“Apocalyptic war makes for strange bedfellows, as I’m sure you’ve recently discovered,” said Hoartrap. “But Empress Ryuki has agreed to join our cause against the Chain once her shores are safe, and that’s just too tempting, isn’t it? An armada of turtleships swarming Desolation Sound as we lead ten thousand Immaculate foot soldiers through the Othean Gate and into Diadem—I’m getting goose pimples again! A much more practical approach than leading a couple thousand frostbitten humps into Diadem now and hoping for the best.”
“Only if we win at Othean,” said Domingo. “If we fall there, it’s all over.”
“Don’t be a gloomy Gus!” Hoartrap chided. “If we fall anywhere, it’s all over, that’s how falling works. And what do we gain by taking Diadem first if all the Immaculate Isles are sacked in the meantime? Believe you me, I’d rather be taking us to Samoth, too, but war’s all about making personal sacrifices, isn’t it?”
“Hmph,” said Domingo, unable to hear that word without getting queasy. “And what about Cold Zosia’s personal sacrifice, then? Were you able to bring her back from Diadem, or send word of the change in plans?”
“I’m afraid not,” said Hoartrap, which went a long way toward explaining his ill temper this morn. “As soon as Ji-hyeon convinced me of the tactical benefits of shifting our campaign to the Isles, I popped straight over to Diadem myself to tell Zosia, but she can be a hard woman to find, as you well know. Wasted the whole night there, when I should have been scouting out the Isles.”
Hoartrap’s cavalier attitude about traveling through Gates was probably meant to inspire confidence, but it only made the freak seem freakier.
“So Zosia’s going to expose herself, rally some rabble, and start a diversion, all for an attack that will never come?” At long last, some good news for Domingo to glom to! “She’ll be a sitting duck in Diadem?”
“In the best of all possible outcomes,” said Hoartrap irritably. “Frankly, I have no idea if she ever arrived. Just because her devil took her into the Gate doesn’t mean he led her out again. I warned her not to trust him, that he was too powerful to push around like the rest of his kind, but did she listen? We may never see her again, and all for the pride that made her push away my friendship in favor of a capricious devil. Tragic, really.”
“I’m on the verge of tears,” said Domingo placidly. “So General Ji-hyeon has the Five Villains at her command and doesn’t even have Cold Cobalt to worry about. Not a bad strategic development, from her standpoint.”
“Three Villains, actually,” said Hoartrap, getting more and more peeved the longer they talked. “Chevaleresse Singh and her children deserted last night, along with their dragoons, and I seem to have misplaced Maroto. The lummox was making the sorts of noises that I worried might permanently cool Zosia’s rage toward the Crown, and rage is quite the hot commodity when you’re waging a war—pun intended, by the way—so I enlisted him to do some reconnaissance.”
“But you… misplaced him?” That did not sound very good.
“It was a rash decision, I’ll admit, and one I’ve come to regret,” said Hoartrap. “I’ve snuck back over to look for him a few times, since our circumstances have changed and he no longer needs to be protected from himself, but sadly, without success. If I’d been thinking ahead I would have given him a little going away present so I could easily find him again, but to be honest at the time I wasn’t sure if we’d ever be of any more use to one another. It was that kind of spat, Maroto jamming his foot into the gears of my grand design and then blaming me when he came away with a boo-boo. But I digress; it’s a dodgy business, poking around where he’s gone, but we may have ample time to try again in the days to come—think of Maroto as an advance Cobalt scout on Jex Toth.”
At times like this, Domingo really, really wished he’d kept his mouth shut and didn’t provoke the witch into talking so much. As usual, the conversation was interesting, but it was also quite obviously the sort of secret intelligence that people would kill to protect. Being brought into Hoartrap’s confidence made Domingo feel like the rodent drinking buddy of an adulterous cobra.
“Well, I suppose we’ll all have a better idea of what’s what on the other side,” said Domingo, and seeking to remind the deranged sorcerer of his allegiances, he added, “And I’ll trust that wherever you take us, and whoever you enlist, it’s all bringing us that much closer to seeing every Chainite church in flames, and every cleric, monk, and nun swinging from a tree.”
“Ooooh, but you are just a man after my own heart,” said Hoartrap with an unwholesome grin, his yellowish face looking as fake as the dummies in that wax museum Efrain was so obsessed with for a summer. To Domingo’s extreme displeasure, Hoartrap reached out and placed one of his paraffin-soft palms on top of Domingo’s age-speckled left hand. “I remember how dashing you looked all those years ago, and even now I see that haughty, handsome young colonel looking back at me—where do the years go, Domingo? Why didn’t we ever make time for us?”
“Yes, well, you’ve got more important matters than molesting me,” said Domingo, pulling his hand away… and feeling such contentment that it once more had a pommel to rest on. “See you on the other side of the First Dark, I hope.”
“I hope so, too,” said Hoartrap so somberly that Domingo wondered if the Touch had mistakenly assumed he was being poetically existential instead of simply literal, but there was no sense correcting the madman. “Before we can be reunited, though, I have the supreme privilege of playing errand boy for our august general, as if I have nothing better to do with my time than courier love letters and baubles all over the Star. If I didn’t owe the boy in question a rather sizable debt I’m eager to see paid and out of the way I’d tell her where to stick her oh so special delivery, but that’s life, isn’t it? Some days you’re the devil-eater, but most you’re just another bound devil, enslaved to the capricious whims of your intellectual lessers.”
“I think I know the feeling,” said Domingo, though most of Hoartrap’s bellyaching went right over his head.
“Well then, I’ll go my way and you go yours, and let’s compare notes over tea when next we meet,” said the Touch, squeezing Domingo’s shoulder. “Oh, and I’d suggest you keep your eyes open when you go through the Gate—it’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience, at least for most mortals.”
And leaving Domingo to ponder what he might see, exactly, Hoartrap the Touch scurried off into the torch-brightened morning to clear a path of a dozen steps between the Lark’s Tongue valley and Othean’s Temple of Pentacles.
CHAPTER
23
Ji-hyeon punctuated the end of her speech by thrusting her new sword high into the air, the ebon steel flashing in the torchlight. For but a moment the only sound was the crackling of pitch and Hoartrap’s low murmurs behind the general, but then one girl up near the front started banging her gauntlet on her shield, and it caught like wildfire. Turning to Fennec, she cut the blade through the air, and, taking a deep breath, he stepped up to the rim of the Gate, its black surface flashing with lightning-like streaks as Hoartrap held his palms out over the edge. Behind Fennec was his squad of a hundred plate-armored meatheads, all knocking their fists into their shields. Pointing into the Gate with the sword in her left hand, Ji-hyeon saluted them with her right.
Maybe it was the speech that had convinced them. Maybe they really believed that the fate of the Star hung in the balance, and if this new enemy was not stopped at Othean it would not be stopped at all. Maybe they believed in a thing greater than coin or conquest, the notion that all people of the Star deserved to live, and with the same liberties they would seek for themselves.
Maybe, but not bloody likely. These two thousand soldiers who had rallied behind her, who had followed her up to the very Gate and now made their support known with the clangor of heavy metal, these Cobalt heroes… they were in it for the money she had promised them if they came, for the wages she wouldn’t pay if they didn’t. A few were brave from Fennec’s special so
ur ale, and many more were fearless from the regular stuff they’d been told would gird them from cowardice. They were going to march through this Gate because they were trapped between Imperials who would almost definitely kill them and a devilish scheme that might not. They didn’t believe anymore, if they ever had, except in something even stronger than ideals, sharper than faith: they believed in getting good and drunk before they died in a truly legendary fashion.
Except Fennec. He could have fled in the night like Singh, but here he stood, returning her salute with the inhuman hand he had acquired the first time he went through a Gate on her behalf. On the far side of Fennec and his squadron stood Ji-hyeon’s second father. Over the mountain range of armored heads and through the forest of pikes, she saw Kang-ho watching Fennec, his former lover, his former friend, and when Ji-hyeon returned her attention to Fennec he had dropped his hand and turned back to the Gate. It was time.
Fennec had gone first the last time, too, when they had fled into the Othean Gate instead of arriving through it, but he had held her hand when they went, and she’d been pulled in too quickly to see what happened. Now she had the proper perspective and plenty of examples to monitor, as first Fennec and then his squad stepped briskly over the edge and vanished from her sight. Instead of dropping feet-first into tarry black nothingness, each individual seemed to swing stiffly forward and down, as though there were hinges in the soles of their feet. There was no flapping of arms, no trying to catch themselves as they fell onto their faces atop the Gate, even their stride staying steady, and she realized that was because they weren’t falling forward at all, but rather the perspective had become impossible to process; despite it appearing to be flat on the ground, they weren’t stepping out over the Gate, they were simply walking through it.
When the last of Fennec’s soldiers passed over and Choi began leading another unit into place, Kang-ho cut through the gap between the squads, joining his daughter at the edge of the Gate. Overhead, Fellwing’s plumage was once again blacker than the night sky as she circled them both, the devil staying very close to her mistress this near a Gate. Ji-hyeon didn’t acknowledge her second father’s appearance, though her bodyguards certainly did, moving slightly closer as well.
“Yesterday’s fashions are out, I see.” He must have been too upset the previous night to notice the new helm resting on its peg, but he certainly noticed it resting on her head. “May I?”
“Now what kind of fool would I be to take off my armor on the middle of a battlefield?” she asked him, but was already loosening the chinstrap. It was too cool not to show off to one of the few people who could really appreciate it. Swinging it free and handing him the open-faced Immaculate helmet, she gave the signal for Choi to go in after Fennec. While her dad cooed over the buckle work and glittering steel, Ji-hyeon kept her eyes on Choi’s red ones, until her former Honor Guard led her soldiers into the Gate, too. As Faaris Kimaera and the remaining members of his cavalry dismounted to enter, she noted with satisfaction that the horses weren’t shying away from the Gate now that Hoartrap had “opened” it, just as he’d said they wouldn’t. She turned back to her dad and snapped her new sword up under his nose, nearly making him drop the helmet. “Want to have a better look at this, too?”
“That’s close enough, thank you,” he said, handing back her helmet and giving the black blade a cursory inspection. “Odd pattern on the steel—looks almost like a horsehair pot. You know if you deck someone with that knuckle-duster hilt it’ll break the two fingers you’ve got left.”
“I know,” she said, reverting to the affectations of her younger years to mess with her dad… and to cover up how devastated she was by the news of Hwabun. When the bearded vulture devil had flown into the command tent just after midnight, carrying the treaty Empress Ryuki had already signed and stamped, Ji-hyeon had read it twice before adding her own ink, and then twice more, hoping she had missed something. But while exactingly precise in the terms of the truce, the document had offered no further details concerning the fate of Hwabun, and had there been any hope at all for the Bong family, the empress would surely have dangled it to further entice Ji-hyeon home. Her hands were shaking when she’d held up the signed treaty and the intimidating courier had winged away with it, back to Othean via the Lark’s Tongue Gate… but they weren’t shaking anymore, and she put her hand on her second father’s shoulder.
“I’m proud of you, Ji-hyeon,” he told her, and looking into his bloodshot eyes, she actually believed him. “Can I… can I give you a hug before we go through?”
“Daaaad, not in front of the troops,” she said, fitting her helm back into place. And seeing that lower lip begin to tremble, she whispered, “I’m going through last, so wait until then.”
“Where’s my daughter?” said Kang-ho, looking all around. “Where is she? You look just like her, but I know no child of mine would ever do a sensible thing like leading from the rear.”
“Don’t worry, I’m not going last for tactical reasons,” Ji-hyeon told him, signaling another squadron forward with the sword made from her lover’s ancestor, the cobalt feathers Hoartrap had found devils knew where swaying atop her helm. “I’m King Jun-hwan’s daughter, too, and that means I know how to make an entrance.”
And what an entrance it was, Hoartrap’s pledge to see every single soldier, steed, and cart horse safely through the Gates proven once and for all.
Dawn was just breaking, lending its warm glow to the golden roofs and terraces of the Autumn Palace when Ji-hyeon Bong and her second father stepped out from the wide pearlescent doors of the Temple of Pentacles, Royal Guards standing at attention on every ivory step leading down to the terra-cotta path through the pumpkin fields. Hoartrap had other business to attend to after he sent them through, so they didn’t have a ghoulish show-stealer trailing after them, and the entire Cobalt Company waited for her, lined up along the road. General Ji-hyeon Bong had returned through the Othean Gate, as no champion had since the Age of Wonders.
And hard as Ji-hyeon had planned her triumphant return to Othean, Empress Ryuki had still upstaged her.
The sovereign matriarch of all the Immaculate Isles sat watching their approach from atop a terraced mountain of mahogany and gold brocade that had been erected just in front of the temple, a dozen Royal Guards kneeling on each of the platform’s dozen steps. The Cobalt Company was in formation beyond this dais, an obvious move on Othean’s part to establish from the outset that Ji-hyeon’s army was now entirely behind the empress… and behind the thick twin bands of blue that bordered the road were twin seas of emerald armor, the entire Immaculate army brought out to fill the fields and make an unmistakable impression.
As Ji-hyeon and Kang-ho stepped down to the terra-cotta road from which the majestic pulpit rose, the Cobalts were blocked from view by the temporary throne room; another heavy-handed symbol. The white-robed empress rose from her cushion of white fur with perfect poise, the cylindrical, meter-high white hat rising above her white face not shifting a single white hair, and then she held up a bone-white hand. Ji-hyeon didn’t like the woman making her bow as soon as she arrived to save her royal ass, but dropped to her knees in the red gravel all the same. Wouldn’t do to make a bad impression, especially since she now saw that every kneeling guard on the dais had a white bow on one side and a white-fletched arrow on the other, and Fellwing gave an unhappy chirp from her perch on Ji-hyeon’s shoulder.
“Yes,” said Empress Ryuki after a cramp-inducingly long silence. “I recognize you, even in such a state. Ji-hyeon Bong of Hwabun. Hwabun, which is no more.”
“Your Elegance, you honor me—” Ji-hyeon began, but it was not her emotion that cut her off, but the empress.
“I do no such thing.”
Ji-hyeon was utterly stumped as to the etiquette of how to respond to such a slight, but knew better than to look over to her second father for a clue. Obviously the empress had not believed Kang-ho’s proclamations of his daughter’s innocence. Well, let her be as nast
y as she needed to be, if it made her feel better about the death of Prince Byeong-gu—now that she’d signed a treaty with Ji-hyeon, some petty court bullshit was the only toll she could exact.
“What do you have to say for yourself, murderess?” demanded the empress, a decidedly unrefined edge to her voice.
Ji-hyeon almost did something stupid. She wasn’t sure what, but she really, really wanted to do something stupid. Instead, she held her tongue until the impulse passed, and looked up at Empress Ryuki as she tried to be diplomatic about this, the way her first father would have wanted her to.
“Your Elegance, I sympathize with your grief for the loss of Byeong-gu—I wear this white armband as a token of mourning for my fiancé,” she began, glad Kang-ho had talked her into tearing a strip off her sheet just before they’d set out that morning. “But I am no more responsible for his death than you are for the fate of my family at Hwabun. We are bound not only by the inhuman threat to the Immaculate Isles but also by our mutual loss. And I swear that once the terms of our treaty have been fulfilled, once Othean is again safe and the twin threats of Jex Toth and the Burnished Chain vanquished, then I will help you find your son’s assassin. I swear on the memory of Hwabun, I will bring Byeong-gu’s murderer before you, and prove my innocence.”
No wind stirred the silence that followed, or perhaps the breeze was ensnared by the barricade of twenty thousand Immaculate soldiers that surrounded the rebel general, the Immaculate Empress, and the Temple of Pentacles. Then the empress smiled, so faintly Ji-hyeon might have missed it if she were not studying the woman’s face for some token of understanding. Empress Ryuki said something too low for Ji-hyeon to hear, and the archer closest to her on the dais reached into his robe and held up a piece of parchment, his eyes never leaving Ji-hyeon as the empress stepped up behind him and retrieved the document.
A Blade of Black Steel Page 52
