Folk called it the Jewel of Samoth. It was supposed to be the most magnificent city in the Crimson Empire, maybe the whole Star. But the day they finally arrived smoke from the city smudged into the low-hanging clouds, and from the high pass overlooking Diadem’s rim Sullen saw nothing but a dread prophecy poised to boil over.
All along the circuitous road from the Haunted Forest up into the Black Cascades the Faceless Mistress had kept him company, not even the comforting weight of Grandfather’s spear in his hand enough to dispel her. It wasn’t that he feared her wrath anymore, but that he feared she had been right. The vision she had shown him of a hollow, densely populated mountain erupting with liquid fire had been at the forefront of his thoughts ever since he had awakened in Nemi’s wagon and found out where exactly they were headed.
At least the thought of a whole city burning alive with him inside it took his mind off the constant vicious cramping in his gut where the boy had stabbed him, and, almost as painful, Diggelby and Brother Rýt’s theological debates. He’d asked to ride up top with Nemi but she wanted him to stay in her too-short bed as long as possible, whatever she had done to help his wound needing time and stillness to mend.
When they were still a dozen miles out from the city Nemi drove the vardo off the road, slowly winding their way deep into the forest of sky pines that blanketed the slopes. Once they were deep into the cover of the shadowy, dripping wood she ushered everyone outside. Even Sullen knew that bringing a horned wolf into a city was unthinkable, and he helped Nemi unhitch Myrkur and turn her loose. According to the witch her monstrous companion would claim a den nearby and guard the wagon until Nemi came back to collect them. The question of what the animal would do if her mistress didn’t return remained unspoken; like Sullen, Nemi kept her own counsel, but also like Sullen, from her bleak mood it seemed probable she wasn’t too keen about traveling through the Gates to join a war against demons from the First Dark, either.
As soon as they started hiking he realized he hadn’t actually had the slightest notion of how bad his stomach really hurt—being jostled in the couch aggravated it, but each footstep was like getting stabbed all over again. Coughing and laughing alike still broke him out in a cold sweat. And laying it all out there, the worst thing in the fucking world was copping a squat; he’d come to live in fear of his own body and its mundane functions, even with the tangy eggs Nemi fed him to ease his suffering.
Before, any pilgrims they passed on the road tended to flee screaming into the underbrush from the appearance of a colossal horned wolf tugging a wheeled cottage, but once they were on foot their fellow travelers offered more coherent noises, though some of these weren’t much more pleasant. Dire tidings from Diadem, said the better-to-do travelers, the whole city given over to anarchy.
Others were as wide-eyed as Chainites passing out tracts, and told not of chaos but a return to order. These mendicants had not taken to the road to flee the capital but to go and spread the good word. Diadem had been saved from itself, and all people of all creeds were welcome to take part in the revolution.
Of the many particular rumors they heard, the one that most piqued Sullen’s interest was that Cobalt Zosia had attempted to retake the Carnelian Crown from the people only to be shot down in a Chainhouse, in front of thousands of witnesses. If she had died she had died, and that would presumably be the end of Sullen’s obligation to the Faceless Mistress, but the whole world had thought she had fallen before and that hadn’t stopped her from making a comeback. He’d only met Zosia the couple of times, but that had been enough to convince him she was a woman who cheated death more often than Rakehell cheated at dice, and he couldn’t be sure she was out of the song until he got down to Old Black’s Meadhall himself and saw her standing over by the keg.
Diggelby and Brother Rýt were less concerned that one of the key players in the Cobalt Company was rumored to be dead and more upset about the news that the Burnished Chain had brutally seized control of the city only to turn right around and abandon it. Even with Diggelby wearing him down the whole wagon ride out here with tales of Chainite corruption, Brother Rýt refused to believe that the Black Pope had done half the things people said. When the consistency of the accounts seemed to confirm that most of the Burnished Chain had indeed commandeered the Imperial fleet and sailed out of Desolation Sound, the monk could not contain his amethyst tears … which Diggelby collected in a handkerchief for him, telling him that few were so blessed by the Fallen Mother that their very sorrow was profitable.
The pasha’s concern over the Chain turning tail was less a spiritual crisis and more a financial one. His uncle was a cardinal here in the Holy City, and he’d intended to seek the man out for a loan before they traveled through the Diadem Gate. When Sullen had asked why on earth Diggelby would want to borrow money just before they disappeared into the First Dark, with the best-case scenario that they then emerge in Othean to join a battle that might claim all their lives, Diggelby looked at him like he was stupid.
“You’ll never be rich with that attitude,” said Diggelby, lighting a braided cigar off the ghostly purple flame they clustered around on the impressively cold mountain night. The closer they had come to Diadem’s walls the more of these ever-burning beacons they had passed, carven tubes of stone rising from the roadside that danced with gaseous fire. Here at the base of the city’s enormous gate there were hundreds of the natural lamps rising like a forest of flames all across the wide plateau where travelers were obliged to wait until the opening of the city at dawn; coming up the dark road toward the flickering field had made Sullen feel like he had found Silvereye’s secret trail up into the stars.
“If one must borrow money,” Diggelby went on, “I can’t think of a better time. Besides, I am in desperate need of some new threads, and flashiness requires flash—we can’t just show up in Little Heaven wearing these old rags!”
“Little Heaven?” asked Brother Rýt, talk of heavens or hells just about the only thing that provoked him into conversation.
“It’s what some folk call Othean,” said Sullen, his heart beating quicker at the thought of tomorrow’s journey. Being real now, part of the reason he’d been obsessing so hard about the Faceless Mistress and her portents of doom might have been to keep himself from worrying the whole time about Ji-hyeon and Keun-ju. It was always there, though, the fear that something might have happened to one or the other. Or the both of them. His anxiousness to be reunited with the two Immaculates had at least taken most of the fear out of the fact that he would be entering a Gate on the morrow. Most of it.
“We go directly to the Gate,” said Nemi, passing the communal sack of foraged foliage over to Sullen. His stomach gurgled and twisted, already furious with him for the day’s march, and his eyes watered from the spasm. It was like his damn gut had already decided that neither the sour succulents nor the woody fungus were welcome, but he knew starving himself wouldn’t help the pain, either. He had tried.
“Except for me,” said Brother Rýt nervously, as though the witch had forgotten him. “Except for me.”
“Yes, and it would be jolly bad form to just bid our chum here farewell as soon as we’re inside the city,” said Diggelby. “We have an obligation to see him safely to … to wherever is it you need to go, Rýt?”
“Um … I’m not sure?” said the monk. “Father Turisa charged me with delivering news of the strange weather in Flintland to the Holy See, but if they … if they are truly gone …”
“Chin up, chin up!” said Diggelby, taking their dinner bag from Sullen as he chewed his cud. “You heard that Usban spice-slinger, there’s still a Chain in Diadem, just a better one! Less Burnished, maybe. They’re working with the … what did he call it …”
“The People’s Pack,” said Sullen, his poor estimation of his clan making him immediately skeptical of any group who used lupine terminology to refer to themselves.
“Quite so!” said Diggelby, popping a ghost pipe in his mouth and talking on even as he chewed the white-stalked plant. “So there’s been a teensy schism, which is long overdue in my book, and now we’re all truly in this together as mortals. Better take your news straight to this People’s Pack—we all ought to, really, get Diadem involved in the campaign against Jex Toth.”
“I think I should just stick with talking to someone in the church,” said Brother Rýt.
“Which you can do when we all go directly to the Gate,” said Nemi. “No matter what land or faith, you always find priests drawn to Gates.”
Sullen thought of the Jackal People hurling human sacrifices into the Flintland Gate, and that made him think of the Procuress of Thao, which gave him the creeps. It began to rain.
“Look, Nemi, I know you’re late to the soiree, and not in a fashionable fashion, so let me lay it down for you,” said Diggelby as he passed the weed bag back to her. “While we’ve been traipsing toward a reunion with the Cobalt Company, to join our friends in a righteous cause, Diadem has apparently gone ahead and accomplished what the Cobalts were trying to do in the first place! Which means we’re all on the same team, and if we’re all on the same team that means they can help us fight the monsters of Jex Toth. What’s better for the war, if tomorrow we three pop over to Othean for breakfast, or if we wait and have brunch with the People’s Pack, and then bring over a whole army by suppertime?”
“Huh,” said Sullen. “That’s not a bad idea.”
“Good ideas are sometimes better as ideas,” said Nemi, and finding a slug on the leaf she was about to eat she passed it under the blanket that covered her cockatrice’s cage. “We shall be seen as curious strangers to this city, and it is common for curious strangers to be delayed when they arouse the interest of the local magistrates. What shall we do if we seek an audience with this People’s Pack only to be incarcerated?”
“You must learn to start giving your fellow mortals the benefit of the doubt,” said Diggelby. “At the absolute worst they won’t help us, none of this getting-tossed-in-the-gaol-for-speaking-the-truth business.”
“And if we do raise an army here you can bring them through,” said Sullen, Diggelby’s plan making more and more sense. “Like Hoartrap did with the Cobalt Company at the Lark’s Tongue Gate, you could bring Diadem’s soldiers to Little Heaven.”
“No, I could not,” said Nemi, fishing around in the weeds for more bugs to feed her monster. “I have never used a Gate to travel like this before, and simply getting the three of us safely to Othean shall be sufficient challenge for my maiden voyage … Although it is true if Diadem pledged their soldiers we could go ahead, find Hoartrap in Othean, and send him back here to clear the way for our reinforcements … Yes.”
Nemi seemed to be coming around to the idea, but Sullen got stuck on something else. “Wait, what’s this about you never using a Gate before?”
“And did I hear you say sufficient challenge?” asked Diggelby, relighting the three ends of his silly-looking plaited cigar—it was hard to keep it lit in the freezing drizzle. “It rather sounded like you did.”
“Do you think securely navigating the First Dark is easy?” asked the witch. “I don’t. But I would not be leading you through if I were not confident in my abilities. I value my life more than any of yours, and I’m going through. If you wish to actually help save the Star, you will come along.”
“But first we see if we can get in with the People’s Pack and warn them of the danger facing the whole great big world,” said Diggelby. “Shouldn’t be too hard for a pair of heroes of the resistance like Sullen and me to stir up the sentiment of the common folk.”
“I’m not a hero,” said Sullen, secretly delighted and trying not to blush.
“You will be to these peasants, trust me,” said Diggelby. “As soon as we tell them we were very important persons in the Cobalt Company during their campaign to liberate the Star from Chain and Crown, they’ll be on us like stink on bug.”
Remembering the rumors of what had recently happened to Zosia in this very city, Sullen wasn’t so sure that bone carried much marrow, but he couldn’t debate it further because the rain was now coming down too hard to hear over. Which was okay, since he’d talked enough and wanted to be alone with his thoughts for a spell … though in his thoughts he was rarely alone. Due to the obvious need to keep Myrkur off any major roads where she might’ve attracted unfriendly attention from Imperial soldiers it had taken them weeks to wind their way up here from the Haunted Forest, and Sullen had spent most every hour of most every day of most every one of those weeks imagining all the bad things that might have been happening to the people he cared most about while he was stuck in the back of a bumpy wagon. Now that they’d finally arrived and the time for daydreams ran short he allowed himself the indulgence of something a little less awful.
Come daybreak he would enter one of the wonders of the Star, a city that a forgotten god had charged Sullen with saving from the deviltry of a dead woman, to rally an army and follow a witch into a Gate, and all he could think about was how badly he wanted Ji-hyeon and Keun-ju to be on either side of him, the three of them keeping each other warm on this dreary night. Not such a dramatic song, that, but as his stomach pinched him so bad he nearly doubled over Sullen reckoned he was about done with the epic shit for a good long while, and would be happy with the mushy sort of love song he used to find terminally dull.