The whispering started as early as the Arsay waystation.
A few brigades were milling around the grounds, waiting for cabalists or allies, and though the second years were discreet about their staring the first years were not. The Calendar Court had taught Izel to parse looks, to tell the curious apart from the cruel or the ambitious, so he could tell that this wasn’t the same as the aftermath of the Old Playhouse. They’d been treated like rabid dogs, then, pulling at the leash and slavering to bite. Now they were being treated like they were cursed.
It was polite, at least as much as half-hidden pointing and stares could be polite, but they were being given a wide berth. It’s like they think they’ll catch a stray death just standing too close. No one was picking up pavement for a stoning or spitting as they went by. They were being treated like a frog in the house, like they had a four tattooed on them or put on a black cat’s coat. Bad dice, jinxes.
He’d expected Song to take it the worst of them, but her face had been a block of ice since they left the cottage. Maryam barely seemed to notice – she had her hood down, the staring was nothing new – and Izel was not unaccustomed to this sort of attention but Angharad? Angharad wilted. Strangers kept gesturing at her, the name ‘Cai Wei’ blooming on their lips, and the disdain that regularly accompanied it struck her like a blow every time. She was being blamed for not having killed the dead girl haunting her, which was bad enough, but worse yet was that she very clearly blamed herself.
Tristan avoided all of it by virtue of being too exhausted to attend class.
Izel put himself between Angharad and the stares, not that it did anything. He was not nearly large enough to shield her from the world. Running into the Thirty-First on the plaza outside Scholomance was something of reprieve, Ferranda standing stiff but her cabalists very pointedly making sure to be seen chatting with the Unluckies – well, Shalini and Zenzele anyway. Rong mostly stood there being openly bored and sleepy.
They had a few more visits. Tupoc swung by, though without the Fourth, as did Guadalupe de Tovar and her Second Brigade – Song’s rival looked irked at being there, and clearly counted down how long she stayed, but in a way that made it a stronger show of support. Song looked sick afterwards, and Izel understood why. For de Tovar to believe the Thirteenth’s reputation bad enough she had to prop it up against Cao was... not promising.
The last visitor was mostly for Angharad, Awonke Bokang from the Third. He leaned in to whisper something at the Pereduri, patted her shoulder and left – still, it had her brightening up. To lose the esteem of her fellow Malani highborn and of Scholomance’s student body in such quick succession must have been a crushing feeling, so Bokang signaling she was not exactly exiled made a difference.
“Come,” Song tightly said. “I’ve had enough dawdling for today.”
Teratology did little to improve Izel’s morning, or the Thirteenth’s for that matter. Professor Kang had taken to pretending that Song was thin air after last year’s debacle, but the man was not above taking the occasional indirect stab at her when he could get away with it. This time it was by discarding the original planned lesson of the day, the one for which they’d been assigned readings – social hierarchies of lemures, with an emphasis on the phenomenon of ‘packs’ that involved multiple species – to have an impromptu in-depth study of the common Trebian ketos.
“The largest wooden ships currently sailing are Ramayan galleons,” Kang began. “Those seafaring castles meant for the Sorrows trade.”
The man quickly sketched the silhouette of a three-masted galleon on his slate, making small marks above and to the sides.
“The greatest of these are around one hundred and sixty feet long,” Professor Kang said, leaning on his can as he tapped the drawn ship with his chalk.
He paused for effect.
“There is no Trebian ketos on record that was fewer than two hundred feet long, and of all the ketos breeds it is the smallest.”
As gasps echoed across the classroom Kang set to drawing the broad shape of the same kind of ketos they had seen in the depths beneath Scholomance, though he kept it a bare bones outline. It was still enough to have Izel clench up.
That thing, it had treated rifle shots as if they weren’t even worth noticing. Song had put a bullet in one of its eye and it hadn’t cared, only ‘blinking’ with its transparent membrane. His grenade’s burn had only clipped it, but Izel knew the truth: even if it’d been a clean hit, it would have barely given the ketos pause. Gods, but the sense of... helplessness still had his stomach in knots. The knowledge that they could nothing but flee and hope the skimmer was fast enough to get them out alive.
Pleased with the room’s reaction, the professor then revealed detailed anatomical drawings of ketos and had them passed through the class as he continued his lecture.
“As a species, it is teratologically significant because it is showcase of how lemures adapt to their surroundings,” Professor Kang said. “The Trebian ketos is smaller than its Straying Sea and Pastel Sea cousins because of the large amount of islands in the region: it grew smaller to be able to access the shallower waters near the coast, and then over the centuries the sheer volume of Trebian sea trade led it to develop the most sophisticated lures of any ketos breed.”
Kang’s lecture was fast paced but thorough. After setting out the basics he focused first on the lures, which was the proper name for the forest of tentacles going down its back.
“These are sensory appendages as much as they are tools,” he explained. “The ketos uses them as hands, but also to sense currents in the aether and stir up the Gloam to blind the ships it intends to sink. Still, their primary use is described by the name – above all they are lures.”
He tapped the mouth of the beast then moved the finger towards its stomach.
“The ketos will keep the most vivid of the souls it swallows and grow them at the end of these tentacles, not unlike how a stag grows a horn a horn,” Kang said. “It uses the remnants of the soul’s consciousness to make the lure mimic human speech and saturate the local aether with emanations that affect the emotions of lucents in a short range. Usually it is a sense of love and protectiveness for the lure, driving crews to recklessness to ‘save’ it, but some have been known to use terror or rage.”
The professor paused.
“The ketos uses the lure to drive ships into reefs or storms in order to be able to eat the crew without needing to devour the ship itself – which it can digest, but the process is irritating and tedious. The lure is a tool, like an otter cracking open an oyster with a rock.”
Professor Kang smiled.
“We are, unfortunately, the oyster flesh in this metaphor,” he said.
There was much curiosity about how these creatures might be slain, now that word had spread one waited in the depths. It’d been more than a day since the return of the expedition and Song had leaked it as early as when they’d stepped onto the docks, the tale had done the rounds at lightning pace.
“A well-placed cannon shot in the heart will kill it in a matter of minutes,” Kang said, “but given that the heart is located a little past the front flippers, in the chest, it is almost never out of the water.”
Meaning that until someone made a cannon that could be shot from underwater, it was a moot point.
“The usual whaling tactics, driving them to the coast and harpoons tied to a drogue, simply will not work. Not only will ketos choose to fight against even large numbers of boasts, their sheer size means that most harpoons do not dig deep enough to prevent diving and those that do will be plucked out by tentacles. Malani whalers assuming the Trebian breed to be easier prey than their Straying Sea cousins learned this the hard way.”
Kang cleared his throat.
“The finest known ketos hunters before the invention of gunpowder were the Skiritai mercenary companies that were the predecessor of the modern guild, and they slew the beasts by getting around the skull.”
He tapped the boar-like head on the slate.
“Through use of a substance called plousperi – black pepper with alchemical additions – they made the ketos sneeze, at which point a band of warriors leaped into the open mouth and put up heavy rods of iron to prevent the jaw closing fully again. This prevented it from diving under. They then shoved long spears through the roof of the ketos’ mouth into its brain until death ensued.”
Kang offered them a grimace.
“In its death throes the ketos then often flipped and drowned everyone inside, when the iron rods did not simply get squeezed out of place or outright bent,” he noted. “It was considered a risky enough assignment only the old were allowed to volunteer for it.”
He then shrugged.
“This was in olden times,” Professor Kang said. “Modern nights brought with them a solution that, though inelegant, is significantly less risky: sustained cannon fire to the front of the head will shatter the skull and smash the brains, killing it. Given how quickly a ketos can lunge in the water, it usually kills at least one ship first so clever admirals will bait it with a fireship or a derelict – though these must be manned until the end, else the ketos will sense it through its lures and change target.”
He was asked, by an openly fascinated Bait, whether poison would work.
“The same process it uses to create its lures also purges poisons,” Kang said. “It is theoretically possible to poison one, but the sheer amount of distillate required to kill it would likely be more expensive than hiring ships for the hunt.”
He shook his head.
“There is a caliber of beasts against which only overwhelming firepower is a reliable answer. It takes a great warship or a flotilla to drive away such a creature: unless the garrison fleet mobilizes, our friend beneath Scholomance is not going anywhere.”
The entire hour-long lecture, Izel thought, had been a vessel to get that conclusion in the mind of everyone sitting here. To corner the Thirteenth just a tad more by making it plain that even their skimmer would avail to nothing in the face of the creature in the depths. To point out that the last coin they could bring at the table to bargain with was entirely worthless.
They could not get out of class soon enough. The Thirteenth retreated all the way back to town despite the risks, as there was little choice. Song was to head to the Abbey for the continuing examination by Professor Yue, while Maryam had been summoned by Commander Bouare to expand on the expedition report and the same matter further east demanded the presence of both Izel and Angharad. Okuhle had finished reforging her blade and it needed picking up at the Workshop.
When they’d first struck the deal, the plan had been for the other tinker to bring it in town and have a meal with them before it was handed off. Now Okuhle was ‘unfortunately detained’, almost certainly because they did not want to be seen in public anywhere near a member of the Unluckies.
They stuck together until the Rainsparrow, splitting up on Hostel Street. It was worse in town than it had been in Scholomance, the... taste of the attention was different. It was the townsfolk who were the source: the sight of the Unluckies killed their smiles and turned faces sullen. Resentful. Were their brigade not armed blackcloaks with a fearsome reputation, there might have been more than angrily closed windows at their approach.
Angharad went more and more silent as they walked, and they weren’t even at the dock warehouses yet.
They were intercepted by the dead fountain, chased from behind. Izel’s hand went for his pistol at the sudden movement, but it lowered at the sight of Shalini Goel leading the pack. She was with Salvador, the so-called Tall Bibek and even Yayauhqui from the Twenty-Ninth.
“Angharad, slow down!”
The throng caught up to them, sweeping through with an insistent demand that they have a meal together at the Dregs to ‘plan how we’ll do when the Marshal inevitably puts a bounty on that ketos’. It was a fairly transparent attempt to prop up Angharad by being seen eating with her in the busiest tavern of Port Allazei, which visibly touched the mirror-dancer. Izel felt a pang of envy at the sight that was rightfully followed by shame.
He left Angharad to her throng of Skiritai and her meal, declining twice the offer to join them. He would not be a third wheel so much as a sixth, a stranger but no more enticing proposition. He begged off on behalf of his freshly invited prior intentions to grab a bite near the docks.
Well, the blade wasn’t going anywhere so he might as well eat in truth.
What should have been a proper chicken meal at the Poultrayal but instead saw him buy too many churros and wander off. He forced himself to finish the second bouquet even when no longer hungry, feeling a little sick afterwards, and then... walked around. Lost.
The first time a finger was pointed at him, he made himself take in stride. By the fifth he no longer had the composure for it. Gods, he’d thought he was past caring about stares, that his time at court had cauterized the part that flinched. It was different here, though. Somehow. Maybe because it wasn’t lords and scions sneering but ragged, tired look townsfolk. He fled.
He’d thought the direction of his steps to be random, but after a beat he saw otherwise. He recognized the street he was on, though he’d only been once before - when Tristan brought him to point out the house.
The one where Yaotl lived.
He found himself standing across the street from the door, staring at its worn paint and worrying at a lip that still tasted of churro. It would be risible. He’d cut ties with Yaotl after, well... ruining her life, the way she’d see it.
And yet.
Who else could he speak to? Not the Thirteenth, who were all yoked to an outcome that demanded he bend his principles to deliver. His friends among the Umuthi did not know about the lenslight and he did not dare tell them. Gods, it was a sick thing but Izel still found that he trusted Yaotl Acatl more than most. At least enough that if he told her a secret she would not speak of it.
And she would understand, he thought, in a way that no one else would. She’d been there during the days that forged who he was now, she could understand his reasons in a way that only someone who’d walked those halls with him could.
He found himself knocking at the door before he ever made the decision to do so. Just limbs moving. He immediately castigated himself afterwards – for all he knew, she would be in the Acallar at the moment anyway – but he froze when there was movement behind the door. It was cracked open a moment later and he got a shadowed glimpsed of Yaotl through the opening.
“Izel,” she neutrally said.
And nothing else. He coughed into his hand.
“Can I come in?” Izel asked.
She regarded him for a long moment, then snorted.
“No,” Yaotl said. “Get lost.”
She closed the door in his face and he stood there blinking for a moment. Thinking, for a bit, that she might open the door anew. But then he heard movement inside the house and he swallowed. He choked down... hurt? Presumptuous of him, after their history, and yet. He took a few lightheaded steps towards the end of the street, feeling as lost as he had been ordered to be. He had not, he’d thought that... Izel blew out a breath, passed a hand through the stubble on his scalp.
Movement at the end of the street, where another pass through it, and he stiffened. People were approaching, making an attempt at being quiet – or at least manage the noise. He saw when they passed the corner that there were four of them. He recognized one for certain from the delve, Captain Susana. The first year who had spoken for the student association and then captained Nathi Morcant’s delving crew. The other two were vaguely familiar, half-recognized faces.
And they were holding the fourth, who he knew. Young Koval, pale and dark-haired and utterly terrified.
The boy had a gag over his mouth and had been struck in the face hard enough his eye was purpling. He was struggling out of the grasp of the pair, but weakly – as if exhausted. Izel’s fingers twitched. He was at the end street in heartbeats.
“What,” he said harshly, “do you think you’re doing?”
One of the pair looked at his face and swore, recognizing him. Young Koval started struggling again until the other man struck him in the stomach in a way that had Izel’s nails digging into his palm. Captain Susana stepped between them and Izel, pistol in hand.
“Walk away, tinker.”
“Susana, he saw us,” the first man hissed. “If they go to the garrison-”
“He’d have no proof,” Susana dismissed, and pursed her lips. “Would you, Coyac? Just your word against ours, and yours isn’t worth much these days.”
“I asked you,” Izel said, “what you think you’re doing.”
The captain snorted.
“You’d think an Izcalli would put together the slight hints,” she said.
She gestured for the two to keep dragging Koval away. Izel did not move the fingers on purpose, did not realize he had until he heard the crisp snap of the clasp coming open to free his roundhead mace. Captain Susana, unimpressed, cocked her pistol.
“Think this through,” Izel told them.
You are abducting a child, he almost said, but killed it. If you appealed to better natures, you were just being sentimental. You had to given them cold reason, consequence. Numbers and iron.
“He is a Watch auxiliary under a contract signed by Colonel Cao herself. She won’t protect you, she can’t. It’ll be the gallows for all of you if you go through with this.”
“Will it?” Susana said, teeth bared. “I don’t think so. The rules don’t mean a thing in this place, Coyac. Your Mask does two thirds of a murder in broad glarelight and they what, let him out of his cell after a day? Your mirror-dancer brutally beats a man over conversation, your Navigator almost blew up Bingwen and your captain fed two of us to Scholomance at gunpoint - and where’s the punishment?”
She waved her pistol around.
“Where are the consequences?” she hissed. “Nowhere. None of the teachers care about anything but the letter of the law, so that’s what we’ll heed. We’re not killing the boy,Coyac. And it’s not against the rules to take someone a prisoner.”
The worst of it, Izel thought, was that she wasn’t wrong. She stripped the events of everything around them, held up every incident without acknowledging that none had been unprovoked – the Thirteenth had been drawn on and threatened, been insulted and lied to, been put through a gauntlet of duels and attacked by the same souls later conscripted. But it remained that the Unluckies had done all these things Susana reproached them. For reasons, every time, but they’d done them nonetheless.
And they kept getting away with it.
And now Song wanted Izel to arm them. To begin making them weapons. For a good reason, of course. There was always a good fucking reason for everything the Unluckies did, even himself.
“And this will make it better?” he asked, but it felt weak.
“I’m told it’ll get you animals out of Scholomance,” Captain Susana replied with a hard smile. “I’ll settle for that.”
“He doesn’t deserve to be brought into this,” he urged. “He’s just a boy.”
She hesitated, for a moment. But then she looked at his hip, at the mace, and her face hardened.
“Rodrigo barely knew how to use a gun,” Susana said. “And you still threw him into the fucking grinder, didn’t you? Deserve’s not what we trade in, here at Scholomance.”
He had no idea who Rodrigo was but the, in a way, wasn’t that was the very point she was making?
“If you come after us, it is one thing,” Izel said. “But this crossing a line.”
She laughed scornfully.
“Did you think you were the only ones allowed to do it?”
There were words that could have done it. Izel believed that, down to the marrow of his bone. There was a sentence that could have bridged the gap, made her see and made him see. But like every time he stood at this crossroads, Izel tried to close his fingers around those words only for them to slip through his grasp like sand. There were words, but he did not know them.
They’d never stopped moving Young Koval. The boy’s eyes were nearly white as he desperately tried to slip their grasp only to get slapped and told to stop struggling. Another few seconds and they’d be past the corner.
When Izel’s fingers closed around the grip his father’s mace, it did not slip through his grasp. It never did.
“Don’t be an idiot,” Captain Susana said, raising the pistol. “Do you think-”
She was holding up Skylaki-pattern pistol, the Watch’s single most circulated gun. It had been the main sidearm of the order for the better part of sixty years, almost entirely unchanged. Izel could have put together one in an hour’s work, and knew Clockwork tinkers who could have done the same blindfolded. He knew that pistol, could map out with a charcoal pen how long it took from pulled trigger to struck flint to lit powder and the bullet shooting out.
Izel burst to the right and Susana’s pistol tracked him, then pulled slightly ahead to account for the delay of the shot.
By the time she pulled the trigger he’d darted back to the left and the mace was in his hand, an old friend, a fifth limb. The iron head sang as it came down, breaking bone and pulverizing flesh as Susana’s gunhand went and the stock of her pistol with it. He let the momentum carry him, the way he’d been taught – the teeth are not the killer, the jaguar is - and shouldered her with his full weight as she screamed. She tumbled back, tripping onto the ground, but he was already a step past her. One of the pair drew a blade while the other tossed away Young Koval with a yelp.
He struck the armed one first. No frills, no feints or footwork or elegance: he swung to place as much strength as he could as quickly as he could somewhere it would put down what stood in front of him. The blade flashed, a cut to force him back, but he didn’t stop and the man balked in surprise – hastily put more strength in the cut, but too late. The sword bit into Izel’s side, through cloak and coat and the flesh of his side. The iron head punched into the side of the man’s chin, shattering it and the cheekbone with it.
He dropped and, as Izel began to turn, the kick hit the back of his knee. He folded, the musket stock hitting his temple. He fell with a gasp on all fours but kept his mace – lose your grip, lose your life – only to be kicked onto his belly as the musket was leveled at him.
“You fucking Unlucky madman,” the man snarled.
But Izel’s eyes were past him, on Young Koval. The bruised boy who should have run but was looking at him with teary eyes, unwilling to abandon his rescuer.
“Run,” Izel gasped. “Gatehouse. Now.”
“No you don’t,” the man snarled, pivoting to aim his musket.
No, Izel shouted, but he was on the ground and- he aimed the mace at the man’s temple as he threw, a kill shot, but the man got his musket up in the way and it bounced off after cracking wood. He got kicked on his back for it, belly forced to the ground, and the man again aimed his musket as the running Young Koval. Izel watched in horror as he pulled the trigger and- and a hand went under the barrel, nudged it up. The bullet went high.
Yaotl Acatl, barefaced save for a single stripe of black around her eyes, casually sliced through the man’s eyes with an obsidian knife then broke his right arm at the elbow when he reached for his bleeding face. With terrifying ease she then knifed him in the stomach, away from the vitals, and shattered his knee with a well-placed boot.
“I’m impressed you even got that mace on target,” Yaotl said, ignoring the screaming. “It’s not made for throwing. Did Lord Doghead have you practice it?”
Izel panted, trying not to throw up. Those damn churros. And without the rush of the fight him, he was feeling the painful ache of the cut into his side. It’d gotten deeper than he thought.
“Zelztin,” he got out. “Thought it was funny. Made her laugh.”
“Your stories always make her sound so interesting,” Yaotl said, then paused. “If you get up, Lierganen, I will cut off your hands and feet. Back to the ground now. Yes, that’s better.”
Izel made it back onto his knees, head spinning. He blinked as he watched Yaotl crouch by the still-unmoving man whose chin and cheek he had shattered. She let out a low whistle, then forced open an eye and checked for something.
“He’s dying,” Yaotl informed him. “You rattled his skull hard enough there’s bleeding behind the eyes. That or some bone spike went up.”
“Fuck,” Izel said, forcing himself up. “Help me get him to the hospital.”
Yaotl eyed him for a moment.
“You mean it?”
Izel looked askance at her.
“Right, moving him like this might be worse,” he muttered. “Do you have something to make a stretcher in your house?”
“You do,” she mused. “He won’t make it, Izel. Minutes at most, and moving him is death.”
“I won’t just-”
Smoothly, unhurriedly, Yaotl cut the man’s throat. There was a wet gurgle as red spilled loose and Izel let out a hoarse cry, but by the time he’d gotten there the man was dead. He had at no point opened his eyes, or moved. Yaotl wiped the knife on her sleeve like she was cleaning her hands after a meal.
“Why?” he got out.
“Because the Morcant sent someone to speak with me, a few days back,” she casually said. “You think it’s a coincidence they were taking the boy somewhere that just happened to be close to where you were, at the precise moment you were visiting me?”
He swallowed. In the moment it had not occurred, but now that she mentioned it.
“Morcant wanted you to kill a student,” Yaotl said, rising to his feet. “Your brigade is out of rope and out of favors. Another dead student at your hands and even if it is deserved the Thirteenth is finished. Clever man, this Malani.”
“But now you are the one who killed him,” Izel quietly said. “And the others will live.”
Yaotl said nothing.
“Why?” he asked again, but gently.
“Because you meant it,” Yaotl finally said. “The consequences hadn’t even occurred to you, and you meant it.”
She shook her head.
“You are wrong, and foolish,” Yaotl told him. “But you genuinely believe. And who is to say you will not make a truth out of that belief?”
They were still standing there, facing each other, when the garrison arrived to take them away.
--
Izel had never been imprisoned before joining the Watch.
Now he’d been put in a cell for the second time since putting on the black. That was the opposite of where he had thought the journey would lead, so in a way perhaps he should have expected it. The detention house near the docks was nicer than Tristan had described, though that might be because he was in a larger room than the Mask had been.
Not out of favoritism, but because he wasn’t alone in his cell.
Yaotl had claimed the lone chair in the room and was idly leafing through a book, leaving him to sit back against the wall in the corner of the room. She’d hardly said a word as the soldiers escorted them here, and the silence had kept after the door was closed behind them. Through the wood they could hear muted talk, which had not been muted at all when passing through the Triangle’s edge to the docks.
The pointed fingers were nothing new, but the... contempt? That was new. They’d looked at him almost like they were looking at a man who kept repeating a too-worn joke at a party, only the joke was the Unluckies having a hand in student deaths. Before the fire, Izel would have expected the revelation that the dead and battered had been abducting an auxiliary and a child besides would promptly unravel the scorn.
Now, though? He had doubts. Once someone’s reputation grew bad enough even their virtues were flaws, and there’d been little virtuous about that skirmish.
“You look constipated.”
He turned to face Yaotl, finding her sitting with her arms crossed. The book on the desk, a manual for the upkeep of firearms, lay open and abandoned. More boring than conversation with him, evidently.
“I am considering the day’s consequences,” he said.
His fingers closed around the pocket of his coat, around the solidness there. The garrison men had taken all their weapons, but they had left him the piece of alloy he carried everywhere with him these days – the same from the scrapyard where things had been done that traced a line on the ground that could be allowed all the way to today, in that street.
“There won’t be any,” Yaotl said. “Not from those above us, at least. That’s twice now Morcant minions made a pass at your auxiliaries, if they punish you for defending them again they tacitly endorse a third attempt.”
While Yaotl had not proved an apt at predicting the Watch so far, he was inclined to agree with her read there. Not that it mattered.
“We’ve killed too many students, Yaotl,” he said tiredly.
“You killed no one today,” she dismissed. “I have. And they will do nothing to me, because the Old Vulture still thinks he can make use of my surname.”
He wondered if she called Commander Pale that to his face. He would not be surprised if she did.
“That would still leave those around us to worry about,” he said.
She shrugged.
“Those who were going to act will,” she said. “Those who were not won’t. The Unluckies are too dangerous for reputation along to sink you.”
It mighthave, if you’d not finished my murder for me, he thought. He looked away. There was a sigh.
“I do not understand you,” Yaotl suddenly said. “How you can stand masterful in a moment and now cower in a corner at the thought of frowns.”
She shook her head.
“Tell me, then. What bout of shadow-chasing brought you to my door? It must be quite the stump, for you to eschew your new friends in favor of returning to me.”
He licked his lips.
“You don’t have to-”
“Padding your decision with false demurs is more insulting than a clean acceptance,” Yaotl said flatly. “Am I too weak to handle your concerns?”
“I never said that,” he sharply said.
“Then talk.”
Was this a bad idea? It was feeling like it, right now. But then he’d not come to Yaotl Acatl for comfort and pats on the back. He’d come to her for that careless disregard for the consequences of speaking her mind that was, in its way, more reliable than simple honesty.
“You were right about the cannons,” Izel said.
Dark eyes studied him, but she did not interrupt.
“Not literal cannons,” he said. “But I made something, a device that could be used as a weapon, and it might get us through the waters guarded by the ketos.”
He clenched his fingers.
“I buried it for a reason,” he said. “It’s not that difficult to reproduce once you understand the principles, and simple observation gets you most of these. Once I use it, once it is seen, there will be no stopping the spread. Even if I sit on it for the rest of my life, others will make similar machines.”
She cocked her head to the side.
“What does it do?”
He didn’t even hesitate. The thought that she might want to use the lenslight or leak it wasn’t even worth the label of risible. It just wasn’t who Yaotl Acatl was.
“It amplifies and Glare light and concentrates it in a narrow beam,” he said. “The amplification is by more than the fuel adds.”
“Your Candle research,” she said.
He nodded.
“Even your peace bond has a weapon’s cast,” she said, sounding amused. “Coyac indeed.”
His stomach clenched. He looked away, as much so she would not see the tightening of his jaw as because he didn’t want to look at anyone right now. A moment passed.
“Apologies,” Yaotl said. “That was unkind.”
“It was,” he hoarsely said.
She sighed.
“And your captain is pushing you to build this weapon?”
“It’s already built, or close enough,” he admitted. “She wants me to install on the skimmer and fight the ketos with it.”
“Worthy,” Yaotl said, sounding approving and surprised by it. “A brigade and a skimmer, against a shiptaker? She does not lack for stomach.”
“It’s at least half desperation,” he said. “Near everybody in the Thirteenth has something they need on the other side of that lake.”
“And you do not believe it a cause worth fighting for?” she asked.
“I do,” he said, lips thinned. “But not... It would grow bigger than just that fight. And once they’ve asked me once, how long until we hit another wall that a weapon made by my hand could get us through? We run into one disaster after another, there’s always going to be something on the line.”
Izel raked a hand against the back of his head. It was itchy from dried sweat.
“We’re five people,” he said. “Lenslights built for war would kill a thousandfold that.”
She cocked her head to the side.
“I do not understand your fear,” Yaotl said.
He almost sighed.
“Once my lenslight is revealed-”
“I am not an idiot,” she said curtly. “I understand the concept of proliferation, Izel Coyac. Likely better than you, considering you fled warlord’s lessons while I sought them out. I simply do not understand why you fear this.”
“Because it might just be worse than what my father asked me to do for him,” he honestly said.
Father sought to refine and standardize horror. He was not making fresh ones to plague mankind with. Yaotl pinched the bridge of her nose.
“Let me ask you this instead – why do you believe that you, a man barely twenty years of age, can force a realm as powerful as Izcalli to abolishing serfdom and candlework? What has you so convinced it is even possible?”
He swallowed. It was as much a blessing as a curse that they’d never had this conversation before, he thought. If they had, if it had gone the way he had sometimes let himself dream it might, he might have never left Izcalli. He took a moment to gather himself before answering.
“Do you know what the first books I asked for were, when the Watch took me in?”
“I assume something about aether machines,” Yaotl said. “Or perhaps the Candles.”
“No,” Izel softly said. “They were religious treatises from the local Arthashastra library. Though it might be more accurate to call them histories.”
“You have never been devout,” she frowned. “You haven’t even taken on dedicated face paint.”
“It wasn’t about believing,” he said. “It was about understanding. And I already knew that nothing Izcalli has written about the Dialectic of Night could help me understand it.”
She straightened in her seat.
“What could the Watch possibly have to say about the Dialectic that has not already been said by its practitioners?” she asked.
“All the things we lie about, for one,” Izel said. “Though the royal priests weren’t lying when they called it the oldest faith in Izcalli. There are records of it from before Viterico’s Conquest.”
“The Dialectic began with the very founding of the Seven Valleys,” Yaotl warily said. “A truth every Acatl is taught from the cradle. My ancestor the Night King made this kingdom at the cost of his own foot, it is why the House of Acatl’s rule has brought Izcalli to new heights. Our blood is in the land itself, making us most suited to rule it.”
That was debatable at best. The House of Solin had reigned for around three centuries to the Acatl’s current one and a half, and though the Solin had lost most of Izcalli during the Whirlwind during the century preceding that disaster they had reigned over more territory than any other line of Grasshopper Kings. Tariac had been outright annexed, most of northern Tianxia had been in their grasp and the rulers of the Grand Duchy of Huac had been directly appointed by the Calendar Court.
The Solin had ruled longer and more successfully than their eventual successors, and Yaotl wasn’t even from the line that had succeeded the House of Solin! That lineage had been bloodily usurped by the currently reigning former branch house after one disastrous invasion of the Towers Coast too many.
“Did you know that when Sugey Acatl became the Grasshopper King, the Dialectic of Night was considered the teaching of a mystery cult?”
Yaotl blinked.
“You admitted that it is the oldest faith in Izcalli,” she slowly said.
“Oldest, yes,” Izel said. “But most popular? No, it was for priests and warrior lodges. And back then the teachings were not that that the Dialectic was universal but that it was a law binding initiates, a sacred contest that set them apart from the ‘dreamers’.”
The dreamers being everybody in the world save perhaps a few thousand souls. Generously.
“That is not what the priests tell us,” Yaotl said.
“No,” Izel agreed. “I expect they don’t tell you either that the oldest record we have of the Dialectic is that to have the right to practice on must first cut off their right leg at the ankle to honor the Night King’s sacrifice. Or that during the Century of Crowns it was mainly the practice of an order of ascetics in the Smoking Mountains who believed the Dialectic to be a metaphor and that they must do violence on their own attachments to the world to see the truth of existence.”
“That sounds... Someshwari,” Yaotl spoke with open distaste.
“The Laurels chronicle that it was a significantly more popular faith in the Raj of Kuril than our own lands,” Izel said, still a little startled by that even years later.
He shook his head.
“The Dialectic, we were raised under it,” he said. “It is the court’s way, the way of nobles and generals and warrior societies. Our whole world is under its shroud, moved by its rules, and that made it... inexorable. No part of our lives was beyond its reach.”
Izel looked up at the ceiling.
“But it’s not even two centuries old, Yaotl,” he said. “We made it what it is. Us, not the gods. And our world is not the whole world. Most people in Izcalli have only the broadest idea of what the Dialectic is. To them it’s just the old myth with some odd rules attached. Merchants and craftsmen and farmers, serfs and soldiers – how many could quote more than the one sentence from a sermon? They don’t believe.”
He slid off the bed, fevered with enthusiasm.
“There’s not some fundamental rot in us,” he said. “We’re not born bad. Izcalli has become something sick but that’s... sediment. An accumulation, years of corruption and compromises forming a layer that chokes us out. But it’s not deep, that layer. We can dig through, we just need the tools.”
He strode back and forth.
“They have to teach it to us,” he told her. “That’s the detail that unravels the illusion. Because no one is born liking to torment serfs and redden altars. They teach us it’s all right when we’re too young to know better. But we still do, deep down.”
His fingers clenched.
“All that’s really needed, Yaotl, is a better method,” he said. “One that is inarguably, objectively better than cutting men’s throats. And when that method is made known, is given out freely, it will be as inexorable as the Dialectic pretends to be. Because then it becomes a choice, to be cruel. It will be going out of our way to be, and that strips away all the excuses we gave ourselves.”
He met her eyes.
“And I don’t believe that we will choose cruelty, Yaotl,” he confessed. “Not for cruelty’s sake. Not enough of us like it that it will win. I’m not going to force Izcalli anything – all I need to do is hand it a tool.”
She did not look convinced.
“You make it something that it is not,” Yaotl said. “There is nowhere under firmament that that men are not yoked to other men, there is no... bleakness in it, any more than there is in sowing grain and reaping it. But that doesn’t matter.”
She shook her head.
“This, this is why I do not understand your fear,” she said. “You think you can remake the most powerful kingdom in the world from a smithy.”
Yaotl leaned back into her seat.
“Yet you cower at the shadow of what your companions would do if you lent them your skill. It is a strange hand that can rewrite the lay of the Seven Valleys but somehow cannot restrain four souls who love you from warmongering.”
Yaotl met his eyes.
“And do not speak to me of your lenslight spreading,” she said. “How can a man be both arrogant and timid in the same breath? You hoard consequence as if it were a treasure instead cairn stones.”
She sneered.
“Live up to your own words,” Yaotl said. “To bury your work is not the act of a man who believes men will choose kindness over cruelty.”
“Only if it’s easier,” he said.
“Then make it easier,” she said. “Or are your boasts of changing the world truly so empty you cannot even make of a Glare light something better used for peace than war? I don’t ask of you the deeds of a soldier or a lord, peace by force or treaty. You claim to be a tinker, so forge a peace as a one.”
She shook her head.
“Else what good is any of this?” Yaotl asked. “What did you make a ruin of your old life for?”
And to that, he did not have an answer.
--
It was evening when they were freed.
Captain Wen and Commander Pale were both present, and by the looks of it the latter had gotten Izel’s release secured early largely as a side effect of doing it for Yaotl. Wen slapped him on the shoulder, loudly congratulated him on pushing off the murder on ‘the witless princess’ and while Izel was still cringing dragged him out. Maryam and Angharad were waiting there. To his utter startlement he found himself with an armful of Izvorica, Maryam hugging him tightly enough that his arms creaked. At least she’d avoided the cut.
“Thank you,” she said after drawing back. “Thank you.”
“Think nothing of it,” he croaked out.
“I will think something of it,” Maryam flatly refused. “And remember that something. You could have run for reinforcements and we’d have never seen him again. You took the risk, Izel. I won’t forget it.”
Angharad awkwardly patted his shoulder, which had Maryam releasing him.
“Song was informed, but Captain Yue denied her request to be released early,” Angharad said. “She would be here otherwise.”
He nodded at her.
“Still no sign of Tristan?”
“None,” she said, pursing her lips.
Captain Wen cut in, as was his wont.
“Good news, Quenmach Pale had to pull strings for you too since his troublemaker did worse,” he cheerfully said. “In the process of getting her off with a slap on the wrist, he got you off entirely.”
Wen Duan grinned.
“I’m sure you murderous little fucks getting away with yet another student put in the ground will do wonders for your already abyssal reputation,” he said. “I can only admire how your answer to having hit the bottom of the barrel was finding a cooper’s shop to get industrial about it.”
“Were we supposed to let them abduct Koval?” Maryam harshly said.
“If I disapproved of what you did, we’d be having a different conversation,” Captain Wen plainly said. “It was just about the worst way to get it done. I strongly advise that you stick to your cottage for a few weeks. The town is not going to be safe. Someone grieving is bound to do something stupid, you just poured oil on a pitch fire.”
A truly hideous choice of words, considering how the fire had been started, but Captain Wen only ever put his considerable talents at the turn of phrase in the service of appalment.
“Angharad’s saber is waiting at the Workshop,” Izel said. “If we are to leave, I would pick it up first – and set the fixtures besides.”
“I’ll pick up Song,” Maryam offered. “And leave a message for Tristan at the Rainsparrow in case he came to town.”
“Then I shall accompany you, Izel,” Angharad said. “Considering the... state of affairs.”
Izel was disinclined to argue against protection at the moment. He did warn Angharad that after the break-in at the Workshop there’d been guards posted at the door and she would not be allowed in, but she did not seem to mind. They headed out briskly, and once allowed into the halls sped towards his nook in the storage room.
Okuhle had left the blade on top of Izel’s chest, with its freshly replaced lock.
It was only the blade wrapped in a cloth, with besides it the sheath and a pouch carrying the old hilt and pommel. Those would be his to put back or adjust, though Okuhle had tested the weight and declared it balanced. What Izel was meant to do was head back outside, where Angharad was waiting, and then head back to the Rainsparrow together. He could finish the blade in the morning.
What he did, instead, was slip into one of the forges. He lit the lamps, set aside the sheath and the pouch and then placed the wrapped blade on the anvil. Izel unfolded the cloth, gently and almost reverently and ran his fingers down the side of the blade.
There was art in bladesmithing. Not of a sort he would ever embrace, it was not in Izel to be able to separate the beauty of the work from the violence inherent to it. But he could see it, sometimes, the grace in something honed and polished to its sharpest possible edge. Something balanced to its precise purpose, a tool refined and iterated and reinvited a thousand times over a thousand years through the lenses of need, fashion, limitations.
A sword was not just that, it was a lineage in the working hands of mankind. He could see the beauty in that, even if the lineage was dedicated to the dealing of death.
He stepped away, leaving the saber blade on the anvil, and moved to the back of the smithy. Not towards the fitting tools for the fixtures but towards the lever that would pop open the access to the firepot. He pulled it down out and lit the matches, stepping away. He fed the coal to the hearth and pumped the bellows until there was a burning, sparking redness.
Only then did he return to the anvil and reach into coat for what still lay inside the pocket: the piece of Antediluvian alloy, the tomic metal. He set it down by the naked blade and shrugged off his coat, careful not to pull at his bandages. There was work to do while the furnace heated up, but he did not move. He stared at the fire instead, fingers clenched.
You think you can remake the most powerful kingdom in the world from a smithy, Yaotl had said. Yet you cower at the shadow of what your companions would do if you lent them your skill.
He stared at the sparks, the flights of red and yellow. Looked for a pattern, an omen, but today was a silent day. The gods were silent, his ken muddied.
How can a man be both arrogant and timid in the same breath?
Izel dragged his stare way from the fire and looked down at the work of the Ancients, the priceless alloy he was considering fitting on a sharp piece of metal so it could be swung at things. Every time he put his hand to work, he risked evil coming of it. Every time. The only possible way to avoid this would be to hide in a cave until he emerged with a way to mend the Candles, and even then...
It wasn’t about trust, he finally decided, or rather not about trusting the others. It was about trusting his own hand. About trusting that if he put evil out in the world, he could put out enough good to make up for it. That he would not be taking a hammer to the foundation of the house of steel.
And that faith, it came harder. Because Izel had seen evil done with ease, but good? Good was small and long in the making, if it was made at all. If it did not die with a whimper before ever seeing the light of day.
“I’m not sure she’s right,” he confessed the fire. “I can still see the root of it, the argument that releasing evil is fine if good triumphs over it. It’s the same old disease given a fresh face.”
But there was a clarity to the way Yaotl saw things, sometimes, that he could only envy. And having looked at himself through her eyes he could see that he was really balking because once he made something he could no longer run. It would be his responsibility wherever he went and no amount of old lives shed like cicada shells would change that. That was where the fear came from.
Reforging that blade, fitting the lenslight to the ship, it was declaring war on the world. Daring it to do its worst, believing that his best would close that gap and surpass it.
The light of the forge burned red and yellow, sparks flew, and Izel Coyac made his choice. Yaotl was right, he did not have much faith. He believed in gods, in principles, but that wasn’t the same thing. Faith was not conditional, and Izel lived in a world of conditions. Of lines, of laws, of limits. Vesper as held and measured by maker’s hands.
“But that will be enough,” he told the fire.
Faith could be made, and he had maker’s hands.