuman warriors surrounded them, separated them, struck at them over and over, but Moonspell struck back harder and faster and crueler. The spatha’s edge passed through the rain and armor and flesh with equal ease, the long-missed keening whine of the blade driving Indsorith to swing it harder and harder still. She was nicked and she was pushed and she was almost impaled and she was definitely not dreaming, she realized as a hulking thing gashed open her off hand and she skewered its helm, but that awakening only made her more desperate to find Sullen through the smoke and the storm and the demon horde.

  But maybe she was dreaming a little, because in that frantic moment she felt like her mother’s sword was guiding her, dragging her forward into the thickest part of the press. She passed through this final crucible of screaming metal and clattering insect armor and scratching blades and barbs, and burst out the other side, straight into the back of yet another nightmarish foe. Moonspell knew the way, and Indsorith followed, and then it was over.

  She had spent countless hours imagining this reunion, rehearsing what she might say to her tormentor, if given the chance. Never in her fantasies or her nightmares had she pictured such a scenario as this, Y’Homa dead by her shaking hand before she even realized who she was attacking. It was probably for the best. Had she known who lurked under that monstrous armor she might have hesitated, if only for a moment, and that moment might have meant death for many, many more.

  Death. The only courtier who never abandoned the Crimson Queen. The bizarre insect Y’Homa had worn as an armored headdress leaked yellow ichor and grey steam from its mortal wound, spurted its last jets of white venom from its erect quills, the creature’s compound eyes as remote and alien to Indsorith as the black orbs of the Black Pope. However familiar the features of this severed head lying in the mud of a smoking battlefield, there was something in those vacant, oily eyes that made Indsorith recognize that her rival from Diadem had died a long time ago. This was a mercy killing … and that withered any satisfaction Indsorith could take before it even fully fruited.

  And this was the great riddle of mortality, that which her mother had solved that fatal day in the work camps when Indsorith was but a child: no matter how much we crave it, no matter how much we welcome it, at its heart death is always cruel.

  Death was a dream, but at least it was a good one. At the time this scene had been anything but, a grueling nightmare Sullen relived over and over again in his sleep, even years after they had safely made it home. Now, though, the familiar vision brought comfort instead of fear, relief instead of panic. Perhaps it was because in death their roles were reversed, Grandfather carrying him through the snow as Sullen’s deep wound dribbled its warmth against the old man’s chest. Death didn’t cleave families apart. It reunited them.

  Grandfather wore Old Black’s facepaint, the left half of his skull dyed crimson with blood. The old man had strapped Sullen’s spear to his back, the shaft jutting up into the snow like a limbless black tree, and as the thick white flakes landed on Sullen’s cheeks they burned instead of cooled. He closed his eyes and let the old man carry him down to the Meadhall Beneath the Iced Earth, content that his song had at last come to an end … and then snapped them open.

  “Ji-hyeon,” he croaked at his ancestor. “Ji-hyeon. Take her with us. She earned it.”

  “I don’t know if that’s how I’d put it, but she’s here,” said the bloodied skull, but it wasn’t Fa, his voice was all wrong. Too nice. He was lifting Sullen farther up, into the air that swirled not with snow but pale ash and crimson cinders.r />
  “Craven,” Sullen gasped. “Uncle Craven!”

  “Not on your life, pup.” The skull winked its only eye at Sullen, the top of its close-shorn head bloody and raw. “Your uncle’s the Mighty Maroto, and don’t you forget it. Ever.”

  Then other hands took Sullen, helped steady him on the back of the great scaled beast. Ji-hyeon’s hands, on Ji-hyeon’s beast. He looked over his shoulder at his girl. She looked just beat to shit. Like, even up this close she looked as if she’d aged a decade in the weeks since he’d seen her last … but then he reckoned he must look a fright, too. A leather belt striped the left side of her face, holding a wad of torn cloth and loose chainmail flush against her skin. He was glad she had scrounged up the makeshift patch; it had frightened him, seeing that second, stranger iris crowding her eye, its wide, curious pupil staring at him with a very different kind of hunger than its twin. It would not be her prettiest song, how she came by that devilish third eye, and what secrets it might show her, but he hoped to live long enough to hear it, and all the rest …

  For now she kissed the back of his bruised neck with split lips, her wheeling owlbat as grey as the ash in the air as she helped Sullen settle onto the saddle in front of her.

  “I know you said Horned Wolves don’t ride but I thought you’d make an exception for me,” she rasped in his ear.

  “Anytime and every time,” he said, his throat feeling as pained as hers sounded. “We … we okay?”

  “Not even close,” said Fennec, the old Usban standing next to Ji-hyeon’s pangolin. He, Maroto, Nemi, and Indsorith were all together, but while the others were looking to the north Fennec only had eyes for Ji-hyeon and Sullen. “No matter what happens, you must get over the wall at the heart of Othean. We’ll try to keep up, but if we can’t there’s nothing you can do. Our only chance is to lead as many of them in after us, and once the Dreaming Priests decide the time is right that will be the end for anyone who isn’t safely on the other side. Understand?”

  “We understand,” Ji-hyeon said before Sullen could protest that he didn’t have the slightest fucking idea of what was happening here. Well, so long as she did he’d trust her to see them through … “If you’d be so good as to return our weapons, Maroto, we’ll lead the charge into Othean.”

  “These are yours?” Maroto pulled out the black sword he’d shoved through the belt of his skirt and handed it up to Ji-hyeon, then reached for the spear on his back. Half his fucking face was grotesquely swollen, his left eye a leaking chasm, but at worst he seemed kind of stoned. He held the spear up, but Sullen shook his head.

  “You can borrow it, Uncle, until we meet up on the other side.”

  “Yeah?” Maroto smiled, his ruined face pulsing underneath all the gore. “All right then, it’s a deal. Until the other side. Nephew.”

  The ground rumbled under their feet, and Ji-hyeon’s pangolin took that as their cue to get moving. As it took off Sullen gave his uncle a knowing nod … and then his jaw fell open as he saw what the others had been looking at, to the north. A Tothan army massed not a hundred yards away, standing at the ready. Dozens and dozens of the long-legged horse demons pranced in place, and beyond them stretched a black sea of soldiers, massive pale monsters rising here and there from the flood. Over their frontline another of the giant octopus-bats drifted through the rain and the ash, and as he watched a rider on its back seemed to point its spindly arm straight at Sullen. At that, the whole evil army resumed their charge, sweeping down at the scattered Cobalts and Tothans who still struggled against each other on the fields surrounding the Temple of Pentacles.

  “Look!” Ji-hyeon shouted as their mount picked up speed, her three-fingered hand turning his head for him when he didn’t avert his gaze from the charging horde. He’d assumed that had been what she was talking about, because what else could warrant—oh.

  Hoartrap the Touch ran so swiftly he could have outpaced the pangolin, if he’d been of a mind. Instead the naked man leaped from one Tothan soldier to the next, an ivory blur through the ranks, tackling one after another only long enough to crack their helms with his forehead and ram his slime-covered face inside. Sullen had seen the Touch get up to some nasty shit, but this … this was the worst. The old giant’s tattoos were pulsing with black light as he landed on another Tothan and bit through its helmet as if it were made of meringue, sucking out a mouthful of runny black gore.

  Well. Sullen could have done without seeing that.

  The rampaging witch fell from sight as the pangolin galloped around another pack of Tothans. They were making straight for a collapsed portion of Othean’s wall, but while their approach was clear for now, Sullen glimpsed more of the black-shelled soldiers amassing on the rooftops beyond. Sullen looked over his shoulder to warn Ji-hyeon that they were about to get back into the shit, but before he could say a word he saw what was swelling out of the battlefield behind them. He could have done without seeing that, too.

  Hoartrap rose from the press of Tothans, standing atop a blooming mountain of black insects. Higher and higher the mountain grew, ten feet, then twenty, and then the swarming bugs at his feet began crawling over his flesh, too, consuming the Touch until he resembled an onyx statue, his arms stretched out like the Chainite saint on Diggelby’s charm bracelet. The summit of the swarm erupted like the volcano in the Fallen Mother’s vision, except instead of liquid fire it shot more and more of the shiny black bugs into the sky. They didn’t spread out, either, or fall to earth, but instead whipped around through the air, a tornado of swirling insects that quickly coalesced into a human shape. Somewhere in its center was Hoartrap the Touch, and the last thing Sullen saw before their pangolin scrambled up the ruins of Othean’s collapsed outer wall was a fifty-foot-tall construct of living insects striding after them, clearing a path for the Cobalt Company.

  Fennec had kissed her cheeks with tears streaming down his, had thrust a copy of his map into her hands and made her promise to go on without them, no matter what. Ji-hyeon had agreed, but as she wheeled Shagrath around and steered him back into the Tothan host choking the only entrance to Othean, she figured he didn’t have much choice but to forgive her a broken promise or two. He’d been the one to teach her how much fun it was to break oaths, after all. Well, him and Keun-ju.

  “Whoa!” Sullen cried, slipping around on the saddle. That seemed to be about the extent of his vocabulary, now that he was riding an animal for the first time in his life. Funny how he knew that command innately, even if Shagrath would only heed it when it came from his mistress. “Whoa!”

  “Whoa!” Shagrath obediently came to a stop atop the rubble of the outer wall, mistaking Ji-hyeon’s agreement with Sullen’s assessment of the field for an order. Which was okay, because it looked like the Cobalt Company wasn’t going to have much trouble breaking through into Othean even without her leading the charge.

  Ji-hyeon had battled giants in her time beyond the First Dark, but never before had one fought on her side. This headless titan of glistening shell waded through the Tothans behind her, crushing them underfoot and sending dozens flying with each sweep of its heavy arms. Blue rivers rushed after it, filling its footprints in the Tothan horde, both her outer Cobalts and the veterans Fennec had brought to their rescue now following the giant toward the Autumn Palace.

  She prayed her sisters were among those who could still flee the folly of her final command, that Sasamaso, Hassan, Din, and Shea were safe and helping shepherd the rest. Witnessing the godlike power of this giant golem she marveled at her hubris, to think she of all people could depose the Empress of the Isles and govern the realm, when she couldn’t even govern a simple battle.

  Of course, she did have a certain set of skills, she just needed to be willing to use them. Her hands were shaking as she undid the belt wrapped around her head, letting the makeshift blindfold fall away and freeing her devil-eye for the second time that morning. It always tempted her to see more, to look farther, to keep staring until she saw what lurked beyond even the
farthest borders of the First Dark … but over the years she had learned to tame her mutation, to make it work for her instead of acting as its slave. Squinting it just so, she cut through the billowing smoke and the swirling embers, through the mobs of mortals and monsters, through flesh and chitin.

  Hoartrap was a bright black oil slick sloshing around the heart of the rampaging giant, streamers of spectral light trailing from its swinging arms. She had never seen anything so beautiful, every tiny shell winking a different unnamed color in the scintillating rain. The colossus was almost on top of them when it lurched out of the fragmenting Tothan lists, stepping along the ruined wall and then turning to the north.

  Despite the driving rain and stinging fumes Ji-hyeon saw the second Tothan regiment as clearly as if she’d used a hawkglass on a sunny day. The demons came charging down on the retreating Cobalts, and Hoartrap’s insectoid simulacrum lumbered back out into the fields to meet them. Now that he was free of the Tothan horde, Ji-hyeon saw that every moment he was shedding hundreds of bugs, their inner light burning out as they fell, the giant diminishing with every heavy footfall. As he reached the galloping horse-things his giant was half as tall as it had started, and while that was still large enough to smash the monsters underfoot and wreck them with its blunt arms his enormous puppet was slowing, growing clumsy.

  A hulking elephantine horror reared up out of the charging horde, steady on its rear legs as its six forearms grasped at the giant golem, each limb ending in a mouth so big that Ji-hyeon could see its teeth from here even with her normal eye. They grappled, teetered … and then Hoartrap’s pastel-steaming giant sent its Tothan attacker rolling through the ranks, crushing scores of black-plated infantry. The great beast vanquished, Hoartrap again drew strength from his massed victims, his giant no longer disintegrating as the soldiers he touched exploded into clouds of insects that swarmed up his body, swelling him larger than ever. As each soldier fell apart and their components became one with Hoartrap’s monstrous puppet, Ji-hyeon’s devil-eye also caught a transference of ephemeral light, yellow radiance flowing through the air from each victim to the warlock’s pulsing black presence in the center of the giant … and then winking out of existence. While the exact mechanics of the exchange were as mysterious as any of his despicable magics, it was obvious Hoartrap was once more eating his way into obscene power.