A Blade of Black Steel

by Alex Marshall

  She tried to fortify herself by remembering why she was out here, who she was doing all this for… and remembered Maroto as she’d last seen him: wild-eyed and buggy on the battlefield, talking too fast to be understood. It wasn’t her fondest memory of her chum, but it was what came to mind as she trudged through the piss-warm water. The Mighty Maroto, probably running as fast as he could to Zosia’s hated enemy Queen Indsorith just as soon as he found out his old flame was actually a cold fish… and like the dog-girl she’d become, Purna was hot on his trail, for reasons that were no longer quite so obvious, all things considered.

  Ahead of her, Digs began to colorfully curse, pinwheeling his arms in vain as an overambitious step led to him falling with dramatic slowness. He went facedown in the muck. Purna gave a triumphant cry and looked back over her shoulder to grin at Hassan and Din, but of course they were dead and gone, and the two po-faced boys who had taken their place looked at Purna like she was the asshole for laughing at Digs’s clumsiness. She turned back to their floundering scout, Digs acting like he was drowning in a few inches of muddy water and trying desperately to retrieve his boat-like hat before it sailed beyond the reach of his swagger stick, and shook her head.

  Fucking Maroto. He better be down on one knee, praying for his old chums to rescue him, with big snotty bubbles in his nose and tear-streaming eyes, hoping against hope for salvation. It was only fair that he suffer some really, really stinky fate in the interim, considering all the bother they were going through on his account.

  Maroto had suffered in his day; not even his most hated enemy would dispute that point. Some of it had been his own doing, he’d fess to that, but plenty of it hadn’t; bad luck, worse luck, hells, worst luck, you name it and Maroto had endured it. Physical agony and emotional, the hurt of desire and harder still, the pain of attainment, he’d been there, he’d paid his dues… overpaid, in most cases, and never been given any change. He thought he knew every kind of misery there was, a veteran martyr if ever there was one, but here on Jex Toth, as the days blurred into weeks and the weeks blurred into regrets that he hadn’t better kept track of the days, Maroto had managed to discover a new kind of pain. Her name was Bang Lin.

  It wasn’t her flirting that got to him, though his commitment not to engage her on those terms could be a burden, fit as he found her and fine a pastime as flirting undeniably was.

  It wasn’t her giving him the hardest chores, or the way she’d sit back and make cracks about his glistening thews as he carried them out… though that could be severely irritating, too. Everyone likes a compliment, but there’s a time and a place for such things, and someone doing you the solid of rigging up a hammock out of a salvaged sail is definitely not it.

  It wasn’t even her insistence that he always be the one to accompany her on expeditions deeper into the interior of Jex Toth, where the presence of quicksand, deadly snakes, and minor monsters incurred a slightly higher risk than came from staying near camp to watch the bay for ships, as Dong-won and Niki-hyun did.

  What it was, straight up, was not even her doing, but Maroto’s, and it was this—despite his refusal to even acknowledge her double entendres, despite his careful looking away whenever she bathed in the pool or otherwise exposed an appealing portion of her anatomy, despite his tender thoughts and intense dreams of Choi, despite his promise to himself not to get hung up on another girl who was obvious trouble, Maroto had developed a crush on the pirate captain. A crush can be uncomfortable, obviously, especially when one knows as well as Maroto did that the object of his affection has no genuine interest in him, that it was a passion that could never be quenched… or at least a minor infatuation that seems incurable until something better comes along.

  But Maroto had been hurt by love before, obviously, and being sweet on a new acquaintance is not even in the same realm as spending twenty years punishing yourself over a woman the way Maroto had.

  No, what messed him up so bad, what gave him palpitations when he thought about it, and what he couldn’t stop thinking about, even though it gave him palpitations, was how utterly doomed Bang was. Ever since he’d first started rolling with Purna he’d half known he’d be the death of the girl, and surprise surprise, his gut instincts had been right for a change… and as soon as he’d gotten her killed, he went and met another feisty young woman. Bang was quite different from Purna in appearance and personality, but bore close enough a resemblance in certain ways to have her fate sealed by Maroto’s very presence. This one wanted to be a pirate, not a barbarian, but Maroto knew the devil wasn’t in that detail, it was in him—he was the common link, and it was only a matter of time before Bang bought it in a bad way. He could barely look at her smiling, metal-studded grill without envisioning some deformed jungle beast bursting from the bush to decapitate her. Every rill they drank from and every fruit they foraged was sure to be her last, and that would be that—vomiting blood, she’d die slow, painfully, clinging to his arm and gasping out words between heaves, making him promise to look after Dong-won and Niki-hyun after she… after she… and then she was gone, the shine leaving her eyes as Maroto closed his in shame.

  “You still with me, Useful?” she called down the ridge, and Maroto shook off the vision, knowing as he did that it wouldn’t stay gone for long. The gut-pinching daydreams were faithful as bound devils, always returning to his side. Even now another one was coming on, as he looked up the wildflower-covered saddle they climbed and saw her striking a cocky posture with a knee up on a boulder, peering into the distance. It would be just the opportunity for an emperor centipede to strike one of her tan legs, and reeling back, she’d slip, tumbling over the edge to—“Shake a fat leg, Useful, I don’t have all day! Looks like there’s something up ahead and I’m not inclined to take the lead when I can send you in first.”

  He knew he must look crazed, but as he hustled up the narrow, treeless ridge after her he cuffed the side of his head a couple of times, as though his compulsive imagination could be dislodged like water from an ear. Well, you never knew until you tried. Bang watched his approach from her perch, her hands on her hips, the flower-scented breeze stirring her blood-coral hair around her tan, tattooed face. The hot color suited her better than the fading green had, and that gave Maroto a rush of satisfaction—he’d been the one who spent hours on the hunt, splashing through tide pools and risking a nasty case of coral burn harvesting the dangerous growths, and even grinding up the pigment himself, adding in kamala fruit and some ruddy beetles as a sort of sympathetic magic to make the dye as red as possible. Under Captain Bang’s orders, it was all literally thankless work, but the vibrant results were their own reward.

  “So what do you make of that, old salt?” she asked as he clambered up the flowering knoll to join her, and blinking the sweat out of his eyes, he saw what she’d been looking at. The bottom of the next valley over had previously been hidden by vegetation and the angle, but up here on the steeply climbing ridge he now saw a wide white river winding through it… a frozen river, with the occasional tree rising from it.

  “It’s a road,” he decided. “Alabaster, or white marble or something.”

  “That’s what I thought,” said Bang, and pointed far up the exposed saddle to where the grass- and flower-ornamented ridge rose to a summit crowned with similar white stone. “And I bet my bottom we’ll get a better look at where it leads from up there.”

  “I’ll take that bet,” said Maroto, so busy following the distant road with his eye that he didn’t pay attention to the stakes. “See how overgrown it is down there? We’re in the sweet spot right here, soon as we climb up or go down the road’ll get eaten up by the jungle again.”

  “It’s a wager, then,” said Bang, grabbing the hand he’d been using to shield his eyes and shaking the unholy hell out of it. “Both our bottoms are on the line, but just you wait and see, Useful, you’re not in the sweet spot yet! Now shake both your legs, all this talk of going down and eating jungles is getting me antsy.”

 
“That’s not what I said!” It was hopeless, though, Bang already moving along up the ridge, and Maroto followed her. There was a time not so long ago that he would’ve relished going second up a soft climb like this, taking the opportunity to admire the way Bang’s baggy cut-offs went taut against her thin, muscular legs and narrow rear as she picked her way up the saddle… but those days were behind him, and he intended to keep it that way. He kept his focus on the ground in front of him, and when that became impossible due to Bang pausing and wiggling her butt in his face as she fished around for a better handhold, he looked back at the panorama spread out behind them.

  The grassy ridgeline gave way on either side to even steeper slopes, earthen cliffs, really, hung with trellises of orange and pink blossoms. Both sheer sides of the saddle eventually plunged into the interminable jungle, but back the way they’d come a band of azure now shimmered at the top of all that emerald as the Haunted Sea came back into view, a border on the manifest color wheel between rich green flora and pale blue sky. Once you moved inland from the gentle beaches and sheer headlands of the coast, Jex Toth became a series of incredibly steep but short and narrow mountains intercut with equally tight and densely wooded valleys, as though the jungle grew atop the splayed fingers of a titan.

  Yet here at last they seemed to be moving into new terrain, the ridge they now followed the first they had encountered that rose above the treeline, and beyond it the miniature mountains loomed taller and wider, and the valleys spread out accordingly. It was pretty, this place, and he felt the old elbow of guilt grinding into his heart as he thought of how much Purna would have loved it, this scenic wilderness full of monsters he’d never even heard of and more adventure than you could shake a curved Ugrakari blade at.

  “Answer me a question, Useful,” said Bang, and as was usually the case, it sounded more like an order than a question.

  “Sure.” Turning back from the breathtaking landscape, Maroto found himself staring at a more immediate but nonetheless impressive vista: Bang still had her arse perilously close to his head, hanging from an especially sharp uptick in the ridge like a cat clinging to a curtain.

  “Would it kill you to give me a boost? I know the thought of touching me gives you the fantods, but unless you help we may be at an impasse.”

  “Right, of course,” said Maroto, his fingers far too quick to leap at her bottom for his liking. “Sorry, Bang, my mind was elsewhere.”

  “Sorry, Captain Bang,” she corrected, floating up to easier climbing with the help of his hands. “So where were you, Useful? Someplace much more interesting than the Sunken Kingdom, with all its mundane sights that no mortal has glimpsed in ten lifetimes?”

  “Sunken Kingdom,” repeated Maroto, digging his fingers through warm grass and the twisting stalks of tiny flowers, into the cool, black earth, each hand and foothold in the ridge taking them farther away from the old-growth jungle below. “Tell you this much, Captain, Niki-hyun was right that first day we all met—wherever we are now didn’t just rise from the seabed last month. If it went somewhere it wasn’t under the waves, that much is obvious.”

  “Obvious is the word, all right—that fact just now sinking into your doddering pate, Grampa Useful?” asked Bang, her boot slipping and almost bonking Maroto in the nose. He dug his toes deeper into the dirt, this unexpected climb up a soft and sun-drenched saddle the first time he’d been okay with his involuntary barefootedness since arriving in a jungle full of sharp rock outcroppings, prickly vegetation, and snakes snakes snakes. “Or you just trying to dodge the question?”

  “Okay, it’s like this…” said Maroto, because it was long past time he kept his promise to Purna’s memory and properly told her story to the world that was poorer for her passing. “That first night on the beach, I told you about my friend Purna, remember?”

  “Your friend who died, just before some others betrayed you and wizarded you here, yeah?”

  “That’s her,” said Maroto, pausing to haul himself up and over another steep patch. His belly was nearly flat against the grass and itchy flowers, but if he leaned back too far he’d topple over and roll all the way down. “Except she died after they sent me here. Wizarded is a good word for it, too.”

  “Wait…” Bang inched up over another hummock, seeming to climb straight into the blue sky. “How do you know she’s dead, if you got dumped here before she died?”

  “She…” It was Maroto’s turn to pause, but not just so he could focus on the ascent. He ground his forehead into the cool, soft grass until his grief passed, then explained, “She was hurt too bad to recover. Nobody could survive what happened to her.”

  “Fuck that,” said Bang, pausing to look back down at him. “You didn’t see her die, you don’t know she’s dead. That’s basic, Useful, as basic as basic gets.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” growled Maroto, knowing she only meant to help but nevertheless insulted. “False hope is worse than no hope, Bang. Believe me, that’s a lesson I—”

  “Captain Bang,” she growled back, kicking the earth beside his head. “And I don’t give a shark’s shart what lessons you think you’ve learned, Useful, there’s always hope for our friends, until we know for certain. I’ve met a woman who the whole Star swore was dead, and just before I dragged you from the water I dodged a doom that any sane person would think a foregone conclusion. Becalmed in the Haunted Sea, water full of monsters, boat afire, off the coast of the Sunken fucking Kingdom, and you want to tell me about false hope? ’Twas false hope what made me and Niki-hyun swim for shore instead of going down with the Queen Thief, and false hope that lit the signal fire Dong-won spied through the night.”

  She went quiet, but while he couldn’t see her face from down here Maroto sensed she wasn’t finished, so he stayed quiet, too. After a spell, she cleared her throat and said, “I’m not a fool, Useful, I know the odds are long for the rest of my crew, and I’ll live my life accordingly. But I won’t give up on them, not until their bodies wash in on the tide. And I’m not naïve enough to think you’ll listen, but I’ll say it all the same, because while I’d lie to my own mother’s face I’ll never bullshit my crew, nor spare their feelings at the expense of the truth, and this is the truth: you didn’t see your friend Purna die, you don’t know she’s dead. Basic shit. Let her live in your heart, man, at least until you’ve gotten yourself off this rock and can start worrying about someone’s skin other than your own.”

  It was a good speech, so good, in fact, that Maroto was sure some new winged horror was about to snatch Bang off the ridge, the ironic punctuation to her youthful optimism. When that didn’t happen, he tried to let her words actually seep in a little, instead of just washing over him. Oh, how he wished he could share her childish hope, but life had taught him that things were always worse than you feared, never better…

  But what then of Zosia? Bang just mentioned meeting someone the whole world thought dead, straight up confirming what Maroto already knew—that Zosia had been the ex-lover who had carved Bang’s pipe. Zosia who Maroto had given up for dead along with everyone else, because even if he hadn’t witnessed her death himself it seemed impossible she could have survived the fate everyone insisted had befallen her. What if instead of believing those who said she had died, Maroto had kept his hopes alive? He’d been mostly successful thinking that way about dear Choi, and Din and Hassan, so why not for Purna, too? What if instead of wasting every day since he’d been dumped out here mourning her death, he had let himself cling to the chance that all was not as it seemed?

  You had to let the dead go, of course you did. Refusing to acknowledge their passing could only lead to your squandering your own life, possibly even madness… but wasn’t that what Maroto had done with Zosia, anyway? He’d given up all hope that she lived, true, but he hadn’t moved on, hadn’t accepted it. It wasn’t Zosia’s presumed death that had destroyed Maroto’s life, but his refusal to let her go—he thought she’d been the one to die yet it was he who had
become the ghost, driven only by sorrow and loss, existing only to grieve her…

  And over twenty years later, he discovered she’d never died, that his whole tragic-hero-with-a-bug-habit bit had been on account of a tragedy that had never actually happened. And as soon as he learned this, another beloved comrade seemed to fall, and he committed himself to avenging her memory… the same fucking way he had with Zosia. His pledge to find and kill Hoartrap and everyone else responsible for Purna’s death bore a striking resemblance to his pledge to kill Indsorith after he’d heard about Zosia. And after the young queen kicked the living shit out of him, he’d been so scared of dying that he’d sworn that dumb oath not to lift a sword against her, and started on his steady descent into depression and addiction.

  Thinking back on it, why hadn’t Queen Indsorith just killed him when he stormed her throne room, demanding a duel? Why had she let him off with the oath? He hadn’t much thought about it since finding out Zosia lived, but now it was starting to make sense—Indsorith saw the grief-maddened Maroto, a man willing to burn his whole life to avenge his beloved, and took pity on him, because she knew Zosia still lived but must not have taken him into her confidence. The Crimson Queen must have realized how wretched Maroto was long before he did; she must have been moved to mercy, to offer him a chance to start over, and what had he done with this second chance? Squandered it, the same as he did with every other good thing that had ever happened to him… that was what he had done with Zosia’s friendship, too, wasn’t it? Squandered it, demanding affection she never felt, poisoning their relationship with his selfish insistence that she give him something more, something physical… she might have viewed him as a brother, if he hadn’t insisted on treating her as a bashful sweetheart.