A Blade of Black Steel

by Alex Marshall

  Which was just pathetic, really, but Zosia was several blows to the skull past caring. Put some color in his cheeks, anyway. He came in huffing and blowing like a tempest, stepping between her spread legs with the clear aim of booting her guts out through her ass. As soon as his right leg came back for the kick Zosia cocked her own, and fast as a devil, slammed it into his left shin. His leg slipped out behind him on the icy ground, and the big man fell forward so fast Zosia barely had time to sway out of the way before his face connected with a thick pine post of the palisade. Rocking back to her original position against the wooden backrest, she shoved the man’s limp body out of the way. As he rolled onto his back in the snow she saw a thickening smear of dirty blood right between his crossed eyes.

  The big man’s friends were coming in now, a dozen Azgarothians with murder writ in bold script on their hard faces. All she wanted was to stay where she lounged, denying these soldiers even a decent fight before they claimed credit for killing Blue Zosia, but when did she ever get what she wanted? She owed them a good story out of it, at least. Her body carried her lightly to her feet, or so it must have looked—inwardly, the creaking of her joints and the aching in her bones pained her worse than any of Princess Pumpkin’s little lovetaps. A wave of muddy Crimson tabards rose up to engulf Zosia, and she ground her feet into the slick earth, bracing for the impact…

  “Stop! That’s an order, damn it! Stop! All of you!”

  If there was one creature in the world that took commands more seriously than even a bound devil, it was an Imperial soldier out of Azgaroth. The squad halted as one, heads pivoting in unison. They looked confounded, and Zosia couldn’t blame them—the man who had given the order was a wisp of a youth with a mustache so weak it looked like it might blow off in the first strong breeze. He walked stiffly over from where he and a gaggle of soldiers in slightly different tabards had watched the scene unfold, and then Zosia recognized him as the young Myuran commander Hoartrap had captured, along with the rest of his regiment, when they had tried to ambush the Cobalts by sneaking around the back of the Lark’s Tongue during the epic battle of the day before. He’d looked so traumatized when Hoartrap led him down from the mountain that Zosia had wondered if he would ever get over it, but apparently she shouldn’t have concerned herself. His gait and gaze were both steady as he approached her.

  “Colonel Wheatley,” she called. “To what do I owe this honor? Fancy a turn with the belle of the ball before the rank and file wear me out?”

  “We’re better than this, damn it!” cried Wheatley, ignoring Zosia entirely and addressing the soldiers who crowded around. Many of the captured Imperials still looked as slack-eyed and shell-shocked as the cavalry Zosia had led to the Gate, but those who had come out of their torpor—or been rattled out of it by the appearance of a hated enemy in their midst—all turned to the Myuran colonel. “Of course this… this war criminal deserves justice! Of course! But we must not sink to her level, not even in the name of doing what is right. A true soldier obeys the laws of the Crimson Empire not only when it is easy or convenient, but when it is hard, damn it, hard as steel in your belly! A true Crimson hero knows that order is only preserved when we hold ourselves to a higher standard, even when our hated enemy is cast at our mercy! A true citizen believes—”

  And on and on he droned, but seeing that she wasn’t about to be lynched after all Zosia sat back down against the palisade and pulled her hood low over her ears to drown out his insipid speech. Most of the soldiers were drifting away, too, but as a pair knelt to retrieve their concussed comrade from where he still lay beside Zosia, one of the stern Azgarothian women hissed, “Wait until dark, fuckface. Just you wait.”

  So at least now she had something to look forward to.

  Ji-hyeon would have fallen off her horse a dozen times over if Choi hadn’t insisted on squeezing onto the saddle behind her. Her head felt like it was full of bees. Big, angry bees that kept stinging the inside of her nose and throat with every hoofbeat of the charger. There were rather a lot of hoofbeats between the Gate and the meet with the Thaoan brass on the far side of the valley.

  “Shoi… shit.” Ji-hyeon flexed her jaw, willing herself to stop slurring before they reached the Thaoans. She’d sounded a little funny after her fight with Zosia, but that weird scaly bug that Diggelby had produced from a cigar box in his satchel and insisted she eat must be weighing down her tongue. Maybe her Honor Guard had been right and they should have delayed the meeting long enough for her to be tended by a barber, but refusing to show when Colonel Waits herself had ridden down from her regiment would make the Cobalts look vulnerable. “Shoi… Shhh… Shhh. Shit. Chuh. Chuh… Shoi. Shit!”

  “Turn your head this way,” said Choi, the comforting weight of her armor in Ji-hyeon’s back and the woman’s arms around her waist the only things keeping the general on her horse.

  “Shhh… Shhh…” Ji-hyeon kept trying but it just wasn’t happening. She obliged Choi, craning her neck around, but her eyes wandered over the smoky vale behind them, looking for Diggelby. Cobalt guards leading the surviving Azgarothian cavalry away from the Gate, but no sign of the dandies. She was going to give that bug-barmy fop a piece of her mind, if not her boot, for giving her—

  Black lightning blasted Ji-hyeon’s skull and her mouth flooded with thick blood. She reeled, and Choi’s hand slipped from her nose to her side, holding her up as she drooled red syrup into the trampled grass. Her face, Choi had done something horrible to her face…

  “What the shit, Choi?” she gasped, letting herself be pulled upright on the horse again.

  “You sound better,” Choi said happily. “Your nose won’t display your honor as prominently now that I’ve set it, but your enemies will better understand your boasts and challenges. A necessary correction.”

  “My nose?” Ji-hyeon still heard a little lisp in her voice, but not as much. “She broke it, didn’t she?”

  “A misnomer, but that is how the injury is commonly described,” said Choi.

  “Damn,” said Ji-hyeon, worried about how it would look when it healed but also a little thrilled to have reached this milestone in most every warrior’s career. “Aren’t you going to tell me how I should’ve avoided it? What I did wrong?”

  “No. You fought admirably.” Was that smugness in Choi’s voice or pride in her pupil? “You may not have been aware, but your right arm was rising to block the backfist that crushed your nose. You almost intercepted it. She was faster. That is the way of all opportunities to win honor. Next time you must be faster, but you do not need me to tell you that. And…” Choi seemed reluctant to continue, but then, though the rest of the mounted bodyguards were flanked out beyond risk of overhearing anyway, she leaned in and whispered in Ji-hyeon’s ear, “I believe if your left hand had not been injured in yesterday’s large-scale opportunity, you should have overcome her.”

  Coming from Choi, such a compliment meant something indeed. In nigh on a year of campaigning, encouraging words were rare as owlbats’ teeth, and outright praise unheard of. Apparently all it took to impress her Honor Guard was getting herself choked out by Cobalt fucking Zosia.

  Looking down at the reins in her right hand and the bloody bundle of rags that covered her left, she supposed she’d acquired some cracked bones to go along with the throbbing stumps where her pinky and ring finger had been bitten off… and the very next day after a cannibal tried to eat her alive, Ji-hyeon had tried to rip out Zosia’s arteries with her teeth. Nobody could say she wasn’t a fast learner.

  The squeaky bugles of the Imperials began to sound from ahead and, walking their horse through the last thinning bank of lingering smoke, Ji-hyeon saw a cluster of red-caped riders waiting for them just where the edge of the valley began climbing the foothill that bordered it. Behind the delegation of envoys, the Thaoans had their whole damn regiment spread out on the snow-smudged slope. Metal glinted even in the dimness of the day, the cold wind burning Ji-hyeon’s face, but she couldn’t very well cover
it without touching the skin, and touching the skin made her feel faint. The small herd of Imperials did not walk their horses to meet her retinue, forcing her to approach them instead of meeting in the middle. Typical.

  Coming up on the handful of officers, dozen mounted guards, and one sketchy-ass Immaculate envoy, Ji-hyeon offered an Imperial salute, because it never hurt to be polite. Especially since a full Imperial regiment, even one with the ho-hum reputation of Thao, could squash the beleaguered Cobalt Company before nightfall, if they had half a mind. If Fennec was right and her second father was plotting to come after her with both swords drawn, she had to play it very, very professionally with these Imperials he’d conned into working for him. The tall woman with her steel mesh visor pushed up to reveal sharp, heavily made-up cheeks must be Colonel Waits, and Kang-ho was just whispering something in the ear-slit of her helm when he got a proper look at Ji-hyeon. The treacherous old bastard broke with the rest of the Thaoans, cantering his horse the last few meters and flipping up his owlbat faceplate to better gawp at his daughter.

  “What in all the incontinent gods of the Golden Cauldron happened to you, child?”

  “I told you, Kang-ho, you’re to address me as General Ji-hyeon,” said she. “And if you think I’m bad you should see the other girl.”

  “I see it, but I don’t believe it,” said a familiar voice, and Zosia looked up from the tarp she was fixing to the palisade to see Singh walking toward her across the makeshift prison yard.

  “Hey there, sister,” said Zosia, turning back to her work. The light was fading fast and she was keen to get her lean-to completed before the snow-shrouded sun dropped behind the Lark’s Tongue; an invisible sun still made for warmer work than a set one, and the weather must show no signs of slacking if the Cobalts were giving out tarps and tents to their prisoners. “Don’t suppose you’ve brought me a hot meal and hotter kaldi? Maybe peatfire and a packed pipe to while away the hours until my execution?”

  “As a matter of fact…” Singh set down her steaming knapsack and helped Zosia with the tiny cairn of scavenged rocks she was using to pin down the edge of her tarp. She was grateful for the help, her fingers too numb to balance the stones properly. “Now that my queen’s boudoir is in order, might we step inside for some privacy?”

  They wedged themselves under the small lean-to like two girls squeezing into a fort they’d fashioned in the woods from an old sheet and a low hanging bough. In most circumstances it might have felt cramped, but with Singh sharing her beaver mantle, an over-steeped press of spice tea, and a rich pot of curried roots, the low shelter seemed positively cozy. After she’d bolted down the food and tea and began sipping on Singh’s meerschaum pipe and silver flask, Zosia let herself lean into her warm friend, one of the very last she had.

  “I fucked it all up, Singh,” she said quietly, warming her hands on the clay pipe and savoring the cedar-scented smoke rising from the bowl. “But what else is new, huh?”

  “Stuff and nonsense,” said Singh, squeezing her shoulder until Zosia reminded her of the bite with a hiss of her teeth. “You’ve been in tighter spots than this, sister, and always came out free in the end.”

  “Not much tighter,” said Zosia, making her point by brushing her head on the tarp that barely covered them both.

  “So about that…” Singh pursed her lips. “What are you doing here, exactly?”

  “You haven’t heard?” Zosia sucked on the pipe, then passed it to her friend, letting the smoke roll out with her words. “I would’ve thought it’d be all over camp by now. I found out some of the cavalry who attacked Kypck survived yesterday, so I came here and talked the captain on duty into letting me take them out, so—”

  “Oh, I know all that—what are you doing here, in an understaffed stockade in the middle of a snowstorm?” Singh took a pull at the meerschaum, and by the glow of the pipe Zosia saw her friend looking at her with the same pitying expression she had worn back in the Zygneman stinghouse when they’d first been reunited. In the old days Singh had never looked at her that way. Zosia supposed she’d never had cause. “What’s the scheme?”

  “Scheme?” If it had been anyone else, Zosia would have faked a laugh. “There’s no scheme.”

  “You expect me to believe the woman who single-handedly broke into Kaldruut’s dungeons to rescue me can’t hop over a wooden wall? Why are you here, Zosia?”

  A fair question, but when Zosia tried to reply she found she’d lost her answer… if she’d ever had one. The simple truth was she’d barely slept in two days and was just aware enough of her state to recognize she was in a very bad way, every thought that crossed her mind twisting into ugly shapes. She shrugged, and Singh leaned into her until their scalps touched, rocking sadly in place.

  “Oh, Zosia,” she said quietly. “I’ve been there. It’s scary, especially at first, but it does get better. You get used to their absence, and you’re able to go on with your life.”

  Zosia shook her head, because while she had so much she could have said on the matter, she didn’t trust her lips to let anything out but a sob. Even after everything she’d done to avenge Leib, to honor him, he was more remote than ever before, and fading all the time. Thinking of him every day, every hour, she had been able to cope with that… but now she had to remind herself to remember him, and that was what tore her heart apart, the guilt and shame so overpowering she couldn’t even think straight…

  “I knew you before you bound him, Zosia, and you were even more fearless then,” Singh murmured in her ear. “Youth played a part, yes, but your bravery didn’t come from immaturity, it—”

  “Bound him?” interrupted Zosia, wiping her snotty nose on her sleeve. “Hold on, who’re you talking about here?”

  “Choplicker?” Now Singh sounded as confused as she was. “You loosed him, didn’t you? And now you’re unsure how to go on, without his protection to see you through?”

  It felt good to laugh, after the day she’d had, but soon enough the ragged cackle trailed off. “Oh gods no, I’m glad to be rid of the fiend.”

  Saying it didn’t quite make it true, however, and remembering the damn dingo-dog’s happy bark when they’d both come through another scrape together choked her up again. If she wasn’t the better blessed part of a decade past the last of them, she would’ve thought her moons were coming on, fast as her moods were shifting… and hell, she did almost miss the old monster, at least a little. She took another hit off the warm flask and chased it with one on the pipe; this peatfire was even smokier than the smoke.

  “Your husband, then?” Singh asked when Zosia passed her back the pipe.

  “Yeah, I guess…” It had gone unsaid so long she didn’t even know where to begin, or if she even wanted to. But want and need aren’t the same things at all, and clearly her brilliant strategy of figuring it all out on her own hadn’t gotten her anywhere good. “I miss Leib so much sometimes, and others… at other times I have to tap myself to even remember why I’m here. I know nothing can bring him back, knew that from the first, but it’s the only thing I want, the only thing that could possibly make me happy. And since I can’t be happy, here I bloody am, doing the last thing he’d want me to do—tossing more bodies on the scales, as though killing folk ever evened things out instead of skewing it worse than ever. He hated bloodshed, Singh, hated me even talking about the old days… so what in all the fucking devils of Forsaken Emeritus am I doing out here?”

  “Right now? Talking to an old friend, one who’s always ready to listen, and sorting through troubles that no one should ever have to face alone,” said Singh, but then she didn’t say anything else, because the woman knew Zosia better than she knew herself, and knew sometimes more can be said in a warm silence than in a thousand thousand words. Then Singh cleared her throat, and asked, “When was the last time you got laid?”

  “That’s not it!” Zosia elbowed Singh, but not very hard. “I mean… yeah, it’s been a while since I was with anyone. Not since… Leib.”

>   “Grandmother’s mercy, no wonder you’re so crazy,” said Singh. “I thought a week was your personal worst? Remember that time we were all coming back up through the Panteran Wastes, and you were so hard up Maroto thought he had a shot, but then we hit that cult of cannibal lepers and—”

  “I remember,” said Zosia, though she kind of wished she didn’t. “Not exactly my finest hour.”

  “You did better than Maroto! I wouldn’t be surprised if those demented cultists still have him on their shit list, after the stunt he pulled… but really, Zosia, as your friend, I’m begging you—get some play, and not just with yourself.”

  “Easier said than done,” groused Zosia, a certain perfidious pirate blowing her a kiss in her mind’s eye. “But give me a little credit here—you think I’d be this fucked up over a lack of action?”

  “Yes,” said Singh, sounding serious as a hedonistic friar of the Ten True Gods of Trve preaching against temperance. “Absolutely, without a—ouch!”

  Zosia let go of Singh’s braid with a smile; she hadn’t tugged it that hard, and her friend went on: “Alright, alright, you want me to be serious? I can be serious. You lost your lover, your devil, your whole life, all in a year’s time. That is bad, Zosia, the kind of bad some people never bounce back from. I saw you were in a bad way back in Zygnema, which was the whole reason I signed on for this foolish errand—I thought it would be good for you to get some blood under your fingernails again, chop up the Imperials who torched your town. But I’m going to level with you, girl—you are worse than when I found you.”

  “You asked me to oversee your kid’s rebellion out of charity?” Zosia didn’t know if she should be touched or insulted.

  “Don’t use the C word,” said Singh. “Even after all these years it immediately makes me think of Maroto’s—”

  “Oh wow, yeah, what was he even thinking?” The merry memory of Maroto melted into the decidedly less pleasant encounter of the day before, and Zosia already had enough to beat herself up over without adding his bugged-out hissy fit to the docket. “So call it a pity-coup then, but it amounts to the same thing—that’s fucked up, Singh!”