The Orrery light was golden and distant, like a king’s disdain cast upon the world.
Izel spared it little attention, consumed as he was with the last checks on the greater lenslight – work made ever more urgent by the Sheba Bastion’s rapidly approaching silhouette. Maryam was making more than good time, having grown comfortable enough with the route to shave off minutes. The belly screws were all tightened properly so Izel pushed off from the metal bones of the turret, wiping his hands on his coat.
He’d already checked the aether-forged lenses for hairline cracks, but he made sure to test the handholds one last time: the brass grips were cool to the touch and moved smoothly, letting him orient the box of the lenslight. The core of the machine had not significantly changed, mostly been remade larger and with accommodations for larger gas canisters. The changes were in the segmented tripod and the twin handholds on the back of the box, changing from the lenslight from a lance to something that could be aimed.
That made it twice he’d run the checks now, but his hands were already itching for a third. A cleared throat startled him out of the thought, Angharad standing by his side in her killing-finery: the black coat of the Watch and steel clasped at her side, pistol and rifle secured.
“Captain Ren sends an order to take a breath and to cease worrying yourself into an early grave,” Angharad drily said.
He grimaced. Fair enough.
“I’ll stop,” he conceded, shoving the cloth in a pocket. “I think it’s nerves about the ship.”
And where it was headed, and who else was on it. Yaotl was giving him a wide berth, staying near the prow with the harpoon that had her swaggering for some reason, but she had come. That was something, and a something he was not yet ready to unravel. He’d just been getting used to the idea of that bridge being ash, the thought that it might not be was difficult.
“I am told that Izcalli are not a sailing people,” Angharad said.
Izel chuckled.
“That’s something of an understatement.”
The kingdom owned two large and well-armed fleets, but it did not have a strong naval tradition and what successes it’d had at sea usually preceded the rise of Malan as a great power. There’d been an ironic span during the Century of Crowns where Izcalli had been the preeminent naval power of Aurager, but that’d largely been because every other rival was busy with unification, collapse or being invaded.
Arguably, the Kingdom of Izcalli existed at all because of its weakness at sea. The Succession Wars had begun when King Chongsheng of Cathay saw that the wealthy southern coast of Izcalli was ripe for the taking and promptly invaded. His success had in turn allowed the House of Toxtle to unite the Seven Valleys and begin the work of unifying all of Izcalli into a single state without southern rivals constantly sabotaging them.
Even in modern days, the finest sailors among Aztlan peoples were from Tariac and Totochtin. The kingdom heavily recruited from the cities of the latter for naval officers, which Father had once told him was half the reason why the kingdom needed to keep recruiting from Totochtin for naval officers. The other half was that sailing was usually seen as belonging to the Culture Sphere.
“There is not a single warrior society dedicated to naval warfare,” Izel told her.
“Really?” Angharad said, brow raising. “Not a single one? I thought the societies of the War Sphere to be quite comprehensive.”
“There have been attempts to secure such rites, over the centuries, but they were stamped out by the Calendar Court,” Izel said. “The royal house owns no coastland, so they fear such a society would naturally lean the way of the Sunflower Lords.”
And the warrior societies were a crucial part of how the Grasshopper Kings maintained control over their every-unruly vassals. A king who allowed them to bend the way of the Sunflower Lords would not be king for long.
“Both Malan and Peredur boast of raising the finest sailors in the world,” Angharad told him, then cleared her throat. “I am partial to the Pereduri claim, of course.”
“Of course,” Izel smiled.
“But I will concede that Malani explorers have some great discoveries to their name.”
Indeed, Malani seafarers had all but named the Century of Sails: during the preceding Dominion they had found the Wrecking Isles, Glare-touched islands on the far side of the Aetolian Ocean, and from there discovered the ancient wonder known as the Western Canals – beyond which lay the enormous sprawl of the westerlands, the western continent on which Malan was settling colonies.
“You mother was an explorer of some repute, I hear,” Izel hazarded.
Captain Rhiannon Tredegar - Anwar Maraire, as her name in the official records went – had famously discovered a passage through the Western Canals, freeing Malani ships from the need to sail around them and chance the hazardous northern passage called the Ranging Way.
“She was,” Angharad replied, tone melancholy. “She loved the sea, my mother. Staying on land for too long had her on pins and needles.”
She cleared her throat.
“But I did not much take to sailing myself, so I will confess that ships are no great love of mine,” she said. “I can offer some sympathy as to the nature of your nerves – I would rather this journey be over with.”
He side-eyed her and found, to his unsurprised disbelief, that she seemed entirely serious. As if the plan she found more enticing than the trip into the dark was not magnitudes more dangerous. Izel was effectively deputized as an artilleryman for the day, a position not without peril, but at least he was not planning to board the ketos like it was some island instead of a massive, furious monster trying to kill them all.
“Skiritai,” he sighed, shaking his head to an unwarrantedly baffled look from her.
He went to check on the lantern in the back, where Song would not be in position to see him fuss. While the design had originally been meant for the turret now occupied by the lenslight, and thus taken some time to reposition at the aft of the ship, he’d built the structure with an eye to flexibility from the start. It wouldn’t be quite as well-secured as when it had been anchored in the turret, but unless a powerful force tried to wrench it forward the device should be in no danger of coming loose.
He would have soldered the base of the device to the floor, but Maryam had threatened to solder him to his own buttocks and spoken the threat with such utter seriousness he’d not been able to laugh it off. She was quite protective over the looks of the skimmer.
From the back he could see the galleasses following behind them, three-masted ships with black triangular sails and protruding oars. The Western Fleet had leant them three ships for the hunt, under the paper-thin pretense of sending them out on exercise, and he’d been assured that all three officrs were Trebian Sea veterans with experience fighting men and monsters at sea. Not that we would have been able to turn them away even if they were green as grass.
They could not keep up with the skimmer, not even with the wind at their back, but then it was only to be expected from warships armed to the teeth and thus much heavier than the skimmer. All three galleasses bore forty cannons of different sizes, a handful on the forecastle and the aft but with the vast majority on the sides of the ship. Broadsides would be the source of monster-killing volleys, not head-on chases.
“Quite a sight, aren’t they?”
This time he’d not been so lost in thought to miss the approach, though the sound of the waves had mostly covered for it. He spared Musa Shange the kind of smile you put on for Candle priests and court grandees, friendly and fixed solidly in place no matter what was about to be said.
“Not so impressive as the galleons, but then I hear the Western Fleet has few of those,” Izel said.
“Only five, Sebastian says,” Musa replied. “Admiral Zokufa brought more than half his heaviest warships to visit Tolomontera.”
A pause.
“One might call that heavy-handed, were they so inclined.”
“Are you?” Izel said.
“Not at the moment,” Musa carelessly shrugged. “I find it most interesting that the Thirteenth has ties to the admiralty, but I come for a different reason.”
“To this ship or to this conversation?”
“Yes,” Musa laughed. “But I shall not tease overmuch, Master Coyac. My captain again extends inquiries over sale of the blastcap design.”
And finally Izel had a marginally less frustrating answer to give him.
“It will become available on the ketos has been dealt with,” he said.
Song had conceded that he needed the money badly enough that trying to hold back the design for favors was no longer worth it. Thank the gods for that, broke was almost too kind a word for the state of his funds.
“Glad news, glad news,” Musa said, hands resting on the railing.
His tone was entirely casual, which had Izel’s hackles raising. He wasn’t acting like someone who’d just gotten the answer they had come for.
“And this new device, the one mounted in front of the ship?”
And there it was.
“Unrelated,” Izel evenly said. “And still a work in progress. It will be a long time until I am ready to sell it.”
Never was quite a long time, after all. Musa shrugged.
“As you say,” he replied. “I am curious to see what it will do, that the likes of Song Ren and Angharad are willing to bet our lives on its effectiveness.”
The prick to his pride twinged and a defense was halfway to his lips before he swallowed it. Musa Shange would already see more than Izel would like, he would not let anger grant the man anything more than what his eyes might gather.
“As you say,” Izel replied with studied pleasantness.
Musa eyed him, smiled, and with a pat on the shoulder swaggered away to join the rest of the Skiritai on the deck. Izel watched him leave with thinned lips as the skimmer began lining up with the mouth of the Sheba Bastion. He didn’t know why Musa Shange was here, but he’d put blade to finger it wasn’t for the hunt.
The man was after something, and Izel could only hope that his suspicion as to what came from arrogance.
--
Agreement had been made to convene one final time with the Western Fleet officers before the ships went through the water gate, so Song asked Maryam to dock near the end of the waterway.
There was no sign left of the chiropters, not even corpses, but her silver eyes saw holes and scorch marks in the ceiling where muskets were fired. The occupation of the Sheba Bastion’s bottom level was an orderly thing: Colonel Azocar’s men had fortified their corner of the wharf, barricading the stairs with filled-up crates and setting up two batteries with cannons stripped from their ship.
One, carrying all the heavy guns, was pointed at the darkness beyond the gate. The other had prudently been arrayed to face the mouth of the cavern, in case a sea creature happened to get curious. The captain in charge had been informed with last night’s shift change that the flotilla would be coming, so the man quite decently welcomed Song with a warm liquid that could claim to be tea-adjacent and a tin of biscuits.
The courtesy was also extended to the two fleet officers that came ashore, Commodore Acahua and Captain Beristain. The former shook Song’s hand, the short and heavily tattooed Izcalli complimenting Maryam’s navigation of the local waters. He gulped down his cup in a single swallow, ignoring how it was near-boiling, while the Lierganen captain accompanying tore her way through the biscuits with relentless eagerness.
The commodore had already been part of a ketos hunt, Song had been informed, though only as a sailor and not from a ship that’d come close to the beast. Still, he had monster-hunting experience in spades. Captain Beristain, on the other hand, was here in large part because she was the second-in-command of the triad of ships and would be taking command should Acahua perish.
“It’s a brave thing you’re doing, going in as bait,” the commodore said. “But I will be blunt, Warrant Officer Ren: if you get sunk, I’ll not risk my ships to fish out your people unless the ketos was put to flight.”
“Nor would I expect you to,” Song assured him. “As discussed, it is our role make the beast surface and keep it in place for you. Your role is to bring to bear the firepower we do not have.”
The man nodded in something that was not quite approval, but not too far off.
“Then I wish you luck,” Commodore Acahua said, offering his hand to shake.
She was startled by how genuinely friendly the gesture was, but smoothed it off her face as she shook the hand. A disgruntled noise from the captain had her turning a wary look her way, Commodore Acahua raising an eyebrow at the dark-haired woman.
“Is it true your skimmer doesn’t have a name, Ren?” Captain Beristain asked.
Song blinked, then slowly nodded.
“You should take care of that,” the captain said. “It’s bad luck to leave a ship nameless.”
Beristain traced a circle on the back of her hand, to the commodore’s open eye-rolling.
“Gods save me from Circle-botherers.”
“They won’t,” Beristain muttered under her breath. “All the good gods are on the Orthodoxy’s side.”
It sounded like a long-running argument and Song had no intention of sticking her oar in bickering that didn’t sound particularly fond, so instead she gave a platitude about considering it and retreated back to her ship. She did not know what reason the Khaimov sisters had for not naming the ship, but she had no intention of pressing them regarding the matter on behalf of some stranger’s superstitions.
She did head towards the sisters, however, to give the order to set out. Hooks and Maryam hid it well, but she could tell their nerves were strung out at the thought of what was to come.
“I do not expect miracles of you,” Song gently said. “We have done all we can to stack the odds our way.”
“I know,” Maryam tightly said.
“But you’re not the one watching for jaws coming from below the ship that could kill everyone here,” Hooks grunted out, leaning against the glass wall. “If you could, we’d have you strapped down there and looking.”
“The drowning might be something of a hindrance to giving alarm,” Song said, letting herself be drawn in.
A few thrown hatchets always made them feel better.
“Sound like shirker talk,” Maryam said with a put-on sneer. “A real Stripe would just think of the order and hold her breath.”
“Thus I am revealed an impostor,” Song drily said, clapping her friend’s shoulder and smiling at Hooks. “You two should come join us when you pass the wheel to Bolic.”
“Standing in the middle of a band of Skiritai murder-stroking their blades like they’re firstborns?” Maryam skeptically said. “You have the strangest ideas of a good time, Song.”
“She also gets weird about her rifle,” Hooks noted. “This might be a birds of a feather situation.”
“I have not yet decided who will tally our powder expenditure after the expedition,” Song warned.
They both hastily withdrew any implication that Song might clean her rifle more than was strictly necessary by the unfit maintenance standards of others, and went away satisfied in the knowledge that order had been restored. It was only natural that she should head towards the prow of the ship, on the way trading nods with the Skiritai gathered around Angharad in what some might ungenerously describe as murder-stroking weapons.
She left the mirror-dancer to it: unlike her, Angharad had the respect of the band and the natural authority to lead them. It had been a simple enough matter to informally deputize her as a lieutenant over the others and have orders handed down through her, sparing Song of the risk of the kind of denial that would damage the fiction of her authority. After all, for all that she was mostly the one giving out orders she did not actually outrank anyone on this ship.
Her place near the prow was not empty, Tristan already standing there as Maryam eased the skimmer off the stone wharf. Behind them the galleasses of the Western Fleet were doing the same, though their sails were pulled up and it was oars that were pushing them off the wharf. Tristan looked tired, as he always did these days, but there was a grimly determined cast to him as Maryam aimed the ship at the water gate.
The constant delays in reaching Fortuna were eating away at him, but he’d been able to choke it down since they were in sight of an ending. If they had not been, Song suspected that his thinning patience would already be torn right through.
“Ready?” he asked before she could.
A rote answer was on the tip of her tongue, but a gray-eyed look stopped it there. She sighed, leaning her elbows against the railing. After a moment she glanced down at her palms, closing them into fists. She could not see anything below the skin, could not feel it, but Captain Yue had shown her it was there nonetheless.
“I do not think I can be ready for such a thing,” Song admitted. “But I am as prepared as I can be and that will have to suffice.”
“We’re all riding closer to the edge, these days,” Tristan said.
She hummed in agreement.
“Ready?” she echoed.
“My role is simple enough,” he shrugged. “I’m little more than a signalman for this one.”
“Which bothers you, when today’s skirmish is the gate to Fortuna,” she guessed.
He eyed her for a moment, then looked at away.
“I would feel more at ease were it in my hands,” he conceded. “Instead of seemingly everybody else’s.”
“We can sail out today only because of the funds you provided,” Song reminded him.
He snorted.
“I have not been afflicted with a taste for the heroic, Song, don’t worry,” Tristan said. “I don’t envy your role to play. I’m just... unused to asking others to carry the bag for me.”
“I can sympathize,” she murmured.
“I expect you can,” he said just as quietly.
They crossed the invisible line of the water gate, the cool of the dark washing over them like a cold breath, and Tristan shivered.
“Best I get to my perch,” he said. “Draw first, Song.”
“Red days and jade nights,” she wished back.
He went away, light-footed as a cat, and she was left alone to look into the abyss.
It was hard to tell when they crossed into the grasp of Scholomance. The water gate must lead somewhere that wasn’t the smoky, haunted waterways beneath the ground, but at some point over the years Scholomance’s grasp has crept far enough it was able to seize upon the water and make it lead into itself. It might have been as small an opening as a hall beneath Scholomance coming too close to one of the waterways, allowing the god to claw through the wall to reach it.
Once they reached the still obsidian surface of the lake, though, there was no mistaking where they were.
It should not have been possible for so vast a cavern to smell musty, but somehow it did. Cold, wet and musty without so much as a hint of salt – what water lay here had not come from the sea, or had come to be estranged from it. Were it simple darkness here, Song’s eyed would see through it. It was not so simple. Izel’s lantern, the bubble of light through which they sailed, seemed to thin the dark even beyond its immediate cast but beyond that thinned layer lay Gloam as Song had hardly seen before.
The thick, oily darkness moved like solid winds – a living painting in dark, blowing and coiling around itself. Song sometimes caught glimpses through the gaps, but it was like looking at a veil of living smoke. This must be what the Gloam was like out on the Straying Sea, where it grew so dense that Gloam storms blew through some part every day, slamming against this coast and that.
There would be signs, though. The Gloam moved in currents, but most of these were unhurried and almost lazy. When the ketos had come last time, Song had seen the storm taking shape even as the monster stirred the storm into being. Her eyes moved from curl to another, looking for any hint of a storm, but there were none. Not so far behind them the three galleasses were following, long oars dipping into the water as they chased the tireless advance of the skimmer.
Song was on edge, but the currents of Gloam remained unstirred as they sailed into the dark. Had the ketos yet to see them, or was it drawing them further away from the gate?
It was difficult to remain at full attention for a long span of time, but fingernails biting into her palm and chewing at the inside of her cheek kept her stare from waning too much. It was waiting for them to falter, to stop paying attention. Maryam had some time again left the captain’s cabin behind and moved onto the deck, where she sat cross-foot near the turret with her sister nowhere in sight – gone below, no doubt, to see if the creature was lurking. The Skiritai were keeping an eye on her from a distance.
The wheel was in Bolic’s hands, and the pirate might not be trustworthy but he was a fine enough steersman could be trusted to want to live. Song’s teeth and cheeks were aching by the time the darkness parted to reveal a giant silhouette in the distance: the god-mold, the two split half-spheres jutting out of the water. One half had mostly fallen below the waterline, but there was enough still above for the ancient mold to look like some manner of ancient monument.
It was, in a manner of speaking. Only the Antediluvians had built wonders such as this.
Bolic adjusted the course of the skimmer, curving towards the tall structure, but Song’s eyes caught not on the outside. They remained peeled on the insides of the sphere, the ichor-like darkness gathered in the curve like blood in a wound. That was not... natural. They had not come close enough for her to see it, last time, but to her eyes the liquid looked almost alive. Writhing ever so slightly.
She remained almost spellbound as the skimmer approached the mold, slowing a hair as they came close enough the lantern’s light almost caressed the edge of the stone structure. Song pushed off the railing, tugging down her coat. A glance told her that the galleasses were beginning to trail behind, the men pulling oars struggling to keep pace with the finest work out of Asphodel’s shipyards, and it would b dangerous to get too far ahead.
Bolic must be told to curve around, and a decision made as to where they were all headed next. Song moved past the Skiritai, but two strides past was stilled by the sound of someone breathing in sharply.
“Something is here,” Maryam called out, shoulders tensing even as she remained ahead. “Below and behind.”
Behind? Shit. There was only on reason for the ketos to line up like this.
“Bolic,” Song shouted. “Ahead at all speed!”
She dimly registered Angharad exhorting the Skiritai to ready for the fight, and up above she could see that Tristan had just shot a red flare without needing to be told. The skimmer thrummed and began to carve deeper into the water, wind picking up around them, and one of the galleasses fired back a green flare. Good, Song thought, heart in her throat. She moved towards the back of the ship, rifle at the ready, and was joined by Orel Poltava. The blacksmith had a ‘borrowed’ musket in hand, and though the barrel trembled it was pointed the right way.
“Steady,” Song said.
Even as the wake of the skimmer grew broader and larger, she caught sight of the ripple in the water. Sligh, but growing by the instant and – and she screamed the same time Maryam did, about the same thing.
“Lunge!”
Bolic had been drilled about this very thing and did not fail them. He banked hard to the left as the ketos lunged out of the water with snapping jaws, a leviathan-in-the-box, and Song shot at the moving mass more out of hatred than need. Her bullet tore into hide as the ketos massive form slipped past them, close enough a tentacle slapped against the top of the cabin and smashed glass.
Tall waves rippled out as it smashed back into the water, Song desperately grasping at the railing as the ship near toppled over. They were turning to face the ketos but it was turning to face them, and the fucking waves were slowing them down. It’d be ready first, ready to lunge again, but Bolic knew his trade: he steered the ship further left, curving around the mold. The ketos disdained sinking back under the waves, instead turning around the mold from the other way, and as the prow of the skimmer went past the edge they came face to face with the monster.
The great, calamitous beast with its open gullet and writhing forest of tentacles, too many of which ended in softly crooning lures. Gods, it was so large – its head alone large as the ship – and the song was urging them all to sleep, to rest, to-
There was a faint flick, the sound of well-oiled metal turning and then of a lever coming down.
“Firing,” Izel Coyac announced, voice perfectly even, and the world went white.
--
The first heartbeat was blinding, like a star shot out of a bottle, but the aftermath was unsettlingly gentle.
Angharad blinked out the ache and found that the mounted lenslight was no different than a lantern, a simple beam of pale light being shined onto the ketos as Izel aimed it with brass grips. Only where the light touched the monster’s hide it bubbled up and popped with a sizzling sound, like water on a hot pan. The beam slid across one of the eyes, light as a feather, and the entire thing burst like too full waterskin. Wet, transparent chunks went flying and the ketos let out a noise like a shrieking whale song, echoed by every lure’s mouth.
Bracing!
Musa, standing besides her, was looking at the lenslight with something like awe – and, strangely, regret.
“What a weaponsmith your brigade has found,” he said, shaking his head.
Regret at the relations between their brigades being at such a low ebb, perhaps. Angharad did not have the heart to tell him even fine friendship would have made no difference.
In its throes of pain, the ketos smashed against the side of the grand mold and let out another shriek as the structure trembled. No matter: it had now been long enough for Yaotl Acatl to run up to the prow and with a battle cry make the throw she’d been charged with. The princess’s arm whipped forward and the harpoon flew like an arrow, rope slithering behind, and Angharad allowed herself to admire the arc for a moment.
Yaotl had squarely beaten out Musa when their band tested harpoon-throwing, being familiar with javelins – while Musa’s own experience with hunting spears in turn squarely beat out everyone else in their warband.
The harpoon’s barbed head sunk a little past the nostrils of the boar-like head, biting deeply, but it was so tormented by the lenslight it didn’t even notice. It soon would, though, for Yaotl immediately began pulling at the rope. The notion that the skimmer might be able to forcefully keep the beast out of the water if it wanted to dive was absurd, as Professor Kang had made plain to them. This was no whale, and their ship was much too small besides.
No, when Yaotl Acatl pulled at the rope what it did was rip open a handful of waterskins around the shaft of the harpoon and send a heavy helping of plousperi splattering all over the creature’s nose.
There was a beat of silence as the creature stilled, and then it heaved.
“Ready for boarding,” Angharad shouted even as the ketos began to sneeze.
It was no comical sight, not on a monster this size. Every spasm sent tall waves roiling and if it’d hit the ship it might well have dented the hull. Instead Orel Bolic managed to guide the skimmer close to the sneezing beast even as the hunting crew thrummed around her, tense as a pulled string. They settled into a broad triangle with her at the front, leaving room within for the two bodies they would be escorting onto the keto’s back: Song and Maryam.
The two had the blank faces of someone thinking too hard about what it meant to board a furious sea monster, so Angharad clapped their shoulders and smiled.
“Think of the story!”
Oddly, this did not reassure. Ah well. They rushed to the prow, Yaotl naturally falling in to turn the triangle into a diamond, and moved to secure their climb onto the trashing beast. It was easier than the dantesvara, at least at first – the beast was larger and it was harder to shake them off from the water, so climbing spears did their job. Angharad went first, pushing down a somewhat inappropriate whoop when the creature’s thrashing about had her weightless for a moment, and pressed down against the top of the sneezing ketos’ head as a tentacle struck blindly past her.
They climbed, one after another. Maryam almost fell off but Shalini caught her wrist in time, almost pulling that thin arm out of its socket by tugging her back in place. By then Angharad had largely secured her foothold, not that it would help much.
This was not to be a fight, for what lay ahead was not an opponent. Hundreds of writhing tentacles going down the ketos’ back were swinging and grabbing blindly, each whistling as they tore through the air. Each was long length of muscle-flesh, powerful as a kicking horse and entirely capable of snatching a bird out of the air, and their only advantage was that the ketos could not yet see them.
But the ploupseri would not keep it above the water much longer, so into peril they must push.
It was not a fight they waded into but a forest. Blades out on the screaming, trashing monster they pinned the tentacles with spears and carved at them like they were tree trunks. Her blade, Sleeping God, always seemed to perfectly cut into whatever it touched for the first instant. To advance was to retreat, ducking out of the way when the ketos’ limbs tried to smash them. Shalini was clipped three steps in, through bad luck dodging one into another, and her shoulder cracked like it was stepped-on kindling.
She let out a hoarse cry but they pushed on, because if they didn’t they were all dead. If the ketos went back in the water, it would drag them down with it. They cut and ducked and when lures – men and women, children and elderly – came down to snatch them Musa emptied a pistol in the face of the one who had grabbed Song, cracking open the puppet of bone, while she and Yaotl tore through another with twin swings.
The air kept rippling with whispers and screams and a wailing dirge pounding at their ears, the entire journey hardly a minute long but feeling like an hour, until Maryam called them to a stop at the bottom of a lure-tentacle made headless by Shalini.
“Here,” Maryam shouted. “Song, at the foot.”
“Make a ring,” Angharad made heard over the din. “Cover the two of them.”
The tentacles whipped at them still but they held fast, spears pinning down the appendages long enough for blades to hack at them, and it was all going well until Song knelt by the root of the lure, laying a hand on the flesh, and Maryam in turn put a hand on their captain’s shoulder –
And every single tentacle on the back suddenly shivered before going still.
--
There was a god on the other side of Song Ren’s soul and Maryam could feel its sheer, dreadful hate pouring out into the world.
She could not tell how powerful the nascent curse-god truly was, but she and Hooks got the barest impression of its scope and it felt gargantuan. A nation’s worth of hatred and spite poured into the aether year after year, eager to reach out and crush the name it had been born to end. Gods, it was like playing with fire to even touch such a thing but the plan demanded it.
Maryam reached out for the thing at the heart of Song that was the conduit, the root of the god’s reach, and felt something reach out at her nav through it. But Hooks was wary and quick, and before she could be ripped out and devoured she wove a single string of Gloam between the god and the ketos. Not even a little finger’s width, an anemic little thing.
The curse god poured through it like an ocean crammed down straw, slamming into the ketos, and Maryam let out a wild laugh as she drew away.
“Gods,” Song rasped out. “I can feel it.”
So could Maryam, by virtue of still having a hand on Songs soul. The distant curse-god was using Song as a bridge to try and seize the ketos, to drown out its mind and turn it into a thrall, but the creature was centuries old and powerful in the way that great and ancient lemures often were. It fought back, wrestled for control of its own body, and the result was exactly what Maryam had theorized.
The ketos stopped moving, going still as a corpse as it floated in the water.
“Ancestors,” Musa said, voice colored with disbelief. “It actually worked.”
It had, Maryam thought. Now there was, however, the slight problem known as the second part of the plan: the galleasses, having mostly caught up and spread out past the mold, turned to offer the ketos the side of their ships. A flare went up, bright red, and in a rolling thunder they emptied a broadside into the monster.
The cannonballs ripped into the flesh and smashed bone even as the monster stayed entirely still, mind trashing at the danger but unable to spare even a thought away from the struggle with the god lest it be swallowed whole. This part, immobilizing the ketos so the galleasses could kill it, was working very well. The problem was that it would stop working the moment Song took her hand off the lure, and that meant they had to stay on the fucking monster being shot at by the better part of sixty cannons.
One would think this patently dangerous enough for anyone with sense, but joining the Thirteenth evidently jostled something loose inside skulls so Maryam breathed out and prepared to make this much, much worse. She traced a sense of now against the veil and her sister slipped out of her, fully adorned as a princess of the Izvoric, and ignored the startled Skiritai to raise a hand to firmament.
“Hear me,” Hooks shouted in Recnigvor.
The currents rippled a little around them, Gloam and water both, but it did not take.
It was a little bit like madness, attempting this. They had no prepared circle, no ritual. Nothing to bind with or pay by, not even the formula of a prayer or precedent. All they had was this place, the old cradle of a god still dripping with the fifth of its creation, and the sea of Gloam around them. What they sought to do, it was like striking a match atop gunpowder pot while riding a wild horse.
The flesh beneath their feet shuddered as the galleasses fired again, a wave of powder smoke streaking across water as the balls flew and lodged into the monster’s body. The same thing that had saved them earlier, the mold being in the way, was not preventing any of the ships from getting a clear shot at its skull to kill it. One of the balls overshot, hit the stone of the mold and chipped off a piece with a whistling sound.
“Mean it,” Maryam told her sister. “You have to mean it.”
She traced comfort on the veil, which had never felt thinner, and Hooks shivered.
“Hear me,” Hooks ordered the world, and this time it took heed.
Gloam and water shivered, then went still as stone. Held, seized.
“I was named and yoked to the tyranny under which I will labor, as is the charge of all living things,” Hooks said, then grit her teeth. “That is not enough. I claim a name of my own, a place in the chain of hierarchy.”
They drew in the Gloam, sucked in like a breath. Only this was not some casket in a crypt, surrounded by candles. This was the cradle of Scholomance, hidden inside its belly, and down here the dark dwelled deep. When Hooks called, the Gloam came in rivers. Torrents came from the sky and the sides, pouring in, and Maryam heard shouts and questions but could not spare the thought to parse them – every inch of her was needed to keep the Gloam from drowning them.
And from the mold, her sister drew out the afterbirth of Scholomance, that accursed lingering liquid. She stole it out on strands of Gloam, carefully picking out the liquid strands.
“I sacrifice three things,” Hooks said, teeth tight. “First, the remnants of a god’s name.”
There was a ripple in the water below, like a burst of wind.
“Second, the thwarting of a curse.”
Besides them, Song violently jerked. Her tormentor had heard that and not liked it at all. Before the third offering could be made, they had to reach out for the Gloam they’d drawn in. Shape it even as thunder echoed across the lake, as cannons tore into the ketos, as the curse-god behind Song finally pushed aside the last of keto’s mind and seized the body.
It was a jagged, ugly spike they put together in the air above the monster, weaving even the strands if afterbirth inside, and when it was finished Maryam took her hand off. Left it entirely to her sister, who had to finish it on her own.
“Third, the death of a ketos,” Hooks swore, and slammed the spike into the monster’s rattled skull.
And in the same moment, won thrice: she spent the last of the god’s name, thwarted the curse trying to murder Song and slew the ketos by punching roiling Gloam deep into its brains.
An offering promised and given in the same breath, rippling out into the aether, and Hooks seized the ripples desperately. Gathered them to her, every scrap she could until the ripple was dead and silence followed in its wake. The ketos was a floating carcass, the cannons had fallen silent, and around them the darkness slowly began to clear until they could see it.
In the distance, to the north, a small star. A distant shore, the path ahead.
“Ester,” she whispered. “My name is Ester.”
So she said, and she made it so.