A Blade of Black Steel

by Alex Marshall

  “We’re being abducted by sharks?” asked Ji-hyeon. She was sure that didn’t sound right, but whatever Fennec had just said in reply to the cavalry officer had resulted in the ring of Thaoan pikers tightening around them, spears pointed at their breasts and polehammers raised. Fuck those hammers in particular, looking at them made her eyes water anew.

  “No such luck,” said the mounted officer, but her eyes weren’t on Fennec or Ji-hyeon, but something far taller that lay behind them. “Tell your guards to come peacefully, General, or we gut them now and leave them to the warbeast. We’ll move faster if it’s just you, but I’ll give you one chance to save your dogs.”

  The fop propping up Ji-hyeon made an indignant sound at that, but she shushed him and said, “You heard her. They got us, so let’s all go quietly.”

  She was surrendering to save Fennec and the dandy, she told herself; she wasn’t doing this because here at the moment of truth she was scared to die after all. Besides, she deserved something worse than death for ordering Hoartrap to loose that thing on the world, didn’t she? He’d promised her a great weapon that would run their foes off or even intimidate them into submission, and fool that she was she’d listened. Now even more of her people were dead, she was captured, and the giant monster was having some sort of fit behind her in the middle of the field… but at least the Thaoans were retreating, and that’s what Hoartrap had promised her, wasn’t it? A devil’s bargain, if ever there was one, exactly the sort of thing she should have—

  Ji-hyeon doubled over, the air split by a squeal so loud and raw it nearly made her puke again.

  “Shit,” was the Thaoan officer’s composed response, and then she wheeled her horse around and took off at a gallop. Ji-hyeon’s mare jerked her reins out of Fennec’s paw and followed fast on the first horse’s fetlocks. Which didn’t bode well, given the circumstances. A few of the Thaoan pikers ran after them, but the rest just stood there, too scared or awed to move, staring up at whatever it was that projected the increasingly loud humming aura as it slowly approached. Ji-hyeon still hadn’t gotten a good look at the thing, but seeing how transfixed these soldiers were by its very appearance reminded her of how she’d felt hypnotized by the pumpkin devil back in Othean that fateful night she and her guards had snuck away from the Autumn Palace in search of adventure. Rather than risk becoming similarly enthralled by the grotesque majesty of the looming giant, she kept her gaze from its visage as she turned to confront it, instead focusing on the thick, furry legs that brought it forward in a faltering waddle. Here was death, taking its sweet time but nonetheless certain for the sluggishness of its approach.

  Ji-hyeon should have expected something like this, after ordering Hoartrap to go fishing in the First Dark for something big and scary to throw at the Thaoans. Gates were called gates for a good reason, because they were the portals devils used to enter the world of mortals, and it stood to reason that the bigger the doorway the bigger the visitor… and this new Gate the Chainites had opened up with their suicidal ritual was by all accounts the largest in the Star. She hadn’t even fully understood the mechanics of what Hoartrap was saying after a certain point—she got the part about how in order to fully cross over to the mortal realm devils had to possess a living creature, preferably a scavenger, but everything after that had been too screwy to follow. Something about how by using a bound devil instead of a mundane animal he could entice a far greater power into entering a living vessel that was already fully in his command. To his credit, he had warned her there might be some collateral damage, for although such an entity could not harm him it would surely seek to feed on anything and everything else it could lay claim to… but so long as everything went according to plan, the devil-eater would compel it to return to the First Dark as soon as it had run off the Thaoan regiment.

  So much for everything going according to plan, she thought as the titanic devil approached them with impartial but obvious malice. Its obscenely distended stomach swayed so low it almost brushed the ground as it walked, and behind the salmon curtain of its drooping gut several small figures harried it across the field; she wondered if it even noticed the mortals lashing at its rear leg, and if they were Cobalts or Imperials.

  It was approaching so slowly they might have fled its coming, Fennec and the fop each tugging at a sleeve and hissing urgent entreaties, but she shook them off and nodded ahead. Between Ji-hyeon and the leviathan lay some fifty corpses, some mauled, others trampled, and more than one dressed in a Cobalt winding sheet. She had called this horror up, so it fell to her to put it down, despite the pounding in her head, despite the exhausted owlbat sleeping fitfully in the curve of her elbow, despite how badly she wanted to follow the fleeing Thaoans all the way back to her bad second dad and certain death at the hands of Empress Ryuki, if only it meant she didn’t have to face the consequences of trafficking with a warlock. Drawing her sword, she slapped the slackly held polearms of the five remaining Thaoans, startling them out of their torpor.

  “Looks like it ate itself stupid, so let’s take it down before it wises up,” she told the pale, shaky Thaoans in their native Crimson, holding out her sword like a torch to guide them toward glory. “Stick that big belly if you can reach it, and its legs if not. And be swift! Honors like this do not come often.”

  They all looked at her like she was crazy, but at least their eyes were on her instead of the shambling devil lord. Then the face-painted fop tapped her sword with his diamond-faceted blade, Fennec did the same with his scimitar, and after a serious double scowl from her fellow Cobalts, the five remaining Thaoans brought their spears and long hammers in, too. By then their weapons were no longer vibrating from the slight impact but from the proximity of the buzzing monstrosity, and taking a deep gulp of the sharp morning air, Ji-hyeon braced herself to lead seven warriors into a hell of her own making.

  CHAPTER

  5

  Singh and Fennec had often argued with Zosia and Maroto on the merits of sharp weapons versus blunt ones, especially where attacking oversized enemies was concerned (Kang-ho usually sat out these debates, as he preferred to attack big targets the same way he went after small ones: from a distance). The line of reasoning went that even the sturdiest opponent possessed veins to slice, ligaments to sever, and flesh to puncture, whereas a dull blow might be shrugged off by a large or armored foe. To this Maroto and Zosia had always replied, usually in unison while bumping fists, “Not if you hit them hard enough.”

  Swinging her war hammer overhead as though she were going to split a log with an ax, Zosia found no cause to doubt that old wisdom. The devil queen’s splayed foot was the size of a tower shield; the head of Zosia’s hammer wasn’t much bigger than a fist. Yet when it connected with the top of the paw it crunched bones into splinters, mashed muscle into stringy paste—she’d wielded this hammer for so long it was an extension of herself, and she felt the damage she’d inflicted vibrating down the haft, vindicating her argument.

  Not that there was anything wrong with a sharp edge, a point Sullen proved as he severed the thick tendon at the back of its ankle with the leaf-shaped blade of his spear, but Zosia would always prefer her weapons the way she liked her women: thick, blunt, and capable of fucking up even the biggest devil in the First Dark.

  From the way the thing squealed you would’ve thought they’d gone and killed it, and instead of the leg giving out and causing the backside to droop low enough for Zosia to nail it in the sweet spots, the monster took off in clumsy, plodding steps, fleeing across the field with a definite limp. So, not the quick and smooth victory she’d hoped for, but then she’d also half expected it to respond to the attack by spinning around to gobble them up. Pleased as she was not to have its giant, drooling mouth or agile front claws to contend with, having the thing immediately flee was almost anticlimactic. If the first soldiers it laid into had stood their ground instead of justifiably freaking out, would this big bully have just turned tail back into the Gate?

  No telling now, but
at least she and Sullen had herded it back toward the retreating Thaoans instead of the Cobalt camp, and all the carnage the beast had caused seemed to have put the spring back in Choplicker’s step, and some color in his coat to boot. This nasty fucking devil queen wasn’t the only one eating well out here. The dog ran after the giant, looking over his shoulder to make sure they were following, and after exchanging wary nods with Sullen, they did. It might be moving a lot slower than it had as whatever abominable incubation process took place in its belly, but with legs that long they still had to run all out to even hope to catch it, and catching it before whatever was transpiring in its gut-sack reached fruition seemed like a wise plan.

  Sullen gave a choking shout, and then he was gone, five, ten, twenty feet ahead of her, closing fast on the devil queen. She’d been flattering herself to think they were keeping pace because they were equally swift; apparently while she’d been giving it her all he’d barely broken a sweat, but something had put the fire under him now…

  Tapai Purna, lying flat on her face on the ground right in front of the advancing devil queen. It had to be her, she was the first person in twenty years Zosia had seen wear a horned wolf hood. Zosia pushed herself harder, doubting very highly the girl could still be alive, laid out like that on a field like this, and hating herself for remembering what she had told Maroto when he’d begged her to save his injured friend just two days earlier—that a wish would be wasted on a girl like Purna, who’d find another grisly end for herself soon enough even if she recovered from her wounded leg. By all the godless devils of the First Dark, Zosia hated being right all the damn time.

  “No!” Sullen wailed; not a bellow or a battle cry, definitely a wail, and now Zosia saw why: it wasn’t Purna he was worried about; it was the huddle of Crimson cloaks holding their ground just beyond the prone girl, in the path of the beast, half a dozen shaky-speared Imperial infantry led by… Ji-hyeon?

  Ji-hyeon. Seeing her there, standing firm with her sword held high in the face of a creature whose mere backside had paralyzed him with fear, made Sullen feel all kinds of funny. Terrified for her but impressed by her bravery, straight up fucking wigged out but also kind of inspired? They would fight this thing together, they would turn it back or cut it down.

  He’d sheathed his sun-knife when they ambushed the devil queen, figuring he only had one chance to surprise the monster and wanting to make it count; he’d always been better at jabbing a spear than throwing a blade. He considered throwing one of his sun-knives now, but what if instead of slowing the monster it only spurred it faster? He couldn’t risk that, so put everything into racing the behemoth, desperate to reach Ji-hyeon before it did.

  No mortal nor devil was as swift as Sullen when he needed to be—Grandfather always said he could’ve outrun Count Raven himself—and even with its lengthy stride Sullen overtook it, outpacing even Zosia’s devil. There was no time to circle around it so he just ducked underneath it, noting with satisfaction that the rear leg it dragged was leaking thick grey sludge from the hurt he’d put on it. He darted to the side to avoid careening into the translucent belly-sack pulsing with new-made monsters, wove back inward so as not to collide with the back of its front leg, and then Ji-hyeon was twenty yards ahead, only a few corpses for him to hurdle over before he reached her, and—

  Someone tackled Sullen face-first into the slush and the mud, someone fat and slimy and stinking like a dead animal left to bloat in the summer sun. Except this wasn’t even someone, it was something, its teeth latching onto his shoulder, its claws scratching him, and through the blind panic and confusion a part of Sullen just knew what had happened… and that part went utterly, utterly mental. Instead of rolling over to try to dislodge his attacker or pawing around for his dropped spear, Sullen slapped his palms into the slick, melting earth and shoved off as if he were performing the fiercest push-up of his life. Even with the squirming weight on his back, Sullen launched himself up far enough to pull his legs in, planting his toes beneath him, and from there he jumped as high as he could, pivoting in the air so that he came down on his back, and came down hard. As intended, the creature cushioned his landing, its squeal cut off with a crunching sound and sensation, its mouth falling away from his neck, its claws flapping limply aside… but just overhead Sullen saw another of the foul, furry spawn pull itself free and drop over the lip of its mother’s pouch, the man-sized monster landing on all fours in the slurry beside Sullen. Bad as their parent looked, these poor bastards were worse, for the eyes staring balefully at Sullen were still human.

  Before he could even reach for one of his sun-knives it came at him, just as hard as its sister had… but not half as hard as he came at it, for while it had claws and teeth and a mother’s love, all Sullen had were his fists.

  Sullen. For one golden moment crystallized in time like a lightning bug in amber, Ji-hyeon saw him racing for her, running between the great devil’s legs with a cry on his soft, sweet lips… then a lump of the living nightmare detached itself from the whole, dropping onto his back. Before her shock could even register, he made short work of this new monster, beautiful man that he was, but then another descended, and another, and then Sullen and his attackers were hidden behind the curve of the giant’s teeming belly as the devil queen came for her, relentless and inevitable as grief.

  “No!” She didn’t even realize the voice was her own until she was moving forward and heard her echo reverberating off the wall of spines and muscle. Now she looked, because she’d be a fool not to track the position of her enormous enemy’s maw, and instead of being bewitched by its hellish visage she almost laughed out loud at the manifest absurdity—it was a fucking opossum. Magnified to a dragon’s stature and devilfied into loathsome cast, sure, but still a fucking opossum. If only they had wheeled out all of the camp’s refuse to distract it this whole fiasco could’ve been avoided.

  A horn trilled, her horn, and then Choi rode in between Ji-hyeon and the lumbering behemoth. It was reckless, Ji-hyeon was still thirty yards out, but her fearless Honor Guard put herself in harm’s way all the same, charging straight into the path of the beast, but slowing her whinnying steed as she did. Then Choi half fell out of her saddle, hanging off the side of the cantering horse, clinging to the saddle horn with one hand, and Ji-hyeon realized the wildborn hadn’t come to protect her, but another. Choi tried to scoop a body off the field but either the angle was wrong or her strength failed, for the white-cloaked figure on the ground flopped back out of her grasp. And insane as it surely was with the hulking opossum devil almost on top of them, Choi clumsily dismounted, dropping into a crouch as the horse bolted away… only to be slapped into the air by a massive claw.

  Then the unthinkable happened, and Ji-hyeon went utterly, utterly mental.

  Someone slapped Purna, a great big slap that covered her whole body, and while her natural inclination was to roll over and ignore them, drifting back off to dreamtown, the damp chill that began to intrude on her skin was too clammy to be ignored. Opening her eyes, she found herself splayed out on her belly, dirty snow and dirtier dirt the whole of her world, and with each smack of her gummy lips and lick of her doglike tongue she found herself less inclined to appreciate being roused. Whether she’d been dead or only dreaming of being dead, it had to have been an improvement on this, a steadily increasing and nigh-universal sense of dread… and pain, she couldn’t overlook the pain that was now manifesting in her face, shoulder, knee—heck, pretty much everywhere.

  But then Choi rolled her over, and it seemed a small price to pay, because the wildborn cutie was flushed and sweaty, her fetching left horn and the stump of the right visible through her wide-brimmed mesh hat, and she was down so low Purna could have kissed her… and dash it all, why not? You never know when your last grain of sand will drop, so you might as well make the best of every occasion. Maroto might not like it, but whatever he felt for Choi wasn’t the same as his thing for Zosia at all; this wasn’t poaching, and besides, Choi seemed like a sensible lad
y, she probably had no interest in boys, so why not seize the day by the horn, as it were, and—

  But then Choi was floating away like the angel she was, her scarlet eyes widening with the same disappointment Purna felt at having her dream so rudely interrupted, the pointed teeth Purna wanted to feel nip at her thighs exposed as the flying wildborn said something that sounded awfully like—

  “Fuck.”

  The giant monster. Choi. The giant monster had Choi. As Purna’s stupid brain finally registered what had happened, she saw the moon-big monster’s face split into a thousand-toothed smile as it raised the wildborn in its fuzzy paw. And awful as it would’ve been to watch it eat Choi alive, the monstrosity did something even worse—it shoved the woman into a disgusting, lathered-up flap in its stomach, the border of the belly-mouth stretched wide by the emergence of smaller but equally disgusting monsters who swarmed out, some of them tumbling to earth, others crawling upside down along their mother’s flanks and then disappearing around the bend, climbing up onto its wide back.

  Some people would’ve gone mental at a time like this, seeing something that no nightmare could compete with. Like, utterly, utterly mental. But not Purna. No, seeing her friend Choi get pouch-swallowed by an immense devil, Purna felt herself go to an angrier, uglier, stronger, darker, sharper place—Purna went absolutely fucking Maroto.

  Sidestepping a back-kick from the broken paw that could have squashed her flat, Zosia swung her hammer underhanded, battering a startled mutant under the chin and knocking it out of her way. The big barbarian was being dog-piled by the things—or opossum-piled, to be more accurate—but Zosia cleared them out in a jiffy, her hammer dancing in her hands, colorless blood and grey fur and white teeth exploding out of the horde with each strike, warm gore splashing her arms and face. Maroto emerged from the cloud of flying bodies, soaked in oily grey ooze but alive, and only when she saw his bovine look of surprise did she remember it wasn’t Maroto but his nephew, Sullen. Kid looked a lot like his uncle, but Maroto would’ve grinned to see her, whereas Sullen mostly looked startled and kind of intimidated to be rescued by an old lady, clearly amazed one woman could do so much damage with one little hammer.