Of all the many perils that day, the lift came closest to killing them all.
By a narrow margin, anyhow. The Machinist had effortlessly captured Song the instant she stumbled into its workshop, the thing of light not even sparing her a glance before trapping her inside a bubble of amber. It had felt like being inside a sphere of mud, only translucent and in no way hindering her breathing. More worrying still had been that she could feel her contract was just as trapped, Luren’s presence dimmed to a faint ember. She didn’t like to think about what it would have done to them, if not for Izel. The powerlessness behind any clearsighted assessment of that situation was... difficult to swallow.
In the end Izel had come through, however, and after Fortuna freed herself in a flash of gold the workshop had been torn apart – and the Thirteenth were spat back out exactly where they had entered, inside the lift. With the slight problem of the lift having one of the neitspawn’s legs still clutching it. The creature could have ripped the lift out of the rails and killed them all in a heartbeat, if it so wished. It didn’t, on account of being dead.
The stream of furious gods that ripped their way out of the physical anchor of their prison made sure of that. Yet the neitspawn was still very much a problem because the massively heavy construct fell down towards the bastion and its leg was still stuck inside the lift. Song was not ashamed to admit she had shouted in fear as the weight of the dead creature dragged the lift down a dozen feet against the efforts of mechanical strength dragging it up the rails.
Several brass bindings snapped, and when the leg finally did fall out the lift shot up in a flash and almost threw Maryam out of the broken window. Angharad caught her by the hood.
The cabin then stopped a dozen feet away from the top of the cliff, so they had to risk climbing out through the broken glass and standing on top of the roof to climb past the edge. Some of them, anyway: Tristan had been knocked unconscious by Fortuna’s return, steady breaths his only sign of life, so they had to pass him around like a package while hanging on a teetering cabin hundreds of feet in the air.
But they made it to the top of the cliff, in the end. More than that, they had made it to the very place that Song had been trying to reach ever since Chunhua Cao told her about the book that might be waiting within: before the six of them stood the Glass Repository, Lucifer’s own library.
It had loomed tall from the bottom of the cliff, but from here the size of it was... oppressive. The edifice was a great rectangle with a curved roof of paned glass – it reminded her of Tratheke, save that the glass here was not green – that was interrupted in the middle by a towering glass dome held up by silvery arches. The walls were old white stone, too chalky to be marble, and two gargantuan wooden doors nailed with silver stood in the middle. Each tall as four men and wide as two, paneled with inscriptions in a cant she did not recognize.
Song was not sure they were meant to ever be open, as the left gate had a smaller iron door set into it that was cracked open.
“You want to go in.”
Song started, turning to spare Maryam a look. Her friend was kneeling by Tristan’s unconscious form, a hand on his forehead. Silver eyes flicked eastward, where across the width of the bastion below she could see the upper end of the second lift. There was a platform there, and levers to call it up.
“It would be wiser to go back down,” she acknowledged.
“I’m not so sure about that,” Izel called out.
He’d been standing at the edge of the cliff, looking down, and only now backed away.
“The revenants collapsed,” the tinker said, “but the remnants of the kobaloi are still fighting the regulars and the volunteers. It might actually be wiser to stay up here until the fighting is done.”
Against her will, Song’s eyes went back to the small iron door.
“I should wait,” she said. “But to have answers so close...”
To finally known whether there truly was a copy of the Book of the Lofty Mountain or whether she’d been struggling in vain. Whether all the sacrifices of these last few months had been wasted.
“Well, it’s not like we’re not going anywhere,” Ester said, head popping out of her sister’s shoulder.
“You aren’t going in there alone,” Angharad firmly added. “We have been warned that a spirit dwells in the Repository.”
One the Watch had an accord thing, if the old records were to be believed. Students and professors had used the Repository, when the school was last open. The god that dwelled on the ground – the Librarian - was not exactly friendly but neither was it hostile.
“I’d rather avoid more time with gods today,” Izel said, tone a little shaky. “But I can keep watch at the door.”
Song breathed out, centered herself. Denying herself the answers without a good reason for it would be vanity, not a proper decision but sacrificing at an altar.
“Let’s go,” she allowed herself to say.
She set out briskly, the others falling in. The walk was longer than they’d thought, the sheer size of the Repository tricking perspective out of an honest gauge, but that only meant a few minutes longer than expected. There was no shadow cast by the edifice, for the Orrery was at their back, and Song swallowed as she laid a hand on the iron door. Cool to the touch. No curse erupted, no monster jumped out. Breathing out, she pushed the door open the whole way.
She squeezed Izel’s arm in thanks, leaving him there, and entered with Angharad at her back.
She barely took two steps before the sights stopped her cold.
Song was well acquainted with the cost of books. Uncle Zhuge had a very fine library – larger than the one on the estate she’d been raised – and a scholarly interest not only in literature but its spread. He had been the one to teach her that the history peddled by schools, how Charvi Bairwa had invented the printing press in 6 Dominion and thus freed Vesper from the shackles of handwritten manuscripts, was a tale for fools. Mistress Bairwa had gone bankrupt within a year of printing her first copy of the Atmastuti, because printed books still used parchment and parchment was ruinously expensive to make books from.
Bairwa unlocked the door, Uncle Zhuge like to say, but it was Yoloztin who opened it. Cathayan paper had existed since before the Second Empire, mostly made out of bamboo or mulberry bark, but the rarity of both in Izcalli had led paper-makers there to experiment with hemp and cotton instead. Yoloztin of Olhuac not only crafted the standard recipe for this, he’d also built the first river-powered paper mill to replace the labor of men and animals. Within fifty years the cost of paper books was a fifth of their parchment equivalent, and the gap had only widened since.
It was why Uncle Zhuge could afford a private library of almost sixty books, which before the Century of Dominion maybe twenty collections across north of the Trebian Sea had surpassed in size. Even now books were largely the province of scholars and the wealthy outside regions where paper was milled as an industry – Yoloztin had merely made it so that the basic requirement for owning a respectable library was not ruling an Izcalli duchy or being hierarch to a Someshwari temple-city.
The thing was, the Glass Repository had been built during the Century of Accord. The century preceding Dominion, which meant that the vast majority of the book she was looking at had been written by hand, and save for the Tianxi volumes also been written on parchment.
Song Ren was standing in a library whose central hall was three hundred feet long, the stacks flanking her on either side at least forty feet high. On this aisle alone, there were more books and scrolls visible than had existed within the entire the Kingdom of Izcalli during the Century of Accord. And, saltless gods, this was the largest aisle but hardly the only one.
From the inside the Glass Repository was a beautiful sprawl of glass, silver and polished wood. The rectangle cut right in the middle by a long hall, but spread out on either side into a maze of stacks – most at least two levels high, with wooden walkways around the second level. There were raised platforms that caught the Orrery lights in elaborate mirror-traps and deep wells dug into the floor were silver cages kept restricted volumes safe.
Above their heads the labyrinthine twists and turns were overlooked by a spread of bridges connecting the top of the stacks to one another, forming small islands held up by arches where lanterns burned and tables had been set.
Gods, Song thought again, swallowing dryly. There must be tens of thousands books and scrolls in here, perhaps hundreds. How many hundreds of ancient libraries had Lucifer plundered to fill these stacks? There must be volumes here stolen from the Desolation to the mouth of the Biscarosa. Song genuinely doubted that a room filling the same stacks with solid gold instead would be worth more.
“Impressive,” Angharad murmured, and Song shot her a look that would strip off paint.
Impressive was someone doing a handstand in fighting fit, this was a miracle of a place.
Song walked down the hall, footsteps echoing softly as her gaze caught on small motes of dust bared by rays of light, and kept her focus on the shape ahead. Under the gaze of the central dome and the circular open ground beneath it stood a large wooden counter, two thirds of a rectangle open at the back. It was beautiful redwood, polished to perfection, and covered with haphazard piles of books. There was a single opening in the towering piles, facing the hallway she now strode, and it revealed the sitting librarian as they wrote in a ledger. It had not taken a shape clearly a man or a woman’s, and why should they? The Librarian was a god, one old and powerful enough to manifest. Such trifles were beneath them.
The god’s light brown hair was tousled and short, artfully messy, and their eyebrows slender. Their dark skin was flawless, their cheekbones sharp and their jawline just a little too rounded to be square. They had soft lips, dark eyes under round silver spectacles, and were dressed finely: a silken open coat in gray over a matching waistcoat with silver buttons, a pale collar peeking out from beneath. They had a silver pocket watch tucked away, hanging from a chain, and fine matching silver earrings.
The dipping pen in their hand was silver as well, and was raised when Song and Angharad approached.
“Names?” the Librarian asked.
“Giving our names to a strange spirit seems unw-” Angharad began.
“Song Ren,” she cut through.
The pen scratched against the ledger.
“You are added to the list, Song Ren,” the Librarian said. “Books can be borrowed for exactly seven days from the moment of borrowing. Restricted volumes from the cages cannot leave the premises. Late fees will be directly collected.”
“Late fees?” Angharad skeptically asked.
“The very hours of delay,” the god said. “In lifespan.”
That sounded more than fair, Song thought. What sort of savage madman brought back library books late, anyhow?
“And should the books be damaged?” she asked.
“Memories, according to the degree of damage,” the Librarian said.
Its eyes rose from the ledger for the first time since they had walked into the Repository. They were ink-black, Song saw. As if made of such a number of letters that they’d become solid black from it. Angharad was looking at the god like she was wondering how best to kill them if it came to that.
“Might I trouble you for the year?” the god asked.
“The Fifth of Smoke,” Song said.
The silver penned still.
“Worse than I’d thought.”
The god shook their head.
“Though if I might say, Mistress Ren,” the Librarian smiled, “it is a very great pleasure for the Repository to finally open its gates again. A return long overdue.”
“Oh,” Song said, “the pleasure is all mine.”
She paused.
“What might I refer to you as, sir?”
The old reports had called it the Librarian, but it might prefer something else.
“I am the Librarian,” the god said. “Custodian of these volumes, by the Lightbringer’s curse. It is my charge to maintain these grounds, and to aid to who come seeking knowledge.”
“I am one such,” Song said, throat tight.
“Do you require aid, then, Song Ren?” the Librarian asked.
“I seek the Book of the Lofty Mountain, the work of Momu the Lame,” she said. “Is it among the stacks?”
The Librarian paused and there was a faint shiver in the air.
“The Old Kingdom collection,” the god said. “Western stacks, third row, second story. The full text is spread across three woodprints.”
The Librarian’s eyes went back down to the ledger.
“Good reading, Mistress Ren,” they said. “Do not forget to sign out the volumes should you borrow them.”
Song managed to hold it in until she’d found he woodprints. Only then did she kneel down on the wooden floor, forehead against the stacks as Angharad’s warm hand stayed on her shoulder.
“Burn you all,” she whispered in Cathayan. “They’ll live. My sisters will live.”
Song would buy them enough years to kill that curse on their name. She thought about what Yue had told her, the foothold the curse god had in her, and smiled. Can you see me? Can you hear me? I hope you do.
Song wanted it to know she was coming for its neck.
--
When Tristan woke the day after the assault on the bastion, it was to bitter disappointment: Fortuna was not back.
But neither was she still missing. Tristan could feel her now, and while running his finger down the seam did not let him feel the rattling of the dice as it once had, did not let him taste the odds, he now felt something again. The connection was not yet complete, there was still something missing. He might have taken that worse than he did, were he not almost entirely sure he knew what it was.
The sole shrine to the Lady of Long Odds had yet to be restored.
It took time to get that done, more than he would have liked. Cao still needed to be handled, Ishanvi needed to be freed. He made the time, though, even when it meant cutting into his sleep. Masonry was beyond his skill and means to mend, but the shrine had always been a ruin of sorts. For it to be ruined again did not mean it had been broken, really. Sometimes you had to learn to love the scars as much as the rest.
The back half of the house-turned-shrine had been swallowed by the false dantesvara, the chimney and the whole wall it was set in. Between a second wall being ripped out and the weekly rains the last of the house had caved in, but there was something to be made of that. With only the front wall and the left remaining, the remains of the tiled roof had collapsed inward. The triangular intersection of the walls had been filled with a slope of masonry and tiles, though it stopped about halfway up and left the stone walls bare.
It was enough.
It took him three days to carve away hours enough to finish, but Tristan was pleased with the work. Fortuna herself he put as close to firmament as he could: her golden hair crowning the top of the walls, the goddess filling them with the deep red of her dress. Golden eyes burned in a pale face, the angle of the walls having cast the heart-shape of it into something subtly starker, and from the hem of her dress the Lady of Long Odds bled out across the entire shrine. Rivulets of red slid down the tiles to mix with swirls of orange and red, her sleeves bleeding in strands to join green and gray.
It was a simpler pattern than the last, not as elaborate, but there was a beauty to it. In Fortuna standing between earth and sky, a bridge to both. In the rain that would come and spread her across the colorful remains of her old shrine, the traces of which still lingered on the floor. The new and the old, intertwined.
The last thing Tristan did was carve out a place for offerings. Nothing too elaborate – he moved tiles and masonry around to form a bare bones alcove where a clay bowl could be left safe from the elements. Tristan had placed trinkets in the old one, pieces used in games of chance and cheap sticks of incense, but those wouldn’t be enough for today. Instead, as the lights above turned faint gold with evening’s arrival, he sat in candlelight and sliced a knife across his palm.
Part of him screamed it should have been on his arm or his leg, somewhere the wound wouldn’t hamper him, but Maryam had taught him better. It wasn’t a sacrifice if you were sacrificing nothing. The pain and inconveniences to come were what gave the blood he dripped into the bowl weight, why it counted for more than red paint.
Even as the bottom filled and blood dripped down his skin, he kept on feeding the trickle – until it happened. A shiver in the air, almost like a sigh. A breath released. The knife fell through his trembling fingers as he wildly looked around, starving for the sight of her, but she was-
She was there. Standing on the slope of the shrine, before the very outline of her in paint as if summoned by it. Silent, still, but very much there. Her long, billowing gown was the same shade of red as his spilled blood and rested across the tiles in a spread, but she wore no jewelry. Only the gold of her locks and eyes, a serious mien looking down at him.
“Fortuna,” he choked out. “You’re back, you’re all right?”
She studied him for a moment.
“Thank you,” she said, “for freeing me.”
And nothing else. Even as moments ticked on she said nothing, simply looking at him with a calm patience that was like nothing he had ever seen of her.
“No,” he whispered. “No.”
The golden stare was unblinking.
“He said you’d lose parts, but also you’d cling onto me longest.”
He’d lied. The Father of Lies had lied, a thought that sounded so childish and foolish he had to swallow to a scream. His fingers bit into his blood-slick palm.
“Tell me you know who I am,” he begged.
“You are my celebrant,” Fortuna said.
“You must remember something,” he rasped. “Anything. Not even our contract?”
In a whisper of silk she was standing past him, looking up at the Orrery gold. He turned to watch, her not quite allowing himself hope. It would be too deep a wound if it were spoiled again.
“I must have loved you very much,” the Lady of Long Odds thoughtfully said. “A part of me still burns in your soul.”
“Take it back,” he choked out. “I don’t want it.”
Not if she was to be like this. He wanted no part of this fucking stranger. She shook her head.
“I cannot,” she said. “It was a gift.”
A hand was laid on his shoulder and for the first time since he could remember Fortuna’s touch made him flinch. She hummed, then withdrew.
“Not power, or a boon,” she said. “How strange.”
“Then what is it?”
“Remembrance,” the Lady of Long Odds said. “I can only see glimpses.”
And through the curtains of grief, Tristan saw it. The possibility, the chance. I bet on you, she’d said as he fell into the layer. As she flooded his veins with something that the goddess now called memories.
“Oh,” Tristan Abrascal said, and closed his eyes. “Oh.”
“You seem relieved,” she observed.
“I am,” he sighed. “Because you’re not gone. Just missing.”
“How so?” the Lady of Long Odds conversationally asked.
As if they were discussing the weather. Because you gave me your memories of our time together, Tristan thought. You stashed them where you knew the Machinist wouldn’t be able to take them from you. She had trusted him to return them to her.
“I just need to find a way to give you a gift, that’s all,” Tristan Abrascal said, fingers clenched. “And gods willing or not, I will.”
--
Ferranda pushed to strike while the iron was still hot.
Song suspected it would have been very easy to resent her for that had the infanzona not been there with them, fighting on the rise and then through to the bastion. But the Thirty-First had been with them, even Shalini with her broken shoulder, so the resentment curdled before it could truly take root. Ferranda Villazur had a right to exploit the victory she had fought to make happen.
That she would be willing to put her life and her brigade’s lives on the line for it had been a surprise. Song had probed her colleague some and quickly found the source of that change of heart. It’d not been all that difficult to recognize, when she knew what to look for: Song was not unfamiliar with what the stitches following a hard conversation with Angharad Tredegar looked like.
Date and place were debated heartily, everything from the Galleries – with Colonel Cao missing and said to have boarded a ship, the interim covenant teacher had relaxed the rules of who could enter – to renting out the Dregs or even the Old Playhouse. Zenzele cut through the discussion with but a few words when they’d already spent an hour exhausting themselves.
“Misery Square,” the one-eyed diplomat said. “Let them remember why this needs to be made at all.”
It lacked the comforts of most places they’d entertained, but it would have room for everyone and the symbolism of it was powerful. Zenzele Duma got his way.
Consulting everyone for a date that suited them all would take days and a despicable amount of back-and-forth, so they simply picked a morning a week away and let people decide whether or not they’d make the time. Once enough had agreed, it pushed those who’d hedged their answer into coming – and even some of those who’d refused to change their minds. And once the attendance of those who’d already agreed to buy in was confirmed, they could send the last invites.
Every brigade of the second year, but some mattered more than others. First Brigade. Second, Third, Fourth. The Eighth and Ninth. The Twentieth, the Thirty-Eighth, the Sixtieth. All those who had made the top ten of Cao’s rankings and not been involved in this from the start. The invitation came appended with the numbers of the brigades who would be showing, which in practice forced all their hands. None of them could afford not to be there, when of the fifty-three remaining second-year brigades thirty-one had said they would attend.
And once those leading cabals were in, the last holdouts flipped around. Every single student of the second year would be there, save for those in the hospital or the grave.
Come that morning the brigades mostly deeply involved – the Thirteenth and Ferranda’s lot, but also the Eighth and the Eleventh – came early, as much to make sure the ruins around Misery Square were free of lemures as to bring the sole piece of furniture, a wooden table. An ink pen and a large, almost empty ledger were set down on it.
The crowd began to trickle in with the green star, at six in the morning. Boots shuffled up from the Triangle through the partly-cleared rubble, coming to mill about the open grounds of the square. Talk was muted, eyes bleary and more than a few had brought their fast to break with them. As brigades filled up and most the crowd gathered, sleep’s dregs fell off and talks began in earnest. Song was sought after, if not anywhere as much as Ferranda or Captain Pillai. It was the nervous ones who came for her, seeking assurances.
“And if there is retaliation,” Captain Tristan Ballester of the Forty-Fourth pressed, “can I count on-”
“Yes,” she flatly said. “Look around you, Ballester. At the numbers gathered. Does it look like something that can be scattered with a hard look?”
He scoffed.
“One is always alone in a crowd, Captain Ren,” Ballester replied. “But your word is enough. You have proved you will follow through with it whatever the cost.”
Song put on a cordial smile and chased him off so she could offer essentially the same assurances to the captain of the Fifth-Third. She was put out of this misery by a sudden hush. She caught the reason with but a glance: the last guests were arriving. At a delay, of course, lest they be mistaken as coming together in any way.
Sebastian Camaron was flanked by the elite among the Garrison princelings: Guadalupe de Tovar and her Second, Captain Mandal and his Twentieth. Vivek Lahiri bore the banner for the free companies, along with Captain Gengeshe from the Sixtieth. And last of them Nenetl Chapul with her fellow in-betweener, Captain Philani of the Thirty-Eighth. Tupoc and his Fourth came alone, as if to insult everyone.
There was a balance to it, however precarious. The Garrison had put more brigades in the top ten, but these cabals were only broadly allied to Sebastian Camaron and Vivek Lahiri had claimed the top spot for the free companies while keeping a tight alliance with the Sixtieth and a better reputation with the student body at large. Nenetl had many friendships and was owed favors on all sides, but she lacked relationships with leading brigades and her faction was far from steady.
“Step in quick,” Song quietly advised Ferranda. “Else Camaron will see a stage and claim it. It is in his nature.”
“Princeling prick,” Ferranda fervently agreed.
She stepped out before anyone else could, helped in drowning out noise by the signifier from the Eighth. Zama Luvuno had learned the same Sign that Professor Baltasar had once used at the first delve meeting, allowing Ferranda’s voice to carry across the whole of Misery Square. She quickly moved on from thanking everyone for their attendance to the thick of the matter, though she did not make it seem hurried. A trained speaker, Song mused.
“When they first let us past the gates of Port Allazei, we were told that Scholomance has only three rules,” Ferranda Villazur said. “Simple ones: students must not kill one another, they must not cross the painted lines and they must be part of cabal.”
She paused.
“That is all,” she said. “Not a word about cutting off limbs, about imprisonment or even rape. For more than a year now we have lived in this city with only an unspoken accord keeping us civil to one another.”
Her gaze swept the crowd.
“And this accord is failing.”
Murmurs from the crowd. It was not the sort of thing one cheered at, but more than a few heads nodded in agreement. Lahiri caught where this was headed first, Song thought. She caught a flash of rage on his face, before he killed it and looked around. Began looking for angles. She could not say who between Sebastian and Nenetl got there first, but their reactions stood out. Sebastian contemptuously amused, Nenetl’s eyes narrowing. Looking for an opportunity, as Vivek was.
She’d seen further ahead than her rival had.
“-beatings and cripplings, possessions stolen and homes set aflame. Feuds have become commonplace, and they grow less and less measured.”
There was not a hint of apology on Ferranda’s face at what she said next.
“Barely three months ago, one of us gunned a first year down from behind and poured poison down her throat while she bled out,” Ferranda said. “Where was the punishment, in the wake of that? Nowhere, for none of Scholomance’s three laws were broken.”
She scoffed.
“Is there anyone here who believes that this was just?” Ferranda asked.
Rumblings of approval.
“We have been set to compete and rewarded it for it so thoroughly that we forgot where we are,” she continued. “Scholomance. The school that devoured so many of our predecessors that the Watch had to close it. The cursed ground that still traps and kills us to this day, a place of malice we must dwell in five days a week. Why are we pulling knives on each other over assignments and point rankings when just there, past the horizon, dwells a god trying to murder us all?”
Feet were stomped. Rare was the student with a fondness for the god in the walls.
“The Watch has only given us three rules,” Ferranda said. “That does not mean there can only be those three. We can make our own.”
And there she ceded the place to another. Just in time, Song thought, to avoid the perception that this was her game alone. Captain Saran Pillai joined her at the heart of the plaza, his signifier moving the Sign to him instead.
“During the delve, a clever idea was put forward,” he said. “It was immediately put to fool use, but the foundation remained sound: a student association.”
Murmurs spread. Captain Pillai laid out the bare bones: a student association that any Scholomance student could join. It would be an oath to abide by some basic rules. Limits on violence, no thefts or attacks on each other’s property, no torture or imprisonment, aid against lemures and Scholomance when feasible. Meditation by a tribunal whose members would be drawn by lot when there were conflicts between members. When in conflict with non-signatories, the entire strength of the association was to be mustered.
Song kept her eyes on the three that could still try to sink this: Vivek Lahiri, Sebastian Camaron and Nenetl Chapul.
The tribunal talk got stuck in Vivek’s throat, as she had thought it would. The only reason the captain of the First had not tried to make largely the same play already was that such a move from him would get the entire roster of Garrison princelings to band against him, including Nenetl and her Third. But he’d been leading up to it, no doubt, with the scheme in mind to have a guiding hand of the association behind the scenes.
Now he could not have a founder’s prestige and tribunals drawn by lot meant he could not try to squeeze a niche as an ‘impartial’ judge either. Both irked, but did they irk so much he’d pass on the advantages of the association?
Nenetl, on the other hand, realized early on that she had little to lose. Her ‘faction’ was already a loose web of friendships and favors spread across every faction of the student body, so if anything the cover helped her. The black mark on it from her perspective was that one of her main bargaining chips – offering the help and protection of the Third – would largely cease being useful, but she could adapt. She was in before Pillai even finished his speech, Song judged.
Sebastian Camaron was very much not.
If the First Brigade had tried to be a diplomatic force, then the Ninth’s strategy had been to be the head of the pack. They offered access to goods and services by virtue of their connections that no one else could and used that and their record as a hard combat brigade to pressure other brigades into doing what they wanted. Losing the threat of force was a problem for Sebastian in the way it was not for the other two. And, most of all, he didn’t believe that anyone was in a position to strongarm him over this.
So with a smile he stepped into the aftermath of the speech. Prowled, really, with the distasteful confidence of man who was handsome and had never not known it.
“All lovely sentiments,” Sebastian said. “Truly. But in the end, this is little more than daydreaming. I must ask you, Pillai – who is it that enforces your pretty rules?”
He flicked the man’s chest with a laugh before drawing away.
“I am a peaceful man,” he said. “But your little laws will be tested, and when they are they will fail because you are simply incapable of imposing them through strength. How many of those you want to sign your ledger are actually willing to bleed for them?”
He was cut off by a laugh. Ferranda grinned at him.
“A fair point, Captain Camaron,” she said. “But worry not: we have a volunteer.”
And so Song Ren stepped up onto the front with the others, Camaron’s face darkening at the sight of her.
“The Thirteenth Brigade has volunteered to be the first brigade assigned as enforcers,” she said. “We will work with any other who joins us on the roster.”
“Is this a joke?” he said. “The Unluckies were nearly half the examples of unhinged violence that were quoted as a justification for this so-called association.”
“Amnesty is offered to all who sign today,” Song calmly said. “We will be as subject to the rules as anyone else going forward. We bear further duties, not privileges – no enforcer brigade will be eligible for the tribunal draws, so we have no voice in any judgement over our practice as enforcers.”
“All you are doing is fleeing from the consequences of your schemes,” Camaron angrily said.
“You’re free to think that,” Song shrugged. “No one is forcing you to be here, Sebastian. You were invited here as a courtesy.”
She gestured towards Arsay Avenue.
“You can leave whenever you want.”
He was too angry to see it clearly, but not Guadalupe. She noticed, right from the start, the trap being laid: if they didn’t join, the free companies princelings were sure to. So was Nenetl. And suddenly the largest and most powerful faction, the Garrison legacies, would be simultaneously diminished and set against almost the entire rest of the year. It was the very definition of a losing fight.
So Guadalupe de Tovar measured the cut and struck.
“While I respect the strength demonstrated by the Thirteenth, I cannot say the same of its integrity,” Guadalupe cut in sharply. “It would be a loss to us all for the Unluckies to cause the collapse of this association through their… unruliness.”
She smiled thinly.
“The Second Brigade volunteers to be the second enforcement brigade. A steady hand is needed.”
You bitch, Song admiringly thought. In the same stroke Guadalupe had threatened Sebastian’s position as leader of the Garrison faction, splashed mud on Song’s face and positioned herself as a core member of the student association. By the very miffed on Nenetl’s face, she had been planning to do the same – presumably without the mud – but de Tovar had beaten her to the punch.
Half a dozen expressions flickered across Sebastian Camaron’s face in the span of a moment. Rage, of course, but also surprise and fear and the slightest sliver of gratitude. Because in the same move where she slid a knife in his back, Guadalupe had left him a way out.
“I cannot doubt your commitment to order the way I do the Thirteenth’s, Guadalupe,” he said, smoothly pivoting. “Your generosity allays much of my concerns with this arrangement.”
“Are you quite done with the face-saving, Camaron?”
Song’s eyes flicked to the source of that, Vivek Lahiri himself. The smiling man’s entrance into the fray meant she could withdraw, and without a word she ceded her place back to Ferranda.
“We have no such concerns about the integrity of the proposed association,” Vivek said. “We are ready to sign immediately.”
“So are we,” Nenetl Chapul agreed.
Sebastian lost a few feathers but avoided disaster. Vivek, the smooth bastard, managed to have his signature be the first on the first page and was now occasionally implying he had supported the entire effort from behind the scenes from the beginning. It didn’t matter, though. Ferranda was entrusted with the ledger and the power to call on the signatories for a tribunal or mediation, an implicit recognition that she had been the one to arrange all this, and the matter was closed before everyone began the trek to class.
Song stayed behind, watching as Ferranda looked down at the thick ledger on the table with its drying ink. At the hundreds of signatures: every single living second year, save for those at the hospital. The silence stretched out.
“I thought it would fail,” Ferranda suddenly said. “Somehow. We had eighteen brigades ready to sign from the start, but they could have backed out. Manes, I expected half of them to do so the moment the princelings walked in.”
“They didn’t,” Song said, “because you offered them something worth the risk.”
The other woman let out a disbelieving laugh, passing a trembling hand through her hair.
“Zenzele helped me write the speech,” she said. “Shalini said she was proud of me.”
And she spoke those two sentences, Song thought, like they were more a treasure than anything else that’d happened today. She squeezed Ferranda’s arm.
“Now is the hard part,” she said. “You have to keep it that way.”
Ferranda shook her head.
“I owe you,” she said.
“This helps us more than I can say,” Song replied. “Even after the Machinist our reputation has been... tarnished. This turns us from the mad dog to a guard hound.”
And they didn’t need to stay an enforcement brigade forever, either. Next year or the one after, when their reputation was recovered, they could pass the torch.
“Your reputation is the only reason half of those people believed me when I said the rules would be enforced,” Ferranda said, shaking her head. “I could not have done it without you.”
“Or us without you,” Song said.
The Unluckies could not have gathered the people who’d been in Misery Square today. They were simply not that sort of brigade.
“A common effort, then,” Ferranda said.
Song met her eyes, after a moment.
“The best friendships tend to be,” she said, and offered her hand.
Ferranda sucked in a breath.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, that’s true.”
She took the hand, and the other thing too.