A Blade of Black Steel Read online

  “Your Majesty?”

  “There’s Y’Homa, and me, of course, now that the Black Pope and I share certain offices and honorifics, so that’s two.” Cradofil was obviously having a hard time following, even though Indsorith was holding up only two fingers. “And before his niece stepped into his slippers and mitre there was old Shanatu, whom you must have served before, during, and after his repeated attempts to depose me, yes?”

  “Yesssss?” Cradofil fidgeted as Indsorith made a big to-do of retrieving Moonspell and her scabbard from their sheath in the arm of the throne. Her mother insisted Indsorith’s first weapon be the ancient Bodomian spatha that had been in their family since the Age of Wonders, and while the sword had felt so heavy and unwieldy when she was a girl, she had grown into it, like so much else. Hard to believe that tracking down the Imperial who had stolen Moonspell when she’d first been captured had been the hardest part of her vengeance—escaping the prison farm hadn’t taken much, and confronting Zosia even less.

  “That’s three, which isn’t a bad run for a lackey, but old as you are I expect you may have had other masters before we youngsters came along—my predecessor, for example?”

  “King Kaldruut would never have allowed a humble abbotess in the Crimson Throne Room,” said Cradofil.

  “Ah, but he wasn’t my predecessor, was he?” said Indsorith, allowing the pair of attendants who had glided into the room to help her into the absurd parade dress she was expected to wear. It was all garlands of garnets and rows of rubies held together with black velvet. “You know who I’m talking about, don’t you? Or will you force me to say her name?”

  “Never, Your Majesty,” said Cradofil quickly. “And no, I… I should not say I served her. She was a heretic, a butcher, and—”

  “And why do you phrase it so?” Indsorith had only intended to get Cradofil’s goat as payback for the woman’s disturbing her from her memories, but now her lazing curiosity was unexpectedly awakened. “I don’t give a good devildamn what you should or shouldn’t say, I want the truth—did you serve Cobalt Zosia when she was queen?”

  One of the attendants gasped and the other nearly tore off a gem-studded button at the use of the forbidden name, and Cradofil looked like a turtle who’d just realized she’d swallowed a fishhook. The abbotess looked down at the halo of the sun reflected in the obsidian floor as she said, “I met with her once, yes. Here. Only a month before you cast the pretender down, Your Majesty.”

  “Do tell!” said Indsorith, pulling herself free of her trembling handmaids and straightening the Carnelian Crown on her jaded brow.

  “She…” Cradofil looked as nervous as Sister Portolés had, the night the disgraced war nun had been brought in here. “The Stricken Queen…”

  “Out with it, woman, I’m not very well going to punish you for something that happened twenty years ago.”

  “It was the Stricken Queen who charged me with establishing the Dens,” said Cradofil, finally looking back up at Indsorith. “Under King Kaldruut’s rule any obvious anathemas were put to the stake on sight, and there was nothing the Chain could do to dissuade him from this position. When… she usurped Kaldruut she first tried to break the Chain entirely, to dismantle our noble church, but her sinful ambitions were thwarted by the will of the Fallen Mother. When we proved too strong for her to sunder, she made a number of egregious reforms, all but one of which were reversed as soon as you liberated the realm, Your Majesty.”

  “And the one reform the Chain kept was the practice of amassing an army of fervent weirdborn converts right under my feet?” Indsorith drained the glass of salt wine a page had brought her but waved away his squid pie, tempting though it smelled. “For the life of me I can’t imagine why.”

  “It is only through my continued resolve and patience that the institution persists,” said the abbotess, her chest puffing out with more than a hint of that shameless pride Chainites were so big on. “I know you have had your differences with the Holy See on the particulars of the matter, Your Highness, but of course that is not my purview.”

  “Nor mine, at present,” said Indsorith, not caring to rehash the whole ugly business anew—when she’d found out just what methods the Chain used to “heal” the weirdborn and tried to put a stop to it, Shanatu had refused to budge, and one thing led to another, and that was the most recent civil war. For all the good it had done her, or the weirdborn for that matter—the only ones who had benefited were mercenary guilds, blacksmiths, and, as always, the Burnished Chain… and now there was another war in the works, because there always was. To think there was a time not so long ago that Indsorith had thought getting Shanatu’s young niece to succeed him was a minor coup for the future of the realm…

  “I believe that not even the lowest devil is so lost that it cannot be brought into the Fallen Mother’s grace,” Cradofil added, perhaps to fill the silence or perhaps because she thought there was an argument to win here. “And it is only through the benevolence of the Chain that these poor wretches are made whole.”

  “Or close enough,” said Indsorith, remembering how scarred the Chain had left Sister Portolés, and not just from their surgeons’ removal of her weirdborn mutations. It was the deep emotional scars that had convinced Indsorith to trust the wretched war nun after knowing her for only an hour, and to trust her absolutely—one look in her scared eyes and Indsorith had known she had found the most powerful ally in all the Star, and also the most dangerous: a true believer in both good and evil. Of course she might betray her queen out of misplaced faith in the Chain, but Indsorith had wagered her life that the girl wouldn’t, at least not intentionally. In a world of chance, deception, and deviltry, intention counted for something. It had to, because if it didn’t, what did that say about Indsorith, and all the countless lives that had been snuffed out by Imperial soldiers over her twenty years of rule? What sort of a symbol had she grown into?

  “News, Your Majesty, and what news it is!”

  Indsorith squinted in the glare of the setting sun that washed out the only entrance to the Crimson Throne Room, recognizing the voice but scarcely expecting the girl would come to her.

  “Your Grace!” Abbotess Cradofil exclaimed, confirming that the hazy silhouette striding out into the open terrace of the throne room was indeed Pope Y’Homa III herself. She wasn’t alone, half a dozen of her personal guard accompanying the girl. She was naked under her loose cape of oily black fur, her pale cheeks and brow daubed with fresh blood, but far more disturbing than her ceremonial dress was the curved bronze dagger in her left hand, its rune-etched blade still dripping.

  “Is the news that you have decided to get tossed over my balcony, stepping in here with a drawn weapon?” Indsorith demanded. “I don’t care what ritual I’m late to, you don’t come in here…”

  But she did, Y’Homa’s bared teeth flashing brighter than her sun-kissed dagger as she advanced on the Crimson Queen, the Dread Guards stationed at the door who should have at least announced the pope and her retinue nowhere to be found, and Indsorith recognized the scene for what it was. Well she might, having welcomed forty-seven assassins over the course of her reign. Yet never in her wildest fantasies had she imagined Y’Homa herself daring to settle the matter with steel—the girl must have gone off her nut, if she thought this was going anywhere but south.

  “I knew Your Grace was a loon, but I’ll admit I underestimated your madness,” said Indsorith, snapping Moonspell out of her scabbard. As she did, her eagerness to duel the girl evaporated. Her hand was heavy, her arm sluggish, and her head floaty; something more than salt in the wine, and something strong at that to be hitting her so fast. “I’ll give Your Grace one last chance to reconsider, chalk it up as—”

  “It’s happened!” Y’Homa cried as she stopped a short distance away, her cape flapping over her wildly gesticulating arms like the wings of an oddly hairless owlbat. “The Fifteenth’s met the Cobalt Company on the Witchfinder Plains, and the war is ended! We’ve won!”

&
nbsp; “We’ve… what?” Indsorith had assumed the girl’s bluster about news of great import was just the preamble to a boast. Pieces began to materialize through the harsh sunlight, like interesting pebbles glimpsed at the bottom of a swift-moving stream. Too late, she gleaned the girl’s plot. “You… you’ve been working with Hjortt? You had him engage the Cobalts without my permission, and so his victory is yours instead of mine? And now you come to kill me?”

  “His victory?” Y’Homa brayed with laughter, and began saying something else when Indsorith charged. Being drugged and betrayed came with the regency, but mockery did not. Would-be assassins could try to kill her or try to laugh at her, but they couldn’t have both.

  Even reeling from the poisoned wine, Indsorith’s thrust would have skewered the startled brat’s heart if one of her guards hadn’t gotten in the way. The big cleric’s sword batted Indsorith’s away as a second guard came in with a maul. Indsorith oozed around it and swept the swordsman’s leg out from under him, her blade coming back down to bisect Y’Homa’s snotty face. But that hammer again, coming in fast, and so she redirected her swipe, chopping off the fingers that wielded it and biting into the weapon’s handle. Two more guards surrounded her, Y’Homa drifting back through the contracting ring of bodies, and Indsorith speared one under the chainmail cowl and elbowed another’s face before the rest took her down.

  To her mortification, neither the blows of their pommels nor the drugged wine were strong enough to kill her outright, and so she suffered the indignity of staring up at Y’Homa as the girl leaned down and tugged the Carnelian Crown away from her throbbing temples.

  “Oh, Indsorith,” said Y’Homa dolefully and, instead of donning the crown she’d stolen, the girl slid down onto the slippery floor beside Indsorith, cradling the limp queen’s head in her lap. The mad little pope stroked Indsorith’s cheeks, but the queen couldn’t lift a finger to stop her even had she wanted to… and the worst of it was that Y’Homa’s touch was actually comforting, maternal. “I fear you’ve got it all wrong, as usual. I didn’t come to kill you, and Hjortt wasn’t victorious. At least not to his primitive thinking. I’m talking about something much, much bigger, something that you’re going to be a part of, the same as me. We each have our part to play, and I know that by the end of this we’ll be as close as sisters. Closer!”

  Indsorith felt as though she were sliding down a chute, arms and legs bound to her side, and the farther she fell the faster she went, speeding toward the twin pits of Y’Homa’s world-spanning black eyes. The Black Pope leaned down closer, and Indsorith saw that the blood on the girl’s cheeks hadn’t been anointed there, but dripped down from her shining eyes like war paint running in the rain. Her breath smelled of raw meat and vinegar as she tenderly kissed Indsorith’s brow, then whispered in her ear.

  “All is forgiven, sister. The sun sets on the Day of Becoming, and the Sunken Kingdom rises from the deep. The Fallen Mother has returned, and she awaits our journey to the living paradise she has brought us. The reign of mortals has expired, Indsorith; our duty is complete!”

  The words struck the surface of Indsorith’s ears but floated there for a time, yet more religious babble without real meaning. What did register was Pope Y’Homa holding up Indsorith’s crown to catch the last rays of light, and then casting it toward the edge of the throne room. It skipped several times on the obsidian, then slowed so quickly it seemed it might stop just short of the precipice, or jut out over the edge like a piece in some noble’s lawn game. It didn’t, though, slipping neatly over the edge and vanishing, the Carnelian Crown tumbling down to the streets of Diadem like the heaviest symbol ever wrought by a mother’s metaphor.

  And finally, the Black Pope’s words made some kind of feverish sense to Indsorith, but her tongue was too sticky to ask the obvious question: if the reign of mortals had truly ended, who would rule the Star in their stead?

  CHAPTER

  2

  Everything was already ruined long before an entire regiment of Imperial soldiers lost their minds and started eating each other alive, but that didn’t make the development any more pleasant. Walking through camp to the command tent the morning after the Battle of the Lark’s Tongue, Zosia marveled at just how long the Burnished Chain must have been planning this shitshow. It was a quarter century since the devout Fourth Regiment had gone all cannibal crazy during their engagement with the Cobalts, and there was no way the similarities between two such nightmarish scenes were unrelated. What she and her Villains had witnessed all those years ago during the Fall of Windhand must have been a botched ritual, the faintest hint at the catastrophe that might have been… the catastrophe that had now come to pass. And unlike after Windhand, there would be no debating the cause or results of the Imperials’ sudden suicidal madness on the battlefield, because the consequences were as obvious as they were earthshaking: those nutty fucking Chainites had gone and raised the Sunken Kingdom.

  Who even does that?

  Well, they weren’t the only ones to call back a power long absent from the Star, and the dearly departed young Efrain Hjortt had summoned her back with a far lesser sacrifice—only the slaughter of her husband and village. Now she just had to prove that the return of one bad old broad and her mangy devil could be as momentous as an entire kingdom rising from the fucking ocean.

  Assuming Choplicker ever came back. In a lifetime of boneheaded plays, telling her devil he could treat himself to any prize he wished had to be the boniest. What fiend doesn’t desire its freedom above all else? And after being so meticulous in her wording back in Hoartrap’s tent, too, rehearsing the language to make sure Choplicker couldn’t slip through a loophole… only to naively let him off the leash as soon as they were done interrogating the sorcerer. Small wonder she couldn’t hack it as the Crimson Queen; with all her brilliant, noble impulses she couldn’t even keep hold of a bound devil.

  Try as she did to stop herself, she kept glancing down the rows between the frost-laced tents to see if Choplicker was trotting merrily back to his mistress. All she saw were soldiers wearily hauling themselves out to face a morning they wanted no part of. Miserable as most of them appeared, Zosia wryly wondered how they’d look once word got out about the Sunken Kingdom, or the much more immediate issue of a titanic Gate opening up at their doorstep. When the rank and file found out the Burnished Chain had lured the Cobalt Company into completing their ritual for them, the real question wasn’t how many of these mercenaries and wide-eyed kids would desert; it was how many would convert. Ji-hyeon would have to put those ones down even harder than the deserters, lest religion spread like dysentery through the camp.

  Come to think of it, Zosia supposed the awe-factor of the feat might have been what the church was after all along, something to inspire belief in even the hollowest heart. It would take a lot more than that to sway Zosia, who had met enough so-called gods to not think too highly of any cult, especially the Burnished Chain. She didn’t know what else the Black Pope hoped to achieve with her monstrous miracle, what the legendary land’s resurrection would mean for the Star, but it seemed pretty damn obvious anybody who wasn’t a fundamentalist lunatic had a vested interest in figuring this thing out, and fast.

  Well, obvious to some, anyway. A voice from inside rose alongside the guard’s salute as he admitted Zosia into the command tent.

  “I don’t care if they brought back every citizen of Emeritus and every witch queen of the Age of Wonders, our goal remains the same,” said General Ji-hyeon, barely acknowledging Zosia’s arrival. Hoartrap, Fennec, and Singh were already seated with kaldi and oatcakes on one side of the board, the general and Captain Choi on the other. Zosia sidled around to sit next to Ji-hyeon, but the girl was either too exhausted to care or actually welcomed the gesture instead of bridling at the imposition.

  “Captain Zosia is already aware of the news regarding the Sunken Kingdom of Jex Toth?” Singh was tactful enough to direct the question to her new general instead of her old one as Zosia reached for
the kaldi press. It was empty save for resinous dregs. Kind of how Zosia felt this morning, with nary a drop of satisfaction left to be wrung out from her ground-up ambitions.

  “Yeah, I heard the whole sad song, though I guess we need to start calling Jex Toth the Unsunk Kingdom now—’scuse me, General, but any chance you’ve got some more beans, and a cupbearer to work them?” The girl’s dark glare shifted to Zosia, her eyes more red than white, but from lack of sleep or weeping? Smart coin was on the former, and Zosia stood back up with a weary groan. “No, don’t get up yourself, I saw where you keep ’em. You all keep talking while I make up another pot.”

  “Thank you, Captain, that would be delightful.” Ji-hyeon’s voice was about as warm as a brass chamberpot on a midwinter’s eve. “In the future, Hoartrap, you will bring intelligence of such import to me before sharing it with anyone else. I didn’t think that needed saying.”

  “It doesn’t,” said Hoartrap, sounding hurt by the insinuation. “I planned on telling you first, of course, but Zosia cornered me with her devil and forced my tongue.”

  “Is that so?” Ji-hyeon didn’t buy it, but Zosia figured she’d be better served in the long run by yanking Hoartrap away from the cart she’d thrown him under. Especially with Choplicker nowhere around to protect her if the old warlock was sour over her forcing his confession.

  “Yeah, but it’s not as exciting as it sounds. What’s this I heard about our goal being unchanged?” Zosia set the kettle on the woodstove and knelt with another groan to root under the kaldi table, shaking jars until she heard the mouthwatering rattle of beans. “Remind me again what that goal was, because I think some of your captains have different notions of what that is, exactly.”

  “I’ve set all confused parties straight,” said Ji-hyeon crankily. “We’re all here because we want to overthrow the Crimson Empire and the Burnished Chain in the same go, as quickly as possible. Those maniacs sacrificing their own people to dredge up an ancient isle is plenty weird, I’ll grant you that, but it doesn’t alter our aim.”