A War in Crimson Embers

by Alex Marshall

  And they stopped. And even more incredibly, backed away. But Choplicker didn’t stop growling, sounding angrier and angrier, and glancing down she saw he’d turned and was staring at something behind them. Clambering up and turning to face the Gate he’d brought her through, she saw what had him so keyed up. This Gate was different from any she’d ever seen, with arched bridges of bone crisscrossing over it, and at each intersection stood a bizarre figure. There were five up there all together, with another five circling the rim at the points where the bone bridges joined, and hanging down from the ceiling over the center of the Gate were the three biggest cocoons she had ever seen. These cultists or whoever they were all stared at Zosia with sunken eyes in grotesque faces—you couldn’t even say they were corpselike, for they were so ancient they made mummies seem fresh.

  “Your Majessssssty,” hissed the closest figure in High Immaculate, dropping an exaggerated bow. Zosia didn’t know what was more unsettling, that the corpulent man’s robe was formed of swarming white ants, or that he seemed to be addressing Choplicker instead of her.

  CHAPTER

  27

  Maroto’s thighs burned. His Gate-healed knee decided this was as good a time as any to act back up, and now it felt like he was grinding broken glass in there with every step. The stitch in his side hurt as bad as a wound in need of sutures. His spear arm felt ready to fall off, and that was an improvement on the one carrying the witch’s birdcage. He was literally sweating blood. His face felt like salt crystals were embedded under the shredded skin. Oh, and he’d really liked that eye, too. Had certainly preferred it to a numb hole, the absence of sensation in that area even more frightening than pain would’ve been.

  Yet for all that, Maroto had never felt better as he led the hundred-odd remaining Chainites back into Othean. Forget bugs, he was a born-again egghead from this day forward! That witch had given him the good shit, no joke. Here at last was a high that didn’t deaden his senses from the pain that was his due, but gave him the strength to bear it, and take on even more. Give the creepy-crawlers their credit, though: if he hadn’t spent the last couple decades chasing the centipede and building up a lordly tolerance he’d probably already be dead—whatever alien venom that Tothan’s quilled helm had injected him with gave him the red sweats and didn’t play too nice with the nervous system, either, but his hands were steady enough for killing, and whose heart didn’t race during a battle? Obviously the day was young and the witch seemed to think it was only a matter of time before the toxins melted his brain out through his nose, but you could say that about anything, couldn’t you? It was all a matter of time, and then you were dead.

  Scrambling up the rubble of the inner wall, he paused at the top of the heap. His bloodied volunteers panted past him, dropping down into the street below and continuing their mad flight to the supposed safety of the wall at the middle of Othean. Fennec had hitched a ride with one of Ji-hyeon’s sisters on her giant sloth or whatever it was, directing the reunited-but-routed Cobalt Company through the trap-laden western city, but here at the rear of the retreating army Maroto wasn’t without new friends. Nemi huffed her way up the debris to join him, Indsorith beside her, and back in the slums Ji-hyeon and Sullen and the rest of the remaining Cobalt cavalry covered their retreat.

  It looked like thankless work from up here, with the massive northern regiment pouring into the outer wall after them, and mobs of Tothans from the first force still lurking about the narrow alleys. The only unexpected boon was that most of that first Tothan army was currently swarming the Autumn Palace, overrunning the empty castle complex that was built into the inner wall just south of here. Lupitera’s theory must have been right—the Tothans were trying to capture the Immaculate Empress and her court, mistakenly thinking she was here thanks to Maroto’s bad but believable intelligence. As he peered at the terraced balconies and exposed stairways teeming with beetle-shelled bastards on their way back down to street level, he imagined they must have figured out the castle was uninhabited. Which meant they were about to come charging back up here at the obvious fleeing targets, and when they reached this breach any Cobalts not safely on the other side would be trapped in the slums between the two walls.

  Maroto felt his Charity swell at the prospect of making his last stand, here and now. Watching Hoartrap gird himself in a cockroach colossus and march out to meet the Tothans had shredded some secret chords deep in Maroto’s breast—the Touch was the most selfish creature Maroto had ever met, but here at the end he’d sacrificed himself to save his friends, and in truly epic fashion. Whether or not the old warlock had intended it to be his final charge there seemed little doubt he was dead now, dead or worse—the Vex Assembly had endlessly grilled Maroto about Hoartrap, their interest in the wizard unrivaled in its intensity. While none of the creeps had volunteered what exactly it was about the Touch they found so abhorrent it was obvious from their attitude they couldn’t wait to get him in their pruny clutches—Maroto had assumed it was just a typical sorcerous rivalry, magic-users being a catty bunch. Watching one of the ancient priests fly its squid-dragon smack into the middle of Hoartrap’s titan and bring the giant down, he supposed they had finally caught up with him.

  A tough act to follow, that, but Maroto was a consummate professional, the closer’s closer, and if Hoartrap the Touch had gone down getting the Cobalts this far, well, Maroto would go down getting them the rest of the way. And within sight of the Temple of Pentacles where Kang-ho had apparently bought it, too. This was the stuff of legends, right here: the Fifth Villain joining the Third and the First in a noble death outside the Autumn Palace. Total fucking classic.

  “Come on,” Indsorith panted as she passed Maroto, sliding down the mound of debris into the city of West Othean. “They’re almost on top of us.”

  “They are on top of us,” said Nemi, pointing back at where a massive furry thing with lampreylike mouths on the ends of its many sinuous limbs crested an unbroken section of the outer wall. If the first Tothan army had arrived with giant monsters like that they would have taken the Autumn Palace in hours, not weeks. “Time to run, Captain Maroto—you owe me your life, and etiquette dictates you return the favor.”

  “I figured as much,” he said, euphoric at the prospect of more mortification. “I’ll hold this hole as long as I can while you make your getaway. Can you take this spear back to my nephew, though? Not much chance of my delivering it to—”

  “Absolutely not!” huffed the witch. “I did not buy your life so that you could simply throw it away again.”

  “Wait, what?” Maroto couldn’t figure this girl out. “You said the poison in my face is going to kill me, right? So why not help everyone get away with a gallant last stand?”

  “I said it will probably prove terminal,” said Nemi, stepping on her tiptoes to examine the oozing pincushion of his face. “But my egg slowed it enough that you have a little time, at least, and you will not squander those priceless minutes on empty dramatics. You will carry Zeetatrice to safety, because even after doubling my own dose I’m not fit enough to run with her—if you die she dies, and if she dies I die.”

  “Oooooh,” said Maroto, nodding his floaty head as he watched one of the enormous mouth-legged monsters leap from the outer wall onto a nearby tenement roof, shattering tiles but not falling through. It moved fast over the rooftops, straight toward them … “Oh! Run!”

  Nemi was already moving, though, catching up with Indsorith on the cobblestones below. Maroto slipped his way down after them, the blindfolded cockatrice hissing at him as the cage swung every which way, more Cobalts cresting the stile of rubble behind him and joining the exodus into West Othean. The crowd was fleeing up the eastern boulevard, and crossing a wider avenue that led a mere six blocks down to the Autumn Palace’s majestic inner gate he saw the Tothan soldiers come charging out to catch them.

  Behind the clacking soldiers, another of the eight-legged monsters dropped over the top of the wall, crashing through the gabled roof of
a temple … and then exploding out of its double doors, the fall not having slowed it in the slightest. Rearing on its hind legs, its leathery white bulk stretched as high as the second story of the castle, and from each of its six wavering, ring-mouthed limbs issued discordant, trumpeting wails. Maroto wasn’t sure what that might mean, exactly, but he didn’t think it was surrendering. After that, he caught up with Nemi and Indsorith in no time.

  Ji-hyeon whirled her steed around, its tail snapping the legs out from under a horse demon, her sword slicing through a Tothan’s helm. Sullen, meanwhile, clung to the saddle horn and tried not to throw up or be thrown off. When they’d been working with the other mounted Cobalts in the narrow streets between the two walls he’d been able to contribute something, using the spear he’d found to modest success. Now that Ji-hyeon had ordered everyone to flee, however, he was worse than useless, probably blocking her view as he bounced in front of her on the saddle.

  After they had galloped up the ruins of the inner wall and dropped down into Othean he had hoped they might be able to slow their pace a little. On the contrary, the wider avenues let them ride faster than ever, and every jostle on the saddle made Sullen feel like he was being stabbed anew in his leaky stomach. With half a Tothan army already overrunning the city around them and a far larger regiment coming in at their heels, their fastest might not be fast enough. They tore through the metropolis that went from completely deserted on one block to choked with enemies on the next, rounding corners so fast their steed slid across the wet cobblestones, bumping into the handsome stone buildings and breaking through the occasional fence. The deeper they penetrated into the sprawling neighborhoods the less frequently they encountered the rest of the Cobalts, though he didn’t know whether this was Ji-hyeon’s design to lead the enemy away or if they were simply lost in the biggest city on the Star … a place chock-full of deadly traps, apparently.

  “Sullen!” They had just overtaken another Tothan throng when Ji-hyeon tapped his thigh with the arm she kept wrapped around his waist. The one holding on to the reins. “Take these—I need to read the map!”

  “Uh, sure.” Sullen did, fully expecting the animal to throw them both as soon as he touched the leather leads. It didn’t, but without Ji-hyeon’s arm around him he felt even more likely to slide over its scaled side. When her hand didn’t return even as the empty avenue they sped down split into a fork, he said, “Uh, Ji-hyeon?”

  “Left? Left!” she said, and Sullen gave the reins a little tug in that direction. The big animal didn’t seem to acknowledge it, so he pulled harder … but instead of taking the left-hand path its long head whipped around, yanking the reins out of his hands as it slid to a stop just in front of the intersection. “Sullen!”

  “Damn,” he said, leaning forward and reaching for the dangling reins as the animal huffed at him. He didn’t puke and his guts didn’t fall out, though both felt like distinct possibilities as he snatched at them. When he finally caught the straps and straightened back up he that saw that the animal hadn’t just taken offense at his inexperienced steering—a huge grey shape came careening down the left-hand path, its many limbs pushing off along both the walls of the alley and the street below. It was maybe a bit like a naked mammoth, only with sharp-toothed trunks instead of legs, and twice as many limbs at that, but Sullen didn’t get a really good look since he was already yanking the reins in the other direction and kicking their mount’s flanks for all he was worth.

  Now it was Ji-hyeon’s turn to cling to him as their steed took off down the right-hand street. Terra-cotta tiles rained down around them, and glancing up Sullen saw that the pursuing monster had taken a shortcut over the tops of the buildings separating the two avenues. It kept time with them on the edge of the roofs, its mouths trilling in turn as they loped even faster, overtaking their quarry. Ji-hyeon began tugging at Sullen’s hair and desperately scratching at his arms, shouting at him to stop, stop, but even if that had seemed like a sane idea he didn’t know how.

  Up ahead the avenue opened into a plaza, and through the screen of rain he saw the monster leap down to intercept them, its thick limbs tearing up the cobblestones as it landed, spinning around to meet them … and then vanishing as the wide square evaporated into blinding light and blistering heat, a thick fog enveloping them as the rain boiled away.

  “Yeah,” Sullen said when his ears stopped ringing and he realized Ji-hyeon had been asking if he was all right. Their mount had stopped, the hot avenue still obscured in steam but what he could see of the buildings around them spattered with grey and black daubs of gore. “So … back there I guess you meant my other left, huh?”

  Before she could answer, figures began to materialize in the misty ruins of the plaza. Black-shelled figures drawn to the explosion, moving toward them with weapons lowered. Pulling the reins hard to the left to turn them back around, Sullen muttered, “Gonna take that for a yes.”

  Othean’s innermost wall towered over the central market district streets, only a dozen blocks away now. Which made it all the more disappointing that when Maroto wheezed around the final bend and came out into the field of stalls between him and safety he found that the Tothans had cut them off. Well, maybe some or even most of the Cobalts had made it to the gatehouse in time, but not all of them, to guess from the torn-up corpses in blue tabards strewn about the market square. As the hundreds of hollow soldiers and their green-eyed cavalry rushed forward to cut down Maroto and the rest of the stragglers, he passed the cockatrice cage back to Nemi and took up his nephew’s spear in both hands. No clever words came to mind so he let the silence stand; better no last words at all than something daft. Besides, this Flintland spear would do the talking for both of them.

  Somewhere behind them in the city the first explosion went off, punctuating his stoic silence, and now he was grinning despite how much it hurt his face. Or maybe because of it; everything was getting mixed up in his venom-cooked brain. Skip a night’s sleep in favor of hours and hours of brutal combat against monsters straight out of a stinghound’s nightmare and life begins to feel a little dreamlike. Point was, that blast meant the Immaculates’ trap was going off, and every last one of these Tothan freaks was going to die a nasty death. As were Maroto and the rest of the Cobalts here on the wrong side of the central wall, yes, but sometimes that’s just how the song ends.

  Not always, though.

  The rain thickened above the charging Tothans, and then the first three lines were hit with the deluge of arrows that had arced over the wall. Most of them collapsed, especially the infantry, but a bunch of the horsey monstrosities stayed upright despite all the shafts sticking out of them. The volley was a nice gesture, even if it wasn’t enough to save them from the rest of the charging legion, but then Maroto saw the unthinkable go down—way over there on the far corner of the market square the portcullis had risen up in the gatehouse, and now rider after rider came streaming out to hit the remaining Tothans from behind. It wasn’t just any cavalry, either, but Raniputri dragoons, their lances lowered and shields high.

  At the time Maroto had been pretty sore about getting a faceful of Tothan bug juice, especially considering how it was administered, but between this and Nemi’s egg he had to fess this was one primo speedball. Indsorith rushing past him with her sword held high reminded him that it was time to make a good day even better—why just gawk at your weird fate when you could hitch up your skirt and dance with it? He glanced back at Nemi to tell her to stay behind him but forgot what he was going to say when he saw she’d sat down on top of her birdcage, tucked in her dress, and planted a saw-toothed sword between her legs. She raised a little bow up into the rain, muttered something, and after snapping the moisture off it, began to play the sword.

  It sounded bad. Just, like, raw hell. But what better music to go hunting for your own? The pike-limbed demons seemed to like it even less than Maroto, the incoming pack all chattering and rearing back, their flaming green eyes guttering pink and their sideways mouths foaming, and t
hen they wheeled away, stomping back through their own troops. Ill magic, no doubt.

  Charging after Indsorith to the sound of possessed cats being exorcised, he had to laugh. When he’d made that pledge all those years ago to never raise weapons against the Crimson Queen he’d hardly expected to one day follow her into battle. Badly as he craved a slow and painful death he knew that was just the Tothan venom talking, and what he really wanted was to live out the day so he could tell Indsorith just how closely he’d stuck to his promise, even during the Battle of the Lark’s Tongue. Nothing wrong with bragging when you’d earned it.

  As Maroto came into the melee after Indsorith he was struck by just how well this spear handled. He’d never been one for pointy weapons, or Flintlander tools at all, truth be told, but this was a bug of another carapace. Probably didn’t hurt that the poison in his skull was giving him more of those weird sensory hallucinations; anytime a Tothan came in from his blind side his ear would sting just like it’d been flicked by a mean old bastard, giving him just enough warning to spin around and parry or pike his enemy. Felt so good he had to howl about it, and howling felt so good he had to wonder why he didn’t do it more often.

  Howl, stab, dodge. Howl, dodge, slash. Trip, howl, spit. Howl howl howl.

  Then he was on the other side of the Tothans all of a sudden, staggering out into the milling Raniputri horses and bumping right into the side of a big bay. The rider looked down at him, an old dragoon whose camail-framed face boasted an even woolier lip-weasel than the antennae-mustachioed emperor centipede design of her spiked helm’s noseguard. Hey, wait a godsdamned minute …