Sea monsters so titanic the previous beasts were as lice upon a mammoth.
Legions of black-armored soldiers, disgorged from the leviathans to storm white sand beaches … the beaches of Othean.
Witchy generals in flight above the battlefield, surveying the field from the backs of their monstrous mounts and giving silent orders that were instantly heeded by the hordes below.
A sabbath conducted atop the beating heart of a giant, a circle of ten channeling the harvest taking place across the sea.
The earth cracking open beneath an Immaculate castle, a fissure in the First Dark that devoured flesh and steel and stone and timber to feed the living moon that swelled up out of the abyss, its brilliant whiteness taking true form only as it entered the world of mortals, a terror that would burn Purna’s brain to a shriveled kernel if she beheld it in all its dread majesty but from which she could not look away as it reached up into the light of the world of mortals, uncoiling, and—
Purna’s world went from ivory to crimson, awe becoming terror, the pain in her heart and her head transferring to her hand. Blinking away bloody tears, she looked down to see Prince lapping at the bite wound he had opened on her palm. The devil looked up at her with eyes as black as their prisoner’s had been up until the interrogation, licking Purna with her former tongue. It was a horribly weird sensation, but like most horribly weird sensations she got used to it pretty quick. Wiping red snot from her leaky face, she petted him with bloody fingers.
“—hast thou done to her?” Keun-ju was shaking the bound devil, the knuckles of his hand covered in the same oily smear that was running from the old woman’s split face. He hit her again, and would have kept at it if Best hadn’t yanked him off.
“Be still,” said the huntress, pivoting Keun-ju to where Purna was clambering to her feet. “She is well.”
“You have to kill her!” said Keun-ju. “Purna and I swore an oath, but you can do it for us!”
“I do not attack the old and the infirm!” Best seemed actually stung by the suggestion. “For a boy who seeks to understand even monsters you know nothing of the Horned Wolf way.”
“Something semantically funny about that, but I’m not touching it,” said Purna, clinging to Prince as she swayed in place. That rank moldy smell lingered in her nose like cheap aromatic tubq ghosting a pipe.
“What has befallen you?” asked Best. “Has it done this?”
“This thing …” The hot pressure in Purna’s skull had eased off a little, but she still felt like a kettle just about to blow. “It can get inside your head. Talk to you, without talking to you. It talked to me, the way it’s been talking to its soldiers all this time without our knowing.”
“Then it is as I thought,” said Best, spitting at the lame feet of their prisoner. “It has led us to this place. We have taken it home and fallen into a trap at the same time. We shall leave this anathema behind. Now.”
“We can’t just let it go!” said Keun-ju. “First we have to—”
“Now,” repeated Best, her fist still clenched in Keun-ju’s coat. “If you and Purna swore oaths not to harm it, it would be despicable of me to commit violence on your behalf. Your folly is my shame. And if it understood you then it understands us now, and we will not speak more in its hearing. Come.”
“Got a point there,” said Purna. Pointing an unsteady hand at the still-grinning prisoner, she said, “See? We’re keeping our word. We’re better than you, and by the time this war’s over you’ll see who—”
“Purna!”
“Anyway, go fuck thineself,” she said, wishing she had time to come up with a better catchphrase. Instead she let Prince down and hobbled after her friends who were already hustling along the ridge, her devil bounding at her heels. They waited for her to catch up, eager for more answers now that the bushy kamala trees had swallowed up the prisoner at their hind, and she tried to explain what had happened as they legged it deeper into the jungle.
The dark was almost fully upon them and she was still filling them in on all the details when Prince whined in alarm just as Best held up a hand. They leaned back into the underbrush, and just when Purna didn’t think she could hold her breath any longer half a dozen Tothan soldiers passed them by, moving purposefully down the ridge. After giving it ample time they hurried on, no longer contributing to the racket of the jungle with further whispered discussions on the powers and prophecy of their enemy. There was a clearing ahead and they moved to skirt it when Best gasped, no common thing, and pointed.
There were three sky-devils, as Best called the behemoths, lying down in the tall wildflowers of the dark meadow. They had never before seen them on the ground, save for the one they had brought down, and they noticed that their wide white wings were pinned back to their saddles with black straps that sparkled in the moonlight. They had no reins, but that was something Purna had gleaned through the deluge of the prisoner’s impressions—the creatures themselves were simple-minded, but the saddles provided a conduit for the rider to reach their blubber-buried brains, controlling their mounts with intention alone.
“Come on,” said Purna. “I don’t know where we’re going but I know how we’re getting there.”
“I know where we are bound, but …” Best licked her lips, clearly warring with herself. “But Horned Wolves do not ride. This is the law.”
“This isn’t riding,” said Purna. “It’s flying.”
Best considered this. “All right.”
Yes! Purna had just known she’d warm to the prospect! Ever since they’d captured the crippled pilot Purna had been talking the idea up, of drawing down another monster but capturing it alive so they could take to the skies with it.
“All right?” Keun-ju spluttered—he would be the one mortal in the whole Star who never dreamed of flying. “I don’t believe this! I don’t! You two really intend to mount one of those, and then what, fly back to the Star?”
“Not the two of us,” said Purna, picking up Prince. “All four of us. It’s a vote. I vote we go.”
“As do I,” said Best.
“Prince?” asked Keun-ju, hoping for a deadlock, but even if the devil’s vote had counted he arfed his approval. Looking incredulously at the massive otherworldly animals, he shook his head in dismay.
“Look, even if this doesn’t work you’ve gotta admit it’s one hell of a way to go out,” said Purna. “Sure beats getting chased through this jungle for the rest of our short lives. So shake a leg, before they come back. And Best, what this about knowing where we’re going? You got some ideas, girl, lay ’em on me.”
“We are going to save the Star.” Best made it sound like the only obvious destination, which, especially coming from her, sounded really sweet and naïve … until she said, “The anathema we captured told you she was a living god. One of a cabal who dwell in this place, at the heart of this land. They are the ones who declared war on all mortals. Yes? So we fly yon beast to these living gods.” Perhaps mistaking Purna and Keun-ju’s stares for confusion, she added, “Such a plan is … is not unlike something in the songs Sullen would sing.”
“And what do we do once we get there?” asked Keun-ju. “Once we confront this … this council of deities who control Jex Toth?”
“What else?” said Best, her eyes gleaming in the dark. “I have never hunted gods before, but if they are truly living then they can be killed.”
Purna bumped Best’s fist, and bumped it hard, but like all wet blankets Keun-ju seemed intent on spreading his damp around.
“With all due respect, Purna, you and I couldn’t stand up to a handful of Raniputri bounty hunters, and now you think we can overcome a cadre of living gods? Even assuming we can ride those monsters, and even assuming we can somehow find the leaders of this place, what makes you think we three have any hope of stopping them?”
“I don’t,” Purna said with a shrug. “Like Digs always says, hope’s for dopes.”
“Then why press ahead with such a stupid plan?!” he demande
d. “This isn’t some … some absurd song, where everything will turn out fine no matter how reckless we behave. Your plan can only mean our lives!”
“Well, yeah, probably …” admitted Purna, “but from the way this fucking adventure has gone so far I’d say we’re actually stuck in one of those songs where everybody dies.”
“Those are the finest songs,” opined Best.
“On that we must disagree!” said Keun-ju. “I like happy endings! I want a happy ending! Climbing on top of that … thing, that does not bring us to a happy ending! So why would we ever—”
“Because we’re heroes, Keun-ju, and dumb shit like this is what heroes do!” Purna was disappointed that after all this time in her company she still had to explain something so basic to the kid. “We only get to die once, so we have to make the most of it. Dying back in Black Moth in some random showdown with headhunters wouldn’t have helped anyone, would it? But here and now we’ve got one fucking chance to really do something—to swing on the band of nasties that’s orchestrating the attack on Othean, an attack that’s been under way for weeks but isn’t lost yet, I don’t think. Our friends are there, Keun-ju, or at least they should be, by now—Sullen and Nemi and Ji-hyeon and plenty of other good people. And if what that freak just showed me is true they need our help like they’ve never needed it before. The whole Star needs our help. And we’re out of time to come up with anything better, so let’s get on these gnarly sky-devils and jam them down the throats of our enemies. It’s like Maroto told me this one time, when I was asking him about the secret to his success—he said, Purna, if you want the smoke, be the fire. So let’s be a fucking inferno so big our friends can see the smoke from Othean.”
It took a minute, but he got there in the end. You spent enough time around Keun-ju and you learned to tell when he was smiling under his veil. He bumped Purna’s fist, not as hard as Best but hard enough. When they turned to bring the Horned Wolf in on the action they realized she and Prince were already halfway to the moored monsters. You just couldn’t bring those two anywhere.
Hustling across the starlit clearing to rustle the biggest, ugliest beasties Purna had ever clapped eyes on, she caught herself wishing that the magic post had been wrong about Maroto’s current whereabouts, that at the tail-end of whatever wild ride lay ahead of her this night she would somehow come face-to-face with her long-lost mentor. Not that she also wanted him to be condemned to whatever mysterious but nevertheless certain doom awaited her, duh, but by all Thirty-Six Chambers of Ugrakar she would have loved to see the look on his face as she came riding in on a giant sky-devil, her Gate-bleached hair looking just bad as hell. Since that fantasy was even less probable than this nasty thing delivering her to a tasteful-yet-sexy reunion with Nemi, however, she reminded herself that it was decidedly for the best that Maroto had already escaped Jex Toth, and hoped wherever the big bruiser had ended up he was having as much fun as she was.
CHAPTER
16
From the moment a school of aquatic abominations upended his rowboat in the shallows Maroto should have guessed he had a crap day ahead of him. At the time, though, he’d been full of foolish optimism: the quickly flooding rowboat half full, as it were. And hey, it could have been worse! The bulky, many-legged things in the water focused more on tearing up the landing craft than they did the people, and must not have sensed the interlopers’ presence until they were right on top of them, seeing as how they didn’t strike until the boats were almost to shore. Maroto supposed if anything the destruction of their only means of escape would light a fire under the volunteers he led—all five hundred of them.
He knew Lupitera was right about the Azgarothian navy doing more good on the northern side of the capital isle, where they could use cannon and cutlass to cut off the flow of Tothan reinforcements. Plus he’d contribute more on the ground than stuck on a galleon; for all the flotsam he talked with Bang and the crew it’d been a very long time since his sea legs had been steady. And he also knew from the final messages they’d exchanged with the Immaculate generals just before the predawn launch that the Autumn Palace was in desperate need of any able hands it could get, the outer wall breached and the inner struggling. That the empress and her court were in a different castle might prolong the inevitable, but a quick glance at a map of Othean confirmed that if one of the four palaces fell the Tothans would immediately gain the interior of the sprawling city … and once that happened the war was lost before it had even properly started, the monsters devouring the Immaculate capital from the inside out.
So Maroto knew all the reasons why his mission had to happen, but it didn’t make him any happier about leading the charge, primarily because of the charges themselves: Chainites captured at Darnielle Bay. Well, not all of the prisoners, only those who’d accepted the clemency deal the Baroness of Cockspar had offered them. It wasn’t a bad contract, really, fighting alongside their fellow mortals against the very demons they had summoned in exchange for a full pardon. And it wasn’t that they fought poorly, for some were veteran war nuns and battle monks, and others were Imperial marines stationed at the harbor in Desolation Sound who’d converted in a hurry when it became apparent the Burnished Chain had set fire to Diadem and only the faithful were allowed on the boats escaping the blaze.
That’s why it wasn’t the greenness of his recruits that gave him pause, nor the size of the squad. No, the bug in Maroto’s butt about this whole affair was that if word ever got out he’d led a Chainite army, even a small one, he’d never live it down. At his age pride was about all he had left, and betraying the human race was a lot less embarrassing than rolling out with Chainites.
This is what happens when you don’t stay clean. The icebee stings and heaping rails of funeral moth dust Lupitera had provided to offset the sluggish effects of the laced blunt had initially been just what the barber ordered, of course, putting pep in his step … but his involuntary bath in the bay washed off most of the fluttery euphoria, leaving him twitchy and melancholic and wishing he’d either managed to stay off the bugs altogether or brought along some more to keep him good and loaded until his unavoidable death. Regret and shame and hunger for that which he regretted, that what made him ashamed.
A typical Maroto morning, in other words.
Splashing through the cold surf, he reflected on how he and Bang must have sailed past this very spot aboard the Chainite ship a few weeks back, and how she’d scoffed at the stupid Imperials for entering the wrong inlet to reach Othean Bay. He knew he’d never see her again, but he indulged a fantasy of reuniting with her on some sun-dappled deck and saucily informing her there was no such thing as a wrong inlet, if your helmsperson had a steady hand and knew his way around the tides. He could probably find a way to work in a ribald joke about inserting the Burnished Chain, too …
Time enough to worry about such things once he’d lived out the day, however, and doing a quick head count after he and his Chainites had all floundered ashore he saw they were already down two dozen troopers. Not an auspicious start, especially as the amphibious defenses began awkwardly following the invaders out of the surf. Maroto had his soggy soldiers cut a few down to get their morale back up, but when a war monk was ripped in two by one of the slow insectoid giants he decided they’d tarried long enough.
After the lumbering, soft-shelled monsters were left behind on the rocky shore, Maroto led his peanut regiment along the route laid out in the map the Immaculates had included with their final letter. Othean’s four city-palaces were laid out in a diamond on the island, but over the many years their settlements had all expanded inward to create a single metropolis, around which rose two walls that were heavily patrolled even in peacetime. Now legions in spiny black armor surrounded the mighty capital and their leviathans patrolled the coast, cutting off escape from all sides. Yet even with their massive armies the Tothans were careful not to spread their siege too thin, focusing their assaults on the Autumn Palace.
In the predawn darkness Maroto le
d his own black-clad army in from the coast, through the carefully manicured forest stocked with wild game from all over the Star. It took far longer than it should have to cross the wood, fools bumping into trees and making a parade’s worth of racket, but they were not discovered by any foot patrols, and so far there were no reports of the flying squid-dragons that were so prevalent on Jex Toth.
On the far edge of the wood they crept north for-bloody-ever, until one of the captains Maroto had appointed noticed the blue-fletched arrow jutting from a tamarack. Coalstick and mirror flashes were exchanged with the top of the wall that had come into definition through the mist, and then Maroto led his meager company huffing and puffing across the field between the forest and the southwestern edge of the Autumn Palace. Any moment he expected an inhuman horde to come charging down on them, but the only thing that struck was a rain shower, and if that’s the worst you have to contend with during a monster invasion then no sense complaining.
Just as they reached the wall there came a slight creaking and then a fissure appeared in its surface, and then another, and then a massive rectangular section swung outward. Impressive as the hidden gate was, Maroto was even more impressed when they got through and found it took only a handful of Immaculates to operate. The Chainite regiment milled nervously in the narrow streets of the shantytown on the other side of the wall, looking anxiously at the dark, ramshackle buildings that edged them in. The one time Maroto had explored Othean he’d marveled at what a rare thing it was, to have a city without slums, but this low-rent neighborhood looked even older than he was. Just went to show that some things are true the Star over—the Immaculate capital had its ghettos, same as everywhere else, they just funneled them out of sight into the gap between the inner and outer walls. Prevented the peasantry from lowering the opulent tone of the place.
A War in Crimson Embers Page 40
