A War in Crimson Embers

by Alex Marshall

  4

  The Othean Gate took Ji-hyeon as it had once before, but this time it did not release her a moment later. She had closed her eyes during that first trip, keeping them shut until Fennec pulled her through the nauseating portal and out into the warm Raniputri sunshine. This time Ji-hyeon went into the Gate with open eyes.

  There wasn’t even darkness here in the First Dark, only grey. It looked as though she were floating through a thick fogbank, but she felt herself pass through chill, slick membranes, the unseen curtains sliding over her face. She worried they might stop her nose and mouth, and as soon as she had the thought she felt one do exactly that, puffing out and contracting with her breath. Or so it seemed, but she wasn’t suffocating, and there was still nothing she could see … at first.

  Contours began to emerge from the miasma, indistinct but shimmering, and with them came the distinct impression that instead of drifting aimlessly forward she was being drawn into a spiral, corkscrewing down, faster and faster. The slapping nudging tickling crawling sensations persisted, and even though she was sure her eyes had adjusted she still couldn’t make out what enveloped her, the former formlessness replaced by the haze of motion. One moment it was like being surrounded by a school of silvery eels in the deepest depths of the sea and the next like sliding down the gullet of some titanic animal, and while these shifts made it all the more dreamlike it was somehow realer than anything Ji-hyeon had experienced in her life.

  What’s more, merely being here satiated something deep within her, a need keener than any she’d ever felt indulged as soon as it was comprehended. It was the sensation of comfortably drifting off to sleep wedded to the first shivery stirrings of waking, and persistent instead of fleeting. This was the enlightenment all sages sought, to dwell forever in the contented moment where the mind frees itself from the prison of the flesh, and lo, it was the same as the paradise promised by Chainite prophets, a place where the innocent spirit was at long last spared the constant doubts and worries of the ever-busy intellect. If she had not been so far beyond mortal sensation she would have wept at the perfection of it, at the knowledge that this tranquility was now the whole of her existence, that nothing could touch her ever again …

  But something did touch her, then, something ugly and sharp and attached to the dead world of the senses. She tried to cast away the roiling coils of disgusting barbed gut entwined around her hand but they only tightened their grip, pain disrupting her absolute fulfillment. With her free hand Ji-hyeon reached to tear away the disgusting mass when a snake-like length of the slimy grey tissue whipped out and struck her chest. Its diamond-hard beak broke the surface not of her skin but the film of the First Dark that had settled over her.

  Ji-hyeon’s serenity was vaporized by a fury so extreme she forgot where she was, what was happening to her. Instead she saw her second father falling to the red road beside her, feathered with arrows. She saw the empress’s cruel smirk as the lying old crone confessed to murdering the rest of their family. Ji-hyeon thought of her sisters falling through this place, beset by forces they couldn’t understand, pictured her first father’s prayers trailing off as his mind untethered and he bobbed insensate through this muted realm until the end of all things, and she screamed her wrath into the grey void.

  And just like that, she was free. It wasn’t like the first time, when she’d staggered out of the Gate in Zygnema clinging to Fennec’s suddenly furry hand and found herself in a bustling city. That had been an impossibly strange experience, yes, but it had been bookended by normalcy—she walked into one temple and came out another, albeit halfway across the Star. This, though, this …

  It was as if she had been inside an opaque soap bubble that had suddenly popped. Her feet were on firm ground but she immediately toppled over, her head still traveling at impossible speeds, her ears roaring as though a high mountain cataract blasted through her skull, and there was a pressure in her left eye so intense it felt ready to pop. Ji-hyeon crashed into the mercifully soft ground, sending poor Fellwing rolling away through the snow. She couldn’t see where the little owlbat ended up, because as soon Ji-hyeon opened her swollen left eye an onslaught of vivid yet alien colors blasted her brain. The intensity of the vision made her retch, and she lay there shivering with both eyes closed until the fiery afterimages finally faded into blackness.

  Lifting her head and tentatively opening her right eye, she saw that Fellwing had settled a short distance down the gentle slope. The owlbat chirped and flapped her pale wings, sending plumes of grey powder flying as she tried to extricate herself from the drift. Ji-hyeon gulped, working up the courage to open her pulsing left eye again, but as soon as she began to crack it she knew it was a mistake. Closing them both tight she stayed where she lay until the blistering lights in her head again grew dim, the phantasms fading to nothing along with the nausea. Still she heard the distant crashing of the First Dark echoing through her skull, as though she held a seashell up to each ear.

  Only when she was confident she could move without vomiting did Ji-hyeon open her right eye again. Fellwing had regained the air and flitted just overhead, clearly concerned for her mistress. As well the devil might be—this migraine or whatever it was that afflicted her left eye unnerved Ji-hyeon in a way she couldn’t even comprehend. Those colors it blasted into her brain weren’t just different from any she had ever seen before, they somehow felt wrong, as if she were witnessing something profane. Keeping her left eye squinted firmly shut, she sat up in the snow, too numb to even feel the chill.

  Yet bad as this situation surely was, it could’ve been so much worse. Fellwing was all right, the devil finally landing on Ji-hyeon’s shoulder and nuzzling her tear-streaked chin. The journey through the Gates had apparently revived the devil a little, and Ji-hyeon’s ongoing discomfort would further nourish her back to health. Ji-hyeon clung to that, told herself that they still had each other, and had come through a Gate in one piece, had lived to fight again. They would avenge her fathers and her sisters and everyone else who had been executed at Othean by the honorless empress. They would find their friends. They would—

  A cry overwhelmed the low rumble that still reverberated in her ears, close and keen. Ji-hyeon pressed a palm over her left eye just to make sure it stayed shut and looked up, still too dizzy to rise to her feet … and then found her footing in a trice, staggering in place as she gawped at the figure rushing up the slope toward her, and what lay beyond it.

  Ji-hyeon had been too busy collapsing on the ground and fretting over her eye to get anything more than an impression of drab snow, the white world spinning all around her dizzy head, but that little bit of familiarity had made her assume they had come back through the Lark’s Tongue Gate, on the wintry Witchfinder Plains.

  They had not.

  There was an undulating impression of slumped grey mountains as far as the eye could see, but far more pressing was the armored warrior who was almost upon her. She assumed it was armor, anyway, and not actual spiny shell that covered the charging figure, but considering the claymore it brandished in both hands she felt quite confident that it was indeed a warrior. A big one. Her hands went to her hilts, and she almost opened her left eye before remembering the paramount importance of keeping it scrunched shut.

  She needed a blindfold for that side, an eye patch or something, but there was certainly no time to fashion one now. Her unexpected foe bellowed again as its thick legs churned through a snowdrift just down the slope, and Ji-hyeon took a low stance, drawing her twin swords. She hadn’t anticipated trying out the black blade of sainted steel so soon, but then when was the last time Ji-hyeon had gotten what she expected?

  Attuning yourself to your environment and using it to your advantage was basic fighting business—there hadn’t been much that Choi and Ji-hyeon’s dearly departed bodyguard Chevaleresse Sasamaso could agree on, but playing the field to your advantage would have been at the top of the list. The problem here was that Ji-hyeon’s immediate surroundings barely h
ad any more features than the space between Gates, a snowy, barren hillside … except that wasn’t right, either, Ji-hyeon finally realized as her opponent closed the last dozen yards, because it wasn’t snow after all. It was ash.

  The warrior came for Ji-hyeon without slowing its plodding jog through the ankle-deep powder, the black plates of its bristly armor dull against the overcast sky and dingy landscape, the tips of most of its spikes broken off, its helm a long boxy cage that revealed nothing of the wearer. The only thing sharp about the charging figure was its enormous sword. The claymore must be as long as Ji-hyeon was tall, and even more unnerving than the warrior’s wordless roars as it had approached was the silence with which it now swung its weapon side-armed at its quarry. The arc of the sword was too high to jump, too low to duck, and if Ji-hyeon tried to parry the enormous blade she would be either battered to the ground or bisected at the belly, depending on how well her swords held out. A perfect attack.

  Or near perfect, anyway. Ji-hyeon threw herself to the other side of the charging brute, and while the ash wasn’t as slick as snow it still had a satiny slipperiness that prevented her assailant from setting a heel and pivoting after her. Instead it stumbled as its heavy claymore whooshed through the air, and as it tried to turn after Ji-hyeon she attacked.

  Judging the exact time to move and the exact places to strike would have been difficult even if Ji-hyeon had both eyes open in the stinging cloud of ash kicked up by the warrior’s charge. Keeping the one squinted shut had made her evasion and counterattack even trickier, but Ji-hyeon had fought more than one battle half-blind from blood in her eyes. Fellwing helped, launching herself from Ji-hyeon’s shoulder at the precise moment when she needed to dodge and then fluttering past the warrior’s face to distract it as Ji-hyeon came in low, catching its leg between her scissoring blades.

  Yet although she hit it directly in the back of the knee where there should be a gap in the plates, her right hand went numb as the sword bounced off it with a clang … but then there was a crunch and a screeching scrape as the black blade in her left hand sheared through the armor covering its shin.

  Its leg buckled and it went down hard, a grey fume billowing up from the ash as it crashed into the ground. It bellowed again as it tried to right itself, but Ji-hyeon’s black sword cut off its war cry along with its head. The killing blow felt so damn good she wanted to scream, her sword arm greedy for more, but the feeling fled as fast as the severed head came free of its neck, leaving her drained and depressed.

  Not five feet outside a Gate with her ears still ringing from the journey and she was already killing, and someone she bore no grudge, a stranger whose entire life up until this point remained a perfect enigma. Wiping her blades off on her cape and sheathing them, she held out her arm and Fellwing lighted down on it. Ji-hyeon dusted the ash off the weak little devil, then knelt over the severed head, lifting the heavy helm to have a look at her mysterious attacker. The head was stuck inside the iron cage, and she had to give it a little shake to dislodge it, like a walnut from a poorly broken shell.

  “Wildborn,” she breathed as the head fell into the blood-muddied ash, but it was less an observation and more a prayer that the matter was as simple as that. She had met quite a few wildborn in her day but had never before seen someone with so much of the wild and so little of the human. The thick-furred face on the ground before her was more wolf than man, snub-snouted and jagged-toothed, with a snarled grey mane in place of mundane hair. Ji-hyeon’s left eye throbbed angrily behind its lid, as if annoyed she wouldn’t let it have a look at the unexpected prize.

  More cries cut through the distant roar in Ji-hyeon’s head, and her heavy heart became rather light of heel as it began to race around her chest—a dozen more black-armored figures came jogging up the barren slope toward her, some of them on all fours. She dropped the heavy helm of their scout as Fellwing nuzzled at her hauberk, feeding on her fear.

  “Sorry, girl, but you’ll have to wait on a real meal,” she told the owlbat as soon as the initial jolt passed. She had no intention of sticking around to ask directions from the charging warband. Whether her second safe passage through the Othean Gate had come from holding on to her devil or dumb luck, she was ready to play double-or-nothing, given the alternative, and duck back inside whatever Gate had deposited her onto this dreary yet dangerous landscape. Anywhere she ended up had to be an improvement.

  Yet there was no Gate behind her. Ji-hyeon staggered past the spot where she had assumed it must be, ignoring the mad sight that actually met her one good eye to look every which way for the Gate that had to be there, the one she must have stepped from … but there was only the narrow prominence of the barren, ash-coated hill, and beyond it an even steeper slope falling down, down, so far down, into the swirling grey sea whose dull roar Ji-hyeon now began to pick apart and compartmentalize as tens of thousands of distance-blurred warriors meeting in seething combat. Great shadowy things waded through the shallows of the clashing armies, reminding her in general aspect if not specific shape of the devil queen that Hoartrap had summoned onto the Lark’s Tongue battlefield. Even after all the strange adventures Ji-hyeon had undergone of late, she was hypnotized by the sheer scale of the conflict and the strangeness of the combatants.

  Without thinking of the consequences, Ji-hyeon blinked, and as her left eye opened those blazing colors and ephemeral shapes again flooded her vision. This time she didn’t immediately close it, and while the sights were even more intense than before, her mind must have been getting used to the intrusion, for she didn’t lose her footing, or her breakfast. Instead she swayed in place, laughing in wonder at the bizarre shimmering filaments that suffused everything, gasping in awe at how different those distant titans appeared now that she saw them with both eyes wide open.

  Out of the corner of her vision she saw that something else had changed, the coiling devil on her shoulder no longer resembling an owlbat, or any other creature of the Star. As she experimentally winked her left eye, Fellwing resumed her old shape and then lost it again, and Ji-hyeon shivered as she realized what had happened. Hoartrap had warned them that using the Gates without his supervision would lead to improvements, as he called them, like Fennec’s hands transforming to claws. Ji-hyeon’s first trip had only drained the color from her hair, but this journey must have done something far more radical to her eye. She couldn’t begin to imagine what, though, as she looked back out at where rivers of light flowed across the previously monochromatic horizon, illuminating the seething hordes of inhuman soldiers and revealing yet more that had previously been hidden from sight behind glassy vapors …

  But then Fellwing reminded Ji-hyeon with another sharp tap of her beak that they were about to get another very close look at the warriors who rampaged across this expanse of ashen waste. Squinting her left eye shut again so as not to be distracted by its overwhelming sights, Ji-hyeon turned to see that the first of the warband was almost upon her, loping in on all fours with no helm to contain its long, vulpine muzzle. The black sword flew to Ji-hyeon’s hand, as light as Fellwing catching an updraft, and she cleaved through the monster’s skull, but only because she had to.

  It fell but another took its place, and Ji-hyeon cut that one down, too, and the next, because they demanded it of her, and so did the black blade. They were many, but she was Princess Ji-hyeon Bong of Hwabun, last of her line, and she would kill anyone and anything that stood in her way, no matter how many of them there were, no matter how long it took, until she found a way back to Othean and delivered vengeance for her family upon the Empress Ryuki. Nothing could stop her, not distance nor devils, nor monsters nor mortals.

  Of all these potential pitfalls, only the last never arose to slow her course—she would face countless foes and dangers untold after cutting down the final bestial warrior on that blasted mountaintop and setting forth with Fellwing to find her way home, but it would be two brutal, horrifying years before Ji-hyeon encountered anything remotely human.

 
; CHAPTER

  5

  You really think we’ll be back with the general within the week?” It sounded too good to be true, and considering who Sullen was talking to it almost definitely was … but given who they were talking about, he couldn’t help but hope. Squinting across the smoky campfire they’d piled with cedar bark to keep the mosquitoes at bay, he saw that Keun-ju looked about as skeptical as he felt.

  “Oh, sure,” said Hoartrap, puffing his gnarled black pipe and blowing a geranium soap–scented cloud up to perfume the beards of moss swaying from oak and cypress. The evenings were so sultry here in the boggy Haunted Forest Sullen couldn’t fathom how the sorcerer could bear to sit so close to the fire and blithely puff away. At least all the smoke helped cover up the Touch’s sickly sweet funk.

  “You’ve given it a lot of thought, then?” said Sullen, not at all satisfied with the blowhard warlock’s switch to taciturnity.

  “Not particularly, but then I could give the matter the barest minimum of my attention and still out-think the lot of you,” said Hoartrap, which was at least more in character. “Provided my perfidious protégé guides us true to Maroto, I can’t imagine we’ll spend much time on Jex Toth one way or the other—either we see an easy opportunity to sabotage the invasion from within, or we simply swoop up everybody’s favorite barbarian and creep back to join the Cobalts at Othean before we’re discovered by the locals. I never linger in a place unless it’s for leisure, and there are better holiday destinations than the Sunken Kingdom.”

  “What do you mean, provided your protégé directs us to Sullen’s uncle?” asked Keun-ju, his pretty eyes narrowing above his stained veil. “We still have the bedeviled compass you gave us, why not just continue to follow it?”

  “Because that was for me to find you, not for you to find Maroto,” said Hoartrap, and if it had been anyone else setting them straight Sullen would’ve given Keun-ju an I-told-you-so look. As it stood he didn’t want to give Hoartrap the satisfaction. “If it could actually pinpoint the bounder, don’t you think I would have held on to it instead of giving it to you merry Moochers?”