Song was the first to see it, moments after they sailed past the edge of the Kingsyard, but it wasn’t because of her contract. Her eyes made no great difference: the entire horizon was aflame, because Port Allazei was burning.
“Sleeping God,” Zenzele hoarsely whispered. “How much did it spread, for us to be able to see it from this far away?”
“An entire neighborhood at least,” Ferranda said, face calm but tone tight. “Probably more.”
The rest of the ride back to port was spent in hushed, anxious conversation. By the time they sailed past the peninsula, in the shadow cast by the hospital over the water, there was more smoke than fire filling the skyline. Soon after disembarking they learned that the fire had been contained. Knowing was easy as asking, as there was a human chain of students and locals beginning at the docks and heading north that was still sending out buckets and caskets filled with water from Allazei Bay.
Song recognized the soot-touched face of Captain Beremundo of the Eightieth near the water and took him aside to talk. The man stepped out of the line to pant, brushing sweat off his forehead and mustache. Shifting around pails of water was not light work.
“There was some sort of shootout near Misery Square, then fire began to spread,” Beremundo said. “Panic spread but Colonel Cao stepped in, mobilized the brigades while organizing the garrison and the townfolk. She got firebreaks in place before the flames swallowed up too much of the Triangle and we’ve been throwing water at the blaze ever since.”
Song swallowed bile. That... changed things. ‘Too much’ of the Triangle implied that some of the most inhabited part of Allazei had burned down. She thanked Beremundo, paying up for the information by sharing that the Thirteenth had encountered a ketos beneath Scholomance and then lengthened her stride to catch up to the others as they trudged up to the gatehouse. There she and Ferranda were sent on to speak with Commander Bouare in the back while the Garrison navigators they’d taken along went upstairs to compile their reports.
Salimata Bouare put on a good show of grim composure, but she looked harried around the edges. She was missing one of her prayer-carved earrings.
“The Machinist’s forces raided the town,” she explained. “Cai Wei led in a squad of twenty revenants with modern muskets. By sheer luck a patrol caught her just off Templewards, but it was a slaughter and before reinforcements arrived she still had time to start fires with pitch and oil.”
Ferranda softly cursed in the Sacromontan cant, something about Manes and buttocks. Song’s fingers clenched. No mention of Wei being put down followed, implying the traitor had been able to retreat afterwards.
“We lost almost everything between the Galleries and Misery Square,” Commander Bouare continued, “and before Cao brought down structures to stop the spread we lost a third of Templeward as well as houses all the way to spitting distance of the Old Playhouse.”
Song breathed in sharply as she fitted that to her mental map of Allazei, but the commander caught it and shook her head.
“Your patron’s fine,” Bouare said. “He was last seen in the bucket chain with Sergeant Mandisa.”
Song nodded jerkily, keeping her relief off her face. Pleased as she was to hear he was alive, Captain Wen would still be homeless: his house was directly in the path of the fire they’d just been told about.
“Wei must have been aiming for the Triangle proper,” Ferranda said. “If she managed to get deeper in before starting the fires...”
Song was not quick enough to stop her wince. About six in ten of the people living in Port Allazei dwelled inside the Triangle or immediately around it, by her reckoning, including nearly all the students and townsfolk. The proportion would be even greater if not for the soldiers that rotated through the barracks and the force that stayed in Fort Seneca.
Still, the Triangle was Port Allazei in most ways that mattered. If it had burned down more than a thousand souls would have been made homeless and that wasn’t even the worst of it from an officer’s perspective. The Triangle was where most the shops, depots and hostels were. Most of the food in the city was kept there, and so was the student treasury. Losing even half of that would have been calamitous.
“If it had spread widely enough, maintaining our hold on Port Allazei would become difficult,” Commander Bouare admitted. “Not that the current damage is anything less than a disaster.”
“How many dead?” Song made herself ask.
“Thirty confirmed, but we’ve barely begun counting,” the commander said. “At least four times that many are missing.”
She cleared her throat.
“We’re filling up the rooms on Hostel Street with families who lost their homes and putting up field tents around the Abbey for the overflow, which is expected to be significant,” Salimata Bouare said. “We’re still struggling to secure enough water and food. I am aware you just returned from a dangerous expedition, but if you can spare-”
“We’ll help,” Ferranda said without hesitation.
“The Thirteenth as well,” Song rasped out.
The commander nodded.
“Lieutenant Felicity in front is coordinating the efforts, go to him for instructions,” she said. “I’ll take your expedition report if you have one, but considering the circumstances I doubt the colonel will give it more than a look until the worst is past.”
They took that for the dismissal it was, but Commander Bouare held back Song for a moment. The older woman’s grim face twisted with something like pity.
“The first reports about the skirmish reached my desk,” Salimata Bouare quietly said. “Cai Wei took prisoners, Captain Ren, and though she shot one the second escaped. He claims that Wei was asking about the whereabouts of Angharad Tredegar.”
Ice filled Song’s veins.
“That report,” she managed to get out. “Who has seen it?”
“If Cao hasn’t read it yet, she will have by morning,” Commander Bouare said. “Brace yourself, child. It’s going to get rough.”
Song walked out the gatehouse, light-headed and about to throw up. Her mind grasped for anything at all that might stop what loomed on the horizon, but there was nothing. If Tristan had found Cao’s original correspondence on the Fall of Techantli instead of the copy he’d passed along maybe Song would have had something to wield, but a copy could be denied and accused of being a forgery. No, she had nothing to stop what was going to happen. And the eldest daughter of the Ren knew exactly how it would go now. In the wake of a tragedy, those suffering would need someone to blame. To point at, to throw stones at, to curse.
And Colonel Cao now had exactly the ammunition she needed to make sure that someone was the Thirteenth Brigade.
--
Tristan knew it was a bad idea.
He still remembered the four rules that Professor Sasan had taught them while they stood in the shadow of Scholomance. Never trust anything you hear or see outside a closed room. Never go around alone or unarmed. Keep your plaques on you at all times. And then the most important of them: prepare for having failed to respect the first three rules. It was recklessness to break the first three, madness to break the fourth.
He’d done it anyway.
The thief ghosted past the guards at the gate, through the gap between their lamps. They were alert but not watchful: the dangers they were looking for came from inside, not outside. What kind of a fool would sneak into Scholomance? Besides, the lingering fire to the south had ensured only a skeleton crew was left behind. Most guards had been sent to help with the aftermath.
Tristan’s cloak whispered against the walls as he skirted the edge of the gentle glow cast by untiring fresfloren lanterns, hardly sparing them a second glance even though the flower-like creations were alchemical miracles. Each was a peak of the Whitening, the art’s second stage, light made into metal that would glow as long as steel could last. He barely noticed them anymore: Scholomance was a house filled to the brim with miracles, be they terrors or wonders.
You saw so many of them every day that it wore away at the very concept, the meaning of the word. Tristan had thought himself clever, once, for noticing the nature of the Marshal’s work down in the Acallar. The unrelenting, methodical brutality that broke down students and reforged them into Skiritai. But this place is just the same if you scratch under the surface.
Five days a week, for years, they would walk in the shadow of death simply to sit at lectures. Students of Scholomance learned as matter of course never to trust a dark corner, never to take a child’s screaming for true or trust an open door to your back. While the covenants dangled competition and prizes like pretty trinkets to distract them, the hours here made mortal peril... mundane. How scared could you really be in the face of a gun pointed in your face, when you’d rolled the dice on a spike trap to avoid being late to class?
Scholomance was not a place that minted watchmen. That was what the Rookery was for, and half a hundred training fortresses across the world. This place was a workshop meant to put together cabals able and willing to face the worst horrors Vesper had to offer. We are bullets being cast for a war yet to come. One worse than this place, and wasn’t that a deeper horror still?
The entrance hall was empty until he ran his finger down the seam, then it filled with song.
A slow violin, not plaintive but expectant. Pleased. He flicked a glance to his right, preparing to argue his case, but there was nothing there. Only pillars and the shadows behind them, no goddess in red squaring up for a squabble or a whine, no constant companion. That was the reason he was here in the first place. The sight of the nothing still, somehow, gave him pause. How was it that the absence was fresh every time? And worse, it’d been more than week since he last made this mistake.
How long before he forgot to make it all?
Tristan clenched his teeth, made himself look away. It was nearing midnight, in less than two hours the last day of the timeline Andreu Claver had given him at the beginning of the year would begin. Only he was not burning the candle on both ends by being here, because tomorrow they would not be taking the skimmer back to sea. Even before the fire, there’d been no question of it. What would be the point, when all that would accomplish was sailing back into the ketos’ waiting maw?
They did not have the iron to kill that monster or make it flee, and the Thirteenth had run out of favors to call on for reinforcements. Gods, but they were steeply in debt when it came to favors. He owed Imani Langa one for helping him into the Galleries, while Maryam owed hours of tutelage to the signifier of the spy’s brigade – and all the Thirteenth owed the Eleventh something larger and less defined for the death of Thando Fenya. Angharad owed back-scratching to Musa Shange from the Ninth, Song owed Ferranda for today’s expensive charity.
They all owed Tupoc for Cressida’s death, yoking them anew to the man just as they were starting to pay off the last of the coin they owed him for contracting the Fourth to rescue half their brigade on Asphodel.
Who was left to call on that did not draw the Thirteenth into a conflict they could ill afford – First, Third, Ninth all intertwined and biting – that could actually help dig them out? What scant favors with the movers and shakers of Scholomance they’d had at the start of the year were long spent, and even their funds were running out. Constant expenses for the delve and the hunt had piled up, adding to the skimmer upkeep and the payments to Tupoc until they were left scraping the bottom of what had been their emergency funds.
Izel had needed to use scraps to build his Glare-lantern, and while their tinker had been thrilled by the challenge it remained that Song had only been able to afford him a budget so small he had to use scraps to build the device they’d relied on to stay alive.
And tomorrow, when Chunhua Cao got to work with the tale that a chunk of the Triangle had gone up in flames and hundreds were dead or homeless because of Angharad Tredegar’s feud with Cai Wei, that position would turn from bad to desperate. The Thirteenth had burned too many bridges with established brigades, this year, and if they tried to reach out to up-and-comers their reputation for victory would drag behind them like a carcass – or, more accurately, the corpses of all those allies they’d gotten killed achieving those victories.
Any advantage over Cao they’d achieved by again taking the lead in the delve was about to vanish into thin air. The Unluckies had enough backing and status she still couldn’t go after them openly, but why would she when she could let a mob do the work? And she wasn’t even the only trouble standing in their shadow. Nathi Morcant had disappeared to sharpen the knife he must stick them with to survive and Cai Wei evidently had no intention of stopping for anything short of Angharad’s scalp.
There was the trouble inside their ranks, too. The way Izel had begun to clench before every conversation with one of them, waiting for that talk they all knew was coming.
Before Tristan left town to head out here, in a quiet moment after the Thirteenth stopped to eat and rest after hours of setting up water barrels and putting up infirmary tents and helping scared people find their families, he’d seen Song sit with her back to the wall with a look in her eyes. The kind someone about to pay their rent would have, if it could only be paid in misery. She could see it too, how they were getting cornered. That the fire had changed things.
So Tristan had come here, to go through with a bad idea. He listened to the violin, waited for a lull in the song and breathed out.
“Hail, Scolomancia,” he began to pray, then hesitated. “Truth be told, I’ve got nothing to bargain with. Only clenching teeth and nothing to bite down on.”
The violin stirred, but only so much. She was not convinced.
“I hate this,” Tristan admitted. “The pit. How there’s no right answer, just different boots kicking down your door. How the harder you struggle, the worse you drown. I hate it, and I want them to hurt. I want to hear bones crunch, I want screams snuffed out. I want to swing and know that whatever I put down will never come back up. I want to-”
He breathed out, panting, and his mouth was dry. He’d raised his voice higher and higher, he only now realized, and shot a fearful look back at the gates. The violin gave a small, light stroke. A hand wave, an invitation.
“Cao,” he said. “I want to find her office in your halls. I want to break into it. I want to take her power and make her choke on it. I want to kill her with her own knife.”
The violin gave a deep, satisfied thrum. Like a hand trailing down his back, and then a little nudge. To the left he went, following it, and stepped into the deep shadows between pillars. Had there always been a door there, a narrow passage flanked by sculpted ivy? It doesn’t matter. It was there now. Tristan stepped into the passage laid out for him, Scolomancia’s winding path. He neither slowed nor hesitated, knowing it would run against the prayer’s course.
The supplicant did not get to look askance at the miracle.
He followed the song, through shadowy halls and rooms of broken glass. Empty ballrooms with moth-eaten curtains, an aviary whose golden cages held only skeletons and a mirror hall where the reflections were nothing of the sort. Scolomancia led him through one after another, her song coiled around his neck like a leash – and ever testing, taking the pulse. Watching for faithlessness, for fear. Tristan thought of sitting across from Hage and lying, of how easily the old devil could snap his neck, and smiled. Graves all around, but he had hands.
He knew how to dig.
“You must be wondering, tia, why Cao even has an office in your halls,” he said in his most charming of voices.
The song balked, tugged at his neck like a child poking at a cat. He laughed, as if amused, and the violin turned questioning.
“Indeed, she does not teach classes under your roof,” Tristan agreed. “And given that rooms you cannot simply toss out at will are in limited supply, it seems odd that she would claim one of them.”
A thoughtful slice, cutting back and forth. Tristan followed the song, turned the corner. Did not look back at the smiling lips pressed against the glass on either side, the clacking teeth and questing hands.
“There are two reasons for this,” he told Scolomancia. “The first, not to be underestimated, is that Colonel Chunhua Cao is an asshole.”
The song stuttered. The creatures behind the glass went wild, clawing at the glass and smashing its head until it cracked, but Tristan clicked his tongue.
“Do you mind?” he said, neither stopping nor turning to look. “We’re having a conversation.”
Scolomancia let out a sharp noise, honed and honeyed edge. Irritation. A heartbeat later there was a wet crunch as something massive dropped on the creature, splattering guts and ichor against the grass as the titan stepped on the ant that’d irked it. It was the nonchalant cruelty of a millennial child. The thoughtful slice sounded again.
“Right, an asshole,” he confirmed, following the song into a stele-strewn hallway. “Half the reason for that office, I figure, is to be the only covenant teacher who has one. She’s fluffing her political plumage to show up the other birds.”
A skeptical note.
“Well, that’s Stripes for you,” he said philosophically. “They can’t make an omelet, and they break eggs.”
Strings like laughter, or chewing. He suspected there might not be much of a difference for her.
“Anyway,” he continued, stepping over the pieces of a shattered stele, “the second reason is that you’re significantly more lethal than anything an officer would be allowed to put up as defenses in Port Allazei.”
A proud trill, high and thin.
“Don’t be too happy, it’d mean she’s using you as a guard dog for whatever she’s keeping in there.”
And that Scolomancia did not like. She tugged harder at the rope, and Tristan thought it retaliation at first but soon she was guiding him through a crevasse in the wall. He pressed himself through, fighting the urge to feel trapped, and emerged into a lantern-lit room. There was a fresfloren just ahead, and a few doors spread across the same side of the hallway ahead. His gaze flickered across the doors, each of which was marked with bronze, until it landed on the third.
COLONEL C. CAO
“Much obliged, tia,” he said, sketching a bow.
He was pushed forward, like a toddler urged to approach a relative they did not recognize. Popping the lock took about a minute, Scolomancia impatiently slithering against his back all the while. None of these locks were anything special, getting to them was the real bar on entry. Cao’s office was not all that large, about the size of the cottage’s drawing room, and as Tristan prepared to strike a match a chandelier began burning above.
It was a thing of tinkling crystal and silver with pearl ribbons and a hundred candles, large as a table and so completely like anything else in the room he could only stare. He flicked a glance at where it hung from the ceiling and, as he’d suspected, there was a ragged patch of ceiling in completely different stone than the rest.
“Thank you,” he said, putting away the match, and received a trill of approval.
Like Cao’s office in the Gallery, this one was decorated with bookcases and a few busts as well as tasteful furnishings. Where this one stood out was how abandoned it was. Like a room in a nice mansion with cloth over the furniture, though the signs were subtler. Dust on top of the bookcases – someone hadn’t taken the time to dust more than the easily visible part – and every door closed and locked. The only part of the room that seemed like it might have seen recent use was the desk, which was cluttered with stacks of paper.
Tristan methodically tore through everything.
Every book, every locked chest and closet. He opened the cushions and took down the paintings, disarmed the hidden compartments in the drawers and even found the false stone under which Cao kept a knife and three vials of very expensive poison. Tristan found sheets with delve schedules, old drafts of the point system for the crews, notes on the rooms and crews who’d solved them. Marked garrison deliveries and even a bare bones note from Colonel Azocar denying additional powder barrels since the hunt was already eating into Garrison stores.
What he did not find was Chunhua Cao’s blackmail stash.
He refused to believe it. Went through everything again, only rougher and not as patient. Nothing. He did again. It couldn’t be. He’d checked the lockboxes on Hostel Street, Cao’s townhouse, her Galleries office. He’d gotten on a fucking ship. Where else was left?
And still he found nothing.
A full room and not a single useful thing in here. It might as well be a latrine, for all the good it did him to wade in. He looked in the eyes of the bust of Iscariot, at the rows of books and the sheets with old schedules in it. Tristan could use none of this. Even if he sifted through every word and trinket the most he’d get was crumbs that weighed nothing in the face of what Chunhua Cao was about to hit the Unluckies with.
He stood there and looked at it as rage slowly rose up through his veins, filling him up with a burning red until his gums ached from how hard he was gritting his teeth to keep bottled up the scream itching to get out.
He’d looked everywhere. Song had wanted Cao’s correspondence with her backer, which he’d found – and lied to her about, pawning her off with a copy. But he’d told himself it wouldn’t matter if he made good on the lie, which was the whole point of tonight: looking for the real prize. Chunhua Cao’s blackmail stash, the real source of her influence.
But it wasn’t here, as it hadn’t been in the Hostel Street warehouse or her Triangle home or the Galleries or the Fall of Techantli. All this work and all he had to show for it was the two parts of the key that could be used to decipher thrice-damned blackmail he did not have. He’d been sure that Cao would be afraid to keep the stash too far for her to easily check on and part of him still believed that, but if it was true then were was it?
“Did you just bury it in a field somewhere?” he asked the room. “Is it under a loose stone in a random ruin, is it up some tree in the Nettlewood?”
He tried, he did. But there was this cut, a slice of violin like a glass slipping through his fingers and Tristan found himself throwing a stack of papers off the desk.
“WHERE IS IT?”
The scream ripped out of his throat, red filled his eyes and he clawed and threw and kept screaming until his throat was raw and his arms ached and around him was an office thoroughly trashed.
He fell to his knees, panting, and choked on rage that wouldn’t leave him. Cao had won. He was out of leads. She was used to keeping her secrets from real Masks, not impostors like him. He had no idea where her blackmail was being kept, and that meant there was no third way. No hole in the loop.
Only the pit and the drowning and decisions that were all ugly.
A hand was put on his shoulder, heavy as stone, and Tristan did not need to look to know it would be corpse-pale.
“Wicked games,” Scolomancia rasped, and it sounded like a promise.
--
The fire’s ravages pushed back the conversation until firstday, but Izel had known it was coming.
Part of him hoped that Tristan’s collapse on seventhday morning after one too many night spent on Mask work would buy him even longer, but after Mayam announced that it was just exhaustion the distraction died out. Still, he did all he could to keep too busy for it. Professor Malajika and Professor Liang – respectively a Laurel architect and an Umuthi fortification specialist – were putting together a force of volunteers so he hurried to sign up.
It was hard but gratifying work, turning the tent city around the Abbey into something that the day’s rain wouldn’t tear right through. It was an unpleasant irony that the same showers that would put out the last of Cai Wei’s fires were also at risk of spreading sickness among those made homeless. Draining ditches obviously could not be dug on paved streets, but they could put up pallets so the tents weren’t swimming in dirty water and put up communal rainwater barrels to cut down on the constant and exhausting trips to the wells that the tent town had made necessary.
Izel was fitting his second hat of the day over his scalp – the last one’s cloth was so soaked through it spat out more rain than it blocked - when it began to change. Professor Liang was picking out which abandoned shop had enough skeleton of a hearth left to it that it could be made into a communal kitchen, since feeding people on rations and raw food was not feasible in the long term, and he was one of the three here to help him take measurements.
“Izel,” the surprisingly young professor called out. “Find me Malajika and ask her to find out how much firewood the garrison is willing to shake loose. The second hearth could be made functional if we put in the work.”
He saluted, to the man’s amusement, and all but ran towards the Abbey. A mere street down he passed by one of the infirmaries the Savants had put up, almost nine tenths of the physician students having volunteered to staff them, and allowed himself a sliver of partisan pride. The College had been taken aback by the fire, but in the aftermath none could deny it was putting in the work. It was a heartening thing to see.
Movement through the unshuttered windows caught his eye, and Izel’s steps stuttered when he realized a stranger was pointing at him through it. Keeping a finger his way while addressing others? He put it out of his mind, but then it happened twice more on the way to Professor Malajika. A first-year did the pointing one of the times, but the other two had been townsfolk. By the time he reached the professor, his stomach had sunk as he realized what was happening.
Song had warned them all last night.
“I’ve got a message for you to carry back to Liang,” Professor Malajika said, “but afterwards it might be for the best if you returned to your brigade.”
“Ma’am?” he got out.
“For now it’s just finger-pointing,” she gently said, “but word is spreading that your brigade was the one the revenants were after. There’s a lot of tired, angry people who lost everything they own out there – or even family. It’s not a long way from pointing fingers to throwing rocks, and if soldiers have to step in to protect you it will get ugly.”
Heart stuck in his throat, he trudged back to the Rainsparrow after discharging his last task. The professor was right: the muttering was getting louder, angrier. The stares were dark, and a man called out something in Cathayan that sounded harsh as he passed. Song was absent but had left a note it would be wise to relocate to the cottage, which Izel reluctantly agreed to after grabbing the correspondence left for him. Okuhle had sent word that Angharad’s blade was ready, waiting for him at the Workshop so he could fit the grip to it, but Izel didn’t have the stomach for so many eyes right now.
Song came back late that night, looking grim, and did not broach the matter hanging between them. Too tired, he figured with guilty relief. But she caught him the following morning, before breakfast. He’d thought to get up particularly early to avoid it but instead he found her waiting at the kitchen table with two cups of tea. He grimaced at the sight, squaring his shoulders. There’d been no running from that forever.
“We have a situation,” Song said, pressing the cup into his hand.
He sipped, finding it at just the right temperature, but thought of the coming conversation killed any appreciation of the taste he might have had. I can still get ahead of this, he thought. Or at least try.
“I’ve looked into the practicalities of repairing the cannon,” Izel said. “The crack in the barrel means it will have to be melted down and recast, but the Workshop has the facilities. I would need to hire at least two sets of hands for help, one of which is a professor.”
“And how much would that cost, conservatively?” Song asked.
He quoted the number. Her face did not change. Because she already knew, he thought. Or close enough.
“That is slightly less than twenty times our remaining funds,” Song told him. “Including our coming monthly stipend.”
Izel cleared his throat.
“It is a large expense, but also an investment,” he tried. “We will have to arm the skimmer, one day.”
And while part of Izel held it in distaste to be casting a cannon, the very thing he had left Kukoya to avoid, he wasn’t breaking ground here. It was an existing Watch pattern making functional again a cannon that’d already been in service. He didn’t like it, but Izel could admit it was not fundamentally a worse thing than maintaining his own musket or making a grenade. It just felt like it.
“You’re going to suggest we borrow the money,” Song said.
He stiffly nodded.
“We can’t,” she said.
“I know that after Maryam’s misadventures and our long payments to the Fourth it might feel ill-advised,” he delicately said, “but-”
“You misunderstand me,” Song said. “We can’t, because no one will lend to us. I spent yesterday afternoon knocking at every door I could.”
He blinked.
“The lending house is closed?”
The Obscure Committee had set up a Conclave-backed lending house in Allazei when they first reopened Scholomance, correctly assessing that students would occasionally have urgent needs beyond what their stipend and private funds could afford. Maryam, for one, had paid for the skimmer off such loans.
“It is closed to us,” Song flatly said. “The reason invoked is that our brigade has shared ownership of an extremely expensive asset that is involved in a Watch investigation.”
“The skimmer,” he said.
“The skimmer,” she agreed. “They claim it would be irresponsible to loan us money when the asset could be confiscated and we will be bankrupted it.”
“That’s absurd,” Izel frowned. “There is no outcome of that investigation where the skimmer would be taken, we were the ones attacked!”
She said nothing; he got there on his own.
“Colonel Cao.”
“Or her backer,” Song said. “The lending house is directly under the authority of the Obscure Committee.”
“There are private loans,” he said. “I know these would come with strings, but...”
“The Workshop declined without giving a reason,” Song said. “Unsurprising, given who backs Cao. I petitioned the Galleries just to be formally denied but they didn’t even bother to answer. Commander Bouare was sympathetic but was clear that in the wake of a catastrophe like the fire it would be politically poisonous to lend garrison funds to students.”
She paused, her calm trembling around the edges.
“The Thirty-First does not have the funds,” Song Ren said. “The Ninth laughed in my face. The Third was originally amenable to putting up half in exchange for a stand against the Ninth, but took back the offer by day’s end.”
“After it got out,” Izel said.
“Nenetl was apologetic,” Song evenly said. “But she told me that Cao has also put out word privately there would be consequences for lending to us and she cannot afford to give the Ninth a lever to us against her."
Her lips pulled back in what would have been a snarl if she mastered herself just a smidge less.
“The First Brigade agreed on condition that we rejoin the delve as part of their delving crew.”
Izel winced. It was an implicit offer to mediate with Colonel Cao, but also one that would put the Song under her thumb again and make the Unluckies into Vivek Lahiri’s hunting hounds. It wasn’t even a particularly unreasonable demand, that was the worst of it. Just an unacceptable one.
“I sought every private lender in town, but we have been blacklisted,” Song tiredly said. “And the truth is, Izel, that even if you did recast the cannon we could not afford to use it.”
She slid a piece of paper across the table.
“One of Azocar’s people passed me that last night.”
It was a decree for the local garrison. That... set a cap on the Allazei garrison’s sale of powder and arms to students through the Hostel Street armory at the usual fixed price until the ‘current crisis’ had passed, in order to prevent the garrison’s supply of powder running low and putting the city in danger. Which seemed reasonable. Students could still buy past the cap, but at tenfold the price. Sale of powder to private shops was also suspended, though their current stocks could be sold as they wished.
“We could still afford powder for the cannon under this, if we stop drills.”
“Look at the second subsection,” Song ordered.
Which outlined that non-necessary garrison military supplies should be sold at tenfold the price as well, going on to define these as beasts of burden, uniform cloth, ropes, pitch, ordnance and-
“Ordnance,” Izel repeated, catching up at last. “We’d have to buy cannon balls from the garrison, but they would be at tenfold the price.”
“I’ve made inquiries about having ammunition made of stone from the city,” Song said. “But the labor costs are prohibitive and they would be much less effective than iron balls besides.”
She paused.
“The cannon is a dead end,” she said. “Colonel Cao will not release her grip until the delve is done, which will be too late. We need something else to force the ketos to retreat or that lake is where the exploration ends for us.”
She met his eyes squarely.
“Your lenslight was capable of scorching lunar salt with Glare at a respectable range,” Song said. “A lemure would be no less sensitive to the effect.”
His captain folded her hands together.
“It is already built. The fuel it relies on is not on the restricted supply list and relatively cheap besides. It would solve our every problem.”
“You want to use it,” Izel croaked. “For me to install it on the skimmer.”
“It would remain your property in every way and the fuel costs would come out of brigade funds,” Song said. “You would decide who has access to it and none would use it but you.”
He swallowed.
“You know that won’t change anything,” Izel said. “Even if we swear everyone on board to silence and it keeps, eventually someone will put together the pieces. And if it works, it will be known as the weapon that drove off a ketos.”
To her honor, she did not lie.
“Yes.”
Her fingers tightened around the cup.
“I have looked for alternatives,” Song rasped out. “I have found none. It is this or going to the First.”
Which would put them in Lahiri’s debt in several ways and would still rely on the bet that a single cannon was enough to put the ketos to flight. Which was... uncertain. For a Watch lending house loan, it might have been a bet worth making. But with everything bargaining with the First cost upfront? That was a less palatable alternative.
“It didn’t have to be this way,” Izel bit out. “You know that.”
Song inclined her head.
“I do.”
There was on the tip of his tongue an accusation about her throwing a fit at Cao and how it’d put them all in this mess, but he swallowed it. It was not that simple – the matter had involved Maryam and the Orels as well – and it would have been hypocrisy on his part to complain of trouble when he’d been the one to bring Yaotl to their door. All of the Thirteenth had added their own branches to the pyre they were about to be burned on.
“I don’t know that the lenslight would work,” Izel said.
“But you think it would,” Song said.
He thought of how the lycosi had cooked under the beam, the Gloam in its very being evaporating, and did not answer. Which was all the answer Song needed.
“If I put that out in the world, Song, there is no taking it back,” he croaked out. “People will use it.”
“I know,” she said. “And I cannot, will not force that decision on you. But we are out of choices, and you know what awaits.”
Tristan would, in all likeliness, lose Fortuna. Song might well be forced out of Scholomance by Colonel Cao before the year’s end. Angharad would get blamed for every death at Cai Wei’s while the traitor kept raiding out from her hidden ways beyond the lake. And if the Thirteenth dissolved, if everything fell apart, then the Orels would no longer be contracted Watch auxiliaries. They’d be tossed out into the Trebian Sea, where the Morcant would be waiting.
Any one of these were enough reason for Izel to agree, if you thought only about the now. About this island, this year, this little war. But how much did any of them really weigh on the scales, against the devastation and brutality that a weaponized lenslight might inflict on Vesper? Even if a gun were literally put to the head of all the Unluckies, would those five corpses weigh more than untold thousands?
Izel finished his tea and did not answer.
They could both hear the clock ticking.