A Crown for Cold Silver Read online

  The barkeep was evidently Geminidean, and as he served a pair of chain-draped pilgrims recently arrived from the Crimson Empire they filled him in on sundry rumors of import from back home. Maroto initially paid the tonsured women no mind, but then one of their voices sliced through his sun-stewed skull:

  “… more than a few rebels, though—they’re professionals, is the thought, given how effective they are, maybe a mercenary band hired by the Raniputri or Immaculates to stir up trouble.”

  Nothing exciting, that, but then the other pilgrim interjected:

  “Hear this, though—they’re led by a blue-haired general with the faceplate of a devil dog, and at least one of her captains wore the helm of a Villain, if not more. Need I tell you what color banner they flew?”

  For the first time in a very long time, Maroto felt dizzy from more than the drink, and he clung to the basalt bartop.

  “That story’s older than my firstborn,” said the barkeep, nodding at the wench serving mugs of kumis at the other end of the tavern. “I haven’t heard it in ages, though; glad to hear it’s making a comeback. It’d be a shame if people stopped telling it.”

  “That’s what I told her,” said the first pilgrim.

  “I heard it from my sister, who heard it from her superior,” argued the second. “These are holy women, not song-singers looking to attract a crowd. The company ambushed a garrison outside Agalloch not a month past.”

  “If not a tall tale, then clever impostors seeking to hijack a legend rather than build a reputation,” said the barkeep. “Unless you believe in ghosts, sister?”

  “No one knows for sure what became of the Villains after their queen was executed,” said the first pilgrim. “So perhaps the captain is genuine, and their leader a fake. That way you’re both right.”

  “I never said I believed it was really her,” said the second pilgrim defensively. “Simply that mercenaries waving the Cobalt flag were seen outside Agalloch. Unlike others I could name, I prefer to repeat facts, not speculate on rumors, even when the details of such facts are admittedly scant.”

  There may have been more to the conversation, but Maroto did not know, for he staggered out of the tavern. From the caravansary, he quickly picked up the trail of the fops. Following their tinny cries through the baking streets, and occasionally stumbling into the walls of the tight-packed houses that scalded like the sides of a tandoor, he eventually caught up to them at an establishment of decidedly grander stature than the one at which he had drunk.

  Purna had not gotten around to informing the others of Maroto’s desertion, and so all seemed as he had left it. Within an hour he was contentedly asleep on the cool tile floor beneath one of the inn’s plush benches, and two dusks later they were rolling back out into the desert, Maroto having successfully convinced the testy nobles that he had a hot tip on some “real adventure” to be found on the Desperate Road: the most direct, and therefore most dangerous, route back across the Panteran Wastes.

  CHAPTER

  11

  As Zosia repacked her gear in the customs house on the far side of the wall, the guard who had brokered her admittance sauntered into the brightly lit chamber. Compared to the polished, spotlessly maintained armor of the Immaculates, Zosia’s old adventuring kit looked downright shoddy. Choplicker did his tottering, just-an-old-dog-shaking-his-butt approach to the young soldier, who scratched him behind the ears and cooed to the foul monster.

  “Thanks again,” said Zosia as she pulled the drawstring tight and turned around to maneuver the massive pack from the table onto her aching shoulders. It was full dark now that customs had finally gotten done with her, and she still had to find an inn or flophouse in Linkensterne. “Anywhere cheap and clean you’d recommend in the city?”

  “Sure,” said the guard, patting Choplicker and straightening up. The fiend whined as she took her hand away. “Let’s get moving. You can tell me if you’re talking food and drink, men or women or what-have-you, or just a bunk.”

  “You’re my minder?” In the old days many of the isles required an escort for visitors, but on the coast foreigners had been free to come and go as they pleased.

  “Bang Lin,” said the guard with the faintest suggestion of a bow, her back barely curving. “It’s my neck if you’re a spy or assassin. Told the captain you seemed friendly, so I get to play chaperone until you prove me right. Or wrong.”

  “That’s one I owe you, then.” Depending on how things shook out with Kang-ho it could go either way, but for all their sakes Zosia hoped she proved Bang Lin correct. Anyway, there were worse traveling companions than handsome youths… but as soon as her thoughts started down the path to private chambers instead of a common room, she remembered the weight of her husband’s severed head in her hand, the butcher’s-stall smell of his hair. The mountain crossing had been cold and lonely enough that she had actually considered letting Choplicker curl up against her when she slept, but it was still too fresh to entertain thoughts of companionship. She’d lost lovers before, plenty of them, but this was something else entirely—the ache had only grown worse with time, and though the thought that she was further fattening up Choplicker turned her stomach, there was nothing she could do to soften the hurt. Not until she had the means to go after the ones responsible for what had happened.

  “So long as you don’t cause any trouble, we can call it even,” said Bang. “What’s your dog’s name? He’s cute.”

  Choplicker barked his assent at this, nuzzling his head back under Bang’s dangling palm. The soldier was delighted. Zosia grimaced.

  “I call him a lot of things, but cute ain’t one of them. Dumb mutt comes no matter what you say.”

  “So long as you don’t call him late for supper, right?”

  “Right,” said Zosia, remembering Choplicker as he had been on campaign twenty-odd years before, feasting on the suffering of the dead and dying until his gut dragged on the ground. It might have been comical, like something you’d see on a Samothan woodcut of a half-forgotten fable, but to witness such wanton gluttony, to watch the creature’s flesh warp to accommodate its appetite… there was nothing funny about it. “A bath, food, drink, smoke, and a bed. That order.”

  “We can do that,” said Bang, ushering Zosia out the door. “But Linkensterne’s liable to be different than you remembered, and not for the better.”

  “I remember it being a real shithole,” said Zosia as she stepped out into the chill night.

  “Then maybe it hasn’t changed much,” said Bang, saluting the customs officer lounging on a bench by the door as they headed up the road.

  This had been farm country, but all of the old outlying ranches had been demolished, the buildings scrapped to construct barracks. A string of pink paper lanterns hung from poles leading back to the gate, and ahead of them the lights were strung from the dwarf pines and plum trees that bordered the road cutting through the overgrown fields. The city glowed at the end of the lantern string, the biggest beacon of them all.

  The Immaculate influence on Linkensterne had always been stronger than just a few bun-carts and noodlehouses to offset the typical sausage-and-beerhall eateries of the Crimson Empire, and a higher proportion of Immaculate whores than you’d find in the nonspecialty brothels of Nottap or Eyvind. The city proudly displayed its bordertown lineage on its skyline, with half-timbered pagodas and stupa-based, steeple-crowned churches towering above the narrow streets, the sharply angled roofs of Imperial-styled rowhouses bumping end-tiles with the swooping curves of Immaculate construction. Far from feeling as though two cultures had been awkwardly pressed together as you saw in some cities on the Star—places in which the people and the architecture stuck to their own quarters—in Linkensterne it felt as though the city had been jointly raised in harmonious collaboration. The reason for this was simple: it had. A fire had leveled the spot some hundred years before, and a broad mix of Imperial and Immaculate interests had rebuilt it. The city stood as a testament to the potential for two peoples to
come together and erect a shared future.

  The city was also a total dump, with the exception of the Merchant’s Quarter, which was judiciously walled off from the rest of Linkensterne and could only be entered by appointment. The rest of town was run-down and rampant with crime both petty and violent, in contrast to the more sophisticated corruption that took place among the governing merchants. The only thing worse than a royal city was a free one, where the ruling elite rarely forked over the funds for sanitation or a decent municipal militia.

  When they tromped into town Zosia could see at a glance how much things had changed. They were entering the Black Earth district, which was on the opposite end of Linkensterne from the Merchant’s Quarter, yet the streets were fairly clear of shit and refuse, and a pair of uniformed militia thugs stood on the corner of most intersections. Lit lanterns on lampposts were the rule instead of the exception, and four blocks in Zosia had yet to see anyone lying dead drunk—or just plain dead—on the too-clean street.

  “You were right,” she said, “things have changed.”

  “I heard it was a lot of fun before we incorporated it,” said Bang wistfully. “Now it’s just a broke-down version of an Immaculate city.”

  “Did a lot of merchants pull up stakes? They can’t have been happy about being conquered.”

  “Oh, they hate the handover like you wouldn’t believe, but it’s not like they’ve got a lot of options—you know any other free cities on the Norwest Arm? Me, neither. So most of those crooks stayed put and have tried to make the best of it. Hard as a barnacle’s breast, doing shady trades with Immaculate oversight, but a tough tit is better than none at all, eh?”

  “That’s why the caravans are lined up for days outside the wall.” Zosia hadn’t been back a day and was already soured on Star politics.

  “Days or weeks, depends on who they’re here to trade with,” said Bang. “Those merchants who were more… receptive to the handover, they get invitations so their guests breeze through customs with a municipal pass instead of waiting in the queue. The merchants who aren’t so amenable about Immaculate overseers, well, their goods take a little longer to clear the wall.”

  “And bad luck for any poor saps waiting on the merchants to provide medicine or supplies, right?” It filled Zosia’s mouth with vinegar, all this familiar squabbling, with the commoners caught in the middle.

  “Bad luck for some, but good luck for others,” said Bang. “Merchants who were on the outs with the old Linkensterne elite have found their prospects much improved by finding new slippers to kiss.”

  “Bully for them. Now, a bath, food, drink, smoke, bed,” said Zosia, yawning at a militiaperson who was sizing her up. “Let’s get on with it.”

  Zosia had fond memories of Immaculate bathhouses in Linkensterne from long before the takeover, but she didn’t remember any being as clean as the one Bang led her to. Jade tiles gleamed in the candlelight, the wide, terraced pools steaming like soup bowls. There were a dozen other bathers spread out in the tubs or lounging on the warm tiles, and as Zosia lowered herself into the hot water she felt true contentment for the first time since she had been forced upon this road she walked. Bang settled in beside her, and, seeing her out of her uniform, Zosia’s interest in the girl increased substantially. She smiled to herself at the younger woman’s flirtatious glances and offer to wash her back… but as soon as the smile arrived it wilted. Zosia dunked her face in the water and stayed down as long as she could, as if she could hide there forever from her past, and from her base nature. As if warm water and a rough sponge could scrub away what was wrong with her.

  In a refreshingly dingy tavern off the main drag, Zosia and Bang were served up a steaming supper fragrant with long-missed spices. They ate at a yellowed floor table, filling their dishes from the large chipped bowl set between them. Mixing up the rice, fried quail eggs, peppery bean paste, and sautéed ferns and radish, Zosia passed the seared venison, curds, and sauerkraut to Bang—it had been decades since she had enjoyed real Immaculate cuisine, and didn’t care to sully the experience with these concessions to Crimson tastes. Besides, she had eaten little else but deer jerky on her journey. She ate and she ate and she ate, offering no scraps to Choplicker even when he whined until the quail yolks turned red, the melting faces of people Zosia had killed leaking out into the rice. She raised bowl to lips and shoveled in the lot, imagining all the new victims Choplicker would haunt her with, once her work really got under way.

  Zosia liked to drink and she liked to smoke, and she liked them best when she could enjoy them together. Once Bang had gotten the measure of her ward’s preferences, they ambled through Linkensterne. They passed the tall, teetering kaldi houses (hash and bud of the saam only, please) and the fluttering silk panels of the sting warrens (insects, arachnids, and the odd kidnapping), arriving in their own full-bellied time at a longhouse that reeked of bitter beer, bitter sweat, and, sweetest of all to Zosia’s nose, bitter tubāq. Even this early in the season the rice paper shutters were slid open, the chill outside mitigated by the large firepit in the center of the room and the dozens of smaller furnaces the patrons puffed upon. Cheap clay tavern pipes were bought for pfennigs from the proprietor, a reedy old gent from distant Vasarat whose longstanding devotion to his brown mistress was writ across callused lips, stained teeth, and the yellow finger he dug into his nostril as though it were an obstinate bowl clinging to its dottle.

  Having the end but not the means, Zosia sidled up to the bar, shrugging off her pack as she bumped past a woolly-bearded barbarian nursing a porcelain-headed jaegerpfeiff. Up and down his arms and neck sinuous indigo tattoos wrestled with jagged white scars, his lionskin cloak stank of wet dirt and old blood, and his pipe gave off the cloying aroma of lavender. Once upon a time she would have challenged the giant to a duel for smoking his pungent aromatic weed within sniffing distance of her; once, but long ago. Pushing her wide-brimmed hat back onto her neck, she settled onto a stool and plunked her smallest purse on the lacquered bar.

  “Hi, honor friend,” said the proprietor, his Immaculate even worse than hers.

  “Right back atcha,” said Zosia in Crimson as she undid the flaps of her enormous backpack. Withdrawing a pouch smaller yet more precious than the coinpurse set before her, she removed a pipe carved in the cutty style, its gently bent antler stem as long as her hand and its smooth briar bowl canted slightly forward, like a tipsy sailor leaning against a mast. Two tiny spurs descended from the base of the bowl, allowing it to sit steady on the bartop. “I’ll be filling this with your finest vergin flake, my horn with your darkest stout, a dwarf of your smoothest ryefire, and a private room. That order.”

  It was the dwarf glasses of ryefire that got her. Bang matched her tipple for tipple and horn for horn at first, the pretty soldier doing her regiment proud. As she eyed Zosia’s pipe the conversation flowed into the safe waters of stormy seas and naval entanglements, of which Zosia had seen more than many in her youth. Bang obviously had the brine in her veins, and as night gave way to early morning Zosia found herself genuinely enjoying the eager young fool’s company—the girl seemed intent on seeing herself washed into an early grave, and it seemed a pity to send her off to sea without a bit more sand under her nails.

  “Should’ve said something sooner, would’ve been easy to arrange a bedmate,” said Bang as she ducked away from Zosia at the older woman’s door. “Still could see, send someone up?”

  “Nah, haven’t paid for it in so long I wouldn’t know the etiquette,” said Zosia, trying to mask her embarrassment with braggadocio. Just as she’d known that last dwarf of ryefire was a mistake before it even hit her belly, she realized now that she had totally misread the situation, that she had mistaken basic kindness and mild flirtation for something more. “Just being friendly, was all.”

  “I am flattered,” said Bang. “Really. Good night, friend.”

  “Sure,” said Zosia. “Night.”

  Closing the door, she looked to Choplicker. He had n
osed the paper screen over and had his front paws up on the windowsill, looking out into the dark city. Much as she disliked sharing her room with him, the alternative was to let him loose on the streets of Linkensterne.

  Or she could set him free once and for all, in exchange for vengeance upon all those responsible. That would take the burden from her aged shoulders and ensure that none escaped their due. She wouldn’t have to take another step into the Immaculate Isles, wouldn’t have to bet her already slim chance of success on a hundred thousand variables—it had taken her over a season just to get this far; how long would it take her to achieve her ends? Why not just let the monster do what monsters did best?

  “Not on your life,” Zosia muttered, sprawling out on the mat. Hoartrap had claimed that devils could only speak to the sleeping and the dead, but Zosia knew better than to put faith in the word of a witch. She often wondered if the fiends couldn’t also project a thought into your mind, the notion planted so surreptitiously as to make you think you’d conjured it up yourself. That would certainly explain how often she thought about turning Choplicker loose, even after he’d declined her previous offer for freedom.

  And why she would have tried to screw the first available person she came across, with Leib not yet half a year dead. She remembered the wink and slap on the bottom he’d given her before riding out for the crossroads that last time and barely made it to the chamberpot in time. When she was sure that her guts were done, she wiped her mouth and looked to where Choplicker had curled up beneath the window, pretending to sleep.