“The smartest of the Five Villains? That’s damning with faint praise, sister, and besides, Hoartrap was wiser than any of us.”
“I didn’t say wise, I said clever,” countered Zosia. “To know that old serpent is to know the difference, too, so enough dodging—tell me your theory while I pack my briar, and then I’ll tell you how close you are.”
“Very well,” said Kang-ho, launching straight into it as he watched her fill her pipe from the terra-cotta jar of campfire-scented tubāq. “You faked your own death because your life was in such danger that you didn’t know any other way of thwarting your enemy. Telling anyone, even your closest friends, was too risky to yourself, and to us, so you fooled us all. Devil magic must have been involved, for there were a thousand witnesses who saw you fall, and I was one of them. After twenty years in hiding, living under an assumed name, that threat to your person has passed, and so you return… Am I warm?”
“You got the obvious one,” said Zosia. “Bungled the rest.”
“Give me a bone, woman. I’m not some wildborn to peer into that ugly skull of yours! I didn’t even think I was right about faking your death—why would you take such a path when you still have that hound of yours? Why not trade his freedom for a less drastic measure than abdicating your people, forsaking your friends?”
“He had his chance to be loosed,” said Zosia, glaring at where Choplicker rolled in the grass a short distance down the hill, trying to provoke the servants into playing with him. “Now he’ll never be free, no matter how great my need. I’d rather die. And they were never my people—they were glad to be rid of me.”
“Wellllll…” Kang-ho scratched his head, grinning at her. “People don’t always know what’s best for them.”
Zosia snorted. “I was a lot of things, but I wasn’t what was best for anyone. But believe me, Kang-ho, I never forsook my friends—had it been safe to contact you, I would have.”
“So I was warmer than you let on,” he said. “Let’s have the full account, then.”
“I…” Zosia wanted to tell him everything: why she had abdicated the Crimson Throne, how she had orchestrated the deception that had fooled the entire Star, what had become of her afterward… But watching Kang-ho’s face as he packed his smooth templewarden, she found she couldn’t. Not yet, anyway. “In time you’ll hear the whole of it, brother, but not yet. Knowing the details now would do you no good; if anything, it could bring you harm.”
“A guarded reply to an open welcome.” Kang-ho’s familiar pout warmed her heart. By the six devils she’d bound, she had missed her friend. “When will I hear this story, I wonder? Will it be after I give you whatever you’ve asked for?”
“I haven’t asked for anything,” she said, and waited until he had his pipe lit before adding, “But since you mention it…”
Kang-ho passed her the small leather-wrapped rod he’d heated on a candle, and she put the glowing end of the coalstick to her bowl. Puffing away on the pipe, tamping it down with the brass butt of the tool, and then lighting it again, she watched Kang-ho from the corner of her eye. His smile had returned.
“That’s more like it,” he said after they had both smoked in silence for a spell. “Rich tubāq on a warm spring day, old friends reuniting, the sea beneath and the heavens above. All is right in the world.”
“No, it’s not.” And because there really wasn’t any point in drawing it out, she said, “I need your help, brother. Will I have it?”
“Of course.” Kang-ho sounded offended that she would even ask. “I swore an oath, didn’t I?”
“And I released you from that oath,” said Zosia.
“Doesn’t mean I had to accept it,” he said, his kindness picking at a wound on her heart that would never heal. She kept her eyes from flitting toward Choplicker but knew he must be watching her. “Then again, the oath I swore was to a woman called Cobalt Zosia, blue of hair, fiery of spirit, and cold as the Frozen Savannahs to her enemies. She was the greatest warrior I have ever fought beside or against, the first in a hundred years to take the Carnelian Crown of Samoth by her own hand, and the first in legend to take the rest of the Crimson Empire in the bargain. I saw that woman plummet to her death, Moor Clell, and unless I hear some explanation of why a humble pipemaker such as yourself would choose to impersonate my dead friend and captain, well…”
“Say I eloped, then,” said Zosia, the pipe overheating in her hand as she puffed it far too vigorously. Eloped was close enough.
“And just who was the lucky lover?”
“Leib.” Zosia whispered his name for fear that saying it any louder would crush her spirit anew. “Leib Kalmah.”
“Leib,” said Kang-ho, and he sipped his pipe until it came to him. “Not the blond stripling who worked that upscale brothel? The one in Rawg we’d always hit coming back west from the Forsaken Empire?”
“Yeah, that’s him,” said Zosia, the most exquisite smoke she’d tasted in twenty years turning acrid on her tongue. “Mountain boy who ran off to find adventure in the Empire, and found me instead. The best lover I ever had, bought or otherwise. Best friend I ever chanced on.”
“You expect me to believe you gave up everything, your own hard-won empire, for a whore you could have installed in your castle?”
“It was the only chance for peace,” said Zosia, remembering how earnestly she had believed that. “I was a fool, Kang-ho, I see that now. I’ve made more mistakes than there are isles in the Immaculate Sea, but none worse than thinking I could just walk away, after all the things I’d done.”
“All the things we’d done, you mean,” said Kang-ho, patting her shoulder. “You’re too smart for regrets, Zosia. We both know that the one truth on all the Star is that you possess only what you take and what you are given. Some are blessed enough to rely on gifts, but for the rest of us, well, that’s why the devils gave us steel.”
“The Ugrakari say the devils never meant for us to have it, that we robbed the secret of swordmaking from them,” said Zosia. “They tell a tale of how a mortal crept down into the First Dark and stole a devil’s ploughshare, and when the fiend tried to take it back she showed him another use for the tool.”
“The Ugrakari eat their own dead,” said Kang-ho. “How much stock do you put in the myths of cannibals? And I ask this having married one, mind you.”
“About as much as I put in the justifications of a retired warlord who would have inherited this lovely island even if he hadn’t turned to villainy.”
“I would have inherited nothing if I hadn’t married the man my parents selected,” said Kang-ho. “Why do you think I left home in the first place? As far as barbaric customs go, forging my own destiny appealed to me quite a bit more than an arranged marriage.”
“And yet here you are.”
“Here I am.”
“What happened after I left?” asked Zosia. “After everyone thought they saw me die at the hands of that girl, what happened?”
“We Five all owed you our titles, but really they were just a means of prolonging the dream, and with your death we woke up… some faster than others. For Samoth and the rest of the Empire, it was bad, bad as it ever was. Your death brought a lot of factions together at first—as you surmised, conquerors aren’t usually held in high esteem. But any unification was short-lived. Despite what you announced before the duel, and despite Indsorith’s popularity with the people after she cast you down, there were many in the Empire who thought they had a stronger claim to the Crown than some upstart girl they’d never heard of.
“Whether from loyalty to your wishes or their own interests, Hoartrap and Singh helped Indsorith solidify her rule, but Fennec sided with Pope Shanatu. After a few years of civil war both Fennec and Singh lost enough capital or gained enough sense to cut out for greener pastures. Hoartrap stuck around longer, but last I heard he’d quit Samoth, too, maybe the whole Empire. Maroto sought revenge but was too drunk or crazy to do it properly, and instead of leading a rebellion with the troops
you gave him the lunkhead tried to single-handedly take on the Dread Guard of Diadem. Made it through ’em, too, and got all the way to the throne room, but then Indsorith showed him just how she’d wrested the Crown from you.”
“Maroto’s dead?” The news was hardly surprising, but what did catch her off guard was the sting in her chest.
“Maybe by now,” said Kang-ho. “He survived the duel, though I’m not sure how exactly he slipped away after the new queen spanked him. Last time I saw him he was in a bad way. Strung out, gone to bugs if I had to guess the poison.”
Well, that was better than dead, maybe, and just as plausible. Maroto would have been all right, if he ever could have gotten his shit together. “And you?”
“I left the day I saw your body land in the street,” said Kang-ho, drawing a line across his throat with the stem of his pipe. “Kang-ho out, along with more loot than my family has ever known. I should have been smarter about it, taken the Empire for everything it was worth, but nobody knew what would happen next, so I got shy while the getting was good. Came home to find my mother dead and my father in poor health, and the next thing I knew I was seduced by the same stud my parents had betrothed me to as a child. Or maybe I seduced him, but the end result is the same—a new ruler with a new name at Hwabun, one nobody would associate with a certain legendary Villain who terrorized the Star for all those years.”
“How’s that work, exactly?” asked Zosia. “If your husband’s Ugrakari and you came back rich before you even married him, why is he King of Hwabun? I thought this isle had been in your family for generations. I’m not judging here, but I thought I heard your steward back there refer to your allowance?”
“It’s a long and boring story,” said Kang-ho grumpily. “The short version is I came back rich, but Jun-hwan was rich. Rich enough to fix this place up, fix the family up, and still let me keep my Crimson nest egg for other investments… investments that have rotted on the vine thanks to my homeland’s blatantly illegal conquest of Linkensterne, but that’s an ulcer for another day. Anyway, I was happy to have him take over as King of Hwabun—even when the kingdom’s small enough you can shoot an arrow from one end of it to the other, being regent is more trouble than it’s worth.”
“Tell me about it. Huh. Kang-ho, living happily ever after as a househusband.” She looked down at the expansive garden and grounds, the picturesque sea to the south, dappled with high green islands that jutted up in single peaks like the jade teeth of some seabeast. Even the eternal storm that raged to the north over the Haunted Sea looked pretty from this distance. “Somehow it doesn’t seem your style.”
“What’s the point of doing all the things we did if you don’t get to sit back and enjoy yourself someday?” said Kang-ho. “Living comfortably and quietly, indulging my every whim, and raising a family’s not such a bum deal. Beats the shit out of getting stabbed out in some pointless bar brawl or falling to my death scaling a tower to rip off some wizard’s treasure.”
“And the thrill of combat? The exhilaration of adventure?”
“Bad for the humors—I have an excess of bile as it is.”
“We always had a lot in common, didn’t we?” said Zosia, imagining Leib sitting between them on the bench, picturing the reunion that never was but should have been. Safer to stay hidden, they had thought, yet here Kang-ho sat, secreted in plain sight, enjoying his retirement. Until her arrival, anyway—the longer she smoked with him, the more she attuned herself to his old ways, and it was obvious some underlying anxiety played at the edge of his mood. Well, there might be, she supposed, for what good could come of her reappearance in his life? She almost felt bad for him, but then he could always say no if he wanted to. “If helping me meant giving up this life you’ve won for yourself, would you?”
“Maybe,” said Kang-ho. “I owe you a debt, of that there is no question. What sort of help would you have me give?”
“War with Samoth,” she said. “I’ll need an army and the element of surprise, and the Immaculate Isles can give me both. If anyone can give me the Isles, it’s you.”
“Oh, is that all?” Kang-ho canted his head to the side, running through the angles. “Why?”
“Leib is dead.” Zosia wished her voice would break along with her heart as she told him everything that had happened when the Imperial soldiers came to Kypck, but all she felt was eagerness to hear his response. Far below, the waves crashed against the Flower Pot.
“I see,” said Kang-ho at last. “But if you’re right and this is all Queen Indsorith’s doing, why wage war? Why not assassinate the queen and spare us all another dark age?”
“So the Burnished Chain can swoop in and fill the vacuum I leave? Does that sound like a good plan?” Zosia was pleased to see the grimace the prospect raised on her friend’s face.
“Ouch. No, no, it does not. But you can’t fight a faith, Zosia.”
“Watch me.”
“Damn, girl.” Kang-ho shook his head. “So all you want is to take out the Crimson Queen and the Black Pope.”
“Tell me they don’t have it coming and maybe I’ll reconsider.”
“It’s not a question of who is owed what. This is the first peace in memory, and if you start banging up Samoth and rattling the Chain, then the rest of the Empire is going to take an interest. And then the rest of the Star will take an interest. And then we’re right back to where we started, before we even went to war against King Kaldruut, before we earned a single ally, before we won a single battle… Except we’re all thirty years older.”
“Thirty years wiser.”
“Thirty years fatter and slower. You killed Kaldruut almost a quarter century ago, think about that! Hells, don’t tell me you weren’t feeling old twenty years ago, when you pulled your disappearing trick. I know I was, and I don’t feel much younger now. We fought for peace, Zosia, and peace is finally here, so maybe—”
“You fought for silver, Kang-ho, silver and steel and glory and power, same as me,” said Zosia, angrier than she should have been at his fair and reasonable points. “It was only later we brought peace and prosperity and a better tomorrow into it, when we started feeling the years and saw we might have a chance to do a little good after a lifetime of bad.”
“Better late than never?”
“Devildamned right. And any peace they know is peace I gave them, and they betrayed me. Samoth calls itself the capital of the Crimson Empire, well, it’s time I reminded them how the Empire came by that color. They brought this on themselves.”
“They didn’t do anything,” said Kang-ho, that damnable conciliatory tone needling at her. “If the queen betrayed you and gave the orders to have your people killed, then she’s to blame, obviously, and those soldiers who carried out the deed have blood on their hands, no denying that… But why plunge the whole Empire into chaos? The whole damn Star?”
“Because it’s not enough to pay blood for blood.” As Zosia spoke the smell rising from her neglected pipe carried the whiff of iron. “Because whoever comes after us must know what it means to be righteous—not just the next province who tries to control the Empire, either, but, as you say, the whole damn Star. All the world will learn what comes of a broken oath. I made a mistake all those years ago when I left the way I did, and I’ve returned to set things right. I’ve paid for my crimes, and I’ll continue to pay for them—I’m ready for that. I deserve it. But I’m not going to hell alone, and I’ll damn everyone I lay eyes on before I let the Star carry on with its business as though nothing happened. Peace was bought for a price, Kang-ho, and since Samoth has decided to renege, I’m afraid they’ll have to find another means to that end.”
“You would see every Arm of the Star burn alongside the Empire just to have your vengeance?” Kang-ho frowned into his dead pipe. “Well, you’ve set my mind to rest in one regard.”
“What’s that?”
“You’re definitely the real Zosia.”
That she was, much as she’d pretended she wasn’t for th
e last twenty years. She felt those years now, that she surely did, and all that speechifying on an empty stomach and a fat bowl of tubāq was making her feel a little floaty. Fortunately there was only one question left to ask.
“So you’ll help me?”
“And in exchange I get my daughter back, is that it?” Kang-ho didn’t sound irate, only sad. “That’s a cold play, even for you.”
“Your daughter?” The words were fuzzy and thick on Zosia’s tongue, in her mind, and she tried to stand. Fell to her knees, knocked the kaldi table over. A subtle poison, she hadn’t felt anything but the pleasant prickle of strong tubāq, and then she was in the grass. Kang-ho’s betrayal was less surprising than that of Choplicker—the devil had not only warned her of danger but actively protected her a thousand times over, yet now he let her fall without so much as a bark. The devil padded back up the hill to flash his bright white teeth in her face just as she lost her grip on the waking world and drifted into his realm.
CHAPTER
14
The Desperate Road ran far deeper and straighter through the Panteran Wastes than any other crossing, and consequently it was infested with perils. The only time bandits weren’t lying in wait was when something even worse had fallen upon them, taking their place in the caves overlooking the road’s entrances at the southern and northern edges of the desert. While the narrower, shadier canyons of the Desperate Road put off most godguanas, the far worse dunecrocs preferred the cooler sandslides and shale piles that routinely blocked the path, and wastewasps wove their barn-sized nests wherever the slightest rumor of a spring bubbled out of the rocks.
Even if one wasn’t robbed, eaten, impregnated with larvae, or befallen by some worse fate still, it was weeks of long nights from either end of the Wastes to the road’s only way station, the Shrine of the Hungry Sands. The lepers who ran it insisted that travelers perform a number of absurd, dangerous, and heretical rituals—on top of paying the stiff toll—before passing through their gate. Maroto had traveled the Desperate Road but once before, nearly thirty years prior, and clearly recalled promising himself that he would never again enter the Wastes if he could help it… and even if he could not, under no circumstances would he take this particular route.
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