A War in Crimson Embers

by Alex Marshall

  Zosia swung her hammer even as she loosed Choplicker, eager to break this stupid fucker’s fat face. Or try to, anyway. With a devil in him he’d obviously be hard to catch … but then Zosia had caught devils before. Not that she expected the sainted steel to do any more permanent damage to him than it had done to his spidery friend, especially without Choplicker around to back her up, but since she had just condemned herself to exile in the First Dark right along with her enemies it was important to get hell off on the right foot.

  They must already be on their way, the light from the Gate going out and the warm slurry of liquefied fat and melting meat turning gelid around her calves. As the head of her hammer came down on the smug face of the priest, she felt no fury or heartbreak, only disgust that all beings were as stupid and cruel as she. Then her target was five feet out of range, his devil propelling him backward so fast her eye hadn’t been able to track his dodge. Zosia was in for a very long eternity … or a very short one, depending on what exactly the Vex Assembly decided to do to her.

  Choplicker whined unhappily beside her, and she saw he hadn’t actually gone anywhere, hadn’t done anything … except from his hangdog expression maybe he had, though it brought him no pleasure.

  “Your time is nothing to She Who Comes; we grant you this reprieve,” said the thing inside the pudgy priest, offering an unexpectedly petulant shrug. The other nine turned away from their positions around and above the darkened Gate, gathering in around Zosia and her devil. “A truce is struck.”

  “You were bluffing, too …” Zosia said, marveling that her plan had actually fucking worked. If these monsters hadn’t abandoned their ritual at the last possible moment a hundred thousand innocent people would have burned because of her … but if she hadn’t been able to pull that trigger then the whole bloody Star would’ve died, Diadem included. “It’s really over? Your black goddess didn’t arrive to ruin the Star? Your armies are backing off?”

  “Our legions are in retreat,” said the ancient devil of Jex Toth. “Had She Who Comes fully crossed the Gate of Gates you would harbor no doubts, mortal queen—her very coming would have shredded your reality.”

  That sounded okay, sure, but Zosia was never one to let the scent of good news distract her from the vague taste of something rotten. “What’s this ‘fully crossed the Gate’ mean, exactly? Be specific.”

  “Do not fret, O bravest monkey, your realm is safe for now,” it said with a smile. “She began to rise, yes, but we resealed the Gate of Gates before she could complete her ascension. What little that passed through was forced to conform to this world, just as your world would have been forced to conform to her. As I say, you are safe. For now. Yet there is a condition to our truce—”

  “You don’t get Hoartrap, that’s not up for discussion,” said Zosia, knowing what the Vex Assembly must want but refusing to give up her gross boy now that she knew what he was really made of. “You wanted to talk terms and make deals, you shouldn’t have forced my fucking hand.”

  “We will come to our own arrangements with the Betrayer of Jex Toth, but that is none of your concern.” It might have been her imagination but that snowmead-sweet voice sounded peevish. “Our condition is, as you say, not up for discussion, for you have forced our hand as much as we have forced yours. It is this: you shall be our advocate. With the Star and its keepers. You are bound to us now, as we are to you, and any peace shall only be as strong and as long as you make it. You will look to our best interests, ensure our needs are met, and see that Jex Toth prospers. You will swear it on your devil’s freedom, and swear it now.”

  “I will, will I?” Zosia wasn’t about to make herself beholden to a pack of devils … except she already was, wasn’t she? This was the very reason she had fled her throne in the first place, because winning a war proved so much easier than keeping a peace … but this time she wouldn’t run. This time she would do everything she could, no matter how frustrating or impossible it seemed to keep the Star from catching flame, no matter the toll it took on her. “All right, it’s a deal … but only on the further condition that this is indeed the end of the war, the end of your efforts to sacrifice this world to some outer god. You must harm no mortals, save in self-defense, and, though I don’t know if he counts anymore, you have to let Hoartrap go, too. Whatever arrangements you make with him end with the Touch and me leaving Jex Toth together.”

  This last especially sat poorly with some of the bug-infested old fuckers, those whose eyes were clear shrieking in High Immaculate at her and each other and those with black-filled sockets seeming to communicate even more with just their baleful stares and intricately repulsive odors. In her brief tenure as Crimson Queen she had come to think of bureaucracy as the definition of hell on earth, and that seemed to be borne out down here. Even with a council of devils beholden to one another there seemed to be precious little unity.

  “Agreeeeed!” screamed the slimy husk of a crone after an interminable debate, her robe of snails clicking as she waded through the icy gel thickening around their thighs. “Your terrrrrrms! Swear themmmmm!”

  “As your spiritual counsel, I strongly suggest you put everything into writing.” Hoartrap burped, moseying up with a bloody foot held idly in one hand. He was still desiccated from whatever they’d done to him, but his stomach looked as pregnant as the spider-clad priestess had after eating Choplicker alive. “And let me look over it first.”

  “That might not be a bad idea …” mused Zosia. “Just so I can have official documentation to take before the people of the Star. You devils may think you know your way around an ironbound contract, but you’ve never had to treat with merchant guild lawyers.”

  “Mundane as fuuuuck,” called Purna from where she and Keun-ju were splashing ichor onto the passed-out Flintlander’s face in an effort to revive her.

  “Mundanity is preferable to mendacity,” said Keun-ju. “And if you need a scribe for any contracts, I am ambidextrous. Or I was, I should say …”

  “We shall draft the pledge at once,” said an especially tall and horrifically gaunt woman clothed in baroque wasps’ nests. “You are forewarned. We have grown wiser at reading the human heart and all its deceptions, and we shall be on guard against it. We shall not be misled again, and if you seek to obscure the full truth or lead us false as Maroto did, your devil and your life will be forfeit.”

  Choplicker sighed heavily, no doubt disappointed that despite all the excitement he wasn’t going to get to incinerate a city after all. Not today, anyway. Giving him a consolatory scritch for being such a plausible threat, Zosia said, “So you’ve met Maroto, huh? Guess we’ve got even more to talk about than I thought, but I’ll tell you right now, I’ve been wrong about him before, too. You’ve got to understand he’s not a bad guy, just … complicated, like the rest of us.”

  “We do not wish to understand Maroto any more than we already doooo!” The fat man’s eyes had gone back to being as white as his ants, his voice screeching and his expression as bitter as an unhappy ex-lover.

  “Yeah, well, as much as I hear that we’re all going to have to try to understand each other a lot more in the days to come,” said Zosia, but she wasn’t meeting the wild eyes of the lucid priests or the black ones of those whose devils had risen to the forefront. Instead, she was looking down at Choplicker.

  CHAPTER

  33

  The great golden eye of the First Dark burst like a boil, just as Maroto’s must have when that Tothan witch queen had whipped his face. Except this wasn’t from his spear lancing it, because he was still falling the last few meters toward its glistening surface when it exploded upward. Something hard and hot and horrible slammed into him, but in doing so it also slammed into the spear, and he clung to the shaft as it carried him high into the air. He was pinned flat against it from the speed with which it flew, its glowing bulk crushing into him, boiling blood pooling around the spear and spattering outward to scald his already raw cheek. There was no telling if the deafening how
l came from his own lips, the titanic god-monster he’d wounded, or simply the wind as it carried Maroto Devilskinner into the screaming heavens.

  Then it stopped so abruptly Maroto was whipped off it, up into the air, his palms blistering as his momentum pulled him all the way up the shaft of the embedded spear, Othean a miniature diorama far below … and then he stopped, doing an impromptu handstand with his haft-burned fingers still clinging to the very butt of the spear. It was something, to hover there for a moment, upside down in the giddiest of giddy heights, but it couldn’t last. It didn’t. He fell, at least a thousand feet of cold air between him and a rough reunion with the earth … and landed flat on his face back where he’d started, splayed out on the rough white expanse his spear was lodged in. Woof.

  He stayed where he lay, heart pounding, a gust of wind buffeting him, and then slowly, slowly took in his surroundings.

  He was lying facedown on an enormous tentacle that was frozen in the sky.

  All right, that was enough of taking in his surroundings for the moment. He closed his eye, waited for the vertigo to pass … but not looking only made it worse. Taking a deep breath, he dared another look. Laughed out loud, but it was a small, nervous laugh, one the wind was quick to snatch from his lips.

  He wasn’t lying on a tentacle … or at least he wasn’t anymore. He was splayed out on the branch of a tree. The biggest tree in all the Star by a significant margin, no doubt, but a tree nonetheless. A white rowan, to be specific, though he hadn’t thought they grew in the Isles. Hardly the most remarkable aspect of the thing, and peeking over the side of the four-foot-wide bough, he felt his body go all boneless again. He had to be a quarter of a mile from the damn trunk of the thing, and from there it was a very, very, very long way down to the surface of the … lake?

  Maroto rubbed the bark dust from his eye and looked again, and now his laugh was a lot stronger, even if it was just as confused. East Othean was spread out beneath him, plain as a map, but beyond the central wall where that enormous eye had opened up was nothing but sparkling blue water, with the mountainous rowan sprouting from its center. What the devils had happened?

  Well, one obvious possibility was that he’d died, either from the poison that even now was prickling through his face or from jumping off a damn wall. The Crowned Eagle People held that there was a big old tree at the center of all things, so maybe this was it? Of course, anytime things got really weird or bad, Maroto’s first assumption was that he’d died and gone to some improbable afterlife …

  If he wasn’t dead, though, and he’d really jumped face-first onto a giant tree branch as it sprang up out of a city-sized eye, what the hell did that mean? Had his sticking it with the spear done something? Or was it just dumb chance that he’d leaped when he had? Did this mean the threat to Othean had passed? Or was this a portent that things were only getting worse? Was that a naval battle going down off the northern coast of the isle, which he could actually see from this ludicrously high vantage?

  And, real talk now, the most important question of all: how the fuck was he supposed to get down from up here?

  “I … can’t. … believe it,” breathed Ji-hyeon, wriggling deeper into Sullen’s arms as they stared up at the tree, listened to waves lap against the foot of the wall. “What does it mean? What is it?”

  “It’s, uh, a tree?” Sullen supplied, and they both laughed nervously. Sullen squeezed her and sat up on an elbow, as if they were lying in a comfortable bed and not splayed out on a battlement overlooking an impossibility. “I … I’ve been wrong before, and often, but yeah, I think it’s a tree.”

  “Sullen.” She sat all the way up and gave him her most incredulous raised eyebrow. He must have missed receiving it as much as she’d missed giving it because he grinned as he sat up, too, putting his arm back around her and letting Fellwing crawl over his skinned knuckles.

  “Well, okay, we agree it’s a tree and all, but other than that you’ve got me. Though …” Sullen pursed his lips thoughtfully, as if scanning through his endless catalogue of songs and folktales. “Yeah, more I think about it the more I think it’s an improvement on a great devilish eye. I like that it’s growing from a lake instead of a Gate, too.”

  “A lake?” Ji-hyeon rubbed the ash from her eye and saw that he was right; where West Othean had burned a few minutes before now there was nothing but azure water, the unbelievably massive tree springing from way out in its tranquil depths. Her devil-eye throbbed behind the makeshift patch Sullen must have put back in place as she was recovering from her fit, but she could barely take in what her normal eye was showing her so decided to let it bide for now. “You’re right—that is an improvement. And you promise you don’t have any idea where it came from, what it means?”

  “Huh …” Sullen craned his neck at the sky of white, white branches and green, green leaves set with clouds of red, red berries. “You know, I think that’s a rowan. Hoartrap and Purna swapped all kinds of ghost stories about them, and the spookiest of the lot was one about how they weren’t really trees at all. They’re fingers of the First Dark that reached up into our world, stretching up to seize the sun, but before they could reach it something magical happened and they were turned into rowans. Devil-haunted trees, always listening …”

  Ji-hyeon shivered, the song reminding her of one her first father had sung her as a child about the legendary trees called Gate-ashes that supposedly grew in the highest reaches of the Ugrakari mountains. She couldn’t remember many of the details, but considering this thing had sprouted straight up from a Gate, that name couldn’t be a coincidence. “We’ll do our research once the day is won, but that story … does it feel right to you?”

  “Only thing I know for sure is some gods must like us, even if they aren’t the ones we were counting on,” said Sullen. After thinking it over, he added. “Well, that and I’d really like to kiss you right now.”

  Their lips brushed, then parted. Tasting the blood and dirt and ash and all the times they’d almost died that morning she kissed him harder, and harder still, until Fellwing politely took wing to give them their privacy. Well, such as it was to be found on the crowded battlement where the rest of the survivors were also coming out of their daze to find that the drizzly, monster-riddled morning had burned off into a hazy and miracle-filled afternoon.

  “More of that later, but for now I’ve got a war to wage, handsome,” Ji-hyeon said at last, breaking away. “Care to join me?”

  “I would, but it doesn’t look like any Tothans survived that … whatever it was.” Sullen got up with a groan and offered her his hand. “That, or maybe they got grossed out watching us neck and called it a day?”

  “Hey, who taught you how to crack wise?” she said, this day just getting better and better. “And if our kiss did that, just imagine what it’ll be like once we get into each other’s pants. We might bring about world peace.”

  “Worth a try, anyway.” Sullen grinned, not so bashful about ribald flirting as she’d remembered, either. “Before that, though, we’ve got some songs to sing each other, no doubt.”

  “Unless you can sing with your mouth full, songs can wait,” said Ji-hyeon, but already her attention was shifting to the other side of the wall. Limping over and looking down, she saw that the streets of East Othean were thick not just with Immaculates but soldiers from all over the Star, mundane men and women bumping shoulders and knuckles with the wildest of her wildborn. More than one pennant looked familiar, too … “So Fennec has whoever’s left of my old Cobalts, I’ve got a serious crew of my own, and those are without a doubt Singh’s Raniputri dragoons … this just might work. Do you recognize any of those Flintland flags, and more importantly, do you think they’re the sort to flip on their employer for a significant raise? If we—”

  “Whoa whoa whoa,” said Sullen, holding up his palms. “What happened, now? All I know is Hoartrap said you and the rest of the company were captured, that there was a trap, but the empress offered the Cobalts their freedo
m if you defended the Autumn Palace. I could tell at a glance that wasn’t the full story, given, uh, certain factors …” He was staring at her face, and she blushed, wondering just how old she must look to him now. “Has Hoartrap been telling his wizard-lies again?”

  “Some details might have been overlooked,” said Ji-hyeon, forcing herself to focus on the practicalities for now. “You were right, Sullen, we do have some songs to sing each other. But first we’re moving somewhere more comfortable.”

  “Yeah, should probably see if there’s an open bathhouse around here, get cleaned up,” said Sullen, nodding thoughtfully. “You ever been to a bathhouse? I mean, obviously you have, but damn. Keun-ju and Diggelby turned me on to them a minute back, and that sounds like just the spot.”

  “I was thinking more like the Samjok-o Throne Room,” she said, taking his hand in hers and lifting it into the air as she made eye contact with her sister Hyori in the crowd below. Time to start rounding the troops back up. “We’ll have to move swiftly, before the Immaculates recover from their surprise at this morning’s developments. But if we team up with our Cobalt kin we should be able to hit the empress with everything we’ve got before she even realizes the wolf is in the yard.”

  “Wait …” Sullen pursed his lips, beetling his brows as he looked out at all the weary warriors and relieved citizenry gathering in the square and streets below. “You wanna have another great big fight, like, right now? This one wasn’t bad enough for you?”

  “There’s a song in it, like I told you,” she said. “But yes.”

  “Damn but I’ve missed you,” he said, and leaned back down for another kiss.