A War in Crimson Embers

by Alex Marshall

  “The stem has broken off inside,” said Choi, as though this were some revelation. “You will not be able to bind it like this. First you must remove the broken piece, and then carve a new stem.”

  “Wonderful,” said Bang, scowling at her bad-luck briar.

  “Let me see that thing,” said her cabin boy, and using one of the nails in his front pocket he began jimmying it around in the shank of the pipe. Even that mild exertion looked to be beyond his ability, his eye watering from the slight shift of his shoulder … Then he gave a triumphant cry as the broken bit of stem that had lodged in the briar came free, a tight cylinder of horn spitted on his nail. “There. Now that this busted tenon’s out of the way just wiggle a reed or coral tube up in there. Won’t hold forever, but should tide you over till someone good with their hands gives you what you need.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Bang, the old dog’s lines not getting any fresher. “I’d sure find that useful. Maybe I should have just invited my old friend Moor Clell along—I bet she could’ve done it in a trice.”

  “Don’t even joke about letting her on the boat.”

  “My boat, my jokes,” said Bang. “It would’ve been something to see her face if I’d turned you over to her, after how well that witch-egg laid you out—I mean, I don’t fool easy, and up until you sat up in the berth and cracked your head on the top bunk I was convinced you’d fucked up and got yourself dead for real.”

  “Nemi said she used the same trick to escape Hoartrap back in the day,” he said peevishly. “Does the Touch seem like he fools easy to you?”

  “More the fool than Zosia,” said Bang. “But chin up, buckaroo, Hoartrap obviously got over his apprentice playing opossum on ’im, so maybe if some dark and stormy night Cold Cobalt bumps into you at a bar she’ll forgive the whole thing!”

  “Not bloody likely.”

  “From the captain’s account of their conversation it does not sound like your letter contained the full story as you relayed it to me, and also miscast your encounters on Jex Toth,” said Choi. “Why give her a worse impression?”

  “Because sometimes the best thing you can do for someone is let them hate you,” said Maroto with that effortless charm and optimism that was his hallmark. “If this truce with Jex Toth is going to last, people are going to need a scapegoat, someone to hang the war on other than the Vex Assembly. That’s me. I as good as told them to attack Othean, so there you go! And as for how I put things in Zosia’s letter, well … okay, say I tell her the more complicated version? That I don’t have any proof it was my freeing Crumbsnatcher with the wish to see her again what led to everything happening to her town—”

  “You don’t even know that’s what happened,” said Bang, mentally tallying all the demerits he was accruing for rehashing his sob story. A regular epicurean for discipline. Just the way she liked him. “You know you freed your devil, but you don’t know it planted the notion to go after her village in the young colonel’s head. No one can ever say for certain, ’cause who knows where dumb ideas even come from?”

  “I know,” said Maroto, scratching under his eye patch. “And now so does Zosia, so she can get on with her fucking life without always wondering who was to blame.”

  “She might have forgiven you, had you told her,” said Choi, the wildborn far more tender with her partner here on the deck than she was in the privacy of the captain’s quarters.

  “You’re right, she might’ve—and that would have made it worse. A lot worse.” He turned the pipe over in his hand and then handed it back to Bang. “I’ve got to own what I’ve done.”

  “Faking your death seems a queer way of doing that,” Bang pointed out.

  “What can I say?” the Mighty Maroto said with a sad smile. “I learned from the best.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  At the end of a long journey there’s nothing better than unlacing your boots, packing your bowl, and pouring yourself a powerful snoot of something brown and strong. Before you tuck in, though, there’s one last thing that needs doing: thanking those who helped you out along the way. It’s been a very long trek since I first set out to the Star, so there are a goodly many names in need of praise, and if you’ve made it this far you know brevity isn’t exactly my strong suit, but I’ll do my best to keep it as short and sweet as some well-aged flake smoldering away in a handsome briar volcano …

  Thank you to my fearless, formidable agent, Sally Harding, who took a look at the first few chapters I did on a lark and saw the potential for something great, and thank you to everyone else at the Cooke Agency who makes my career possible—I have an amazing team.

  Thank you to Jenni Hill, Anne Clarke, and Tim Holman, my editors at Orbit who took a chance on this project, and through patience, hard work, and voluminous input (and more patience!) helped nurture it from a rough stand-alone novel to the epic trilogy you’ve just finished. Thank you to Ellen Wright and Alex Lencicki and Bradley Englert and everyone else at Orbit for all they do to make me look so damn good. Thanks to Lauren Panepinto and her team for even more dope covers, and thanks to Tim Paul, cartographer par excellence, for turning my middle school dungeon master scribblings into a damn fine map.

  Thank you to the staff and owners of Flatiron Coffee, Trve Brewing, Backcountry Pizza, Edwards Tobacco, Barlowe’s, Johnny’s Cigar Bar, Waterworks, War Horse, All Saints Café, (dearly departed) St. Mike’s, Convoy Coffee, Ada’s Technical Books and Café, the Pioneer Collective, Stone Way Café, Miir, Fremont Coffee, Fremont Brewing, Caffe Vita, Caffe Ladro, Elm Coffee Roasters, Broadcast Coffee, the Panama Hotel, the Barrel Thief, (especially) Add-a-Ball (and its crew of irregular regulars), my parents’ gazebo, and any other venues and taverns I haunted while tapping away on this project. Your patience—and your beverages, pinball, and snacks—have fed this machine of guts and bone and vapors. Thanks to the Brothers of Briar, that not so secret society of worthy gentlepersons, and to the wizardly Mark Tinsky for lending his brain to this project, and his briar to my grateful rack. Thank you to all the musicians I listened to on endless repeat, thank you to the venues where I recharged my vile energies at shows, and thank you to the countless writers, filmmakers, and other artists whose visions I pillaged and plundered to stitch together my own. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I’m standing on the shoulders of frost giants.

  Thank you to all my family and friends who inspired me, encouraged me, and, when necessary, put up with me, especially my parents, Bruce and Lisa, my sister Tessa, and my brother Aaron. Huge props to Raechel Dumas for being my first pair of eyes on everything, and all-around bestie. Epic thanks to Caleb Wilson, who beta-read the whole ruddy series and offered brilliant suggestions that I shamelessly appropriated. Many thanks to Molly Tanzer for providing a wealth of aid in the early stages of this project, and thanks to Allison Beckett for beta-reading the grand finale—they all helped transform the project from something with potential to something special. And thanks to John Gove for listening to me endlessly blather about it as the fumes swirled about us, and for always providing a dash of wisdom to go with a splash of scotch.

  I owe a great debt to Trevor Marshall, who put me up to this project and lent me his surname, and another to Alex Bryant, who is no doubt waiting down in Old Black’s Meadhall to give me a hard time for taking his first—I miss you, homie. Thanks to Selena Chambers and Josh for countless edifying evenings talking about this, that, and the other … and the other other. Thanks to Teo Acosta for keeping me cvlt and trve (or trying, anyway). Thanks to Paul Smith for showing me around New York, and stranger realms. Thanks to Jason Heller for being a champion, a frequent sounding board, and for turning me on to Ghost, Year of the Goat, Ides of Gemini, and so much more. Thanks to Anthony Hudson for being so cool about his alter ego Carla Rossi making a cameo in the Star. Thanks to Django and Indra and Huw and Andy and Carol and Wendy and Ian and Amy and all the other writerly folks who welcomed me to the Pacific Northwest. Thanks to Django Wexler, John Gwynne, David Dalglish, and Kameron Hurle
y for blurbing this series back before anyone knew who the hell I was, and another thank you to Kameron for the interview where we dropped the mask. Thanks to Adrian Collins, Rob Matheny, Phil Overby, and everyone else who reviewed the project, invited me for an interview, and/or generally signal-boosted the project—even the haters! Especially the haters? Well, let’s not get carried away …

  More thanks? More thanks. Thank you to everyone who saw me through another obligatory European research trip: Robby, Jimmy, and Sean for helping show me the door; Travis, Ari, and Riley for host-with-the-mosting me in Amsterdam; Willem and Joyce for Dordrecht times; Laurent, Valerie, and Hildegaard for seeing me safely through the wolf-haunted hills of Provence; my sister Tessa for offering me Florentine sanctuary (and pizza); Joseph and Sandra for leading us into Etruscan necropolii and monstrous gardens; Lisa and Joshua for braving mountainside hot springs; Jenni, Anne, Jared, Ruth, and Chris for overdosing on garlic with me in London; Ally and Mike and their cats for jaunts through York’s living pagan history; and of course my faithful manservant Luke, who missed the once-in-five-lifetimes Hieronymus Bosch exhibition in Den Bosch because I told him we didn’t need to book tickets in advance. Don’t worry—I eventually made it there myself … and I bought him a mug.

  Penultimately, crucially, thanks to Shandra, my patient partner and ideal reader, without whom this project never would have come together as it did … and who, without this project, I never would have met. It’s kind of a long story and you’re obviously just coming off one of those, but suffice to say we live in a weird and wonderful and sometimes lovely world, and I have a weird and wonderful and always lovely partner …

  And thanks to you, for reading. I mean it. Head down, horns up.

  By Alex Marshall

  THE CRIMSON EMPIRE

  A Crown for Cold Silver

  A Blade of Black Steel

  A War in Crimson Embers

  We hope you enjoyed this book.

  Wondering what to read next?

  Discover other books you might enjoy by signing up for Orbit’s newsletter.

  You’ll get the scoop on the latest releases, deals, excerpts, and breaking news delivered straight to your inbox each month.

  Sign Up

  Or visit us at www.orbitbooks.net/booklink