"A devil's true name is a powerful thing, Sullen." A few concerned murmurs came from behind Zosia, but she didn't really mind his outing the fiend-if she didn't get to enjoy anonymity anymore, neither should her devil. "I just call him Choplicker."

"Huh," said Sullen, scratching behind the monster's ear to an appreciative yowl.

"I'm more concerned with mortal affairs than my grandson," said Ruthless. "Your errand boy said swords were needed to meet a pack of Crimson cowards stealing down the hill, that the shape of it?"

"Fa," said Sullen quietly, looking up from Choplicker but still keeping his eyes off Zosia. "We're supposed to fight with Uncle, help out Ji... General Ji-hyeon."

"And they weren't where they said they'd be," said Ruthless, "and the lady wants further proof against cowardice. What're you moaning about?"

"It's a big battle, Sullen," said Zosia. "You'll do more good for your uncle and friends by thwarting an attack on their rear than you will by wandering out into the field, hoping to find two fighters amidst twenty thousand."

"That many?" said Ruthless gleefully. "Oh, this ought to be a fine sendoff!"

"Yeah, all right." Sullen looked bashful as a virgin asked to dance by the most notorious rake in the room, and it gave Zosia a petty pleasure to see him squirm. Whatever Maroto thought about his motivations, it was plain to Zosia the boy either wanted her dead or in bed, or maybe he didn't even know which he wanted.

"I'm trusting you to watch my back, Sullen," she said, unable to resist, and that finally did it-he looked her in the eyes, and she saw the last thing she'd expect from a hard-looking Horned Wolf: he was scared of her.

"Yeah. All right."

"Yeah, all right," his grandfather mimicked, and, reaching behind the boy's head, he pulled out one of the crazy-looking knives certain Flintland tribes used to throw at one another. "We've snapped and snarled enough, now let's put our teeth to some use!"

"Up we go, then," said Zosia. Raising her voice to address the archers and foot assembled behind her, she shouted, "I'll whittle a pipe for the first one of you to draw Crimson blood!"

A handful of huzzahs, and whole lot of confused stares. What was the Star coming to?

"Or a bottle of the best booze in camp, your choice!" That got a proper showing out of the ignorant blackguards, and Zosia set off up the escarpment, trying not to be too annoyed that the one skill she took actual pride in commanded such little regard. Oh well, a bottle was a lot easier to procure than briar and a lot less work once she had it; her hands would be busy enough in the days to come.

First Sullen and Da were a no-show at Diggelby's tent, and when Purna got tired of waiting and dragged the Moochers to the command tent they found Ji-hyeon had left without them. Suggestions that they stop off for another round were shot down by Purna, who had her meanest face on. Maroto didn't see what the rush was, considering that the swirling patterns of blue and red that flowed across the valley floor didn't show any signs of fading. Around that time, though, Maroto stopped being able to hear anything Purna or the others said, his one good ear filled with the grinding of insects beneath the earth, graveworms stirring from here to the far valley, rising to the surface to feed...

Purna led them down, but Maroto couldn't look at her anymore, couldn't look at Diggelby or Hassan or Din, because when he did he saw right through the garish makeup and the skin beneath it, saw all the way to their yammering skulls. He put all his attention on Prince, because Diggelby's lapdog kept looking up at him with this weird little smile as he trotted along beside the crew, and while he didn't look much like a dog anymore, at least he didn't look like a walking corpse with its face all chewed away by scavengers, and by Old Black's loose tooth, Maroto had never had a sting trip him out this bad. He was bugging balls.

"Will you stop!" Purna said. Maroto looked up from Prince, relieved to find the grinding riot in his ear had quieted, replaced by the good old-fashioned ruckus of countless people murdering each other. "Thank you."

"Eh?" But the sound returned as soon as he said it, and Purna's skull snapped at him again, a blackened skeletal finger pointing to her jawbone. "Oh."

Maroto stopped grinding his teeth, and the sound stopped, too. Funny how that worked. He closed his eyes, told himself when he opened them again the world would be back to normal. He gave it a go, and saw they'd come down the hill and were less than a hundred paces from the back of the press, bodies fucking everywhere, people wandering around them holding their limbs and where their limbs used to be and weeping and dying and sometimes both, blood welling out of the very earth, and Purna popped him in the cheek, like that ever worked except in the songs.

"Maroto!" The skull under the horned wolf hood sounded just like Purna.

"That'sdefinitelyme," he said, hoping he sounded convincing.

"Some people saw her ride in around there, but it's going to be a mess just getting through our people to the front-you wait right here until we come back with Ji-hyeon, all right? Don't. Move."

Purna was gesturing off into the cloud of whizzing weapons and splattering gore that floated in front of them. As he squinted, it was like his confused brain thought he was already in the mix, because things started getting all precise the way they did when he was in real trouble, the incoherent blur of the battle coalescing into a hundred thousand crystal clear images: An ax cleaving an arm off. A woman bringing a shield up too slow to intercept the spear that was going to puncture her heart. A horse brained with a mace. The rider swinging his sword into another man before his horse even knew it was dead.

"Right, good. Stay. If you have to move, go back to the tent," said Purna, turning away, but before she'd taken a step an arrow launched from two hundred yards deep in the melee came hurtling down to skewer her face. Well, hurtling was selling the song a little hard; it just kind of drifted down, like it didn't have a care in the world, leaving a shimmering trail in the dawn sky, and so Maroto wasn't in a hurry, either; he just bumped past Hassan, apologized for the slight, and then long-stepped up beside Purna, raising one of his shields to neatly catch the arrow before it killed her. The point shivered on his side of the shield, having penetrated both steel and wood just above his sweaty grip. Could've planned that better; an inch lower and it would've gone right through his hand! He'd have to be more careful.

The human eyes in Purna's skull face wobbled at him, Hassan gasped in belated shock, and Din said, "Fallen Mother's mercy, I've never seen a mortal move like that."

"I'maVillainyeahdidn'tgetmyreputationleadingnoguidedtoursofthePanteranfuckingWastes," said Maroto, and Diggelby laughed and laughed, swooping Prince up in one arm and waving his crystalline cutlass around in the other like this one actor Maroto had run with who had this great mad pirate character he'd play, and Purna patted Maroto on the shoulder and sounded a little freaked out when she thanked him but didn't try to make him stay behind anymore, and they all started running to some quarter of the world-encompassing battle that was supposedly better than the rest of it. Leave it to the nobles to know where the best party is happening.

"Question," Maroto hissed back at Diggelby as they wove through the throng, not wanting to alarm the others. "We'rethebluesandthey'retheredsyeah?"

Diggelby was still laughing when another arrow arced down from the clear morning sky, too fast for even Maroto to stop, an evil black tracer wavering in the air behind it, and it was a queer thing, to be looking at a laughing friend and know they were dead even before they were, to see them acting alive and hale but know they were a ghost and just didn't realize it yet. Yet instead of spitting the fop's lace-ruffled neck, the arrow was nudged over at the last moment by a breeze, the missile hitting some poor bastard behind them, snuffing out some stranger's friend instead of his. Maroto started laughing right along with Diggelby, because when you got right down to it, there wasn't anything more hilariously random than war.

Sullen had fought against the tide of the camp, a flood of eager, frightened, and resigned faces flashing past him as he made for his uncle's tent. It was empty, and when nobody returned after a few minutes he hustled Grandfather over to Ji-hyeon's tent, but he'd just missed them, too. It seemed smartest to wait there until someone came to tell him what to do, even with Grandfather harassing him to just run down the hill with the rest of the Cobalts and see what they could find at the bottom. The truth was, Sullen couldn't bear the thought of his leaving the command tent only for Ji-hyeon or maybe Uncle Maroto to wander over just after they'd left, so he made Grandfather promise to wait ten minutes, since the clashing armies in the valley wouldn't be going anywhere.

And once again, he should have listened to his grandfather, because the sweaty guy who had run up, poked his head in the tent, and then told Sullen to follow him back to some fight that was happening ended up delivering him right to Zosia. And now he'd gone and told her he'd watch her back, so there was another fool thing he'd blundered into-after giving his word, he wouldn't feel right carrying out the will of the Faceless Mistress. Not today, anyway. So that was maybe a good thing, gave him one less thing to worry about... Unless she'd somehow figured out he'd been sent to do her mischief, and meant to use the confusion of battle to move on him before he could move on her. Unless that.

"You watching that back?" whispered Grandfather as Sullen scrambled up the steep, grit-slippery slope. Above them, the ridgeline they'd called a "hump" poked out like the mountain's potbelly, but they still had a climb ahead of them to reach it. Zosia was a few lengths ahead of them, and yeah, being real with himself, he had been watching her back a bit; hard not to, from this angle, leather britches taut against her posterior.

"Shut it, Fa," said Sullen, but that must have answered the old man's question well enough, because he brayed with laughter.

Glancing back, Sullen promptly stubbed his toe and went down on one knee, gashing it open on a shelf of rock. He barely noticed, gawping out at the valley beyond the camp. Big a host as the Cobalt Company had seemed, the Imperials were bigger by half, at least-he'd only seen glimpses of the Crimson army after he and Grandfather had met Ji-hyeon in the mountains, when the Cobalts would get a vantage point to look back on their pursuers, and those peeks had barely hinted at their true mass. The two armies had collided right at the base of the mountain, stirring up dust, and while no ground seemed to have been given yet, the mass of red-dressed soldiers stretched back and back from the front, blanketing the valley clear to the next hill.

Impressive a sight as it all was, what had put the slack in his chin was the shadow following fast behind the Imperials, a shadow that persisted even when the slowly rising sun was obscured by plumes of dust. Devils. The incorporeal ones that Ji-hyeon called "spirits," but still, a dire host of them, and Sullen prayed to Old Black and Boldstrut that they were merely scavengers looking for an easy meal. The only time he had seen so many swarm at once was when the Faceless Mistress had used them as her doorway into the world of mortals, and a dreadful thought slapped his heart into a gallop: what if she had come for retribution, to punish Sullen for siding with Zosia instead of carrying out her desire? They didn't appear to be congealing together, though, so perhaps it wasn't as bad as that...

A tumult from just below reminded him of his immediate concerns, and he saw that the foot soldiers and archers were clumping up around and beneath him on the rock- and cactus-spined slope, shiny faces staring anxiously up at him... no, past him, to the lip of the escarpment that now obscured the rest of the mountain. Zosia had also paused her climb, flat on her stomach just below the summit, her devil slinking sideways along the crest of the scarp with a decidedly uncanine grace. Setting his boots in the slippery rock dust, Sullen hauled himself up beside her as she turned back to the trailing troops and put a finger to her lips before waving them up.

"They're here," she whispered to Sullen and Grandfather, eyes shining like her hair in the cold autumn sunlight. "Be on top of us any moment. Their archers catch us here, we're all dead. You ready?"

"Um," said Sullen, trying to think something nice, since it might be the last thing he thought. He tried to picture's Ji-hyeon's sly smile, but she melted into the Faceless Mistress. "Yeah. Okay."

Below them, one of their soldiers slipped, dislodged a stone, and it bounced down to camp, clattering all the way. Nothing stirred above them, most of their soldiers still a hard minute's climb from the top, minimum.

"You ready to see your ancestors, Fa?" Sullen whispered over his shoulder as Zosia nocked an arrow in her bow, her hammer strapped to her back.

"Hells no!" muttered Grandfather. "So make sure you keep that worthless melon of yours between me and the arrows-you're the only protection I got."

"Horned Wolves don't wear armor, Fa," said Sullen, and, glimpsing their shadow on the slope above, he saw that the old man had a sun-knife in each hand.

"Horned Wolves? In case you ain't noticed, boy, you and me been Possum People for well on twelve thaws-now move that pouch, boy, and let's show these red dogs how it's done!"

When charging any hill there's a dreadful uncertainty of where and when the curve of the earth will reveal you to those at a higher vantage. The operative word being "vantage"; the high ground was contested for good reason. As she rose slowly from her crouch, bow ready, what had seemed like such a sharp edge above her now became a gentle curve, the tops of a few pines coming into sight as she rose. Sullen stayed lower, taking those last few uncertain steps up to where the ground leveled off, his grandfather craning his neck for a peek from his own personal high ground.

There, across the grass and rocks of the plateau, was a shaded stand of pine, and Zosia let out her breath, relaxed her bowstring. Despite Choplicker's wariness, there were no Imperials. Yet.

She waved her troops up, and at her signal a shout came from the trees, followed by a half dozen arrows-Sullen had already broken into a zigzagging charge and they whipped past him; the one that would have struck Zosia's leg kicked up dirt at her feet thanks to Choplicker. Zosia steadied herself, drew, and fired on one of the silhouettes that had stepped out from the cover of the trees. It was easy to play hard with a devil minding your interest, but Sullen and his grandfather didn't seem to miss the advantage, both men howling as they quickly crossed the narrow plateau.

"Up and fire, up and fire!" cried Zosia, Choplicker whining as he ambled in front of her to take any more arrows that might come her way. A few more of them did as Zosia's troops stormed the hump, but went wide with a bark from Choplicker. One struck a young boy from Rawonam who had told Zosia he'd brought his own hunting bow when enlisting with the Cobalts. He died screaming on the ground as his comrades spread out on the ridge and drew beads on the pack of Imperials hiding in the dozen stunted pines that curtained the back of the plateau.

Their task was made infinitely harder by Sullen, who ran ahead, crashed into the pines, and fell among the Imperial archers like a panther that had been caged too long, only to be released into a paddock of red deer. A panther with a furious, armed monkey riding its back. The boy's spear was a wet, ruddy blur between the trees, and from his back the old man hurled a giant, multibladed knife at the startled archers. The two men resembled one of the Ugrakari gods Zosia had seen on the old headwoman's shrine in Blodtrst, a hulking, four-armed scourge of the iniquitous.

Blades alone rarely prevailed in a bowfight, though, and even as Zosia's arrow struck the crotch of one Imperial, another dozen arrows flew from her Cobalts, making a choice fucking mess of what would otherwise be a rather scenic grove. The situation managed, she hustled across the plateau, motioning her soldiers after her.

Sullen and his grandfather looked bewildered to be alive and unharmed as the last archer writhed screaming on the ground, a sun-knife in her stomach, and Sullen finished her with his spear before retrieving the old man's throwing weapon and passing it up to him. The wind rustled through the pines as she stepped into the copse, and all of a sudden Zosia remembered the musty smell of Leib's hair when that awful Azgarothian colonel had plunked his head down on the table where they had eaten nigh every meal for twenty years, and she stumbled, steadied herself against a tree. She gagged, and swatted Choplicker away as he pranced around her feet, merry as one of Maroto's fop friends.

Fast and hard as it had come, the dizzying sense of deja vu passed. Glancing up to see one of her archers slit the throat of the wailing kid whose groin she'd shot, she straightened up from the tree, shook out her limbs, spit. It wasn't nice, it wasn't clean, but it had to be done. The bright-eyed young Imperials who had helped that asshole Hjortt murder her husband and village probably hadn't shed any tears, and neither would she. If someone was worth hanging her head over, it was Pao Cowherd, the boy Choplicker had dragged all the way up the mountains over Kypck just to die by her fire, not these well-armed scum.

"Thanks!" said Sullen, seeming relieved. Well, why shouldn't he be? He was alive. "That's one we owe you."

"My pleasure," said Zosia, trying to mean it.

"I know you didn't come all the way up here to stick a handful of dastards," said the bloodied old man. He looked like a vampire out of the songs, clinging to his victim. "So where's the hunt?"

"Huh." Zosia straightened up, trying to get it together. There were people here who were depending on her to keep them safe. If that wasn't the biggest joke of all... "See the crest on that one's tabard? A one-handed man with a greatsword is the seal of Myura. Your uncle's scouting party saw over two thousand of them in the mountains, and then saw their banners again when they brought the horned wolves down on the Imperial camp."

"I haven't heard that song!" said Ruthless. "Maroto did what with horned wolves?"

"Let him tell it," said Zosia. "Later. This is just a few of 'em, is the point, scouts sent ahead to secure the hump. Which means-"

"Yoo-hoo!" a high voice came down the mountain, and everyone ate dirt save Zosia, who recognized the greeting, and Sullen, who stepped behind a tree. Following the voice, Zosia saw that beyond the trees the Lark's Tongue resumed its steep grade up to another, higher hump, and beyond that, the peak. There was a cluster of red shapes on the upper ridge, but as she watched they began marching down the faint hunting trail that linked the two plateaus.

"It's all right," Zosia called to her troops, then to her whining, nervous devil added, "I think."

As the Cobalts watched them with ready bows, the Myuran regiment came down in single file from the upper hump, and even when they slipped and fell on the steep descent not a one removed hands from head. Zosia counted just shy of three hundred surrendered Imperials, and as the first shivering Myuran prisoner reached the pines, a lumbering figure took up the rear of the train.

"Line 'em up on the edge of the scarp back there," Zosia told her perplexed soldiers. "If they run down to camp, shoot 'em. Anyone without a bow waits here and escorts prisoners over to the archers."

"Is that..." Sullen didn't look so relieved anymore.

"Oi, that's him," said his grandfather, spitting over Sullen's shoulder. "If it's no harm to you, Zosia, we'll be headed back down to the real fight now."

"Sure. I don't like him much, either," said Zosia. "Good thing the Imperials weren't the only ones to cozy onto the notion of an ambush from the rear, or we'd have been in real trouble. I've learned every devil has its uses."

Ruthless nodded his agreement at that as his grandson carried him off, but the look Sullen gave her over his shoulder left a lot open to interpretation. Sometime soon she'd have to pry him open, one way or another, and see if the boy held a pearl for her, or something less pleasant.

"The wolves didn't wait for me?" said Hoartrap as he brought his last prisoner in, the Myurans looking ecstatic to be handed off to hard-bitten enemy soldiers. "Well, I'll catch up with them another time."

"A few thousand Myurans against one old greasebag?" said Zosia, ambling back across the saddle with her miserable devil, the misery-inducing sorcerer, and the final haunted-looking Imperial, a young man with iron on his chest but none in his step. "What happened to the rest?"

"I'm innocent, I swear!" said Hoartrap, the stumbling prisoner shuddering at this but not turning to refute the claim. "They lost most of their party getting this far; treacherous river crossings, sheer passes, and something involving an avalanche, is that right, Wheatley?"

The captured officer nodded curtly.

"I may have had a hand in the last, I admit it," Hoartrap stage-whispered loud enough for Wheatley to hear. Zosia rolled her eyes-if he was claiming responsibility, then he probably hadn't been involved. "We did lose a few coming around that last pass, to the saddle above, but I'm sure Cold Zosia will be fair in her dealings with the surrendered Myuran regiment."

This finally got Wheatley to look back at them. She hadn't thought it possible for him to look more frightened, but there it was. "You... you're her?"

"Hjortt tell you about me?" Zosia asked.

He nodded once, eyes growing even bigger.

"Good," said Zosia, the last traces of her temporary weakness flushed out in one heaving sigh of relief that Ji-hyeon's intelligence had been correct and Colonel Hjortt still led the Fifteenth. She quickened her step, eager to get down to the main event now. Hoartrap picked up the pace, too, forcing Wheatley to step lively indeed as they came up to the edge of the plateau where the rest of the prisoners sat, still cupping their heads in their hands.

"If I could ask one thing-" began Wheatley, but Zosia cut him off, looking out over the Cobalt camp and the battlefield beyond.

"You cannot. I'm a busy woman, and I'm sure Hjortt cautioned you against getting on my bad side."

"That's... interesting," said Hoartrap, and, glancing over at him, Zosia was unhappy to see that he was as confounded by the sight as she was, sausagey fingers drumming on his lips.

"Interesting?" Zosia looked back to the battlefield. The ragged front line still held, if only by a few sturdy threads, but beyond it, in the massed Crimson infantry, the soldiers were aflutter with activity. Weird activity. It almost looked like they were... "That's really not your doing?"

"I'd be a lot happier if it were. We'd better get down there and pull our people back," said Hoartrap, a rare tremble of anxiety in his voice as he started down the mountain. "Or things will get a lot more interesting very soon. And not the good kind of interesting, like you want."

In another rare turn, Choplicker's mood improved immediately, despite the presence of the hated sorcerer. Of the two portents, Zosia wasn't sure which was more disquieting, and, ordering her people to bring the prisoners back to camp, she hurried down to see just what in all the fucking hells was happening out there.

CHAPTER.

25.

Such language!" Wan tsk-tsked in Domingo's ear. After delivering them to a small grassy hump partway down the last foothill before the Lark's Tongue, Wan had unhitched the horse to graze and crawled back into the wagon bed beside Domingo, so they lay shoulder to shoulder against the back of the cart, overlooking the valley. There was supposed to be a battle taking place, but instead... instead there was all this.

Domingo lowered the heavy hawkglass, hand shaking, mouth dry, lame arm and shattered leg forgotten. His thumb traced the etching of his son's name on the silver band set in the brass instrument, and most of the fight left him then. Until he'd seen the battlefield he'd held out hope of Shea or some other officer riding back to report, of managing to draw his saber despite his awkward position sprawled out in the back of the wagon, of anything... But the anathema had outfoxed and outfenced him at every juncture, and not a one of the Azgarothians he had brought to this place was going to come rescue him, because they were all too busy losing their minds and dying in droves.

"I'll tell you one last secret, Colonel," Wan said, throwing his spindly arm around Hjortt and giving him a comradely squeeze. "I had my doubts anything would happen. Or it would go halfway, and then... poof, nothing. That smoke, though, you can see that even without your glass, that means the ritual is proceeding just like Her Grace said it would."

"This... this is the pope's weapon?" Domingo tried to remember the particulars of the ceremony he had done his devil's best to ignore while it was taking place. "All that chanting about sacrifice, the Fallen Mother's kingdom ascendant... You fucking poisoned my people."

"Poisoned them? We saved them, Domingo-I may have told a fib or two to convince you to go ahead with the ritual, but I spoke true when I said it was the highest honor to be marked by the Fallen Mother. They will be the martyrs who end this war."

"I... I did this to them. I let you..." Domingo could say no more, his tongue as heavy as his heart. His soldiers had trusted him, and he had doomed them all.

"You did the right thing," said Wan, in the same patronizing good-for-you tone Domingo's wife had used when Efrain so much as pissed in the right pot. "Even after you agreed to take me and the oil along, there was initially some concern that you would raise... secular objections to the anointment of your soldiers, which was why I proposed using it as a poison for their blades instead. It seemed much more in line with your pragmatically disciplined bloodlust. I didn't know how to proceed when you declined both a blessing and a poison, but then those rebels brought their monsters down onto your smug shoulders, and a wolf's tongue convinced you of what my own could not."

"You smeared the same shit on my regiment's foreheads as you did on their weapons?" Domingo was still shaking, but no longer from fear and revulsion at what was happening to his people, at what they were doing to each other, or to see the earth smoking beneath the feet of his soldiers. He trembled because he had never wanted to kill anyone or anything as much as he wanted to kill the anathema that reclined beside him.

"Actually, most of it ended up on their brows, not their swords. We couldn't bring nearly enough of it for both, and if you can only consecrate one weapon, well... It's taken years to store up enough oil from the Chain's hives to make another go of it. The last time there wasn't enough, or something went wrong. I don't know. It was before my time, back when Shanatu was still pope, and a young one at that."

"Windhand," breathed Domingo, clenching the hawkglass in his fist.

"Oh, you were there?" Wan took his arm back from around Domingo's shoulder and sat up, all ears. "What was it like? Did it happen like this? What was different?"

"I wasn't there-it was the Fourth, out of Boleskine. But I heard stories," said Domingo, not afraid of dying, not afraid of much, but revolted to find the world was an even worse hell than he'd always thought. Soldiers he'd marched with for years were down there in that vale, and plenty of new blood that had flowed in during Efrain's short command, and now they were...

"What stories?" said Wan, desperate for it. Domingo sneered at his enemy, here at last some small victory he could claim. But then the anathema climbed on top of his legs like a child demanding a bedtime song from his parent, and the weight of even the slight monk on his broken leg caught Domingo's breath in his chest. "Quick about it, old man, I want to be able to watch when it happens. For all their gossip at the table before they sent me off, not even the pontiff and cardinals know for sure how it will transpire here, or what exactly happened at Windhand. We lost everyone there."