While Empress Ryuki had mounted quite the gala to welcome her son’s supposed killer through the Othean Gate, she hadn’t made much ado about tossing the prince’s actual executioner back into it. It was an altogether utilitarian affair, a single squadron of the Samjok-o Guard delivering Domingo and Choi to the Temple of Pentacles. There they found no mountainous portable throne erected in the terra-cotta path, nor immaculate rows of Immaculate soldiers filling the fields, just a dull red road bordered by dull brown earth. There were a few shoots of green out there, though, the persistent heat wave prematurely drawing up last season’s pumpkin seeds—Domingo wondered how long the warmth would last, before winter reasserted itself and crushed the ambitions of these sprouts.
He closed his eyes as they rolled him through the gravel toward the temple that would remove him from this world. The setting sun felt good on his face. If not for the mugginess in the air he could have been back in Cockspar, sitting out on the balcony above the piazza, overlooking the lemon groves on the distant hillsides.
Not that he had spent much time out there wasting good daylight, but still, but still. Perhaps Lupitera would make better use of it than he had; drag the bar out there and the old nag could spend the rest of her days in her own private booth, mounting amateur productions in the courtyard below. Would his sister-in-law miss him? He wasn’t any more accustomed to taking her feelings into consideration than she was to respecting his, the bedrock of their relationship mutually agreed-upon antipathy, but now he found himself regretting that he hadn’t said something to her before riding out to the south in pursuit of the Cobalts.
Well, what would he have said to the saber-tongued spinster, anyway? Thank you, Lupitera, for all the years of bad plays and worse manners? Well … Yes, he supposed he should have said that. He should have.
And then he chuckled, shaking his head as he fell under the shadow of the Temple of the Pentacles. Colonel Domingo Hjortt was about to die, and on his way to the gallows his last reflections on his life were not for the wife he had loved faithfully even down all the years since she had abandoned him, nor of their son whom he had failed absolutely, nor for the mother whose boots he had struggled to fill all the days of his command, nor of the soldiers he had served above or beneath or beside over the decades, and not even of all his most hated enemies, those he’d bested and those who’d gotten away … No, he’d spent his last precious thoughts on his harpy sister-in-law who referred to him as the Capon of Cockspar, a brassy cow who called him a boor for considering himself above pratfalls and toilet humor.
Well, he thought as the temple guards opened the wide opal doors to reveal the glistening Gate within, he’d certainly spent far more time thinking far worse things over the years, and nobody had to know that a career soldier’s last thoughts weren’t for Crown and country. This lifelong army dreamer had earned his retirement, damn it.
Just like he’d earned this execution. He felt bad for distracting Choi just long enough with his confession that she wasn’t able to make an attempt on Empress Ryuki’s life before the guards mobbed them. Damned unfortunate that she was now mutely led along to die beside him. The worst part of the whole affair, however, was just how good it had made him feel. Such a thrilling victory! The Azgarothian military genius, bragging to a parent how he had murdered her brash young child, and to the only result that many, many more people died senseless deaths.
It turned his stomach, how satisfied he’d felt for most of the march out here—he’d grinned from ear to ear at the expression on Empress Ryuki’s face, snuggling her disgusting unicorn as he gloated over her horror. He knew what it meant to lose a boy of her son’s age, and to lose him for nothing … and Domingo had done it anyway, and then he had mocked her. Mocked her. Maybe the Star was truly in danger from Jex Toth, or maybe it would just carry on slowly murdering itself for another thousand years, it scarcely made much difference—how scary were monsters, now, really? Glancing over at Choi’s stoic countenance, the scars and the broken horn she’d acquired fighting on behalf of pureborn armies, he thought it might be time to let the monsters have their own crack at things.
The captain of the Samjok-o squad stepped between the condemned duo and the short flight of stairs up to the Gate. In addition to the double scabbard on her belt she held a familiar Azgarothian sword out in both hands. Drawing Domingo’s saber, she pointed it at the chair-bound prisoner and let fly a volley of High Immaculate.
“She says any honorable officer would be permitted to choose dying on their own tusk instead of being fed to the hungry mouth,” Choi volunteered, not without a little smugness. When the Immaculate officer then cast the sword off into the empty field with another rush of words, dropping the scabbard on the ground, Choi said, “Does the Baron require further translation?”
“No, Captain Choi, my Immaculate has improved sufficiently to understand the thrust of it,” said Domingo. “I’ll tell you what, though: in acknowledgment of the debt I owe you for all your service, my saber is yours to keep. You just have to retrieve it.”
If her sharp smile presaged a verbal riposte or was answer itself Domingo never found out, because that was when the Samjok-o Guard lowered their spear points all around them and Choi was obliged to carry Domingo up the stairs. She didn’t look terribly embarrassed about it, but for the Lion of Cockspar, being lugged into a Gate in the arms of an anathema was not quite the dignified end he had imagined for himself.
The Gate began giving off a faint noise as Choi climbed the steps, almost like a distant scream. While by no means the most dramatic or strange occurrence Domingo had experienced, that faint yet climbing wail made all his remaining hairs stand at attention. Death wouldn’t have been so bad. Death you could depend on for what it was, a return to the blank, silent state from which all mortals briefly emerge, but this? This was something else entirely.
Domingo had absolutely no idea what would happen once he and Choi entered a Gate without the sorceries of Hoartrap the Touch to protect them, but the best he could hope for was instant death. He had heard stories about what happened to those who vanished into Gates, after all; everyone had. Not that he had ever put stock in such ghost songs, and he still didn’t believe in hell the way the Burnished Chain did, but he knew from experience that so long as you’re alive you can suffer, and now that he’d traveled safely through a Gate once he knew he might again … only to emerge in some far less welcome realm, one where the devils weren’t so friendly as the unicorn he had met this morning. The keening wail rose with each step they climbed, and he could make out the vermilion pentacles on the inner sides of the wide-open temple doors pulsing faster and faster in time with his heart, the Gate almost visible as Choi took another step …
“You could snap my neck,” Domingo told her. “Vengeance for … vengeance’s sake.”
“No,” said Choi, smiling at the broken old man she carried like a babe in arms. “Vengeance is letting you live with your disgrace, even if only for another … hmm?”
She stopped on the penultimate step and looked out across the barren fields to the north, and the four temple guards at the side of the door all craned their necks as well. It was damned inconvenient, because she had cradled Domingo facing the other direction, and though he squirmed he couldn’t see what they were looking at. He did notice one thing, though, which was that the steadily rising scream wasn’t coming from within the Temple of Pentacles, but from the far side of it, sort of to the northwest and—
Ah, Choi deftly swung him in her strong arms, and as she did he finally saw what all the fuss was about—a figure was running in from the empty fields beyond the temple, wailing all the while and waving their hands over their head. It couldn’t be a stay of execution, since they were heading toward the Autumn Palace instead of away from it, so why all the hullaballoo? Standing as Choi was at the top of the temple steps, the cause wasn’t immediately transparent … and then it became as clear as young grappa.
A swift grey monster loped into view and ran down the runner.
It was horse-like, but only in the way that a godguana is lizard-like. The equine shape was there but inflated to grotesque proportions, and its tall, stiff legs made it appear to be on stilts. Sharp ones, too, apparently. After galloping over the poor Immaculate, terminating their impressively sustained scream, it wheeled back around and came to a stop over the body. Its long, spiny-maned neck craned down and then its whole face split open vertically, an enormous sideways mouth stretching wide to gobble up the corpse …
Only then it paused, looking up from its prey and staring at the Samjok-o squad at the base of the steps, and then up at the temple guards, and at Choi … and, so it seemed, at Domingo. It closed its mouth, but only for a moment, before rearing back on its ten-foot-tall hind legs and emitting a shrill chittering sound that made Domingo’s ears ring. They were still ringing when it dropped back down on all fours to charge, and the unpleasant cry it made was echoed dozens of times by whatever fell herd came charging from the other side of the temple.
That seemed to break the spell everyone had been under, the Samjok-o Guards keeping rank, to their credit, as they swiftly retreated down the road toward the Autumn Palace. The temple guards seemed less sure of what to do; according to Choi they’d only started posting sentries out here after Ji-hyeon’s disappearing act of the previous year, and Domingo imagined babysitting a Gate was not a duty reserved for the best and brightest of the Immaculate military. This was his last thought before his perspective changed again, this time all in a rush, and Domingo only realized that Choi had been winding him up for a throw when she released him. Stark terror struck him, the likes of which he had never, ever known, because that witchborn monster had thrown him right into the fucking Gate and he—
Crashed into someone, who made no effort at all to catch Domingo, damn their eyes. He grabbed onto them, the only alternative to dashing himself on the stone stairs. It was a temple guard, the shaft of his spear pinned flat against his chest by the old man clinging to his shoulders. The lad must have stumbled back and missed a step, because fast as Domingo had been launched the first time he was falling again, but forward this time, and riding someone to break his fall. The stairs might have been more forgiving if the boy hadn’t had the extra baggage weighing him down, but then a bad angle is a bad angle, and the sound the back of his skull made when it connected with the edge of a step was not a good one.
Sliding down a few more stairs atop a sled of supine, armored meat did not help Domingo recover from his dizziness, but other than being badly rattled he somehow seemed okay. Crawling off the comatose sentry took some doing, what with his bum hip, but after a bit of squirming around he was able to at last sit back on the bottom step, the slippers they’d given him in place of riding boots resting in the terra-cotta gravel. The setting sun behind the Temple of Pentacles drenched the ornate walls and terraced roofs of the Autumn Palace with a red as deep and rich as … claret, Domingo decided. And then, though it actually brought him no joy, he lowered his gaze to watch the fleeing squadron of the Samjok-o Guard be set upon by the pack of loping, lance-limbed horrors. The soldiers hadn’t even made it halfway back to the palace. The light began to fail.
More of the clicking cries came from the north, and looking to those fields he saw through the gloaming that the creatures charging by had glowing green eyes. They all ignored him, so far, dozens and dozens of them charging straight toward the high walls of the Autumn Palace, but it only ever takes one overachiever breaking from formation in pursuit of glory, eh?
“Baron Domingo Hjortt of Cockspar, Colonel of the Fifteenth Regiment.”
Looking away from the stampeding nightmares was surprisingly easy, because Choi had made him jump—he’d forgotten he wasn’t dying alone. Looking at the witchborn, he saw she was misted in fresh blood, and craning his neck, he confirmed those green temple guards had put the color in her cheeks. More interesting than that, however, or the bloody, broken spear dangling from her left hand was the saber she held in her right. She’d retrieved it from the roadside for him, and now, of all the dramatic endings to a gallingly theatrical life, Domingo Hjortt, the pureborn colonel who had chosen retirement rather than integrate anathemas into his regiment, would die fighting side by side with one. And an Immaculate to boot! Would that Lupitera were here to see this!
“Here.” She thrust it at him, and he looked at it, confused. What the devil would he do with a broken Immaculate spear? When he didn’t take it right away she dropped it on the gravel at his feet and saluted him with his own saber. “I will honor your tusk, Baron.”
Then she turned and walked up the steps.
“Don’t you dare!” Domingo cried, realizing what she intended. When she didn’t so much as acknowledge the direct order of a seasoned officer, he found himself bargaining like a spoiled child desperate for more sweets. “That favor you owe me, Choi, the one to be named later? I’m calling it due! Stay!”
“You never stood watch for one of my dreamtreks,” she reminded him as she reached the top of the stairs. “I owe you nothing.”
“What about honor, then?” he jeered after her. “What about a good clean death fighting for your homeland? You’re a coward if you go into that Gate and we both know it—stay, for honor’s sake!”
“There is no honor here, Baron,” said Choi, “only the opportunity to earn it.”
Then she was gone, into the First Dark, and he felt her passing, like the Gate sighing … or maybe it was just the step he sat on vibrating from the stampede. It wouldn’t be long now. He knew if he looked back at the monsters he might lose his nerve, and instead he leaned down to snatch up the broken spear at his slippered feet, scanning the ground around him to see if anyone had dropped something better.
There, on the edge of the red gravel, beside his abandoned wheelchair, lay his empty scabbard. He cursed Choi’s slovenliness in leaving it behind, but then he supposed she had been in an awful hurry, and it was better to have a saber without its handsome double-ringed sheath than the reverse. The engraved brass gleamed even in the twilight, and he remembered his relief when Hoartrap had returned his weapon to him just before the Cobalts crossed over to Othean. Nobody could stop death, not a witch nor an officer, but a brave warrior never went into death alone—trust your steel more than any friend or kin or fellow soldier, he had told his son, because in the end it will be all you have left.
The sun had already deserted him yet a flash of light sparked off the scabbard, and looking up Domingo met the luminous jade eyes of a great grey beast. It had spied the old man slouching on the stoop of the Gate and peeled off from its herd, charging straight down the terra-cotta path toward him. An aria should swell in this final scene, the doomed officer weighing the merits of snatching up an Immaculate spear to inflict one final wound or crawling on his belly in hopes he could reach his Azgarothian scabbard in time to hold it up as a talisman. Knowing he was dead either way, dead forever.
There was comfort in that.
But not, Domingo decided, enough to give in without a fight.
He flopped away from broken spear and empty scabbard, two strong arms and one strong leg propelling him clumsily up the stairs after Choi. He bleated like a lamb as his limp knee slammed into a step, the leg lame but not insensate, and Domingo cherished even this pain, for it meant he was alive, he still had a chance, the Gate swelling soft and black and rich before him as he scrambled up the final stair, he would live, somewhere, somehow, anything but oblivion, he would live on the other side of the First Dark, he would live forever, he would—
The demon caught Domingo just before he could slip into the Gate, and there on the edge of two worlds he died like he had lived.
Alone.