A War in Crimson Embers

by Alex Marshall

  As the last Chainites pressed into the wet mob of their fellows that now swarmed the slum all around the secret gate, the Immaculate in charge pursed her lips, looking skeptically at Maroto. She was young but didn’t look it anymore, with the sunken eyes and chafed cheeks of a cadet who’d seen far too much, far too soon.

  “Where are the rest?” she asked in Crimson. “We were told to receive reinforcements, not a paltry gaggle of Chainite geese.”

  “Rude,” said Maroto, looking down at the woman with her peacock-plumed helmet. “This flock of mine might be few in number but they’re strong of talon and stout of breast.”

  “Loons, is more like, led by an old cuckoo,” she grumbled in Immaculate. Maroto could feel her judging him—for his skull facepaint, or the cobalt lamé vest Lupitera had told him was woven from a devil worm’s arse, he wasn’t sure which. Quite possibly both. He was all set to respond in kind, but looking up into the rain for the Immaculate word for ingrate he caught sight of a wet blur overhead, on the rampart of the outer wall. It melted back behind the curtains of rain, but not before he was sure he saw water skating off shell as black as the soot-stained tiles of the roofs overhead, and the spear of shimmering white bone it held in one clawed hand.

  “Time to go!” Maroto spoke in Immaculate, so as not to spook his troops. “We just got fucking made by a Tothan scout.”

  “Where?” The Immaculate officer and her cadre all looked around, as if that were the most vital issue here.

  “On the wall there; it headed back north soon as I saw it. Just how far—” Before Maroto could finish asking how far they were from where the Tothans had broken through the outer wall, and if there were any gates or other defensive barriers cordoning off the compromised section from this particular neighborhood, the Immaculates answered by shouldering their crossbows and hauling arse into the slums, toward the inner wall. Ever the responsible leader, Maroto took off after them, calling over his shoulder in Crimson, “Move out, move out!”

  On the map it was no more than a quarter mile between the inner and outer walls, but that wasn’t taking into account that there wasn’t a single fucking straight line in this whole fucking shantytown. Right around the time Maroto was hoping that factor might slow down the enemy, too, he heard the first screams from the rear of his regiment. Of all the lousy dick-shitting fates, to be ambushed before they’d even reached—

  The inner wall reared up in front of him as they slid around the corner of the final dogleg alley. The Immaculate squad ran straight into an innocuous hut, one of countless others built up against the foot of the three-hundred-foot fortification. Trotting inside after them, he saw the soldiers swing the entire rear wall open, offering access to the Autumn Palace. Maroto stared longingly at that torchlit doorway, imagining a world where he was the first one through, and even took a step toward it when he heard another scream from back in the squalid warren.

  On the boat ride over one of the Chainites had been so scared he’d wet his damn self right there, and in a rash attempt to put the kid at ease Maroto had promised him he’d do what he could to see everyone through the day. Maroto and his fucking oaths. When would he learn?

  Yeah.

  At least he wasn’t high anymore. That counted for something, didn’t it?

  Fighting the current of black-robed Chainites pouring into the shack, he shouldered his way back out into the rain. There was a wider avenue here that ran parallel to the inner wall, and since pushing back into the cramped alleys would only slow everyone down he planted his boots in the mud, facing north. The street was empty for now, but as soon as it wasn’t he’d be the only thing standing between the Tothans and the conscripted soldiers in his charge who came slipping out of the alleys, crossing the road and dipping into the hut.

  The rain came down harder, and he hefted the flanged mace Lupitera had helped him pick out in Darnielle Bay. Wondered what had ever happened to the one Ulver Krallice had made for him a lifetime ago, the single damn piece of his history he’d managed to hold on to right up until the Battle of the Lark’s Tongue. Supposed it didn’t matter much; whoever scavenged it from his tent might not know the song behind the relic, but they’d improvise their own … and like all such songs, it would end in a place like this, clinging to the hope that your special weapon would see you through, right up until you stopped hoping for anything ever again.

  And so the monsters. It always, always, always came down to monsters, didn’t it? How could it come down to anything else, given that deep down, where it counts, he was the worst sort of—

  Black-shelled infantry burst out of an alley just up the empty street, spoiling his tired reveries. Who said monsters were all bad, then? There were three of them and one of him, but with all the Chainites escaping into the hut at his hind surely someone would back him up. Surely.

  The three Tothans ran as one, but slowly, and the rain slowed, too, everything coming into sharp relief. He could hear them even over the rain blasting the muddy street; he’d thought they were silent before, but that was only because they didn’t talk. Now that he was really listening he could hear the rough scraping of their armor, insectoid plates brushing against each other as they ran, and underneath that a soft scrabbling sound, like rats in a wall. Two held bone spears in their clawed gauntlets, the third winding back a barbed net. Fuck that net in particular. Maroto sprang forward to meet them.

  Some folk don’t think a mace is a throwing weapon. Those people have never tried to catch one. Maroto hurled his heavy mace straight into the faceplate of the Tothan with the net, his eyes on the pair with spears as soon as the weapon left his fingers. He didn’t have to hear the explosion of carapace to know his aim had been true, but he nevertheless smiled at the sound.

  A slower man would have caught a spear right in his grinning teeth, and a second between his ribs. But then who wants to listen to the songs of slower men? Maroto whipped his head forward and arched his back like a cat, skating through the mud right between those two spears, between those two warriors. More Tothans were coming down the street, but they were still three blocks away. Quick as Maroto was moving, it might as well have been three miles. He turned back to the pair he’d slipped past.

  They didn’t turn after him, still making for the procession of Chainites crossing the street into the hut, but that just made Maroto’s job easier. Wrenching his mace from the twitching wreckage of the first Tothan he had ever killed, Maroto marveled that even after all this time he still didn’t know what the monsters looked like, under their insect armor. They were too big to be human—or formerly human, or whatever you wanted to call the demoniac Vex Assembly—but even when the Tothans had him bunking in titanic bowels and cleaning parasites off their sea monsters these grunts had never removed a helm in his presence, nor slipped off a single gauntlet. Now even in death this one remained a mystery—its shelled helmet had imploded from the impact of his mace, reeking grey goo covering the head of his weapon as its heavy body shuddered in the rain. There was something weird about it, though, something he only started processing as he ran after the original pair …

  They were about to fall upon the fleeing Chainites when he smashed one in the side, knocking it into the other. They both went down in the slippery mud. Maroto nearly careened into a fleeing Chainite, caught himself. Caved in the chest of the first Tothan to rise, his mace crunching deep, ichors misting out and filling the muggy air with more of that cloying bughouse stench. It slumped forward on its knees and he was already swinging around to murder the other when the first sat back up, sticking him with its spear as if he hadn’t just struck it a mortal fucking wound. The bone prong hit Maroto square in the gut, and despite not having any wind-up behind it the weapon carried so much momentum it sent Maroto skidding backward in the mud.

  He crashed into the stampede of Chainites, wrapping his free arm around one to keep from falling … and only succeeding in bringing them both tumbling to earth. His belly was on fire, like the fattest cigar in Madros was being grou
nd out against his gut. Slow as time seemed to be passing, it felt like an eternity before he could bring himself to look down at the wound, sure he’d see a rope of his guts stretching clear back to the Tothan’s barbed spear. Instead he saw something almost as bad—a slight tear in the blue lamé vest Lupitera had let him borrow, with a tiny spot of blood staining the feather-light armor. If he lived long enough to return it he expected her wrath would be as bad as anything an inhuman monster could administer.

  He still couldn’t find his breath, let alone his feet, and looked up to see that the pair of Tothans were almost atop him. The one he’d fatally injured hadn’t gotten the message that it was dead yet, lurching forward despite its entire chest being a gaping wet hole of broken shell … and that was when it clicked, the crazy shit he’d seen when he’d pulled his mace from the first Tothan he dropped. It wasn’t the crushed helmet that was so strange, since he knew their armor was made of insects … it was that the rest of the suit of armor was shuddering in the rain. Shuddering, and falling apart? He’d been so focused on his upright foes it hadn’t even registered, but now it did, oh yes it fucking did, giant plated bugs falling away from one another to reveal … nothing.

  As if sensing he’d figured out their secret, the injured Tothan made straight for Maroto, the other clearing its path through the startled Chainites. Black robes flapped in Maroto’s face as his soldiers fled, and then the pair fell upon him. This was very bad, two spears coming down to spit him, the sensation returning to Maroto’s stunned flesh just in time for him to experience what those jagged bone spikes felt like when they weren’t rebuffed by armor, and—

  The Tothans toppled back, mobbed by Chainites. The fresher of the two was hacked apart by Imperial steel, and the one he’d already injured was beheaded with a single stroke of a war nun’s sword. Its black helm tumbled off in a gout of grey slime, landing six inches from Maroto’s face … and uncoiling as it died, tucking its dozens of sharp legs into what remained of its ribbed belly, the end of it leaking more of the thick, foul blood. Twenty eyes stared into Maroto’s as it died, the queen or brain bug or whatever the fuck it was that controlled the hollow suit of sentient armor reminding the aging addict of why he’d sworn off insects for good, following this morning’s final bender with Lupitera—the things were just too fucking creepy.

  “Up, Captain!” The last of their comrades were disappearing into the hovel beside them, and the war nun seized Maroto by the shoulder. A robed novice got under his other armpit, and together they hauled him to his numb feet … and almost let him go again, staring ahead with jaws good and dropped.

  The horde of Tothans who had seemed so far away a minute ago were a lot closer now … though not so close as he would have expected, really, the whole bloody throng of them having stopped moving a good block away. Lightning crackled across the sky just overhead, and the press of Tothans in the street didn’t even have to part to allow the beasts that had appeared in their midst to advance—the pointy legs of the glowing-eyed, horse-faced horrors were so long they just passed over the soldiers, stepping daintily though the crowd to reach the three mortals who stood against them.

  Well, the three mortals who turned tail and booked arse toward the secret gate, if you wanted to get technical about it.

  Maroto wasn’t feeling so fatigued anymore, he and the two Chainites flying into the hut just in time to see the Immaculates’ gate slowly swinging inward. The Chainites were ahead of him, and then they were through … and then there was a highly sketchy moment as Maroto darted around the closing aperture where he realized he’d misjudged the gap, he was about to get squished, and—

  He fell safely on the other side just as the massive stone door clicked into place. It was dark in here, wherever here was. His Chainites must be climbing up an unlit stair, because high to one side of the cavernous space he saw them passing through an arch of light. Catching his breath and letting his eyes adjust to the gloom, Maroto tenderly prodded the tear in his lamé vest and the bruised and nicked belly skin beneath it until he was certain that he had indeed lived to fight another day … or at least another hour. He doubted the Tothan monsters would be busting through such a thick gate anytime soon, but mother hen that he was he addressed his concerns to the Immaculates who had cranked the hidden passage shut.

  “Now that they know there’s a secret entrance here they’ll be working it day and night until they pop it open.”

  “We have destroyed the mechanism,” said a barely glimpsed Immaculate as he began to head up the stairs. “This gate shall never open again, but we can pray they divert their resources to try. They have almost broken through a dozen weaker places already, and continue to harry them.”

  “Huh,” said Maroto, following them up the slippery steps. Not for the first time that wet and miserable morning he wished he had absconded the night before with Bang and the others. Self-sacrifice always sounds better in theory than in practice, and now that he had succeeded in joining the trapped Immaculates his feet weren’t just cold, they were practically frostbit. He’d made the gesture, which was the important thing, and first chance he got he’d have to cut back out of here—he was sure Bang would welcome him back to her employ, soon as he caught up with her. Easily done.

  Of course, he’d spent damn near every day since Hoartrap’s punkarse had dropped him on Jex Toth imagining a reunion and second chance with Choi, and just about every night doing one better in his dreams. Yet for as bad as he wanted it to come true, that wish was as impossible as any half-baked bugdream, and his ever seeing Bang again wasn’t any more likely. The Star was just too damn big, and besides, it was about to end in a great big hurry, wasn’t it, no matter what he did here? The Tothans had already arrived, no doubt delivered in the bellies of the same leviathans he and the pirates had helped prep for war back on Jex Toth. Just one of those things could carry thousands of troops, and in the time he’d spent there he’d seen dozens of them—how many must be beached on the northern shore of Othean right now?

  But if there was one thing Maroto excelled at it was saving his own skin, and if it really had been hopeless his instincts wouldn’t have led him here, would they? His very biology compelled him to cowardice, and if all were truly lost he’d be on a boat with Bang right now, making the most of his last days instead of hastening them along. There had to be a way to stop this … or so he told himself as they reached the first of many ornate archways, the Immaculates leading him up through Othean’s inner wall—which doubled here as the outer wall of the Autumn Palace—to meet the general charged with defending it.

  This place felt like Castle Diadem, the wall so thick its halls were more like roads than corridors, and always with another stair to climb. With each step the bruise blooming in his belly reminded him that while the climb was arduous the Immaculate command had positioned themselves a safe distance above the contested streets.

  At last they reached the top, stepping out into the dismal dawn on the northern end of the Autumn Palace. The Immaculate officers were gathered up ahead on a covered terrace that rose from the wall-walk. Peeking over the parapet as lightning rippled through the low clouds, Maroto saw that things were even grimmer than he’d guessed.

  It was as if a black sea bordered the inner wall of Othean, and the tide was coming in. Wave after wave of the inhuman army beat against the base of the fortifications only to fall back as the defenders dumped blazing oil and avalanches of masonry down on them, again and again. The Tothan army spread all the way through this quadrant of the slums, and out through a massive fissure in the low outer wall to fill the fields beyond. In the midst of all that squirming black shell Maroto glimpsed a white smudge that must be the Star-famous Temple of Pentacles, making the whole scene look eerily as if the First Dark were seeping out of the Othean Gate to engulf the world …

  In less poetic terms it was also looking an awful lot like a foregone conclusion down there, but then his Immaculate liaison delivered him to the general coordinating the defense of the
Autumn Palace. When Maroto saw the old fox he burst out laughing.

  “They’ve got you running this operation? No wonder the wall’s about to fall!”

  “Shoddy Immaculate construction, nothing to do with me,” said Fennec, dismissing his officers with a wave of his pipe and grinning just as wide as Maroto as they embraced each other to the thunderous applause of the rain on the tiered roof of the terrace. There was that lingering pause where each man made sure there was no dagger planted in his back, and then they broke, sizing each other up. “You’ve put on weight, barbarian, don’t tell me you’ve taken to eating devils on top of skinning them!”

  “Was only the once, and don’t remind me of Hoartrap,” said Maroto, and then his pulse quickened. “Unless he’s here? Is the Touch about?”

  “You missed him by minutes,” said Fennec, pointing his curl-toed boot at a tarry circle on the flagstones. “Blew in like this weather, and of similar mood. I brought him up to speed, and then he did the sensible thing and sodded off.”

  “Damn,” said Maroto, scowling at the wizard’s foul trace. “Did he … did he say anything before he went?”

  “A few fuck words?” Fennec shrugged, puffing away. The thick billiard was the least ostentatious of the pipes Zosia had carved her Villains, but the grain was lovely. “He thinks the world’s coming to an end unless he can find Zosia and asked if we’d heard any word. So I told him that as far as I knew he was the last person to see her alive, same as he was the last person to see you, and both times rather close to the Lark’s Tongue Gate. Did he have anything to do with your disappearance?”

  “About as much as I’m going to have with his, soon as I lay hands on the fickle freak,” said Maroto. “Short answer is he dumped me on Jex Toth, I got free of there, tried coming here, went down to Darnielle instead, and then bounced back up. Got five hundred reformed Chainites ready to fight for their freedom.”

  “Five thousand,” said Fennec.