They left the beast dead in the water, an island of flesh and horror drifting timelessly in the dark.
There was cheering, flares filled the sky celebration. Someone was singing and backs were clapped. All of it washed over Tristan like water on wax. The business was not yet finished. He stayed in the tall cabin; someone began to climb to join him, then thought better of it. It took too long but the joy passed, swallowed by the dark bite by bite. The galleasses gathered to trail behind their ship, crows chasing the carrion yet to be.
North they all went, past the silent cradle of the god whose own innards they sailed, towards the distant star that was no such thing.
Tristan knew what would be waiting on that shore before they ever reached it. He could feel it: heat against his palm, a song in his ear. The same way he could feel Scolomancia’s hands at work around them, already refolding the school with patient meticulousness. How she prepared to tuck away the lake and the grand carcass somewhere beyond the reach of those who would come after them – the Watch would return here and find only a path to what yet awaited the ship.
The star was no such thing: it was a high gate to what lay beyond.
They cut through the dark like a knife, Scolomancia’s hymn rising at the approach. Izel’s lantern did not gutter with the wind, barely even swung, and Tristan would have thought them trapped in a bubble of pale amber if not the destination taking shape before them.
The shrine was like the mouth of a womb. The black, flesh-like stone opened into a world of light: the opening had been the false-star, the light from past it seeming like a source of its own instead of the spillover it truly was. It was taller than men, broader than them, and past the troubling mouth the stone turned intricate. Carved with signs, words and cryptoglyphs all woven together in knots so tangled as to be oppressive.
Up on his perch, he felt Scolomancia’s ice-cold breath against the back of his neck.
“Thus I Have Learned The Language Of All Living Things,” she rasped against his ear, leaning close.
Half the motto of this school, the same engraved on the brumal silver nestled against his heart. It didn’t burn when it touched his skin, he’d checked. Would check again. It was how he knew he was not yet beyond the point of no return.
“It that what it says?” he asked.
“Lesson,” Scolomancia rasped. “None Stand Beyond The Eldest Law.”
She stroked his hair almost tenderly, every touch was like hot coals. It burned under his skin, the searing stirred to life by her attentions. A man could tend to two shrines, Tristan thought, but he could not be priest twice over. Gods, from the greatest slaughter-swelled of Izcalli to the dustiest of forgotten Murk idols, where greedy things. They suffered not to share what they claimed. Tristan held the truth that the Father of Lies had whispered to him in the palm of his hand. Turned it over, studied it.
Put it away for now, back in the box.
Let there be mercy enough in the Circle’s spin that he need never test the truth of it, to find out if he could save it all by losing it all.
Scolomancia was gone a breath later, the burns lingering in her absence. He saw that on the deck below silver eyes had found him and almost smiled down at his captain. The goddess ever avoided Song’s gaze, hiding in the dead angles of it like a ghost haunting from corners. Tristan found little relief in that, not when Scolomancia now walked underneath his skin every moment he spent inside these walls. A lighthouse could not quell the night.
They made shore on a beach of black rubble, the fallen masonry polished like gems by the patient hands of time and water, and Tristan slipped past even the Skiritai to leap down into the shallows. He almost slipped on the wet stone but a hand steadied him – the tip of her fingers burned, burned like embers sown into the skin – and he let out a gasp. Let them think it was the coolness of the water, not the spots of skin next to his ribs he could swear were charred black.
He was the first to the mouth of the shrine, but his steps slowed as he went up hacked-up slopes so gentle they might as well be stairs. There was a buzzing, Scolomancia’s tune trying and failing to drown it out as his eyes skimmed over the shapes of cryptoglyphs.
“A disquieting place.”
Tristan might have startled, were he still enough in his body for it. Instead he reacted only at a second of delay, long after the flash of surprise had thinned. He’d not heard Angharad approach but she was at his side now, boots water-slick and blade in hand.
“It talks, I am told, about the Eldest Law,” Tristan told her.
Secrets leaking out of him like a sieve. Holes were hollowing him out, making lace of him.
“And its name is extinction,” Angharad softly said.
This time he did startle, and so did Scolomancia as she rode him. The violin slipped. She had not expected this.
“How do you know that?” he said.
Angharad’s gaze was somewhere very far away even as it rested on the high gate.
“I was told so by the Fisher.”
Tristan cocked his head at the mention, wondering if Scolomancia would recognize the name, but there was nothing from her. Angharad shivered.
“He thinks little of this place,” she whispered. “I cannot tell whether that is glad news or a grim portent.”
“It can be a fine line, with gods,” Tristan said, and resumed the climb.
The light hit him like a wave, almost toppling him over. He blinked through the pain, steadying as he stepped onto solid stone and heard Angharad exhort the others to follow. She joined him in the shining pale, their footsteps echoing across a dusty nothing.
They stood hemmed in by stone on either side, Vesper’s true firmament spread above as the Grand Orrery’s false stars spun slowly.
They were at the bottom of a canyon, a trench. Ahead what could only be the Glass Repository sat astride a plateau, its grand glass dome and metal spites glittering like jewels. Even from this great distance he could make out the endless, towering stacks – shelves piled up taller than castle walls, longer than streets, bound together by bridges so thin as to be artful.
The problem was the road to get there.
Between the mouth of the shrine and the bottom of cliff stood and long, bare stone trench. The slightly inclined slope on either side must be a hundred feet tall and half as wide, continuing in straight line for at least four hundred yards. At the end of the trench the path split on either side of a triangular bastion not quite as high as the sides, the flat stone roof bordered with piles of statues and debris. There was no visible gate into the bastion – perhaps further down the split hallways – but past the tall ridge on either side he could see lifts rising up the cliffside.
And, hanging above the bastion, was the Machinist’s second creation.
The creature was almost as large as the fort below it, hanging off the cliff by eight spindly legs, and it had a spider’s cast but turned... wrong. The body was oddly proportioned, the spinneret larger than the rest of it put together. The thorax was oddly elongated and ended in a head shaped like a red bowl-crown with a protruding curl. The mouth beneath the ‘crown’ was long, in the form of a T with an almost oval hole above it, and it kept rattling a thousand teeth as it sucked in breaths.
That was not as unsettling as what was coming out of her spinneret, thick strands of something linen-like that slid all the way down to the back of the bastion where black-cloaked silhouettes pulled it out from some eldritch purpose.
The others caught up, footsteps interwoven, but one gait he picked out from the rest. Heavy but faintly apologetic about it.
“I don’t suppose you would know what that is, Izel?” he asked without turning.
The tinker was the finest among them when it came to teratology. He did not disappoint.
“I don’t know the name,” Izel replied, “but I’ve read of something like this. They dwell in the Desolation, west of the Kingdom of Jahamai, in great crypts buried by the ashen storms that sweep across the Anuja.”
There was a whistling sound, someone impressed and appalled and most of all nonchalant.
“Now that it is nasty bit of fortification,” Musa Shange mused. “How would one even go about assaulting it?”
Tristan was no general, but even a child could see it. Hundreds of yards of narrow open ground facing the enemy fortifications with nowhere to go but forward or back. A hundred men could hold that canyon against five thousand, if they had enough powder. Did Cai Wei? For Tristan did not doubt for a moment that it was her revenants they glimpsed in the distance, moving like blackclad ants.
“-must be a way to flank that, the side halls ought to lead somewhere that-”
He did not pay the impromptu tactics argument any mind. It wouldn’t matter, anyway: this was the path that Scolomancia would give them every time. The straight run at doom, death on a road of stone. He was on his third step before anyone noticed.
“Tristan?”
He flicked a glance back at Song, avoiding her eyes. He found it hard to look her in them, these days.
“Just taking a closer look,” he said, and pulled his hood up.
That way he could no longer see the naked truth that she did not want him to go. That she would order him not to, were she not afraid he would ignore the order in front of cabalists from other brigades. That discomfort nipped at his heels but he outran it. He always outran it. There is work, he told himself, and sunk into the cold embrace of that comfort.
The stone was bare, but it was not uniform: it had been worn at by centuries of weather, leaving channels and impressions. None all that deep, but enough that a man might be able to move from one to another in the shade between the sweeps of the Orrery lights. Tristan went at it methodically, but without fear. Tucked behind every corner he could see corpse-lips smiling, the goddess crammed behind blind angles, and he knew there would be no catching him as long a Scolomancia smiled on him.
A hundred yards in, she intervened. Pressed against stone, cheek on the cool and dusty surface, he moved to follow the darkening sweep only for a hand to lay against his cheek. He swallowed the scream, the certainty that his skin had curdled black and was flaking in the wind, and only moved when she let him. Scolomancia painted it for him, after that: like strokes of blood he could see where the gazes swept, where they lingered.
Humming along with the dirge – when had it begun? – Tristan slipped between the rivers of blood, from shadow to shadow, as distance was swallowed up. First he saw the cannons on the heights, pieces rustled up from half a dozen different epochs and crammed between perches of statues and debris. A hundred powder-mouths ready to belch out death at any comer. It was not enough. There was movement on the bastion, where the revenants pulled down the linen from the monster’s spinneret like a swarm of weavers.
What were they doing with it?
He strode between two swiveling fields of blood, pivoting so that not even the hem of his cloak was caught, and calmly pressed himself into the stone’s cracks as a third swept over him. When he ducked out, stepped into the blind, he finally saw it: the revenants were weaving with the cloth. Fashioning the silhouettes of men and women then filling them. With meat, corpse parts, but also shovels of something Tristan was too far to discern. Ash, he guessed. It was what the revenants dissolved into when slain.
Almost there. Only a little further and he could make the run to slip into the dead angle at the foot of the bastion. From there he could explore the hallways, find out the paths. Gather the secrets he must provide to the garrison before it could even begin to entertain an assault on this place.
A cold breath against his neck stopped him.
“Heavy,” Scolomancia rasped. “Give.”
It would have been a mercy to be able to misunderstand her, but he didn’t. The knowledge was in his brain, delivered by an iron spike of agony. Fortuna’s gift, the sacrifice she had made to save his life from the false dantesvara – the same boon Lady Knit had once coveted.
Scolomancia wanted him to be rid of it. To give it to her or, if not, to toss it away.
“It’s why I burn, isn’t it?” he whispered. “When you touch me. It’s stopping me from becoming your priest."
"Heavy," Scolomancia hissed.
And he would be lightfooted, if he threw it away. Enough that he would be able to slither past the gazes of the revenants, to dig out the secrets and open the way. He could almost taste the boon. All he needed to do was throw away Fortuna’s gift and he’d have the strength, the swiftness. The goddess in the walls promised all this and more. Tristan’s hand reached for a coin to flip but seized with pain. His bones ground and his flesh burned. He flinched, stopping, and hated himself for it.
“There must be something else,” he said.
Her silence was the only answer.
It was worse when you knew it was coming, but he did it anyway. His fingers clenched around nothing as he swallowed a scream, felt out where a coin that’d never been would be. The pain was atrocious, and did not flow into some distant sense of agony – it was there, sharp and whole for every moment. And still Tristan held it, releasing only in his own time. His brow felt feverish, his back covered with sweat.
“No,” Tristan told her. “’It’s mine.”
He had expected a tantrum. Hot pokers thrust between his ribs, fingernails ripped out. Screams in violin, shifting ground. Instead what Tristan got was complete, utter silence.
She was gone.
Scolomancia was gone and, he dimly realized as he emerged from his trance, he was now more than two hundred yards deep into a trench of bare stone that revenants watched every inch of like hawks. He stood there paralyzed, pressed into the crack, struck dumb by the absurdity of his position. Wondering whether it would be courage or madness to muster up the will to begin the trek back when the choice was made for him.
There was a shout from the heights, the glint of Orrery light on steel and a shot resounded. He threw himself to the ground, in time for stone shards to splatters against his cloak, and crawled back up to run. Run like a rabbit, like a fool, like someone behind whom Hell had opened its gates. And Hell screamed: arquebuses, muskets even a small cannon spraying shrapnel he felt tear into the back of his shoulder.
Shouts from ahead, someone running towards him as he stumbled.
There was a sharp crack, a rifle, and all that Tristan had the time to feel was pain before it all-
--
Even in his sleep he looked afraid, Song thought.
The physicians had twice asked her to order Tristan to take the sedatives, that they might dig out the musket ball out of him without needing to strap down his limbs, but she’d refused. It was his choice, even if hearing him scream as they cut him open had been like nails on slate. He’d eventually passed out from the pain and exhaustion, tucked away in his little room, and Song had remained. She had a book to stare at without reading and the time to spare to wonder how much of this was on her.
Maryam was sleeping the corner, bundled up in a chair with cloaks and blankets, but her sister was still awake and pacing back and forth across the room. Soundlessly: the newly-named Ester Khaimov seemed possessed with a boundless energy, but she was not so selfish as to keep her battered sister from her rest. The younger Khaimov looked different, now.
She did change her shape as much as she had before, and not as quickly or easily – there was a base now, something she was moving away from. And where Song had once found a faint translucence to her, an etherealness, there was now stark solidity. By taking on a name, Ester had become more... grounded. Real, in a metaphysical sense. She was now less an aether intellect on a leash and more a fully formed soul.
The sharpness of her face had lightened some but it remained more angular than Maryam’s, her eyes a deeper blue and her height taller by at least two inches. There were rings around her eyes now, though, and somehow Song did not think she was the one who’d put them there. There is a price to everything. In putting on a name Ester had become closer to alive, but to be alive meant to cease being a creature of pure thought.
“Am I finally more interesting than your book?” Ester asked.
Song grimaced, conceding defeat by closing it shut.
“I cannot seem to focus on the pages,” she admitted.
Both their gazes dipped to the source of her distraction, Tristan’s prone body on the bed. He did not turn or toss, bandaged too tightly to easily turn, and the paleness to his face had him looking half a corpse. His locks were still sweat-soaked, his face seemingly never more than a breath away from flinching.
“He’s the one who chose to try that approach,” Ester said, then bit her lip. “No one forced him, no one even asked.”
“No,” Song softly agreed. “But I let him do it.”
Her fingers clenched.
“Because he always pulls through, always delivers, I let him walk into what we could all see was madness.”
The way she had let him chase Cao’s trail until exhaustion broke him down. It was so easy to trade away his time, his efforts – he never complained, so long as he saw the sense in the bargain, and so often they saw eye to eye about what needed to be done. He was the copper there for easy spending, and so I thoughtlessly spent him.
“Some might call that trust,” Ester said.
“Then the weight of my trust has put him in a hospital bed,” Song replied through gritted teeth.
She should have known better. Scolomancia was getting to him, she’d known that. And he’d already worked himself so hard that he had collapsed mere days ago, he had been riding ragged edge for a while. But she’d let him keep pushing a little further every time, because he always made it worth it. Just another member of her brigade she was using, like she had used Maryam as cover to selfishly pursue the delve. Only instead of nearly deserting as she suspected the Khaimovs had, Tristan had talked himself into one bold folly too many and gotten shot for it.
Twice, if you counted the shrapnel separately from the bullet. Song did, since if that old cannon had been aimed half an inch to the left most of Tristan Abrascal’s innards would have been shredded and he would not have lived long enough for Angharad to drag him back to the ship. The way the taste of victory had curdled in her mouth, replaced by a pounding terror as they fled back across the lake and down the coast to the hospital, it was a memory that would long stay with her. It should.
“I’ve asked too much of him,” she finally said.
“We all did,” Ester said. “Except for Angharad. Funny how that goes, isn’t it? At the start of the year he hardly trusted her.”
Song was not sure that was true. Or rather it only was if you thought of trust as the Khaimov sisters often did, some sort of merciless absolute. Tristan had trusted Angharad over some matters, simply not all of them. The two Izvorica simply did not deign to consider something so conditional worthy of the word. A knock on the door had them both tensing, Song rising to crack it open. One of the gray-robed physicians waited on the other side, though the man was not only that: tattooed against the side of his neck was a knot of gray string, Lady Knit’s mark. He was a priest as well.
“Captain Ren,” the man said, inclining his head. “Is the patient awake?”
“He is not.”
“Unfortunate,” the man said, in a tone belying the word. “This my lady’s only available time. Are you willing to wake him for such an audience?”
Her eyes narrowed at the priestling. Was Lady Knit was trying to avoid offering Tristan a bargain? It would not work, not even if Song had to stay overnight to ensure the goddess was ushered into the room the very moment he next woke.
“I am not,” she said. “I will fetch one of your fellows the moment he is with us again.”
“As you say,” the man said, inclining his head. “Pleasant vigil, captain.”
She did not return the courtesy, only closing the door in his face. Ester was scowling through the wall at the man when she turned.
“He got on Knit’s bad side after Misery Square,” Ester said. “She’s going to try and gouge him on the price.”
“I am aware,” Song said. “But she is under oath to the Watch to keep her prices fair.”
“Fair for who?” Ester replied. “If you lost a leg, would you call it fair to get it back for the price of forswearing the Repository?"
Song grimaced. A leg was no small thing, but to never step foot in the Glass Repository might well mean her sister’s death. She grasped the implication, plain as it was.
“You think she has this sort of offer for Tristan?”
“Fortuna left something on him,” Ester said. “She’ll ask for that, mark my words.”
And Tristan would refuse, because to surrender even the slightest part of Fortuna while she was fading away just out of his reach would be more than he could suffer. She almost cursed. That meant he would not be back on his feet tomorrow but be left to recuperate for weeks before he was fit to be anywhere near combat. It will drive him mad, or worse.
Another knock on the door killed what she’d been about to say, Song’s brow pulling into a frown as she eyed the door. Surely the priest was not back?
“Ah,” Ester muttered. “You’ll want to take this one alone.”
She was gone in an instant, there and then not, and Song put on a calm face as she cracked open the door again. Immediately a foot was wedged in and Colonel Chunhua Cao pushed through without a word, jostling Song as she eyed the room just long enough to choose a chair by the wall. Cao then turned an expectant look on Song, as if exhorting her to close the door like a proper servant, and tugged at her collar before sitting.
Hand on the chisel. Song closed the door.
“Colonel,” she brusquely said. “This is a surprise.”
“No,” Chunhua Cao said. “It isn’t. Such a conversation has been some time in the making. What is a surprise is that you managed to pull in the Western Fleet and get us to the gates of the Repository.”
“I am no longer a member of the delve,” Song said, folding her hands behind her back. “There is no us, ma’am.”
Colonel Cao crossed her legs, leaning back into the seat.
“Would you like to be?” she casually asked.
“Pardon?”
“A member of the delve,” Cao said. “It can be arranged easily enough.”
Her lips thinned. And hand over the fruits of the Thirteenth’s efforts so that Cao could use them to secure her coup? Even were it not a betrayal of Colonel Azocar the thought would be distasteful.
“A generous offer,” she said. “I must consult my bri-”
“Your brigade is falling apart,” Cao said. “You’ve led them into too many breaches, Song. Several months of combat and exploration is not unusual in certain parts of the Watch, but such a pace is the province of veterans.”
The colonel cocked her head to the side.
“Life has hardened your cabalists, but it does not make them career soldiers,” Cao said. “It is quite plain to anyone looking that your brigade must either slow down or splinter.”
Song’s hand slipped.
“That would be convenient for you, wouldn’t it?” she bit out.
She cursed herself, fingers tightening against the chisel until they turned bloodless. There was nothing to gain here by losing her temper.
“It doesn’t really matter,” Colonel Cao calmly replied. “I’m not unaware that I used too much the stick with you, Song, but this... delusion of us being adversaries does not survive in the glare of day.”
A brow was arched.
“You are, at this point, largely irrelevant,” she said. “A bastion like that will need a mass assault to be taken, if not a months-long siege, and thus you cannot deliver Colonel Azocar the Repository. That was the only bullet in your pistol – there is, frankly, nothing else you can do that would weigh on the scales of my career.”
“If that’s true,” Song said, “then why are you here?”
“Because, while you proved to be overly emotional in your decision-making, you’ve also proved capable of captaining an extremely capable cabal,” Cao said. “I mishandled the situation with Morcant, and it would be wasteful to snuff out the career of someone with your promise.”
Song studied her for a long moment.
“You’re lying.”
“I don’t need to,” Cao gently said. “I under-”
“No, not that part,” Song said. “Maybe you believe that, but it’s not why you’re here. There’s something else.”
Silver eyes narrowed.
“Has the Krypteia paid you a visit?”
Cao laughed.
“Are you so important that your tantrum would warrant the attention of the Masks, Song?”
No. But it doesn’t matter, because that’s the laugh of someone who just lied. Something had Cao spooked, had her wanting to bring Song back onto the poisonous fold instead of strangling her and tossing the corpse of her career out on the street for everyone to see. Only Song had no fucking idea what it was.
“I will make it easy for you,” Colonel Cao said. “There are two paths ahead of you now. The first, the path of reason, is the one where you resume a place of honor among the leading Stripes of your year, joining the delve again just before it is disbanded and turned into an official Watch operation. When the Repository is secured, I will ensure you have access to the Book of the Lofty Mountain should it be in the stacks.”
Cao’s legs uncrossed.
“The second is the path where you stubbornly cling to Fermin and your one-sided grudge, leaving me no choice but to make an example of you,” she continued, rising to her feet.
She closed the distance, coming to stand over Song.
“One of the many, many irregularities the Thirteenth was involved in will be brought to the attention of the Obscure Committee, you will be expelled from this school and the only copy of that book you might feasibly reach is permanently barred to you.”
Cao stared her down.
“You have until the delve is disbanded,” she said. “Let that day pass without first visiting me at the Galleries and I will take it to mean there is no coming to terms with you.”
They matched gazes, eye to eye, until Cao had found whatever it was she was looking for. The colonel walked out of the room without a glance back, leaving Song to stand there in silence. And there she stood, considering the threat. The words spoken, but also those not. After a long time Ester slipped out of her sister and came to stand besides her, staring at the same closed door.
“Why are you smiling?” Ester finally asked. “That was an ultimatum.”
“Because she came to give it at all,” Song said. “And that means that Tristan was wrong – there’s still something on this island that she’s afraid we’ll find.”
And best they find it soon, else whatever had Cao feeling safe enough to make that threat would come to pass.
--
Izel did not consider himself a man of slow thought, but the last few days had moved dizzyingly quick to his eye.
The aftermath of the second passage through the lake had been... tumultuous. The redemption of reputation he had hoped for never came to pass, as hardly any townsfolk had known of the ketos as more than a rumor and none had felt threatened by it, but the discovery of the last redoubt of the traitor Cai Wei and her revenants made some waves. There was a sense of light on the horizon, which improved the mood in town – if not enough to make up for losing one’s home and possessions.
Among students the slaying of the ketos had been met with accolades, though deservedly a great deal of the honor was shared with the three well-armed galleasses sent by the Western Fleet. They and the ranks of the local garrison were alight with talk of when the bastion would be assaulted, the fearsomeness of the defenses contrasted with how close the Watch was to reaching the Repository and being able to slay the Machinist.
Those that made it best out of the whole affair were the sailors. The flotilla from the Western Fleet had decisively slain a monster within a week of arriving and the influx of sailors with coin to burn had been popular with the townsfolk. It helped that the armed contingents from the galleons and the many cannons resting in Allazei Bay lent a much-needed help to the fading sense of safety.
The Thirteenth had not wasted its time. It’d been six days since the ketos was slain and Izel had spent most of them inside the Workshop when he was not attending class or visiting the hospital. Now that he was free to sell aether spike dispensers – blastcaps, what a stupid name – he’d struck deals with several leading brigades and was busy digging his finances out of the hole he’d dug for them. The First, the Ninth and Third had all paid for either a dispenser or the plans for it so he’d even avoided dragging the Unluckies into brigade squabbles.
Song was busying herself with correspondence and plots with other Stripes, not the least of them Ferranda Villazur. The captain of the Thirty-First’s meetings with all the brigades at the bottom of the Stripe rankings were beginning to draw some attention. Maryam had been in and out of meetings with the Western Fleet for days, arranging the last details of her bargain with them, and Hooks – Ester now, he reminded himself – was buzzing around with seemingly endless enthusiasm.
Angharad was even braving Captain Wen’s suggestions by having arranged meetings for Acallar hunts that were well attended, though she let Lindiwe Sarru lead them in her stead. The stares that had her wilting were far from gone, but with every day she was seen in the Dregs or the Crocodilians with a full table of fellow Skiritai the hostility grew a little more hesitant. The Militants tended to get a different tone of respect from the townsfolk than other covenanters, and seeing them openly refusing to shun her was denting the tide.
Only so much, though, so Izel usually made sur to stick with her just as she did with him when he had Workshop hours running long. He’d settled on a neighboring table with his back to the wall, a cup of cider and a treatise on the preponderance of prime numbers in aether tinkering and the possible connections to First Empire cryptoglyphs, but he was barely halfway through when the rowdy talks audibly began to wind down.
He spared a look at the assembled dozen – Lindiwe Sarru’s allies and Angharad’s as well as a few spares attracted by the prospect of glory – and found the usual at play. Sarru looked smug, pleased and smugly pleased. Having Angharad in her Acallar crew had been a coup and she kept rubbing it in everyone’s face. Angharad was taking it well enough, but as Izel watched her quietly talking with a tight-jawed Shalini he noted, not for the first time, that not everyone was so sanguine about it.
It didn’t help that Sarru kept taunting Shalini about it.
Closing the booklet, he drained the last dregs of his cider cup and rose to his feet.
“-know you want her help to deal with Wei, but she is being odious,” Shalini was harshly whispering.
Ah, Izel thought. That. The second reason for their little gathering, the one that had proved admirably sneaky on Angharad’s part. With all those Militants already gathered at the table, she had ventured the idea that since Cai Wei was a Skiritai Guild deserter from their year she could be said to be their batch’s duty to deal with. The idea had been popular with those inclined to chasing glory, and not outright refused by most of the rest.
No one had forgotten Wei’s last raid into town and the damage it’d done.
“It is only for a few months still,” Angharad tried to reassure.
Shalini clenched her teeth, then shook her head.
“A few months too many,” she said, and walked away.
It felt almost unkind to come to stand by Angharad after that, the mirror-dancer planted there and watching her angry lover leaving. Izel spared her a few moments, then cleared his throat.
“If we get moving soon, we can join with Maryam on her way to meet with Ishanvi.”
Angharad blinked.
“Ah,” she managed. “That is today?”
“So it is,” Izel amiably replied.
Now that Ishanvi had passed her Warfare examination – middle of the pack for martial readiness, but apparently very nearly failing tactics – the younger girl was but one Scholomance room away from being able to join the Thirteenth. Her scheduled attendance of the anger room had been pushed back by the rolling crisis, however Maryam had taken it upon herself to help prepare her for it with Navigator trick. The offer alone betraying a deeper fondness than she’d own up to if asked.
Even Izel would admit to being impressed by Ishanvi Kapadia’s continued insistence on joining them even considering the current... difficulties the brigade was facing.
“Let us move, then,” Angharad said, clearing her throat.
They went for the door, which opened before Izel could push it out – and he stopped in surprise as the sight of Professor Achari. He’d never seen the older man in the Crocodilian before.
“Ah, my boy,” Achari said. “I catch you just in time, I see. May I have a word?”
He flicked a look at Angharad, who seemed only amused. She gestured a vague approximation of ‘only fair’ and they both drew back to let in the professor.
“In private would be best,” Achari said.
Something about the professor’s expression has his stomach clenching up. They took a corner table, as private as one could get without paying for a room, and Professor Achari sat down. Th older man stroked his beard with an uneasy air.
“I have received word from a friend abroad,” he said, wasting no time on small talk. “One of the workshops on Khalkea is soon to file for a patent on a device that might be familiar to you.”
The professor handed him a rough charcoal sketch on paper, Izel’s heart clenching at the sight. It wasn’t a lenslight, not exactly. The basic parts were there - a source of Glare, a fuel chamber, an aether-forged lens – but they were assembled differently. The Glare kernel was much closer to the lens, the fuel chamber larger and to the back while the containment mirrors fed directly into the mouth of the device. It was shaped more like a gourd than a lenslight box.
At a guess, it would be better than his how design at strengthening the power of the Glare in a narrow beam but lack the ability to emit more broadly. I made a light, this is a lance. It was his idea made into something meant to be a weapon.
“This is theft,” Izel flatly said. “Open, brazen theft.”
“Brazen, yes,” Professor Achari soberly said. “But theft? You never patented the device, my boy. They are stealing a march on you in that regard.”
“I have dated evidence I worked on it long before they thought to petition for their patent,” Izel insisted.
“And they will claim they came to the notion independently,” Achari told him. “If neither side can come to an agreement-”
He raised a questioning eyebrow here and Izel sharply shook his head.
“-then the matter will be put to the Wednesday Council’s adjudication,” the older man finished.
“Which will rule for me, given the evidence,” Izel slowly said. “The simple fact that my chest was broken into and then the device mysteriously appeared elsewhere weeks later should be enough to have them imprisoned.”
Achari’s lips thinned. He did not answer.
“You cannot be serious,” Izel said, disbelieving. “Such blatant corruption would savage their reputation, what tinker would trust them to be fair afterwards?”
“To grant you the patent and deny it to Khalkea would mean examining the device,” Professor Achari said. “The council will side with you, I expect, but given the potential usefulness of the machine they may be pressured by other parts of the Watch to make a compromise ruling.”
Izel swallowed.
“Who?”
“The name was carefully kept out,” Achari said, “but the Khalkea workshop took up the matter on behalf of another, the second-in-command of Lucierna weapons workshop.”
It took him a moment to recall.
“Helena’s father,” he quietly said.
“Lieutenant Ulises Vargas,” Achari confirmed. “Their family has connections in Khalkea. But should the device prove promising enough, I expect Marshal Camaron himself would get involved. It would be quite the feather in his cap to have the workshop producing these under his authority.”
“She’s the one who broke into my chest, then,” Izel hoarsely said.
“There is no proof,” Achari said, but nothing more than that.
“Can Camaron really force the matter?” Izel desperately asked. “He is the head of a Garrison region, but hardly the only one. Could he really pressure the Umuthi Society to bend?”
“Alone, hardly,” Achari said. “But he has friends in high places who would be quite interested in the potential of the lenslight as a weapon should it prove field effective. It might be some time before that proof can be secured, though.”
Izel thought, then, of Musa Shange on the deck of their skimmer. Of his nonchalant asking about the lenslight, about the oddity of him having used a favor for the right to join the battle against the ketos. He wasn’t here for the fight, Izel thought. He was there to find out for Marshal Camaron if the lenslight is worth the squabble to secure.
“No,” he softly said. “I expect it is already sailing back to Lucierna as we speak. My window is closing.”
He would need to patent it today, this very hour, and hope to the gods that the Thirteenth came out of this mess with favors to call in.
Else it looked like his work was about to be let loose on the world.
--
The unit of blackcloaks moved briskly across the plaza, hands always near their weapons, and Maryam watched them as she nibbled on a piece of pork jerky. It was getting too hard for her teeth, but it would have been a waste to throw it away.
“Headed for the siege dugouts, do you think?” Angharad asked.
Maryam swallowed, but before she could reply her sister’s head popped out of her shoulder to cut the grass under her feet.
“Or that waystation they made past the empty temple,” Ester said.
Like every time she even thought the name, there was a faint ripple in the aether. The improvised ritual had worked more than just well: Ester’s true name was now barded with steel, untouchable by all save who had been freely given it.
“Azocar’s been ramping up the troops there in preparation for the thirtieth,” Maryam agreed. “The Lucierna men must have bolstered his ranks enough he can afford it.”
Admiral Zokufa had proved willing to lend his mariners to the garrison to help man the defenses along Templeward - which had been tested just last night by a pack of lycosi, the sound of gunfire waking up half the Triangle – but the Western Fleet had drawn a line over providing men for an assault on Cai Wei’s fort. Two days back, however, the first wave of reinforcements from the Trebian Northwest regional command had arrived. Only a hundred, but it seemed to be opening up options for Azocar.
“I’ve heard some concerns that the force besieging the fort is too exposed,” Angharad shared. “They are dug in and I understand the necessity of securing a foothold across the waterway, but should Wei sally out against them…”
“The open grounds are as deadly for the revenants as they are for our side,” Ester pointed out.
Scholomance had wasted no time turning the once-lake into a simple water reservoir, allowing the Watch to bring in rowboats through the Trench and cross the water without needing to go through the winding way that passed under the Sheba Bastion. The garrison had promptly landed boats on the far shore and set up a rough crescent of gabions and crates facing Cai Wei’s fort, defended with field cannons and rows of muskets. While Azocar had understandably refrained from ordering a charge across the stone canyon in deference to the withering casualties it would cost, the same was true from the other way around: the revenants would also need to charge into a killing field to reach the garrison force.
It was not much of a siege, since it was believed the revenants were not truly bottled in, but the garrison presence there was a threat that Wei had to respect. That was rather the point.
“That siege force is the reason there hasn’t been a second raid,” Maryam said. “Wei can’t send out too many soldiers or she risks us taking the fort, and then she’s finished.”
Angharad cocked her head to the side.
“You speak with much assurance on the tactic.”
Ester laughed.
“It’s how the Malani rolled over the lowlands,” she said. “They were getting bled from the all the hit and run, so they started sending these large and slow detachments after important castles.”
Angharad frowned, missing the implication.
“It was to force a choice,” Maryam explained. “Either the partisans out in the fields headed to the castle to defend it – and stopped being a problem to supply lines – or they abandoned the castle to stand on its own and much of the locals turned on the partisans for it after it fell. Why would they feed or aid those who abandoned them to the mercy of the enemy?”
Mother had once told her that the first governors sent by Malan had been explorers and colonists, building men. But by the time the war truly started those men had long been replaced by soldiers trained in all the clever cruelties of conquest.
“A ruthless stratagem,” Angharad said, looking down at her hands. “There seems to have been a surfeit of those employed.”
“It’s not on your head,” Maryam said. “You weren’t even born when Zarla’s Drift fell.”
Ester cleared her throat.
“Besides, the comparison is not entirely apt,” she said. “There is a third side to our war here.”
“Scholomance had been worryingly quiet,” Angharad agreed.
Common belief was that the god in the walls was mustering its own force to hit both sides while they fought over Wei’s redoubt. Just as the Machinist’s forces were making every new revenant they could and Azocar was mustering troops for a push, Scholomance having pulled back her kobaloi and the blinded onjancanu leading them hinted that the god was massing its strength for a decisive battle.
“I hope it doesn’t lead to a student levy,” Maryam muttered. “Azocar has been firm about restricting participation to volunteer brigades of students for now, but if the battle for the bastion is botched there’s only so many places to get the bodies from.”
“What would it change for us?” Ester shrugged. “It was never in the cards for us not to participate.”
And not just because of their interest in what lay past the fort. Wei’s obsession with Angharad had been of too much interest to the Watch for them to allow her to sit the assault out, though Song had struck a bargain so that they would be able to operate with a degree of freedom.
“We will put an end to it,” Angharad evenly said. “She has run free for too long.”
“There’s still a week before the thirtieth,” Maryam said. “Plenty of time for things to get better.”
A pause.
“Or worse.”
Twin looks were leveled on her.
“This is why Song does the speeches,” Ester said.
But at least Angharad’s lips were twitching. And, wonder of wonders, there was finally movement from the right direction. A small group of blackcloaks was leaving Scholomance, Professor Sasan the most recognizable of them from a distance. Maryam and Angharad rose to their feet, though her stomach was soon twisted in unease. The professor, a Navigator and two soldiers were walking out of Scholomance but there was no sign of Ishanvi Kapadia. She swallowed.
“Do you think…”
“There would be a body,” Angharad said. “Or at least grief on their faces – that woman is whistling.”
They rushed to the blackcloaks anyway, only to find startlement on their faces. Professor Sasan’s swiftly turned fascinated, however.
“Interesting.”
“Professor, where is Ishanvi?” Ester asked.
“Until this conversation began,” Sasan Tenoch said. “I was under the impression that Maryam had just led her away to where the rest of you were waiting.”
“Fuck,” Maryam swore.
“An impersonator?” Angharad asked.
“Not one using a Sign,” the Navigator noted. “Unless they were skillful enough I could not see through it.”
So contract, most likely.
“Where did they go?” Ester asked.
Professor Sasan gave them clear instructions, but all they found there was an empty hall leading out into one of the Warfare drilling fields. There was no sign of Ishanvi, or of whoever had been deceiving her. After three hours the shadows grew long and Angharad shot at a lurking lemure, so with spite in their teeth they were forced to withdraw.
A letter was waiting for Maryam at the front of the Rainsparrow. Unsigned, but they all knew who it was from.
She will remain unharmed so long as you obey instructions. You are to come alone on the first of fifth, a second letter will give you the location.
Nkonisathi Morcant had, it seemed, finally decided to strike.
--
“It would be safer for you to remain here another week.”
Tristan met the woman’s eyes over the offered paper, and found in them only the professional interest of a physician. Not a priest, this one. She was not one of Lady Knit’s vultures, loving to caw about how paying up with the last gift Fortuna was the only way for him to get back on his feet.
“Will I die if I do not?” he bluntly asked.
“Not unless you rip open your wound again,” the physician conceded. “But it has yet to heal properly, and will not for some time yet.”
Twenty-nine days. He’d already spent twenty-nine days abed in his bed of coals, writhing against the knowledge that now every hour was a part of Fortuna forever gone. That she was being stripped clean and made into materials for an old horror.
“Then I must insist on leaving,” Tristan replied, signing his name. “Thank you for your help.”
“Just try to avoid wasting our work,” she sighed, taking back the dip pen. “They are very well-done stitches.”
“The best, I’m sure,” Tristan smiled.
He could get out of that accursed place soon enough. And, waiting on the steps for him, were five people. Song, tired but straight-backed. Maryam and Ester – gods, he couldn’t even remember her taking up that name – standing together, smiling. Izel biting at the inside of his cheek and Angharad, that startling friendship, offering him a cloth sack.
“Change into fighting fit,” Song Ren ordered. “We have an assault to join.”
Finally.