She doesn’t know about the prescience, Tam gathered, as the woman’s knife slashed nothing but empty air. She can’t know that Astra can anticipate her every move.
Which meant, of course, that the assassin was doomed.
Ios threw a dagger that was dodged with ease. She lunged, but her opponent curled like smoke around her blade.
The Winter Queen’s sword was in and out of the assassin’s heart before Ios knew she was dead. The baroness gaped, stumbled, and would have fallen had the druin not uttered a word and poured her wine-dark soul into the decanted husk of the woman’s corpse.
And just like that, Tam thought, watching Ios rise to take her place among the Winter Queen’s thralls, another loyal soldier joins the legion of the damned.
Despite their succession of small victories—killing the Simurg, stopping Brontide, goading Astra into pursuing Rose—Tam couldn’t shake the feeling of being trapped in a coffin as nail after nail after nail was hammered into the lid.
It wasn’t long before Rose signalled the order to withdrawal yet again. She made a spectacle of herself, ensuring her crimson cowl was tantalizingly visible as they fled west around the base of Chapel Hill. Tam was relieved to find Lady Jain at the rear of the retreating crowd. She and her girls put a volley of arrows into the faces of their closest pursuers.
Another pair of bomb-laden argosies were cut loose to cover their withdrawal, barrelling down the hillside and decimating swathes of fetid foot soldiers. Elsewhere, whole blocks of buildings exploded as Astra’s thrall stumbled over hidden tripwires. Bodies and burnt timber leapt skyward on blooms of fire.
As they followed the road into Sinkwell, Tam sighted a host of shambling dead clogging the street ahead. She’d already put an arrow to string before recognizing her uncle and Clay Cooper among them, weary but alive.
Slowhand, it seemed, was a man of his word: He and the Rusted Blades had managed to hold the Wyldside gate against overwhelming odds. As his haggard veterans merged with the exhausted defenders, Tam overheard Clay inform Rose they’d left the Han’s horsemen to mop up what was left of the Agrians, and to make sure the dead stayed dead.
The survivors of Mad Mackie’s company were trickling in as well. Many of them were wounded, and those unable to fight were taken by cart up the back side of Chapel Hill. Rose ordered Jain and the Silk Arrows to escort them.
Rose assigned Tam to the third-storey balcony of a south-facing inn called the White Lion, which provided a clear vantage of the street below.
“Clay. Bran.” Rose addressed the pair of old mercs as though they were common soldiers and not the heroes of a hundred tales (though, to be fair, Uncle Bran was the author of most of his). “Go with her. Watch her back.”
Her uncle seemed relieved by the appointment, but Clay Cooper was less enthused.
“I should stay near you,” he insisted.
“You should stay alive,” Rose told him. “I’m less worried about Astra than I am about Ginny murdering me if I get you killed.”
Slowhand frowned and fingered the scar angling across his nose. “Fair enough.”
“Good.” Rose nodded. “And I’m serious about needing Tam looked after. She’s got an important role to play.”
“Really?” Tam asked. “Because it feels like I’m being relegated to ‘distant spectator.’”
“Not quite,” Rose assured her. “You’re going to kill the Winter Queen.”
Astra’s Horde spread across Conthas like rot, infecting its streets, polluting its squares, defiling the Free City as it had never been defiled—which was quite a feat considering what a muddy pisshole the place had been before they arrived. Like some insidious arterial poison worming its way toward the heart, the dead converged in their thousands upon the woman waiting for the Winter Queen to round the base of Chapel Hill.
Rose had left her father’s fabled sword with Alkain Tor for safekeeping, but now she stood with both hands on its hilt and the point of its scabbard resting on the ground between her boots. She still wore her cowl, and glared over Vellichor’s pommel like a woman sentenced to death watching the sun rise on her final day.
Freecloud stood at her right shoulder, Brune her left. The shaman’s breath gusted from between his jaws. Rose reached to lay a hand on his scruff, though whether she did it to comfort the wolf or herself Tam couldn’t know.
Around them, crowding the boroughs of Sinkwell and the west-facing slope of Chapel Hill, were the last defenders of Conthas: the Rusted Blades and the remainder of Mad Mackie’s company; the sorcerors of Sinkwell, and the battle-weary survivors of every ward they’d relinquished to their implacable foe. Alkain’s mercenaries were the only ones yet unscathed, since they’d been ordered to wait here in ambush. Now they emerged from home and hovel into the streets, their heads and faces swaddled against the blustery cold.
The Horde, meanwhile, had ground to a halt. Things that had once been men and women stood slack-jawed, their heads canted as if listening for some quiet command. Monsters great and small ceased to skitter, scuttle, slither, or stomp, waiting mindlessly on their mistress’s order. Plague hawks and wyverns wheeled slow circles in the grey sky, while rot sylphs and eyewings hung like gruesome baubles from the smoke-clouded canopy.
“Are you afraid?” asked the Winter Queen. Her voice was the rustle of dead leaves blowing across the face of a tombstone.
Rose considered the question. “Not of you,” she said eventually.
A dry chuckle. “You should be. Don’t you know what I am?”
“If I promise not to ask,” Rose said, “will you promise not to tell me?”
The Winter Queen ignored her. “I am a conduit. An unholy vessel. Within me is an essence greater than you can possibly imagine.”
“I can imagine quite a bit,” Rose drawled, and Tam heard Clay Cooper chuckle quietly to himself.
“She thrives on my pain,” confessed Astra, as though she and Rose were the only two souls in the city. “She inhabits the void my children left behind, and she will do the same to you, Rose, when your daughter is dead.”
“Does this ‘unimaginable essence’ have a name?” Rose asked.
“She is Tamarat,” said the knifing wind. “Darkness incarnate. The Devourer of Worlds.”
Tam saw mercenaries exchange what she assumed were nervous glances, though their expressions were hidden by hood and helm. Even Freecloud looked shaken. His ears, pinned flat against the sides of his head, betrayed a terror the druin could barely suppress.
Only Rose seemed indifferent to the other woman’s declaration. “The Devourer of Worlds?” She shook her head. “Not this time. Not my world. You’ve gone mad, Astra. You’re a prisoner to your grief.” Rose’s fingers flexed on Vellichor’s hilt. “But I’ll set you free. And for whatever it’s worth: I’m sorry about your son. Truly, I am. Lastleaf deserved better. His people deserved better.”
“His people?” The Winter Queen’s scorn was accompanied by a flurry of snow. “Those creatures were not his people. Their kind—and yours—are as chattel to us. Your existence is pointless, ephemeral, so fleeting as to seem unreal. And you, Rose, are nothing more than the smoke rising from your father’s pyre.”
Rose turned and said something to Alkain Tor, who was standing behind her.
“You are the ashes of a—”
“Ashes?” Rose cut the sorceress off, her tone incredulous. “Smoke? I don’t think so.”
All over Sinkwell, mercenaries were pulling back their hoods, tearing off their helmets, uncoiling the scarves swaddling their heads.
“I’m the fire.”
Chapter Fifty-seven
The War of Roses
Red, red, everywhere. The brilliant red of spring flowers, the garish red of fresh blood, the blinding, bedazzling red of a setting sun. Tam gasped in amazement. Her eyes picked out innumerable hack-job haircuts and hucknell-bean hues, a whole army of counterfeit Roses filling the street below and blanketing the slopes of Chapel Hill. It wasn’t just the women, either:
Men, too, had chopped their hair and shaved their beards, or dyed them red in solidarity.
There were thousands of them.
Tens of thousands.
And now they charged, screaming defiance into the varied faces of death itself, roaring like a cleansing fire toward the septic stain of the Winter Queen’s Horde.
And so the rout of Conthas ends, Tam thought, and the War of Roses begins.
Rose remained standing as her army surged forward, waiting until her crimson cowl was lost amidst the rush of vivid red. Only then did she unclasp the cloak at her shoulder, pull it free, and let it fall.
Tam blinked, and would have tripped over her jaw had she been running along with everyone else.
Rose’s hair was gone.
Or most of it, anyway. She’d cut away all trace of the colour for which she was famous. Only a scrub of gold remained, bright as a sun-struck coin.
“She looks just like Gabriel,” murmured Slowhand, who was leaning against the wall behind her.
Branigan swigged from a bottle he’d looted from the bar inside. “It’s uncanny.”
Tam stole the bottle from her uncle and took a swallow, then made a face like a yawning cat. Whiskey. Not her favourite. “Good thing she can’t hear you,” she told Bran. “She’d be furious.”
Clay shrugged. “You sure about that?”
In fact, she wasn’t. Not anymore.
Below, Rose barked an order to Brune. The huge wolf dipped his head and went bounding toward the battle raging farther down the street. Alone (or as alone as two people could be amidst the rush of redheaded thousands), Rose and Freecloud leaned in to one another. He put a hand on her neck. She laid a hand on his chest, and whatever words they shared were lost to the roar and clash of arms.
At last, they joined the flow of warriors running past, and Tam’s breath caught as Rose pulled Vellichor from its scabbard. She’d heard bards refer to the Archon’s blade as a doorway to another realm, but she hadn’t expected the door to be open. Through the flat pane of its surface she caught a glimpse of blue sky and green grass blowing on a rising hill.
And now the denizens of Sinkwell—the witches, wizards, and weirdos Moog had convinced to join the fight—threw the Winter Queen a welcoming party of their own.
Roga, the summoner they’d met at the Starwood two nights earlier, dashed his pink stone elephant on the ground and brought it to life. The thing was enormous—three times the size of a Brumal mammoth—and painted all over with whorls of white and yellow despite looking to Tam like something used to awe children at a birthday party, it caused a fair bit of havoc as it stormed through the congested ranks of Astra’s Horde.
Kaliax Kur, the scar-faced psychopath with a tidal engine strapped to her back, powered it on and aimed the lance to which it was attached in the enemy’s general direction. Lightning sprayed like water from the weapon’s tip. It leapt from foe to foe, leaving corpses blackened like a forest of charred stumps. The woman’s wood armour was oozing smoke, and even from so far away she smelled like pork roasting over a campfire.
Hundreds of heroes were wading into the fray. Jeramyn Cain led the Screaming Eagles against the four-headed hydrake, while Clare Cassiber went toe-to-toe with a saig raider. The white-eyed reptile fought with a net and a hook-shaped jawbone. It managed to snare Claire in the net and sink its hook into her leg, but she lopped off its head, cast off the net, and limped back into battle.
Elsewhere, the men of Giantsbane scaled the war-tortoise’s shell and began assaulting the fortress. Alkain Tor lobbed a torch over a palisade wall, and before long the whole thing went up in flames.
Scanning the battlefield, Tam thought she spied Hawkshaw’s blood-slick skull gazing up at her, but when she blinked the Warden was gone, no doubt enduring another painful death his mistress wouldn’t let him enjoy.
The Horde was in disarray. The Winter Queen was so intent on killing Rose that being confronted by literally thousands of her had left the sorceress flummoxed, unsure of where to commit her strength. She hadn’t seen Rose draw back her hood, and so couldn’t know that the one woman she was looking for was the only one she wasn’t looking at. Astra’s fliers appeared paralyzed by indecision, flapping in frantic circles as the sorceress sought to locate her nemesis below.
And here came the Old Glory, swooping from the hilltop like a steel-plated sparrow in a sky full of hawks. Her spiked prow punched through swarms of smaller monsters, while those too big to take on directly were shredded by bowfire, courtesy of Lady Jain and the Silk Arrows.
Doshi brought the skyship low over the corpse-choked thoroughfare so the girls could hurl firebombs into the enemy ranks. A series of thwumping explosions bloomed along the strip; bodies—and pieces of bodies—went cartwheeling over the rooftops.
It looked to Tam as if the whole eastern half of Conthas was on fire. Thousands of Astra’s thralls would be caught in the flames, with the rest forced to outrun the inferno devouring the city behind them.
Even the weather was turning in their favour. She wasn’t sure if the storm had been Astra’s doing or not, but the wind dropped off and the snow no longer slanted as it fell.
Tam began raining missiles into the press of pale bodies. Slowhand had lugged a whole crate of ammunition to their perch, and the old merc busied himself by handing her arrows as fast as she could set them loose. Before long her arms were on fire and her fingers were freezing. Her enemies were so densely packed she could have killed them with her eyes closed, but for every one she dropped another rose to take its place.
She wasn’t the only one picking off targets from above. Mercs thronged every rooftop and window along the Gutter, and while most selected targets at random, some couldn’t help but take desperate shots at the Winter Queen—which was futile, of course, since whatever her thralls failed to intercept, Astra evaded with ease.
Tam yelped as something with ropy tentacles for arms pulled itself over the balcony rail. The creature’s head resembeld a budding flower, and split open to reveal five fanged petals and a slick, prehensile tongue. There was a spear lodged in its throat, which she guessed was what had killed it in the first place. The creature had no eyes that Tam could see, but its tongue probed the air like a snake hunting for prey outside its burrow.
“I’ll handle this,” said Bran. He lobbed his bottle at the creature to distract it while he hefted a steel buckler and pulled his hammer, Bullseye, from the loop at his waist.
The creature’s tongue snagged the hammer as Bran raised it to swing, so her uncle pinned his weapon to the wall and used the edge of his shield to chop through the coiling muscle. The shield bit into the wall and the tongue snapped back into the monster’s mouth, whipping blood in an arc across Branigan’s face. Sputtering and half blind, he left his shield stuck in the wood and swung his hammer two-handed. Instead of aiming for the monster’s head, he pounded the butt end of the spear already lodged in its throat, driving it deeper down the creature’s gullet. It split open down the centre, and Bran sent it toppling over the rail with a kick.
Afterward, her uncle reclaimed his shield and spit out a mouthful of the monster’s blood. “Anyone know what the hell that thing was?” he asked.
Slowhand only shrugged. “Ugly,” he said.
Out in the street, Roga’s pink elephant shattered and faded away. Glancing to where she’d last seen the summoner, Tam found him impaled on a wyvern’s tail, limp as a flag of surrender on a windless day.
Kaliax Kur went down a few seconds later. The lightning streaming from her lance bounced off the reflective scales of a basilisk, setting her armour on fire and frying the woman in her own skin. To her credit, she managed to survive long enough to ram her lance into the basilisk’s mouth. The serpent convulsed as the current tore through its body. Its scales cracked like a rotter’s mirror, exploding into shards that tore everything around it to shreds.
“Hey.” Slowhand’s voice dragged Tam’s attention back to the balcony. “Did we win? Is the battle over?”
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She eyed him skeptically. “What? No.”
He pressed an arrow into her hand. “Then keep fucking shooting.”
Tam rolled her eyes, but accepted his offering and buried it in a bugbear’s skull. “Have you seen Moog?” she asked.
Clay pointed. “There.”
She followed the gesture in time to see a poof of yellow smoke that left several hundred of Astra’s thralls suddenly transformed into zombified chickens.
Tam spotted the old wizard standing on an overturned crate in an alley mouth. He was brandishing a gnarled wand and looked extraordinarily pleased with himself, at least until the chickens spooked him off his box and chased him down the alley.
The Old Glory made a run for Astra’s inner circle, but a wyvern hurled itself against the skyship’s armoured hull and sent it careening out of control. Tam lost sight of it as it spun overhead, but she could hear Jain and her girls screaming like a boatload of rafters going over the edge of a waterfall.
Scanning the hysteria below, Tam tried to determine if they were winning or losing, but the scene was too chaotic to make sense of. Everywhere she looked, red-haired warriors were killing, screaming, dying, flailing, hacking, or rising from the dead.
She saw one of Rose’s doubles skewer a centaur on the tip of her spear, and another get her head bashed in by an ogre’s club, and another hack through the neck of a saurian, and another torn apart by a spindly birch-bark treant.
A few of them managed to confront Astra herself, but fell quickly to the druin’s phantom blade. Before long, the sorceress was surrounded by undead Roses. The sight made Tam’s skin crawl, and probably wasn’t doing the defenders’ morale any favours.
The real Rose was almost through the Winter Queen’s circling minions. She and Freecloud hadn’t even bloodied their weapons, huddled as they were in the midst of a throng, escorted by a veritable who’s who of Grandual’s greatest mercenary bands: the Boomtown Rats, Overkill, the Vandals, and the Thunderers, who’d killed a wyvern in a chapel near Ardburg last spring.
Bloody Rose Page 45
