There were more of the eight-legged behemoths, though, and they were not content to stand by and watch the giant fatten itself on their army. The four titans stampeded through their own soldiers in their bloodlust to reach Hoartrap, plumes of incandescent intention billowing off their horned backs. The giant strode forward to meet their charge, but before they could clash, another of the flying white monsters that had nearly killed Ji-hyeon, Sullen, and Shagrath came winging down out of the rain. Something on its back shone just as black and brilliant as Hoartrap did inside his titanic armor, and then the winged steed crashed into the chest of his giant.
The two shining ebon presences collided, and everything stopped—the fighting, the furious cries, even the rain, drops hanging in front of Ji-hyeon like crystals from a chandelier. It was only for a moment, but that moment stretched out longer and longer, and as it elongated so, too, did something that not even Ji-hyeon’s devil-eye could quite make out, a presence stretching nearer and nearer from somewhere else. Her hairs would’ve stood on end, if only there’d been time, but before she could even register her primal terror the moment reached its breaking point, and as it did a bubble of the First Dark formed in the heart of Hoartrap’s giant.
This was what had been coming, and badly as she wanted to look away her devil-eye had been waiting far too long for an unfettered peek into those deepest mysteries to be deterred now. It was as if a miniature Gate had opened right there in the center of Hoartrap’s simulacrum, and as she stared the sorcerer and whatever infernal presence had crashed into him tumbled into that infinite vault … and out the other side, some place far, far from Othean, but right there, a telescopic window hanging over the battlefield. There were things on the other side, things like Hoartrap, things like whatever had taken him, but before her ravenous eye could fully see them—and before they could see her—that bubble of the First Dark popped, and everything resumed so abruptly Ji-hyeon nearly fell out of her saddle.
Rain, cries, clanging steel. The flying monster burst out of the giant’s back in a spume of countless bugs, spinning out of control into the infantry. Without Hoartrap to hold it together his construct fell apart, a waterfall of insects crashing down on the Tothan army.
“Fuuuuuuck,” breathed Sullen, reaching back to give Ji-hyeon a reassuring squeeze. His eyes were still out on the field, which explained why he manhandled her belly through her scalemail. “Good thing we got out when we did.”
“We’re not out yet,” said Ji-hyeon, still trying to recover from the vertiginous vision. She had only intended to look past the obscuring smoke and rain to see how close that second regiment had come before deciding on their plan of action, but as usual her devil-eye had shown her far more than she’d anticipated. It was her own fault for looking behind her instead of ahead, and now she put it to better use scanning the rainy slums between them and the Autumn Palace, her sight passing through buildings as though they were made of stained glass … and not much liking what she saw on the far side, she fixed her makeshift eye patch back in place. Trying to stay in the crowded saddle would be hard enough without her devil-eye distracting her. “There are still too many Tothans between us and the inner wall, and we need to thin them out if our people have any chance of getting into Othean before that army overtakes them. Ready to get your hands dirty?”
“I was born in the dirt,” said Sullen, worming around on the saddle to give her a quick kiss. “And with you around I can’t seem to get dirty enough.”
“Too true,” said Ji-hyeon, giving him another kiss for good measure and then spurring Shagrath into the contested slums between Othean’s walls. They were all going to die, there was no doubt of that, but when she’d been a girl in the Isles her favorite pastime had been make-believe. Some games you never outgrow. “If you’re smart enough to live out the day, barbarian, you’ll see just how dirty I can get.”
“Call me barbarian again and I’ll spank some manners into you,” said Sullen, leaning out on the saddle and grabbing a stray spear that was lodged in the lintel of a passing tenement.
“Excuse me?”
He glanced back with a guilty grin, and she smiled at the faint darkening of his cheeks, a blush so subtle she might have missed it entirely if she hadn’t been thirstily drinking up his long-missed features. He might have learned a little boldness from his time with Keun-ju, but not nearly enough. Not yet. It felt so good to feel his sweaty back against her chest as they rode together, pretending everything would be all right. Leaning forward, she whispered in his ear, “Barbarian, barbarian, barbarian.”
He was just turning back in the saddle to say something smart, or close enough, when Fellwing cheeped on her shoulder and the Tothans who had captured this part of the slums came rushing down the street to greet them, with more dropping from the surrounding rooftops. Ji-hyeon kicked Shagrath into a gallop. These monsters clearly wanted to pay her homage, and it would be rude to ignore them. The Empress of the Immaculate Isles had to be ready to entertain guests at a moment’s notice.
CHAPTER
26
In the end the others went through the Diadem Gate first, joining the battle at Othean and leaving Zosia to go for it alone. Well, except for her devil, but that went without saying—he’d been her only companion the last time she’d embarked on an idiotic suicide mission, too, when she’d come for King Kaldruut. A lifetime come and gone, and nothing much had changed.
Well, not quite nothing. Indsorith had wanted to tag along, the long-harried queen probably just as tired of living as her predecessor, but much as Zosia might appreciate the company it wasn’t a good idea. Indsorith was already on the verge of collapse and Zosia didn’t expect things were going to be getting any easier from here on out. Sullen wasn’t doing too much better than Indsorith, ashen and sweaty from some old war wound acting up, he said. While he’d made noises about maybe having an obligation to see this thing through beside her, as soon as he heard Othean was under attack it became very apparent where he wanted to go, even if it was just to die. Hoartrap, on the other hand, didn’t even pretend to want anything to do with Zosia’s admittedly batshit plan, petulant as a jilted teenager that she hadn’t accepted his invitation to sacrifice an entire city.
Everyone had seemed so surprised by her refusal to wake the volcano beneath Diadem, too, which stung a bit, but then Zosia supposed she had something of a reputation. And the truth was she was a little old for idealism, because as soon as Hoartrap took the others through the Gate she’d made Choplicker the offer he seemed so hungry for, with a caveat: if she couldn’t stop this thing and died trying to win the war on her own terms, he could have his freedom in exchange for ending the invasion on his. You had to take a pragmatic approach, when the fate of the Star depended on you, but she damn sure wasn’t letting the Touch overhear that offer in case he got any cute ideas about bumping her off himself.
Standing there in the heart of Diadem, the People’s Pack and their twitchy militia watching her every move, Zosia didn’t look down into the Gate she was about to enter, but across it. She thought she’d seen someone jump forward into the Gate after Hoartrap and the others, but that had to be her itchy eyes playing tricks on her after a busy, sleepless night. There were still plenty of hooded figures clustered on the opposite bank, those who had come to pay tribute to the passing of the Crimson Queen getting far more of a show than they’d bargained for. They no longer seemed so solemn, nor so faceless under their cowls, the light of morning showing them for what they were—folk plain as any other, who’d come here to try to make a little sense of their dark world, and now stared mystified at what had transpired.
“Well, let’s give the people something worth remembering,” Zosia told Choplicker, grabbing him harder than was strictly necessary by the back of the neck. “Take me to the leader of Jex Toth.”
He looked up at her, his muzzle red and wet from the puddle of blood he’d been lapping, and he gave her another of those hideous smiles she could have done without. Then he pulled her
forward and she stepped after him, into the Gate.
As soon as she did, she realized something was wrong. When they had traveled from the Lark’s Tongue Gate to Diadem their journey had been terrifying but brief, a single horrific instant, but now the oozing blackness that enveloped her stretched and stretched, thinner and colder, digging into her, through her, filling her. The First Dark was inside her, and even when she was vomited out onto the scratchy wool rug she could still feel its flush permeating her very bones. She gulped the faintly smoky air, unable to move for a spell, the chamber swirling around her as it coalesced … and then familiar fingers brushed away her tears, cocked her chin up to look at him.
Leib.
Her husband smiled sadly down at her, sitting on the floor beside her as he stroked her hair with his callused hand. She tried to speak but only a sob came out, and he gently guided her head into his lap, petting her as she wept and wept, clinging to the sides of the canvas coat he had worn when he’d left that fatal morning, riding down the valley to deliver tribute to the Crimson Empire …
Then her hands balled into fists, and she murdered her grief. Not opening her eyes, she said, “This isn’t real. You’re not. He’s dead.”
“He kept me safe,” Leib whispered, the sound of his voice demolishing the defenses she’d tried to raise. “Good old Chop kept me safe, just like you wished. He protected me, brought me here. It was the only way. I’ve been waiting for you for so long, Zee …”
He was crying now, too, his tears warm against her scalp as they soaked through her hair. His voice cracked. “I’ve missed you so, so much, my love, but now you’re home.”
“Home,” she moaned, burying her face deeper in the thin tunic she’d mended more than once, his slight belly warm against her cheek. She opened her fists and felt his back, reaching up to his broad shoulders, his lithe arms made strong from the raising of their cabin. The cabin where they now held each other, the sound of the aspens and his bone charms clinking in their boughs drifting in through the door that was always open, the smells of brewing kaldi and pipe smoke rich in the air. The cabin she had burned down, after his senseless murder. “Hell, you mean. Is that where you’ve brought me?”
“Hell?” Fuck, how she had missed his laugh, warm as the crackling fire in the hearth. “I can’t pretend to know what this place is, wife, or even how this place is, but if you ask me it’s just like heaven. It’s home. And we aren’t alone, either—Kypck’s just down the hill, same as ever, and everyone’s here, safe as safe can be. Even that cowherd that was always such a thorn in your boot, remember him? I’ve been teaching him to fish in the lakes over the pass; once he finds out you’re back I can’t imagine we’ll have a moment’s peace, the little—”
“Stop.” She squeezed her eyes tighter. “Stop it stop it stop it.”
“I was confused at first, too,” he said, his strong fingers massaging the nape of her neck the way she’d missed so, so much. “But after all the incredible things you’ve seen, is it so surprising there’s more to this world than we’ll ever understand? That we don’t have to understand life to reap its bounty? Isn’t it enough that we’re here, together, and we never have to leave?”
His words were fishhooks in her heart. Yes, this was what she wanted. This was all she had ever wanted. What she had burned empires for.
“Isn’t this everything you ever wished for, to turn away from all the pain and sorrow of the world and take me to a place where no one could hurt us? This is what you asked for! You’ve earned this, Zosia, after all the sacrifices you’ve made, after all the trials you’ve endured to better the lives of others, this is your reward. Just open your eyes and accept it, you obstinate woman!”
That was the worst of all. He’d only ever called her an obstinate woman when they were in bed and she was insisting on making him come first, despite his attempts to hold off, and that fucking tore it right there. Wrenching herself away but keeping her eyes locked shut lest the temptation overwhelm her, even now, she snarled, “Stop it. I don’t know why you’re doing this, but stop. There’s only one place I’m going, and that’s Jex Toth.”
“There’s nothing there but death,” he said piteously. “Even after all these years, haven’t you figured out you can’t save everyone? Some battles can’t be won, and the only victory is to acknowledge this, to protect yourself, to move on.”
“You think I don’t know that?” The tears were coming so hot and fast it was a struggle to keep her eyes clamped. “That’s what death is, giving up on the unwinnable. But I’m not dead yet. Now take me back.”
“Time moves differently here, Zosia, it’s too late for the Star,” he said, no longer sounding like her husband but talking in the voice of Pao Cowherd, the dying boy who’d once begged her to save his life now petitioning her to abandon innumerable others. “In the minutes we’ve spent here the morning has waned, the battle has been lost, and the Star is falling. It’s over, and you have to accept—”
“You have to accept my orders,” she spat. “Now take me back, if only to die with my kind. Now.”
The air grew chill around her, and she could hear the wind that haunted the Kutumban reaches come roaring down through the fireplace. Instead of the smells of kaldi and pipe smoke and her husband’s sweaty shirt she caught only the tang of charcoal, the stink of wet dog. The comfortable rug melted beneath her rump to a cold hard floor thickly coated in dust, and whatever he said next was lost in a snarling bark.
Zosia fell, the squirming cloying stinking passage through the First Dark no longer so frightening. She welcomed this passage, the breath of time to let her eyes dry. Then she tumbled out across the soft wet ground, her mind continuing to roll even when her body came to a stop, and when she at last opened her eyes it was a place every bit as alien as the spaces between Gates.
She knew she didn’t have much time, probably didn’t have any, but she seized Choplicker by the scruff of the neck and wrenched his guilty face up to hers.
“We’re not finished, you and I,” she growled. “Not by a very, very long measure, devil. If I were you I’d work harder than I ever had before to make amends, or else … or else I don’t even know what. But it won’t be good.”
Then she shoved him away and took in the Sunken Kingdom of Jex Toth. Zosia had cleaned enough kills in her day to know at once they weren’t just somewhere, they were inside something, the ribbed arches of the massive hall actual ribs, thirteen living thrones formed of glistening meat and spurred bone rising in a half circle just ahead of her. All of the grotesque chairs were empty save one, where a scrawny man had been mummified in webbing all the way up to his eyes …
Then, through the translucent silk, she recognized the tattoos on the skeletal figure’s naked flesh. Only it couldn’t be him, it couldn’t be—there simply wasn’t enough there for it to be him. Yet it could be no other, she was sure of it. In life Hoartrap had been one of the biggest men she’d ever met, sturdy as a bull gorgon, but now his desiccated corpse looked even smaller than her. Only his face looked about the same, his bulky, web-muzzled head sickeningly disproportionate to his wasted body, like a prize-winning pumpkin perched on a rickety scarecrow.
What the devil had happened to him? What was he even doing here? And how long had Zosia been in that other place, that he’d taken the others to Othean, beaten her here, and met a grisly demise before she even turned up?
“Fuck!” Zosia jumped as Hoartrap’s watery blue eyes blinked at her. That he was evidently still alive made his condition seem even worse.
Before she could move to free him the rubbery, slightly tacky floor heaved ever so gently beneath her feet, and she had to drop to a crouch to keep from falling over. The devilish mode of travel already threw off her equilibrium, and try as she did to find her sea legs she only succeeded in slipping onto her knees. Hoartrap offered her a series of blinks, but if there was an eyelid-based prisoners’ cant she wasn’t fluent. The great chamber was dimly lit by glowing veins that flowed through the floors
and the walls and even the thrones, revealing that while this plateau was little bigger than Diadem’s throne room it rose from the center of a vast grotto. And in the gently pulsing twilight Zosia saw just what a terrible mistake she had made in coming here without an army of her own.
The black-shelled soldiers surrounded her, cutting her off from Hoartrap and the rest of the thrones as they came scuttling up the sides of whatever mesa she had emerged onto. Their stinger-spiked armor looked even more dangerous than their toothed weapons, Choplicker growling low in his throat, and Zosia tightened her grip on her hammer. She would make them work hard if they wanted to grant Hoartrap’s wish to sacrifice Diadem … but first she had to try her plan, stupid and hopeless though it surely was.
“Hear me!” she shouted, not even knowing if words were necessary for this psychic army, as Hoartrap had called them, or if they could even understand her, but she didn’t know how else to make sure her thoughts went echoing out through the cavernous belly of Jex Toth. “If I die, you die! If I fall, my devil sends you back to the First Dark!”
If anything, that made them come in faster, Zosia still too dizzy to get off her knees.
“You read minds! Read mine and see if I’m lying!” Her voice broke as they closed the final few meters, not for herself but for the people of Diadem about to be incinerated because she hadn’t been smart enough to come up with a better scheme. “Peace for all if I live, death to all if I die! Look in me, damn you, look in me and see if I speak true!”
A War in Crimson Embers Page 51