A Blade of Black Steel

by Alex Marshall

  “Easy,” repeated Fennec, tapping a claw even harder against the table.

  “For me, yes; for a would-be apprentice who never showed up for his second lesson, not so much,” said Hoartrap, throwing his hands in the air. “I understand all of your concerns, I truly do, but this is not something new or scary to me. This is… this is walking across the fucking street easy. For me. And the reason for that is because I have put years and years and years into researching how to do it safely and efficiently, and more years on top of that experimenting with the intricacies of it all, because if there’s one thing I care about it’s my own back.

  “Now, if it will assuage your fears, I give my sacred word, Fennec, that neither you nor Ji-hyeon will suffer further alterations so long as I guide you through, and since dear Captain Choi seems immune to the influence of the Gates anyway, that just leaves the rest of the Cobalt Company. It will be the first time for all of them, and the initial exposure is always very minor. I should hope soldiers willing to lay down their lives for your cause won’t balk at having their coifs lightened.”

  “That of course raises the question of how in all the world you convince threescore weary sellswords to step into a Gate, let alone three thousand,” said Singh. “There are barely a dozen people alive who know someone who has entered a Gate and come out safe, and half of them are already in this tent. However much the rank and file may wish to believe their general’s tales of harmlessly passing through the Othean Gate, you may find the company that readily followed you across the Star will balk at marching into hell.”

  “That’s why I need your help in making the most out of my speech,” said Ji-hyeon, pointing at the blank page of goatskin on the table. “We need that classic Cold Cobalt rabble-rousing to get enough of them excited about the prospect that they’ll herd in the less committed.”

  “In that case I better leave you to it,” said Zosia, preferring the uncertain fate of entering a Gate to the certain horror of speech writing. “See you all on the other side, I guess. I’ll have the peasants revolting an hour before dawn in Diadem.”

  “Better make it first light instead of the hour before,” suggested Hoartrap. “The sun graces Diadem well before it reaches the Witchfinder Plains.”

  “Oh,” said Ji-hyeon. “It does? That’s the first I’ve heard of it.”

  “It’s not the sort of issue that comes up much in this benighted time, but in the Age of Wonders when mortals frequently employed the Gates to travel across the Star—” Hoartrap began, and Zosia hurried for the exit before she could be roped into the debate. When it came to matters metaphysical, she’d trust Hoartrap to have done his homework better than an exhausted teenage general. A riot with the dawn, then.

  “If I may be excused for a moment,” said Singh, rising to follow Zosia out, but Choi’s hand shot over and rested lightly on her shoulder. Ji-hyeon must have told her Honor Guard to expect this and quietly prevent the Villain from having a final collaboration with Zosia.

  “I’m afraid we’ll need the expertise of your tongue,” said Ji-hyeon. “You’ll have plenty of time to catch up with Captain Zosia once you help us take Diadem. For now, Chevaleresse, your employer begs the wisdom of your counsel a bit longer.”

  Zosia waved farewell to her friend for what would likely be a very long time; if the deeply superstitious Singh went through the Gate instead of sneaking away with her dragoons in the night Zosia would eat her boots.

  “Fetch your lackey and I’ll meet you down in the valley,” Hoartrap called after Zosia as she raised the flap, talking over whatever objection Ji-hyeon had raised to his timetables. “And be quick about it, I want to be back here in time for supper.”

  “Yeah, can’t miss that,” said Zosia queasily, the prospect of actually entering a Gate not exactly stimulating her appetite. “But let’s give it another hour, at least, I need to find a smith and pick up a new piece.”

  “You still haven’t done that?” said Fennec. “Unbelievable.”

  “I figured some grunt had walked off the field with it after I got knocked out, and once I announced a reward someone would bring her home,” said Zosia, too damn old and tired to be self-conscious about how hard she’d tried to recover her lost war hammer. “But I guess if anyone carried it off it was that devil queen—last thing I remember was sticking her something fierce with the pick-end, so who knows? But if I ever find some hump made off with my hammer and didn’t take the opportunity to return it, I’ll—”

  “Just get a new one already!” snapped Ji-hyeon, too young to appreciate the importance of heirloom weaponry. “That’s an order, Zosia.”

  “Okay, okay, I will, I just need to—”

  “Right. Now,” said Ji-hyeon. “Go see my grumpy guy, he runs the smithy on the southwestern side of camp, near the Raniputri temple-tents. Buy a new hammer, meet Hoartrap, and get this shit done. If we fall behind schedule because you dragged your feet on commissioning a new one and spend all night picking out the perfect replacement I may seriously lose my shit.”

  “Never going to find a perfect replacement, ever, so I’ll just grab whatever piece of crap they’ve got lying around,” grumbled Zosia, good and annoyed about the situation all over again. “Like I’d commission a fucking weapon from some chucklehead around here anyway. Antique is the only way to go in this sorry-ass age—you know that hammer of mine came out of Emeritus? Six hundred years old, and never rusted or tarnished. Might’ve put a ding or two into her, sure, but—”

  “Zosia!”

  “Yeah, I’m going, I’m going,” she said, but on her way out caught the attention of Hoartrap, Fennec, and Singh, and with exaggerated slowness swung an imaginary hammer at them, making a woooosh sound as she did. Ji-hyeon would never get it, but they did—they’d been there when she’d risked her life to wrest the ancient war hammer from its guardian, after all, and whatever else their faults they could appreciate material history. Fuckings kids today.

  The nervous sweat seemed to freeze on Zosia’s clammy skin as she stepped back out into the cold, Choplicker bounding over and doing cheerful laps around her. Before she’d made her peace with the devil after the First Battle of the Lark’s Tongue, Zosia would have stuck her face in a meat grinder before she’d have considered using a Gate the way Ji-hyeon had when she’d escaped Othean. And now? She would still prefer the meat grinder, if it accomplished the same end, but since it obviously didn’t that left her with hoping that between Hoartrap’s devils and her own she would pass through a Gate unscathed. Her only consolation was that Boris would presumably like the idea even less than she did, and that put a little spring in her step as she returned to the archery range—nothing to make you feel better about your own bad fortune like spreading it around a little.

  CHAPTER

  16

  The Haunted Forest turned out to be a total bust, with nary a spook or spirit in the whole place. The village in the center of the wood was decidedly more pissant than puissant, a smoky burg called Black Moth that looked on the verge of turning into a ghost town. Until that came to pass, though, they really ought to call the forest something else, just so travelers didn’t get their hopes up.

  Or so Purna thought, until the announcement board by the public gallows gave her the nastiest start she’d had since waking up to find herself wildtouched (as she’d taken to thinking of her condition). It was a specter from her past, no two ways about that, so maybe this murky wood had come by its name honestly. She managed to rip it down and stuff it into the pocket of her baggy wool pantaloons before the others could notice; Sullen and Keun-ju were distracted by the poster advertising an Immaculate bounty for General Ji-hyeon, and Diggelby had already taken their pony straight to the sauna to see about a warm bath for the both of them. In Thao they hadn’t let the animal into the bathhouse at all, and while Black Moth was more accommodating of the pasha, he was disappointed to discover that Princess was less obliging of bath time than Prince had been.

  After that, their brief stay in Black
Moth was less than ideal, with Purna obliged to keep her scarf high and her hood low for the duration; the poster bearing her likeness was far too new for her liking. She even went without a turn in the sauna for fear of being recognized once she shed her layers, a tragic development by anyone’s reckoning. The one upside to the stopover was that she’d been able to score a traveler’s pipe case, a cheap coalstick, and some decent flake tubāq from the mercantile, so she could properly teach herself how to smoke Maroto’s pipe—she’d picked up a big pouch of shag in Thao, but had lost it all in an ill-advised wager with Digs before she’d been able to sample a single bowl. Only the Old Watchers of Flintland knew when next they’d pass through a frontier town with decent pipeweed, but she tried not to let her luck go to her head… and then sure enough, she’d almost immediately countered this rare spot of good fortune by foolishly mentioning the score to Diggelby, and in the same phrasing, and so for the past day and night he’d not said three words that weren’t related to her learning how to smoke Maroto’s pipe.

  “Now it’s true that I never cared to wrap my lips around Maroto’s, but that doesn’t mean I can’t offer some valuable advice to a novice,” Digs told her after she’d told him to shut his pretty mouth for the umpteenth time. “For one thing, Maroto’s is bound to be a good bit older than most of the pipes I’ve tried, so you’ll want to treat it delicately. Especially the tip, those can become quite vulnerable over the years; never know when the last smoker clamped down with their teeth!”

  “Quiet!” The more she used Sullen and Keun-ju’s mantra, the more she found herself sympathizing with the pair of sourpusses. Unlike herself, Digs didn’t know when to give a gag a rest, and the fact that she now highly doubted he’d ever sucked any cock at all and was just being childish wasn’t helping. Gesturing ahead to where Sullen and Keun-ju had paused and set down the Procuress’s post in the dead leaves, she said, “Can’t you see they’re trying to think?”

  “I had noticed an inordinate amount of perspiration greasing their unscrubbed necks,” said Digs. “Which is why I thought it the perfect time to coach you on your new hobby—with those two sages sizing up their subject we may be here for quite some time.”

  This wasn’t strictly inaccurate. The tamarind pylon had led them off the road and back into the wilderness shortly after leaving the hostelry in Black Moth, and on they had gone throughout the morning and afternoon, scratching themselves stupid on increasingly thick underbrush and getting cobwebby moss tangled up on the pony’s pack. Yet despite it not being time for Digs and Purna’s next shift nor to break for the night, Sullen had called a stop and fished out Hoartrap’s compass to double-check their course. The problem was obvious—over the last few hours the open wood had become pitted with soggy spots, then more and more pools, and then the forest had contracted entirely, with expanses of bald cypress-studded stagnant water stretching out on either side of them. The ground had proved solid enough, at least, gaining a little elevation over the slough as they strolled along the narrow natural causeway. Fine and good, so long as it held… but of course it didn’t. They had now come to discover that the avenue of dry, leaf-carpeted land was in fact a peninsula, with a final steep slope dropping down almost a dozen feet into the wide-open waters of the swamp. The curious thing was that from this point on the aquatic trees fell away, too, leaving a vast, wet hole in the middle of the marshy forest, but on the far side of the boggy clearing the trail looked to rise out of the mire and resume its course. A shallow pond or lake, obviously, with an abundance of beaver dams in place of trees out there on one side of the pool; hardly a thing to warrant a full stop.

  If only to escape Digs’s interminable needling, she marched to the end of the track and joined the other two, who were hunched over the soiled map and rusting compass.

  “Soooooo, gentlemen, what’s it to be? Do we ford the fetid fen in hopes yon swell of earth is a continuation of this shortcut our magic post led us on, or bite the bitter pill of regret and retrace our footsteps, lest it prove nothing but a mirage of weary wanderers?”

  “Huh?” Sullen finally looked up from the compass, whose needle pointed straight across the depressing pond.

  “Should we plunge ahead or turn back and try to find a way around,” translated Keun-ju. “To which I still say we just go for it. I don’t mind a little mess.”

  “Long as I’ve awaited those words to leave your veil, I fear this is not the context I had hoped for,” said Digs, fanning flies away from their pony’s face with his goofy hat. “These boots are made for walking, sir, not wading.”

  “It doesn’t look more than ankle-deep,” said Keun-ju. “It’s no worse than a wide mud puddle, and much better than knee-deep snow.”

  “Graveyard,” Sullen muttered, scratching his unkempt bloom of tight white curls. “Old man at the inn said we shouldn’t cut through the graveyard.”

  “I believe his exact words were mind the road, stay out the woods,” corrected Purna. “All that beware the graveyard and the castle of the dead business sounded like an afterthought. Besides, seeing as how both our post and our compass ignored the main thrust of the man’s advice it seems silly to bring up the point about steering clear of cemeteries and keeps, when it’s the only suggestion we’re following. Unless you think by graveyard he meant random patch of swamp?”

  “Begging your pardon, Purna,” said Digs, “but I seem to recall it a mite differently. What he actually said was beeeewaaaaaare the graaaaaaaaaveyaaaard and the casssssstle of the deeeeeeeead.”

  “No he didn’t,” said Purna, in no mood for cutting up with him after his merciless ribbing of before. “He said it normally.”

  “I wouldn’t go as far as that,” said Keun-ju, having inexplicably lightened up after their first night in the Haunted Forest. In a remarkably close imitation of the pinch-faced ancient who had sent them off that morning, he said, “Mind the rud. Sty oot the wud. Bevarr the graveyurd und the cassel uv the deed.”

  “Old people aren’t always as daft as they sound,” said Sullen, wagging a finger at them. “I think we better turn back. If we ignore the post for now and then try it again a ways up the road it’ll probably show us another path.”

  “Sullen. Baby,” said Digs, which looked like it went down as well with the nephew as it had with the uncle. Undeterred by the man’s scowl, Digs pointed out at the still expanse. “I know Grampa Ginger-nut said we shouldn’t take any shortcuts through graveyards or castles, but does that look like any graveyard you’ve ever seen? Or a castle, for that matter? Because I’ve been all over the blessed Empire, and I’ve yet to find a place where they dispose of the dead by feeding them to beavers, or refer to their dams as castles.”

  “Beavers?” asked Sullen, and though it broke her ever-loving heart, Purna refrained from making a crack about how she’d thought he’d become familiar with that particular fur-bearing game after meeting their general. Among the many differences she’d noticed between Maroto and Sullen was a distinct lack of wit in the younger relation.

  “Those… things out there, the big piles of sticks? They’re beaver dams,” said Digs. “Or nests or whatever, I suppose there isn’t very much to dam up in a swamp. Or do you think the good people of Black Moth come allllll the way out here to bury their kin under—”

  “All right,” said Sullen, pointing at the far shore some hundred meters off. “You and Purna take the post across.”

  “I’m not going down there until you walk all the way out and make sure it doesn’t get deeper,” Purna told Digs. “For a man who didn’t want to get his hose wet you sure worked hard to get us post duty for the crossing.”

  “Maroto always lets us draw straws to see who goes first,” protested Diggelby, but then threw up his hands and marched straight down into the bog. He probably figured it would be quicker to just walk across than explain to Sullen what drawing straws meant. The coppery water only came to his calves, and he began poking the mud in front of him with Hassan’s genuine dromedary-pizzle swagger stick a
s he advanced out into the open swamp.

  “Who will give me two-to-one odds that he sinks to his chin before he’s made it to the far shore?” asked Purna, but neither of the other two were of a sporting mood. Too broke, no doubt, and sensible enough to guess she never took a foolish bet. Now a dozen paces out into the shallow water, Digs waved them on, and Purna sighed. “Well, come on then—I want to be close enough to throw him a rope if he steps in quickmud. Up, magic post!”

  As many good grins as she and Digs had got out of barking that silly command at Sullen and Keun-ju when it was their turn to hoist the tamarind log, it seemed almost fair it now came back to haunt her—it was the right forest for it, anyway. Pointing at the heavy front of the post, Sullen said, “Nah, think it’s your turn to take the lead. I’ll bring up the rear since your boy got ahead of you, but soon as we’re across you two are taking an honest shift for a change.”

  Purna blew her fearless leader the raspberry to end all raspberries; another advantage of her devilish resurrection. But when she went to lift it Sullen shooed her off with a dopey smile, taking the front while Keun-ju lifted the back, and she realized he had been messing with her. Sullen’s sense of humor was like everything else about him—not stupid so much as just plain odd.

  Taking Princess by the bridle, Purna led her down the soft slope, into the bayou after Digs. The water was only an inch or two deep, but so was the mud—this was going to suck in more ways than one. As she trudged ahead, Keun-ju muttered something that Purna didn’t hear but somehow achieved something even rarer than one of Sullen’s attempts at levity—it made the big galoot chuckle. Earlier in their quest she would have been overjoyed to see the two grumps getting along, but now it just exasperated her. Maybe it was the crumpled poster in her pocket that put Purna in such a lousy mood, or maybe it was the fact that even after all this time she couldn’t stop her stupid tongue from hanging out of her mouth for more than a minute before she felt like she was drowning on it, but this day was a dud round, and picking her way across a half-drained beaver pond wasn’t exactly improving matters.