So an Imperial regiment was engaging the Cobalts. It had to be the Third, since the other closest able-bodied regiment was the Second out of Meshugg, and even if they’d started marching west at the same time as the Thaoans they were still weeks away… but it couldn’t be the Third Regiment, because Colonel Waits still led them, and there was absolutely no fucking way she would come down so hard and fast on an unknown army. Why, a substantial part of Domingo’s reluctance to wait for the Thaoans before launching his attack was his confidence that Waits would insist on receiving explicit orders from Diadem before engaging the Cobalts… and now she was plunging straight in, and without the support of a sister regiment to back her up! Madness.
Unless Waits already had her orders from Diadem, and not necessarily from the Crimson Queen—one of the few things he and Waits had in common was their staunch support of the Crown and their shared scorn for the Burnished Chain, but considering Domingo had compromised himself it obviously wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility that Waits had also struck a bargain with the Black Pope. Maybe she had been duped, the same as he, and now led another religion-poisoned regiment down into the valley for some worse ritual yet…
Or maybe, unlike Domingo, Colonel Waits had actually grown smarter with age, and seeing how weak the Cobalts were after their rough treatment at the hands of the Fifteenth she’d decided to snatch the low-hanging fruit with both hands. The Third Regiment might not be as feared as the Fifteenth, but the Thaoans made up in numbers what they lacked in skill. The more he thought about it the more sense it made, and he sighed deeply, though he knew it would hurt his aching ribs. Sometimes a man has to take an unpleasant action. Kudos to Waits—for once in her career she was giving the most sensible order instead of the safest, and it was without a doubt going to win her the entire Cobalt Company, and a few Villains besides. He briefly flirted with killing himself before she could stride into the tent and gloat over his rescue, but even if he’d been of a serious mind, he was in no health to even try such a cowardly escape from his due. He had made this bed for himself, and until the better officer showed up to relieve him from it, here he would stay.
The strangest thing about it all was the disappointment he felt at hearing those bugles draw ever closer. He didn’t relish being captive and accomplice to Cold Zosia or her Immaculate protégé, that would have gone without saying if only it wasn’t damnably crucial intelligence that was worth saying twice. These Cobalts deserved the justice paid all traitors and criminals, nobody would hear Domingo argue different…
But at the same time, fat luck finding a soldier who doesn’t have something dark coming back to them, and Domingo had known ever since he was a cadet that taking down the greater evil often involves making compromises with lesser ones. That philosophy was the only way you could survive as an Imperial officer, and while it had led him into some trouble of late as far as his ill-considered conspiracy with Pope Y’Homa went, it was also responsible for his allegiance with Queen Indsorith, from her first civil war against the Burnished Chain to the last. It was true that of late Domingo had done the realm more harm than good, but nobody could deny that over the last twenty years the Fifteenth Regiment and their godless colonel had preserved the Empire from dissolution, or worse, a successful Chainite rebellion.
And that right there was where the biting disappointment came from—the realizations that the fundamentalist revolution he’d always feared had as good as happened, and moreover that he’d played a significant role in the takeover. When General Ji-hyeon had come to his tent the day before to ask for his support, she had argued that Queen Indsorith now ruled in name alone… and given that even the legendarily loyal Azgarothian colonel had gone behind the Crimson Queen’s back to collude with the Black Pope, he had to admit the Immaculate brat had a point. Preposterous a notion as it was, that blue-haired teenager had spoken more truth to power in a few minutes than he’d heard in his entire career as a military man—all sane Imperial officers agreed the Chain was a problem, but nobody else seemed willing to consider the possibility that maybe every single one of the lunatics needed to be cut down or cast out once and for all. And that was exactly what General Ji-hyeon wanted, to save Samoth and all the other provinces from a pestilence that had slowly been spreading across the Empire, a pestilence Domingo himself had helped flourish.
At first her speech had seemed as cockamamie as any other rabble-rouser’s, but he’d been turning it over ever since she’d taken him at his word that he would help advise her campaign and gone off to save the rest of the Fifteenth Cavalry from Zosia’s vengeance; it had kept him awake late into the night, no doubt the cause of his uncharacteristic sleeping in. And by the end he’d been almost convinced, crazy as that surely made him. General Ji-hyeon and her advisors were waging a damned impressive war for such a ragtag mob of mercenaries and peasants, she had some of the most cunning military minds Domingo had ever gone up against already on her payroll, and with only the Third Regiment and their dithering, noncommittal colonel to worry about in the short term it had seemed like the Cobalts had ample time to prepare, too. As much as he hated Zosia, he hated the Black Pope far more, and he couldn’t think of a more perfect example of using one enemy to destroy the other—if he and Cold Cobalt pooled their strategies and worked together to help General Ji-hyeon, the campaign would be devastating for the Burnished Chain.
Or could have been, anyway, if Colonel Waits had hung back to let the Cobalts plot and scheme instead of uncharacteristically plunging straight into a confrontation. Who knew, with Domingo’s influence at the negotiation table they might have even convinced Waits to join forces with the Cobalts against the Chain, assuming she wasn’t already taking her orders from the Holy See. Now, though, Waits was seizing the obvious advantage, and not even a regiment as sloppy as the Third could mess this one up. General Ji-hyeon was about to wake up from her little dream, but closing his eyes as he began to drift back off to the trumpeting of bugles, Domingo had to admit it had been a nice one, while it lasted.
CHAPTER
4
You don’t spend as many years as Zosia had in the acquaintance of Hoartrap the Touch without seeing your fair share of weird shit, but all the same this may have taken the razorcake. She had just helped the naked old creep to his feet, nearly as eager for answers as she was for his help in escaping the busy battlefield before things got any hairier, when the ground rocked beneath her boots and Sullen went flying into the big wizard. It looked like it hurt, the two stout men knocking foreheads as they went down together. It might’ve been funny, in a dickish way, sure, but then Zosia saw what had set off the Sullen kid and didn’t feel much like laughing.
It corkscrewed up out of the Gate and into the air, though the curvature of its arc looked less than graceful and more like the accidental result of its furiously twisting spine and tail… an exceedingly long tail that began as thick as Zosia’s waist before gradually tapering to the thin whip that was still wrapped around Hoartrap’s wrist, embedded so deeply in the skin that his swollen hand looked about to pop. Oh. That was about all Zosia was able to process before the spiraling black monster crashed down to the ground on the edge of the Gate, the shock wave knocking her off her feet. It was only after it violently rolled away from the Gate in the opposite direction that Zosia realized she had almost died—if it had come south instead of north it would have crushed her and Choplicker, Sullen and Hoartrap, and the foot soldiers she now noticed some thirty paces behind them in the bargain. It was that big, a monster twice as tall and four times as long as the elephants she and Singh had once ridden to war, and as it came out of its frantic roll in the midst of panicked horses and their yet more panicked riders, Zosia saw its bald, snarling face snapping all around to inspect the cluttered field, meter-long whiskers waggling as it hissed so loudly it drowned out the buzzing sound that came not from the Gate itself, but from this fell monster Hoartrap had called forth with his witchcraft.
The general shape of the titan was familiar, bu
t it was as similar to the opossum devil Hoartrap had fed to the Gate as a horned wolf was to Choplicker. The buzzing behemoth shivered in the cold air, bristling long, jagged quills in place of fur, and she saw multiple rows of yellow fangs in its slavering mouth… a mouth wide enough to bite off a horse’s head in one snap, apparently, as it idly jerked its head to the side and decapitated the mount of a nearby rider. Zosia couldn’t tell from here if the rider had been Raniputri dragoon or Thaoan cavalry, but she saw well enough to know the poor fucker was dead now, hairy claws as long as bastard swords raking out and sending the headless horse and its mangled rider skipping messily across the ground. The unfortunate pair skidded into several other members of the clashing cavalries, horses’ legs snapping out from under them like wheat beneath a scythe. Then the devil king threw back its long crocodilian snout and squealed so loudly that Zosia flinched, and as the sound trailed off, a terrible humming quiet fell on the valley, even the most feverishly locked combatants distracted by the new challenger.
Choplicker broke the silence, barking and bounding toward the monster before Zosia could stop him. The giant’s cannonball-sized eyes fixed on her happy devil, and Zosia turned to demand some fucking answers from Hoartrap when her legs were swept out from under her for what felt like the hundredth time in the last day or two. Even as her tailbone smacked painfully into the ground she saw that it was none other than Hoartrap himself who had upended her, but she couldn’t rightly fault him—the daft bastard still had the end of the devil king’s tail fixed to his wrist, and was being keelhauled across the battlefield as the monster bounded forward into the fracturing mobs of red and blue soldiers. Choplicker chased after them, merrily yapping as the colossal devil dragged the sorcerer behind it, pursuing mortal flesh for perhaps the first time in centuries, if ever. In the event they both got through this, the Touch’s most epic cluster-fuck yet, Zosia would have to ask Hoartrap just where exactly he’d learned how to summon up this particular specimen, and what possessed him to set it loose. First, though, she’d finally found something she was excited about doing—sending this rampaging monster back into the First Dark, having another long talk with Hoartrap, and, assuming she survived all that, bringing Ji-hyeon the broken crown… and, just maybe, an apology for trying to kill her the day before. That order.
“Uhhh…”
Zosia glanced over and saw Sullen still sitting on the ground beside her, one meaty palm pressed to the side of his head as he stared after the monstrosity.
“Yeah, I’d say uhhh about covers it,” grunted Zosia, getting up and hissing through her teeth at the fresh hell radiating from her bruised ass. Offering Sullen her hand and the sort of easy smile she’d given the boy’s uncle back before things had gotten so tense between them, she said, “Well, kid, now that Hoartrap’s taught you one way to call up devils, what do you say I show you a fail-safe means of putting them back down?”
He didn’t look happy about the prospect, but that just went to show that not everybody’s as dumb as they look. Licking her lips and taking the first step toward the incensed devil king thrashing its bulk through Crimson and Cobalt soldiers alike, Zosia wondered just how much the fool she looked right about then, walking straight at a monster the likes of which she hadn’t faced in a quarter century, and even then, never by choice. Seeing the silhouette of its long tail whip through a clump of soldiers, a pale, limp shape hanging from the end, she supposed she looked smarter than Hoartrap, anyway.
Ji-hyeon really hoped Hoartrap lived out the day, so she could plant her toe between his lily-white cheeks. It went without saying that in this scenario she came out of the fight, too; after the Thaoan arrows started dinging off her helm and embedding in her thick hauberk, she stopped feeling the warrior’s death that had sounded so good in theory. That right there was why you always had to be careful what you wished for, and never the more so than when devils were about. Still, Fellwing must be flying close overhead, or else one of the barrages of arrows would surely have dropped her steed, at the very least, but so far she’d stayed ahorse and unharmed. Choi and Fennec were still on either side of her, but the rest of the bodyguards had fallen away or fallen altogether, the only riders around them now wearing Crimson tabards and unmistakable sabretaches, the saddlebags embroidered with the flower-ringed dragon-deer of Thao.
Then the last of the stampeding Imperials veered away from them, and through the canine teeth of her helm Ji-hyeon saw she had become turned around in the fray and was charging straight into the front line of the Crimson infantry. She yanked the reins and dug in her foot, but the wall of polearms was coming up so fast and the necessary turn so sharp that for a moment she was sure her galloping steed would break her legs. The mare didn’t, a better mount than Ji-hyeon was a rider, and they dashed along in front of the Thaoan line, long, steel-capped shafts jabbing out as Ji-hyeon continued to goad her horse into the full turn. Seeing a nearly ten-foot-long polehammer come swinging down just ahead of her, Ji-hyeon thought, what an absurdly impractical weapon, and then it winged the side of her helm so hard she swore she felt her skull splinter. She dropped the Crimson lance Choi had tossed her after her third spear broke, and if her boots hadn’t been so firmly lodged in the stirrups she would have toppled. Instead she slumped in her saddle, paralyzed, as the horse completed the sharp about-face and cantered easily away from the infantry. Still she didn’t fall, but it was too late all the same, the field before her darkening to a deep ruby as blood filled her eyes, her ears buzzing as loud as a barber’s icebee hive. She closed her eyes to stop the world from spinning and, still too stunned to think but feeling the sensation return to her clammy fingers, she drew the reins gently to her chest, feeling herself slipping out of the stirrups and wanting the horse to be at a standstill when she dropped from its side. The buzzing in her leaking brains intensified, traveling down to the raw nerve in her loose tooth, and then she was falling…
And was caught. Blinking through the stinging blood and the tight perspective of her helm, she saw Fennec on the far side of her horse, removing her boot from the stirrup with his soft white claws. He wasn’t the one who held her, and queasily looking down she saw one of Choi’s gloves digging into her armpit, hoisting Ji-hyeon away from her horse and onto the wildborn’s. It felt like they were still galloping, the ground moving beneath her even as the horses remained still, and then she was spun about in Choi’s strong arms, her leg dragging over the neck of her Honor Guard’s horse as the woman planted Ji-hyeon in front of her on the anxiously whinnying steed. She was facing the wrong direction, belly to belly with Choi instead of looking out over the horse’s head.
Fluid as Choi’s movements had been, the transition made Ji-hyeon throw up a little in her helm, but she hurt too bad to be embarrassed yet, leaning into Choi’s chest and resting the chin of her heavy helm on her Honor Guard’s shoulder. She could see the infantry behind them, a funny perspective to have on a horse, and even through the nauseating pain in her skull and the blood in her eyes she managed to smile, because the mighty Thaoan regiment had stopped advancing, the whole line of infantry hastily backing away. They tripped over themselves in their retreat, those who fell trampled by their comrades, and others just standing there slack mouthed, staring at the injured general and her last two remaining bodyguards. One fainted dead away, bouncing off his neighbor on the way down to the slushy field. It sounded like Fennec was shouting, high-pitched, pony-like screams, but she couldn’t make out the words over the buzzing in her brains.
“Oh, Ji-hyeon,” Choi whispered in the ear-slit of her helm, and somehow, despite how loud it was, she heard her Honor Guard perfectly, even over the droning that had spread from her skull to her teeth and now vibrated along every aching bone. “I have to release you now, my general, but slow. You must lie still and gather your strength, and let me take the honor for both of us.”
That was Choi for you. Basically incoherent. But then Ji-hyeon’s world spun again as the wildborn lifted her off the horse like a baby, and passed h
er to other hands. Fennec, his paws so gentle as he helped her down and let her lie on her back. Even through the sheen of blood, she could tell the sky was blue, blue as the waters of Othean Bay.
Fennec said something, but she still couldn’t hear what, and then Choi’s voice cut through the humming noise again. “I will tempt it away. Be swift, my friends.”
Friends? Choi was without a doubt one of Ji-hyeon’s best and only friends, but she hadn’t thought the word even entered the wildborn’s vocabulary, and while her use of it should have warmed Ji-hyeon’s heart, instead it chilled it. Something very bad was happening, and as Fennec’s furry hands slipped the damaged helm off her aching head she rolled over to see where Choi had gone…
No. No no no. Choi was as tiny as a miniature rider pictured on one of her second father’s tapestries in the foyer back home on Hwabun—the Samothan pieces that recounted heroic epics—and towering over the charging wildborn was a nightmare of black spines and drooling maw, sharp talons and lashing tail, a horror the likes of which belonged more to the hell scrolls her first father kept locked away in a chest of vermilion-painted ironwood. The monster was four or five times as tall as the soldiers who ran screaming from it, and even on horseback Choi would barely reach halfway up its greasy flank… and worst of all, her Honor Guard stood high in her saddle and blew the horned wolf hunting horn Purna had given her general, attracting the titan’s wrathful attention as Ji-hyeon helplessly watched.
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