A War in Crimson Embers

by Alex Marshall

  So that was bad. But the second priest was even worse. Not because his cadaverous form bristled with spitting cockroaches, nor because the ephemeral, ringed fingers he stretched out toward Zosia gave off a crackling sound like butter burning in a too-hot pan. No, what made this priest even more terrible than the first was simply that he had the drop on her here in the melting throne room of Jex Toth, and she could see the power of the devil protecting him reflected in the deep black depths of his eyes, while hers was halfway down the gullet of his colleague.

  Zosia didn’t have a fucking chance.

  But she did have a big fucking hammer.

  There were worse ways to ring in the end of days.

  CHAPTER

  29

  There had been times in Maroto’s life where he hadn’t much cared if he lived or died, and if anything leaned more toward the latter. This was not one of those times. He didn’t just want to live, he needed to live, and not just so he and Choi could have something more than the desperate, delicious hump they’d shared in an empty cell they’d found off one of the wall’s stairways, blasts echoing in from outside.

  Well, okay, so maybe making more time with Choi was the long and the short of Maroto’s newfound purpose, but there were worse things to live for than a fit partner who was just as keen as yourself to blow off the big battle for the fate of the world to get rutty in a closet. You might’ve thought he’d have trouble performing, what with the brutal trauma to his face and all the bugs and drugs coursing through his crazed body, but ultimately those little distractions just helped him stave off a premature nut. It wasn’t just good sex, either, it was mystical-like, because the whole time he kept flashing onto all those half-remembered dreams he’d had, the ones he was now dead certain she’d experienced, too. The proof being she knew his body as well as he knew hers; you don’t just know the best way to work a wildborn’s forked clit by accident, nor the surest means of driving a jaded old barbarian to distraction.

  Afterward he told her it was deja screw, which she didn’t find very clever at all, even after he explained it was a play on a Serpentine expression. As they were fitting their armor back into place she explained the mechanics behind their long-distance courtship, far more bashful about having meditated so hard their dreams somehow joined than she had been about doing that thing he really liked with her horn. What an experience it was, to share this bond with her. If only everyone could get inside each other’s heads the Star would be a happier place, as happy as Maroto and Choi … and before he knew it he was back inside somewhere further south, pushing her up against the wall. She had been going real easy on him before, that much quickly became obvious, and when he reeled into his second occasion he felt a great joyous blossom unfurling in his brain … and it wasn’t just the egg, either, that was starting to fade, the pain in his face returning even as he shivered out the last of his lust.

  “I …” Maroto closed his eye, still inside her. “I really like you, Choi.”

  “I like you, too,” she whispered, her husky voice firming him back up even though there was definitely no time for another round—there really hadn’t been time for the first two.

  “I mean, I really like you,” he went on, because with armageddon rattling the walls this was probably his last chance to get something right. “I mean, I might even … do you think you might, too? You know …”

  “Maroto,” she groaned, moving against him and laying her cool horn against his hot forehead. “Maroto … I do not actually know you very well. And you do not actually know me very well. Not yet. But what I know … I like.”

  “Yeah?” That right there was better than any fantasy he’d ever harbored, any dream he’d ever clung to, any imagined love he’d ever cherished in his breast, clinging to it in spite of all evidence to the contrary: her beautiful, simple, and ultimately hopeful truth. Not yet, she said. Not Yet.

  The best part was they wouldn’t live long enough for her to figure out what a total fucking catastrophe he was. Romantic advantage: Maroto.

  As they rushed back outside onto the battlement and ran south atop the central wall to meet Singh and her dragoons at the southern docks, Choi kept exchanging little mischievous looks with Maroto. They probably shouldn’t have postponed their retreat for a quick-and-dirty rendezvous, but she’d raised the brilliant point that they both might die in the attempt anyway so they might as well make the most of a bad morning. Flush with the afterglow of amazing sex, Maroto felt as good as he could remember, even as the whole bloody western half of the city burned beside them, casting shadows on their fleeing flanks … but then the distant clamor of fighting reached them, and he started feeling like he might throw up again. The old devil that forever haunted him was screaming in his formerly deaf ear that Choi was about to die in front of him, that there was no fucking way an honorable warrior like her would ever back down from a fight. Those industrious damn Tothans seemed to have brought down a section of the wall just ahead, and that meant he was about to see her come apart in bloody pieces … assuming he could even keep up. Why, any moment an arrow or burning bit of debris would come flying in and—

  Maroto told that cowardly voice in his mind to stuff it, and somehow this time it listened. He could keep up with her. He would keep up with her. And if she fell, well, it would only be after he went down defending her, and he’d have a horn waiting for her in Old Black’s Meadhall whenever she rolled in. Maybe even the one she’d lost part of back when they’d taken on that horned wolf together.

  It wasn’t that Choi was the love of his life, because really now, how was that for a concept to fuck you all up however the romance panned out. It wasn’t even that now that they’d found each other in the flesh he wanted to see where it all went, though he did, he did. What it all came down to was that she was his friend, a good fucking friend, who’d come looking for him when all others had forsaken him, if only in her dreams, and if he had to die he would die defending her the way he hadn’t been able to protect Purna, whom he now knew to be dead. He couldn’t bring himself to ask Choi to confirm it, but if the feisty little tapai had still been alive she would’ve been five times as quick as the wildborn to harass Maroto upon his return to the Cobalt fold, and so it was really time to let her go … or join her in the underworld, as the case may be.

  They came to the end of the rampart, a hundred-foot section of the central wall collapsed just ahead of them. The sounds of combat drifted up along with the smoke, and looking down they saw a few Immaculate stalwarts still fighting the invading Tothans at the foot of the rubble. With the flames behind the monstrous army it looked like hell itself, and without the slightest hesitation Choi began climbing down the ruined wall to help the last beleaguered defenders of the breach. He was so fucking proud of her, and followed her down in hopes he’d give her something to be proud of, too.

  As they dropped down onto the mountainous wreckage of the collapsed wall he saw that they had been too late to help the Immaculate soldiers, the last of them eaten alive by monsters at the base of the ruins. Bad luck for them, and baddest luck for Maroto—the Tothan venom must have finally started stewing his brains, because before his very eye the flames of West Othean went dark, the burning buildings sinking beneath the earth even as their sparks danced upward like swarms of lightning bugs. More disturbing than this obvious hallucination was the very real pack of tall grey horse demons that were nimbly climbing up the ruins of the wall toward him and Choi. Beyond the Tothan horrors the city continued to be engulfed in the smoky blackness that spread across the land, all of West Othean caving in on itself, even its high-flying embers now drawn downward in blazing tornados …

  “These horses, their legs are as tusks, and their mouths are worse,” said Choi, pointing her long saber at the demons that had spotted them and begun climbing faster.

  “Me and Fennec took one out on the other side of the city,” he told her, admiring her new sword—looked to be Cocksparian or he was no judge of steel. “And these things are about
as close to horses as horned wolves are to goats.”

  “Whatever we call them, they are as goats before horned wolves,” she said, giving him a peck on the lips. “I slew three that attempted to scale the wall just before you arrived, and alone. Between us six should be no significant challenge. We must be swift, however, to flee the hungry mouth that consumes the city.”

  “Wait, you can see that, too?” he asked, but his question was lost as the nearest demon reared up on its hind legs, its pointed hooves punching the air as its scary sideways mouth split its face down the middle. So many teeth. Hefting his spear, Maroto gave Choi a thumbs-up.

  It was kind of like their first date. And while he wasn’t a religious barbarian, his need was great, and he offered a prayer to Old Black that it wouldn’t be their last.

  The blasts were shaking the wall beneath their feet as Ji-hyeon scrambled up the final flight of stairs and burst out onto the ramparts. The guards who should have been minding the door were all staring slack-jawed out at the western city, and she couldn’t much blame them. Sullen came panting out of the doorway after her, so hot on her heels he almost bumped her over as his eyes were snared by the same hypnotic sight. Terraced roofs and stone pagodas detonated outward, humble stalls and towering warehouses collapsed in on themselves, the greatest city on the Star heaving with explosions, erupting in flames. Inhuman screams echoed inland from the tempestuous sea of fire West Othean had become, but whether it came from Tothan throats or the blistering bones of the city itself none could say.

  The heat was already unlike anything she’d ever felt, and Sullen pulled her back, holding her to his sweaty chest as the red snow of cinders began to fall on the ramparts. It wasn’t the acrid fumes that flooded her uncovered eye with tears as she watched the capital burn, and she was just about to beg him to flee this place with her, to find their friends and run as fast and as far as they could from this nightmare, when the change that took over his face froze the words on her tongue. He was still looking out at the inferno, but instead of seeing the flames reflected in his leonine eyes she saw only darkness. A chill swam up her sweaty skin as Sullen’s shiny black eyes stared past her, and turning back to the west she saw something even worse than half of Othean in flames—she saw that the First Dark she had fought so hard to escape had followed her home.

  The forsaken city was still there, but not for long. And the flames still rose from the sinking buildings, but they had turned as black as pitch, casting cold instead of warmth. Even the smoke was drawn down, a black ground fog that couldn’t conceal the hungriness beneath it for long. A temple bell cracked loose from its principal post, tolling as it fell, and then going as silent as the rest of West Othean as it vanished into the smoke. Ji-hyeon had to look, had to make sure they weren’t about to be pulled in as well, and peering over the side of the rampart she saw that the greasy darkness came right up to the edge of the wall but went no further. Small comfort, that, as she gazed out and saw the distant silhouette of the Autumn Palace slumping down along with the rest of the far wall. She couldn’t look away, even when her devil flapped in her face, then landed on her shoulder.

  The First Dark had opened underneath West Othean, stretching as far as her mortal eye could see, and while its presence seemed to have put some of the color back in Fellwing’s coat, that hardly put Ji-hyeon at ease. She found Sullen’s hand with her own, the stumps of her fingers burning against his clammy digits, and together they watched the ancient capital of the Isles twist and warp and cave in on itself as it was pulled down into a Gate the likes of which the Star had never known.

  It might have taken all day, or it might have taken minutes. The blizzard of black embers swirling through the air left unctuous smears on everything they touched, freezing flesh and warping metal. Ji-hyeon’s devil-eye ached behind its blindfold, punishing her for not letting it watch, but the thought of freeing it now filled her with unspeakable foreboding. The last buildings disappeared into the bottomless, lightless sea that now yawned from here to the remote ring of Othean’s outer wall, and no sooner had the final weathervane sunk than the crowds of defenders on the ramparts exhaled as one, more than a few laughing with a nervousness that bordered on the unhinged.

  “Those Dreaming Priests who serve the empress, this is their idea of a trap?” Sullen gulped. “They would do this to their own city?”

  “I … I don’t know,” said Ji-hyeon, staring aghast over the vast expanse—even in all her journeys through unbelievable landscapes she had never glimpsed such an enormous Gate. “Even to stop the Tothans, I can’t believe they—”

  A golden band split open across the center of the Gate, stretching from the base of their wall clear across to the far side, miles long and a hundred meters wide, then two hundred meters, then three, expanding outward in both directions, gold and bright and luminous, there in the First Dark. Except it wasn’t quite gold … it was whiter than that. It was the color of the stars on a winter night, and felt just as cold, just as remote.

  It flooded Ji-hyeon with a primordial dread, to see that widening path of pale gold through the First Dark—it went against all the laws of nature, for a Gate to be anything but blackest black … And yet it captivated her, drawing her forward to the edge of the rampart, and then stepping up on the edge of the wall, something so entrancingly familiar about the vision, something that made her want to drop down and walk this luminous road, to see where it led with her naked devil-eye, and reaching up to remove her eye patch, she stepped forward to—

  Sullen snatched her back from the precipice, wailing, “Don’t look! Don’t look…”

  But it was too late, because even with her blindfold still in place, she saw … and it saw her, the Gate swelling higher and higher, bulging outward, the golden acres of its pupil contracting in the vast blackness of an iris the size of a city. Ji-hyeon screamed, and felt all of the Star screaming with her, a wordless requiem for mortalkind.

  CHAPTER

  30

  Zosia wasn’t one to brag of her skill in combat—that she’d made it to her advanced age in spite of waging countless battles, against incredible odds, well, her record spoke for itself. The most important lesson you learn from steel, though, is that it doesn’t matter how many fights you win, however glorious your victories. The only fight that counts is the one you lose.

  So far, this one was shaping up to be a doozy.

  The cockroach-clad ghoul she faced in the liquefying bowels of Jex Toth was faster than fast and meaner than mean—faster than Zosia, in other words, and meaner to boot. She couldn’t even catch her breath, let alone her adversary, her hips aching as she splashed backward through the slurry of offal that flooded the organic throne room, batting away his grasping hand with the square hammer she’d inherited from Sister Portolés. Something she’d learned from rolling with Hoartrap was that you never, ever wanted to let a warlock touch you, but from the first time she evaded this Tothan’s grasp she knew it wasn’t a matter of if, it was a matter of when. She had never fought an opponent as swift or as relentless, and with each evasion and ineffective counterstrike she could feel the fatigue spreading through her limbs. That vigor she always felt when brawling in Choplicker’s presence had deserted her, but she knew better than to look away from her opponent to see if the other Tothan had actually eaten her devil entirely or if they were still struggling. To turn her attention from this fiend for but a moment would be her end.

  The only reason she was still alive was that it really, really didn’t want to touch her sainted steel hammer, its apparently boneless limbs going through obscene contortions to avoid brushing the black steel weapon. This monster was the greatest foe she had ever faced, but between its commitment to striking her head with its spectrally translucent left hand and aversion to her hammer, their dance persisted far longer than she’d expected, the two of them sloshing around the foul bowl of stew the throne room had become.

  It grabbed at her face again but instead of dodging she flung herself forward, hamm
er aimed at its shriveled nose, and next thing she knew it was a dozen feet back, perched on an empty throne one over from Hoartrap. She didn’t have enough time to get her balance back before it flew forward again, but she did have the time to notice her knife floating above Hoartrap’s lap, the blade slowly but surely hacking through his sticky bonds even with no hand to physically wield it. Get it, Hoartrap!

  His escape attempt wasn’t much of a distraction. Hardly a distraction at all, really. But it was enough to cost Zosia everything. Devildamn Hoartrap to hell.

  Zosia belatedly brought her hammer around to meet the charging priest when its ghostly left hand struck her temple and sank into her skull. Five icy digits stabbed through her brain, the jagged bone rings at its knuckles digging into her scalp. The presumably mortal wound struck, she was it and it was she, their souls as enmeshed as their flesh.

  Leib singing to her in the darkness of the aspens, the coals of their campfire illuminating only their discarded boots and a forgotten turnip.

  An obscene canticle echoing through the lightless reaches far below the world, a profane orgy taking place among the roots of the tree that had almost reached the heavens before being pruned back by meddling hands.

  Pao Cowherd’s final wheezing breath in the star-kissed mountains above Kypck.

  The final sigh of a thwarted goddess, and her first gasp at a second chance.

  Indsorith gasping against Zosia’s fingers, begging for release.

  Zosia gasping against Maroto in his disturbingly similar fantasies, grinding his skull into these questing fingers.

  The cold misery of a friendless widow trying to stoke the embers of hatred in an icy cave.