A War in Crimson Embers

by Alex Marshall

  “Except for me,” said Brother Rýt nervously, as though the witch had forgotten him. “Except for me.”

  “Yes, and it would be jolly bad form to just bid our chum here farewell as soon as we’re inside the city,” said Diggelby. “We have an obligation to see him safely to … to wherever is it you need to go, Rýt?”

  “Um … I’m not sure?” said the monk. “Father Turisa charged me with delivering news of the strange weather in Flintland to the Holy See, but if they … if they are truly gone …”

  “Chin up, chin up!” said Diggelby, taking their dinner bag from Sullen as he chewed his cud. “You heard that Usban spice-slinger, there’s still a Chain in Diadem, just a better one! Less Burnished, maybe. They’re working with the … what did he call it …”

  “The People’s Pack,” said Sullen, his poor estimation of his clan making him immediately skeptical of any group who used lupine terminology to refer to themselves.

  “Quite so!” said Diggelby, popping a ghost pipe in his mouth and talking on even as he chewed the white-stalked plant. “So there’s been a teensy schism, which is long overdue in my book, and now we’re all truly in this together as mortals. Better take your news straight to this People’s Pack—we all ought to, really, get Diadem involved in the campaign against Jex Toth.”

  “I think I should just stick with talking to someone in the church,” said Brother Rýt.

  “Which you can do when we all go directly to the Gate,” said Nemi. “No matter what land or faith, you always find priests drawn to Gates.”

  Sullen thought of the Jackal People hurling human sacrifices into the Flintland Gate, and that made him think of the Procuress of Thao, which gave him the creeps. It began to rain.

  “Look, Nemi, I know you’re late to the soiree, and not in a fashionable fashion, so let me lay it down for you,” said Diggelby as he passed the weed bag back to her. “While we’ve been traipsing toward a reunion with the Cobalt Company, to join our friends in a righteous cause, Diadem has apparently gone ahead and accomplished what the Cobalts were trying to do in the first place! Which means we’re all on the same team, and if we’re all on the same team that means they can help us fight the monsters of Jex Toth. What’s better for the war, if tomorrow we three pop over to Othean for breakfast, or if we wait and have brunch with the People’s Pack, and then bring over a whole army by suppertime?”

  “Huh,” said Sullen. “That’s not a bad idea.”

  “Good ideas are sometimes better as ideas,” said Nemi, and finding a slug on the leaf she was about to eat she passed it under the blanket that covered her cockatrice’s cage. “We shall be seen as curious strangers to this city, and it is common for curious strangers to be delayed when they arouse the interest of the local magistrates. What shall we do if we seek an audience with this People’s Pack only to be incarcerated?”

  “You must learn to start giving your fellow mortals the benefit of the doubt,” said Diggelby. “At the absolute worst they won’t help us, none of this getting-tossed-in-the-gaol-for-speaking-the-truth business.”

  “And if we do raise an army here you can bring them through,” said Sullen, Diggelby’s plan making more and more sense. “Like Hoartrap did with the Cobalt Company at the Lark’s Tongue Gate, you could bring Diadem’s soldiers to Little Heaven.”

  “No, I could not,” said Nemi, fishing around in the weeds for more bugs to feed her monster. “I have never used a Gate to travel like this before, and simply getting the three of us safely to Othean shall be sufficient challenge for my maiden voyage … Although it is true if Diadem pledged their soldiers we could go ahead, find Hoartrap in Othean, and send him back here to clear the way for our reinforcements … Yes.”

  Nemi seemed to be coming around to the idea, but Sullen got stuck on something else. “Wait, what’s this about you never using a Gate before?”

  “And did I hear you say sufficient challenge?” asked Diggelby, relighting the three ends of his silly-looking plaited cigar—it was hard to keep it lit in the freezing drizzle. “It rather sounded like you did.”

  “Do you think securely navigating the First Dark is easy?” asked the witch. “I don’t. But I would not be leading you through if I were not confident in my abilities. I value my life more than any of yours, and I’m going through. If you wish to actually help save the Star, you will come along.”

  “But first we see if we can get in with the People’s Pack and warn them of the danger facing the whole great big world,” said Diggelby. “Shouldn’t be too hard for a pair of heroes of the resistance like Sullen and me to stir up the sentiment of the common folk.”

  “I’m not a hero,” said Sullen, secretly delighted and trying not to blush.

  “You will be to these peasants, trust me,” said Diggelby. “As soon as we tell them we were very important persons in the Cobalt Company during their campaign to liberate the Star from Chain and Crown, they’ll be on us like stink on bug.”

  Remembering the rumors of what had recently happened to Zosia in this very city, Sullen wasn’t so sure that bone carried much marrow, but he couldn’t debate it further because the rain was now coming down too hard to hear over. Which was okay, since he’d talked enough and wanted to be alone with his thoughts for a spell … though in his thoughts he was rarely alone. Due to the obvious need to keep Myrkur off any major roads where she might’ve attracted unfriendly attention from Imperial soldiers it had taken them weeks to wind their way up here from the Haunted Forest, and Sullen had spent most every hour of most every day of most every one of those weeks imagining all the bad things that might have been happening to the people he cared most about while he was stuck in the back of a bumpy wagon. Now that they’d finally arrived and the time for daydreams ran short he allowed himself the indulgence of something a little less awful.

  Come daybreak he would enter one of the wonders of the Star, a city that a forgotten god had charged Sullen with saving from the deviltry of a dead woman, to rally an army and follow a witch into a Gate, and all he could think about was how badly he wanted Ji-hyeon and Keun-ju to be on either side of him, the three of them keeping each other warm on this dreary night. Not such a dramatic song, that, but as his stomach pinched him so bad he nearly doubled over Sullen reckoned he was about done with the epic shit for a good long while, and would be happy with the mushy sort of love song he used to find terminally dull.

  CHAPTER

  6

  While Empress Ryuki had mounted quite the gala to welcome her son’s supposed killer through the Othean Gate, she hadn’t made much ado about tossing the prince’s actual executioner back into it. It was an altogether utilitarian affair, a single squadron of the Samjok-o Guard delivering Domingo and Choi to the Temple of Pentacles. There they found no mountainous portable throne erected in the terra-cotta path, nor immaculate rows of Immaculate soldiers filling the fields, just a dull red road bordered by dull brown earth. There were a few shoots of green out there, though, the persistent heat wave prematurely drawing up last season’s pumpkin seeds—Domingo wondered how long the warmth would last, before winter reasserted itself and crushed the ambitions of these sprouts.

  He closed his eyes as they rolled him through the gravel toward the temple that would remove him from this world. The setting sun felt good on his face. If not for the mugginess in the air he could have been back in Cockspar, sitting out on the balcony above the piazza, overlooking the lemon groves on the distant hillsides.

  Not that he had spent much time out there wasting good daylight, but still, but still. Perhaps Lupitera would make better use of it than he had; drag the bar out there and the old nag could spend the rest of her days in her own private booth, mounting amateur productions in the courtyard below. Would his sister-in-law miss him? He wasn’t any more accustomed to taking her feelings into consideration than she was to respecting his, the bedrock of their relationship mutually agreed-upon antipathy, but now he found himself regretting that he hadn’t said something to her before r
iding out to the south in pursuit of the Cobalts.

  Well, what would he have said to the saber-tongued spinster, anyway? Thank you, Lupitera, for all the years of bad plays and worse manners? Well … Yes, he supposed he should have said that. He should have.

  And then he chuckled, shaking his head as he fell under the shadow of the Temple of the Pentacles. Colonel Domingo Hjortt was about to die, and on his way to the gallows his last reflections on his life were not for the wife he had loved faithfully even down all the years since she had abandoned him, nor of their son whom he had failed absolutely, nor for the mother whose boots he had struggled to fill all the days of his command, nor of the soldiers he had served above or beneath or beside over the decades, and not even of all his most hated enemies, those he’d bested and those who’d gotten away … No, he’d spent his last precious thoughts on his harpy sister-in-law who referred to him as the Capon of Cockspar, a brassy cow who called him a boor for considering himself above pratfalls and toilet humor.

  Well, he thought as the temple guards opened the wide opal doors to reveal the glistening Gate within, he’d certainly spent far more time thinking far worse things over the years, and nobody had to know that a career soldier’s last thoughts weren’t for Crown and country. This lifelong army dreamer had earned his retirement, damn it.

  Just like he’d earned this execution. He felt bad for distracting Choi just long enough with his confession that she wasn’t able to make an attempt on Empress Ryuki’s life before the guards mobbed them. Damned unfortunate that she was now mutely led along to die beside him. The worst part of the whole affair, however, was just how good it had made him feel. Such a thrilling victory! The Azgarothian military genius, bragging to a parent how he had murdered her brash young child, and to the only result that many, many more people died senseless deaths.

  It turned his stomach, how satisfied he’d felt for most of the march out here—he’d grinned from ear to ear at the expression on Empress Ryuki’s face, snuggling her disgusting unicorn as he gloated over her horror. He knew what it meant to lose a boy of her son’s age, and to lose him for nothing … and Domingo had done it anyway, and then he had mocked her. Mocked her. Maybe the Star was truly in danger from Jex Toth, or maybe it would just carry on slowly murdering itself for another thousand years, it scarcely made much difference—how scary were monsters, now, really? Glancing over at Choi’s stoic countenance, the scars and the broken horn she’d acquired fighting on behalf of pureborn armies, he thought it might be time to let the monsters have their own crack at things.

  The captain of the Samjok-o squad stepped between the condemned duo and the short flight of stairs up to the Gate. In addition to the double scabbard on her belt she held a familiar Azgarothian sword out in both hands. Drawing Domingo’s saber, she pointed it at the chair-bound prisoner and let fly a volley of High Immaculate.

  “She says any honorable officer would be permitted to choose dying on their own tusk instead of being fed to the hungry mouth,” Choi volunteered, not without a little smugness. When the Immaculate officer then cast the sword off into the empty field with another rush of words, dropping the scabbard on the ground, Choi said, “Does the Baron require further translation?”

  “No, Captain Choi, my Immaculate has improved sufficiently to understand the thrust of it,” said Domingo. “I’ll tell you what, though: in acknowledgment of the debt I owe you for all your service, my saber is yours to keep. You just have to retrieve it.”

  If her sharp smile presaged a verbal riposte or was answer itself Domingo never found out, because that was when the Samjok-o Guard lowered their spear points all around them and Choi was obliged to carry Domingo up the stairs. She didn’t look terribly embarrassed about it, but for the Lion of Cockspar, being lugged into a Gate in the arms of an anathema was not quite the dignified end he had imagined for himself.

  The Gate began giving off a faint noise as Choi climbed the steps, almost like a distant scream. While by no means the most dramatic or strange occurrence Domingo had experienced, that faint yet climbing wail made all his remaining hairs stand at attention. Death wouldn’t have been so bad. Death you could depend on for what it was, a return to the blank, silent state from which all mortals briefly emerge, but this? This was something else entirely.

  Domingo had absolutely no idea what would happen once he and Choi entered a Gate without the sorceries of Hoartrap the Touch to protect them, but the best he could hope for was instant death. He had heard stories about what happened to those who vanished into Gates, after all; everyone had. Not that he had ever put stock in such ghost songs, and he still didn’t believe in hell the way the Burnished Chain did, but he knew from experience that so long as you’re alive you can suffer, and now that he’d traveled safely through a Gate once he knew he might again … only to emerge in some far less welcome realm, one where the devils weren’t so friendly as the unicorn he had met this morning. The keening wail rose with each step they climbed, and he could make out the vermilion pentacles on the inner sides of the wide-open temple doors pulsing faster and faster in time with his heart, the Gate almost visible as Choi took another step …

  “You could snap my neck,” Domingo told her. “Vengeance for … vengeance’s sake.”

  “No,” said Choi, smiling at the broken old man she carried like a babe in arms. “Vengeance is letting you live with your disgrace, even if only for another … hmm?”

  She stopped on the penultimate step and looked out across the barren fields to the north, and the four temple guards at the side of the door all craned their necks as well. It was damned inconvenient, because she had cradled Domingo facing the other direction, and though he squirmed he couldn’t see what they were looking at. He did notice one thing, though, which was that the steadily rising scream wasn’t coming from within the Temple of Pentacles, but from the far side of it, sort of to the northwest and—

  Ah, Choi deftly swung him in her strong arms, and as she did he finally saw what all the fuss was about—a figure was running in from the empty fields beyond the temple, wailing all the while and waving their hands over their head. It couldn’t be a stay of execution, since they were heading toward the Autumn Palace instead of away from it, so why all the hullaballoo? Standing as Choi was at the top of the temple steps, the cause wasn’t immediately transparent … and then it became as clear as young grappa.

  A swift grey monster loped into view and ran down the runner.

  It was horse-like, but only in the way that a godguana is lizard-like. The equine shape was there but inflated to grotesque proportions, and its tall, stiff legs made it appear to be on stilts. Sharp ones, too, apparently. After galloping over the poor Immaculate, terminating their impressively sustained scream, it wheeled back around and came to a stop over the body. Its long, spiny-maned neck craned down and then its whole face split open vertically, an enormous sideways mouth stretching wide to gobble up the corpse …

  Only then it paused, looking up from its prey and staring at the Samjok-o squad at the base of the steps, and then up at the temple guards, and at Choi … and, so it seemed, at Domingo. It closed its mouth, but only for a moment, before rearing back on its ten-foot-tall hind legs and emitting a shrill chittering sound that made Domingo’s ears ring. They were still ringing when it dropped back down on all fours to charge, and the unpleasant cry it made was echoed dozens of times by whatever fell herd came charging from the other side of the temple.

  That seemed to break the spell everyone had been under, the Samjok-o Guards keeping rank, to their credit, as they swiftly retreated down the road toward the Autumn Palace. The temple guards seemed less sure of what to do; according to Choi they’d only started posting sentries out here after Ji-hyeon’s disappearing act of the previous year, and Domingo imagined babysitting a Gate was not a duty reserved for the best and brightest of the Immaculate military. This was his last thought before his perspective changed again, this time all in a rush, and Domingo only realized that Choi had been win
ding him up for a throw when she released him. Stark terror struck him, the likes of which he had never, ever known, because that witchborn monster had thrown him right into the fucking Gate and he—

  Crashed into someone, who made no effort at all to catch Domingo, damn their eyes. He grabbed onto them, the only alternative to dashing himself on the stone stairs. It was a temple guard, the shaft of his spear pinned flat against his chest by the old man clinging to his shoulders. The lad must have stumbled back and missed a step, because fast as Domingo had been launched the first time he was falling again, but forward this time, and riding someone to break his fall. The stairs might have been more forgiving if the boy hadn’t had the extra baggage weighing him down, but then a bad angle is a bad angle, and the sound the back of his skull made when it connected with the edge of a step was not a good one.

  Sliding down a few more stairs atop a sled of supine, armored meat did not help Domingo recover from his dizziness, but other than being badly rattled he somehow seemed okay. Crawling off the comatose sentry took some doing, what with his bum hip, but after a bit of squirming around he was able to at last sit back on the bottom step, the slippers they’d given him in place of riding boots resting in the terra-cotta gravel. The setting sun behind the Temple of Pentacles drenched the ornate walls and terraced roofs of the Autumn Palace with a red as deep and rich as … claret, Domingo decided. And then, though it actually brought him no joy, he lowered his gaze to watch the fleeing squadron of the Samjok-o Guard be set upon by the pack of loping, lance-limbed horrors. The soldiers hadn’t even made it halfway back to the palace. The light began to fail.

  More of the clicking cries came from the north, and looking to those fields he saw through the gloaming that the creatures charging by had glowing green eyes. They all ignored him, so far, dozens and dozens of them charging straight toward the high walls of the Autumn Palace, but it only ever takes one overachiever breaking from formation in pursuit of glory, eh?