A War in Crimson Embers

by Alex Marshall

  After that the Vex Assembly seemed to forget about the three mortals they had bound above their Gate, and neither Best nor Keun-ju nor even brave little Prince seemed inclined to remind their hosts of their presence. There’d been no time to attempt an escape while they were distracted with their former pal, alas, as the ghouls soon tired of tormenting the Touch, restraining what was left of him in one of their thrones. The bony bastard who’d delivered Hoartrap had hopped right back into the Gate, and the other ten hustled back to their posts around the rim and on the bridges that spanned it, eager to resume the ritual that had twice been interrupted by mortal interlopers. Now Zosia appeared, presumably to see if what they said about third attempts was true, and Purna couldn’t help but notice the Vex Assembly was giving her a much more civilized welcome than they’d offered her crew or Hoartrap.

  The joke was on these jerks, though, because Purna was going to save herself with the very same instrument that had gotten her into this mess: her big fat mouth. While the upside down Vex Assembly was distracted by Zosia’s arrival, Purna began gnawing through the garbage-tasting silk. She also tried pumping her bound arms and legs, getting a little sway going so she might alert Best and Keun-ju to the arrival of a potential savior. Prince wiggled for all he was worth against her bosom, but bless his evil heart, neither of them had much to work with in that neighborhood.

  Not that she had any idea what they could do even if they did get loose, considering how quickly and absolutely they had been jacked by the Tothan priests, but she knew one thing: heroes didn’t dangle, not when glory was to be found. Or the next best thing to glory, anyway. Given that just one of the baddies had obviously overpowered and then abducted Hoartrap, carrying the scary warlock out of the Gate as though he were no more threatening than a sack of tubers, she doubted even Zosia could stand in the way of the Vex Assembly, but that was no excuse to sit idle while the Banshee with a Blade made her last bally stand. Purna just had to get loose without tumbling down into the First Dark below, hanging as they were just above the empty heart of the bone pentagram that bridged the Gate. Chewing a mouthful of fetid web, she figured it shouldn’t be too hard …

  Purna began swinging back and forth like a damn fool, bumping into Best and further tearing the webs that moored her to the ceiling. One more knock like that and she’d come loose entirely, plummeting straight into the First Dark. Unbelievable, especially after how cleverly Best had been cutting her way free from the inside of the tacky net those lobster-devils had spun around her. The living gods of Jex Toth had bested her in combat before she could even finish drawing her sun-knife from its sheath, yes, but in their hubris they had not disarmed her before hanging her up like a haunch to cure in a smokehouse. No doubt the demons wished the sacred weapon to fall into the Gate with her, carrying its holy power out of their infernal realm …

  But now it all came to naught, because Purna had indeed persisted in her spastic swinging, and careened into Best even harder than before. The webbing Best had carefully, systematically weakened now gave way entirely, dumping her out like half-digested offal from an oryx’s belly. She tumbled through the air, trying to focus on one of the Tothans so she might hurl her sun-knife into it before being consumed by the First Dark, and—

  Landed elbow first on one of the bone bridges, her arm breaking with a sharp snap. Purna’s pushing must have swung Best to one side, sparing her from falling straight down into the Gate. She would thank the girl later, when they had time to catch their breath down in Old Black’s Meadhall. For now she lurched up to a crouch on the sticky spinal causeway, bringing back her unbroken arm to sail her sun-knife into the heart of the robed revenant ahead of her on the bridge.

  Before she could throw it, though, some unseen force threw her. Not into the Gate, thank the Fallen Mother, but clear across the top of the ziggurat, smashing into the throne that still housed the soft and shrunken shadow of Hoartrap. She heard something break inside her or her living cushion, she didn’t know which, and then Best of the Horned Wolf Clan left the song.

  Whatever Zosia had expected to emerge from the cocoons hanging over the Gate, it wasn’t a Flintlander. The fat Tothan who confronted her didn’t even look over to register this interruption, one of his fellows on the edge of the Gate pulling shapes in the air and sending the big woman flying straight into Hoartrap. The sound of her connecting with the bound sorcerer made Zosia wince.

  “Zosia!” one of the other cocoons yelped. “Zosia! Help!”

  “The fuck is that?” Zosia pointed her hammer at the two dangling blobs of silk as she addressed the corpulent cultist. “Whoever it is, take them down, turn them loose, and start acting civil. That order. Otherwise you’re all dead inside of a minute, that’s a promise.”

  “Foooooool!” exclaimed the ant-infested fat man. “Your age ends nooooow!”

  And with that he turned his back on Zosia and her devil, waddling back to his position on the side of the Gate as it began to emit a sickly yellow light. The floor started to ooze and melt around their feet, and Zosia cocked her head in disbelief. She had hoped to parley, but failing that had expected a fight. Instead these bug-covered kooks went on with their ritual as if she hadn’t just magicked her ass clear across the Star to confront them. Well, if talking was out at least she’d get to use her hammer …

  “They’re … mad,” Hoartrap gasped from behind her. When the Flintlander had crashed into him she’d done even more damage to his shriveled flesh but also torn the webbing around his face, tarry blood seeping down his busted nose and jutting chin as he coughed out the words, along with a cloud of pearlescent powder. “I warned you, Zosia, I did. Nobody listens.”

  “You said they could see inside my head!” Zosia countered. “I thought that meant they’d know I wasn’t bluffing! That unless they called off their plot I’d send them back to the First Dark! That unless they agree to a truce we all die!”

  “The oldest, sanest argument against war there is.” Hoartrap laughed, ebon bubbles popping in his nostrils. “Pity the Vex Assembly are as crazy … as they are old. You think devils are afraid of the First Dark? You think you can cow them with the promise of going home? You should have listened to me …”

  “I’m listening now,” said Zosia, the light coming off the Gate growing brighter and brighter as she went to Hoartrap’s side, the white-haired Flintland woman sprawled on the softening ground beside him limp and bloody. “You told me they were crazy, and you told me they could look inside my head, inside my heart. You didn’t say anything about devils—just who are these loonies? You know more than you told me, as fucking usual.”

  He looked incredulously up at her, wiggled his hands through his webbing and nodded down at his restraints. He’d always had such big soft hands, but now they looked like mean little claws.

  “Tell me, Hoartrap, or whatever comes next I leave you here,” said Zosia. “I know you love your secrets, you old gossip, but if you don’t spill them now you’ll take them to your fucking grave!”

  He pinched his lips and nodded back and forth as if seriously considering it, and she seriously considered slapping him silly when Choplicker put his paws up on the Touch’s lap and growled in his face, finally rattling the truth out of him. “All right, all right. They’re the High Priests of Jex Toth—are you happy?”

  “Not even close,” said Zosia, narrowing her eyes at the scheming old witch but pushing Choplicker back down. “Why’d you call them devils? What’s this ritual they’re so intent on they don’t even care about me sending them back to the First Dark? Just how much do you know about all this shit, anyway?”

  “Last question first,” said Hoartrap, licking the thick black blood off his lips and frowning like a sommelier asked to give the notes of a bottle of rotgut. “I know everything, as usual. As for the ritual, it’s the same one they tried pulling five centuries ago—they want to wake the Fallen Mother. I fear they’ll find she’s not quite what they expected, though she is definitely a mother, if you follow my—�
��

  “Devils, Hoartrap, you called them devils,” pressed Zosia, a hole in her boot flooding with warm ichor as the whole disgusting meat palace melted around them. “But they’re also priests? Which is it?”

  “It’s the oldest question, isn’t it?” said Hoartrap, squinting from the glare of the Gate. “We can bind devils into the flesh of certain animals, into scavengers, but what of the greatest jackal of them all? What of binding a devil into the flesh of a mortal? We had our suspicions, and they were borne out … for those with a strong enough will to master your devil, the rewards are boundless. Powers undreamt, life eternal, all so long as the one who binds the devil to your flesh doesn’t set it free—all devils have their masters, after all.”

  “They … they called devils into themselves?” Zosia looked over her shoulder at the ancient figures gathered around the glowing Gate. No wonder they weren’t concerned with her arrival—cocky and crazy they might be, but they also had her outdeviled, ten to one.

  “Not quite,” said Hoartrap. “As it turns out, trying to call a devil into yourself is a very bad idea, so they summoned them into each other. The first sacrificed the second, and the second sacked the third, and so on, forming a circle of devils … a chain, if you will, each priest bound to the next, right back around to the first of equals. Keeps the Vex Assembly egalitarian, just the way an idealist like you would have things—no priest can ever free the devil they bound or otherwise turn against their fellows, for fear of having the devil inside them set loose in turn. They’ll never admit it, of course, but I suspect their antipathy toward yours truly stems less from my actions and more from the fact that I’m my own agent. They’re just sick with jealousy that I’m not shackled into their demonic circle jerk, and I can—”

  “Wait.” Illumination made Zosia as lightheaded as if she were on top of the highest peak, or holding her breath at the bottom of the deepest gulf. Of course. Of course of course of course. “You’re one of them!”

  “Close, close …” Hoartrap leered at her in his bonds. “I was the first. An experiment. My master sat on the Vex Assembly, I but an acolyte to the exalted priests … he tried to sacrifice me, Zosia, to see if a devil could be bound in mortal flesh. I was, as you can imagine, quite the success. But when he went down into the First Dark to take his own devil he proved incapable of handling … the responsibility. He ate himself alive, and bid me help.”

  Zosia took a step back from the bound horror as he continued.

  “The first devil I ever ate was that which dwelled inside my master, and in doing so, I inadvertently chanced into the ideal loophole. You’ve heard, I’m sure, that devils who aren’t set free are condemned to haunt the graves of those who bound them? Lucky me, that I became his tomb!”

  Zosia was the baddest of the bad, of that there could be no argument. She’d raised more hell than a dozen diabolists and seen sights that would make a debauched dominatrix blush, but this … this shook her. Hard. She’d always known there was something deeply, deeply wrong with Hoartrap, obviously, but this? Too much. Much, much too much. Choplicker was whining at her, wet nose snuffling her palm to bring her back to this time and place, ill-starred a moment as it surely was, but ultimately it was Hoartrap’s familiar trash talk that snapped her out of her shock.

  “Why, Zosia, you look like you’ve been goosed by a ghost!” said the emaciated shade of the hulking man she had known for close to thirty years … thirty years where everyone they’d known had aged but him. “After all you’ve seen me do, after all you’ve asked me to do, surely a little thing like the truth isn’t enough to turn your stomach?”

  “You’re a devil,” she said, barely hearing her own voice over the rising rhythm of an enormous heart that must pulse somewhere deep beneath her feet. “All this time I thought you were a man playing the devil, you’ve been a devil playing at being a man.”

  “I. Am. Not.” Even in his physically reduced state Hoartrap managed to swell with indignation, straining forward in his bonds as though he might bite her, if given the chance. “I told you, I was stronger than my master. Stronger than any of these lost lunatics. I am not like them. I am not like anyone or anything who came before, on either side of the First Dark. I am the Touch.”

  “Your body …” Zosia laughed softly to herself, ignoring Choplicker’s increasing agitation. “That’s why you look so different, so much smaller—because your size, your strength, it was never real. Flesh and blood are just another illusion to your kind.”

  “Flesh and blood are always an illusion, and I hate to break this to you, dearheart, but my kind is your kind,” said Hoartrap. “And I’m still plenty strong, you’ll see that once you cut me loose. It may take my colonies a good long time to grow back to my preferred stature after being so cruelly denuded by my captors, true, but you of all people should know it’s what’s on the inside that counts.”

  “Your colonies?” Choplicker barked at her, something wriggled against Zosia’s ankle in the dissolving flesh cave, and she vigorously shook her head to center herself. “Never mind, never mind, I don’t want to know. Edifying as it is to find out you’re even older and nastier than you look, Hoartrap, we’re running out of time and you haven’t told me anything I can use. These Tothans, they’re the High Priests of Jex Toth who let themselves be possessed by devils. Great. Gross. But if they’re devils who aren’t afraid of the First Dark, how come they were stuck out there for so long, and how come they came back?”

  “The Chain brought them back, Zosia, at the Lark’s Tongue—remember?” A dreamy look passed over his battered face, as though he were reminiscing on a formative sexual encounter or a cherished culinary experience. Maybe both. “As for how they got sent away in the first place, welllll … they were banished as the result of a brilliant strategy on the part of yours truly, with the help of Jex Toth’s most hated enemies—Emeritus, back before that empire got forsook. It wasn’t a permanent solution, obviously, but it certainly didn’t make the Assembly very happy!”

  “Why?” said Zosia. “Why?”

  “Because hard as it is for you sniveling, scrabbling, scheming little scumbags to believe, I’m the good guy,” said Hoartrap. “I caught wind the Vex Assembly were going to summon their Fallen Mother, and once she returned all the Star would be her sacrifice. I was born and raised in Jex Toth, true—one of the last living Tothans, if you want to split hairs or heirs—but that doesn’t mean I’m some crazy cultist who—”

  “No no no,” said Zosia desperately, Choplicker whining at her heel as the light rising from the Gate behind them began to pulse. “Why did exile in the First Dark make them so unhappy? If they’re devils that’s just like going home, right? That’s what you said!”

  “It’s complicated,” said Hoartrap, pulling the obnoxious trick of sounding simultaneously exasperated and patronizing. “When a devil is bound to a lesser animal the flesh becomes its own, lock, stock, and barrel. But we higher creatures aren’t so easily overwhelmed, and so there can be a power struggle when appetites don’t align. The devils might have been just peachy spending eons in the First Dark, but their human hosts can’t have found it to their liking! And of course, as much as devils love fear and hatred and pain and all those other juicy mortal tidbits, they probably didn’t care for their bleak exile, either—pity the residents of Jex Toth, trapped in some other, darker realm, with a cadre of devil-possessed priests starving for sensation! Notice that none of the countless Tothan citizens seem to have made it back, only their rulers. So unless you want to find out firsthand what becomes of mortals trapped in hell with only hungry devils for company, I suggest you cut me loose already so I can get us out of here—this world is lost, but there are others, and I can take us there. But we have to leave while there’s still time.”

  “No,” said Zosia wearily, feeling all of her many years. She drew the knife she had taken from the Office of Answers. “I’m cutting you free, Hoartrap, because you may be some prehistoric cannibal devil straight from my worst nightma
res, but you’re also my friend. What you do after is your own business, but I’m not running away with you. I’m not running ever again. I’ll give these devils one last chance, and if they don’t take it I’ll free my own. One way or another, this is the end.”

  “You’re damn right about that,” said Hoartrap as Zosia began sawing through the tacky webbing that tied him to the disgusting flesh throne. “If it’s any consolation, I almost admire your refusal to concede the moral high ground even in the face of the apocalypse. Almost.”

  Zosia was still trying to come up with a snappy comeback when Hoartrap’s eyes bugged out of his skull at something just behind her and Choplicker’s bark of alarm was terminated as abruptly as it began. Some unseen force crashed into Zosia’s side, hitting her so hard she was carried off her feet and flew halfway across the raised throne room before splashing down in the disgusting froth of the disintegrating realm. She sloshed upright, all set to free Choplicker and bury Jex Toth at the expense of Diadem when she saw that plan might be a little harder to implement now than it had been a minute before.

  The ten Tothan witch-priests still conducted their ritual over the pulsing yellow light of the Gate, but while she’d been trying to free Hoartrap two more of their number had materialized in the throne room. One of them was a lithe crone dressed in shimmering spiders who held Choplicker crushed to her breast, her facsimile of humanity ending at the distended jaw that had unhinged to accommodate Zosia’s devil. The woman staggered in place, poor Chop’s entire head somehow disappearing into her drooling mouth, his kicking nails gouging black lines in her throat and belly as her spiders swarmed his furry coat.