“Someone who can hold a line,” I said. “That’s the rule. Every group gets one. The temple decides what it decides, and I’d rather not find out it decided on something with teeth while the only two people in the room are made of paper.”
I counted them off in my head the way Lola counted seating charts. “Lucy, Yuki, Llama. You three can anchor. That’s three temples, three anchors, it works out clean for once; don’t get used to it.” I pointed. “Lumi, you’re with Llama. Yuki—”
“I will take Yuki,” Phèdre said before I’d finished the breath, and then, smoothly, because she’d heard herself volunteer and wanted it on record as a favor rather than an instinct, “though she hardly needs me. She is more capable than she advertises.”
Yuki’s tails did something that could be interpreted as pleased.
“She’s with you anyway,” I said. “Not because she can’t. Because you two already know how the other moves. You don’t fight next to each other so much as around each other, and I’m not handing the temple a pair that has to learn that on the clock.” I let the smile go a little deeper. “Also, you’d sulk if I split you up, and I don’t have the budget for your sulking.”
She shook her head. “I do not sulk.”
“You sulk in French, which is worse, because then I have to look up what I’m being called.”
Phèdre’s mouth curved. She didn’t argue the point anymore.
That left the two of them, and I’d known it would, and I’d been saving it because it was the one I trusted least to behave.
“NightSwallow. You’re with Lucy.”
NightSwallow looked at Lucy. Lucy looked at NightSwallow, and then swept off her hat and pressed it to her chest as if she’d been handed a knighthood.
“A finer first mate I could not have pressed into service meself,” she announced. “Quiet, deadly, an’ she don’t argue with the helm. We’ll get on famous.”
“…No,” NightSwallow said, with the flat finality of a closing vault.
“That’s the spirit.”
I turned to the stele before I could second-guess any of it. The dark stone stood there being inscrutable, all that writing Yuki couldn’t make talk, and I put my palm flat against it.
It was warm. Stone shouldn’t be warm. It was warm anyway, and under my hand the carved lines moved. One of the three roads up the slope lit. Pale stone, gone bright as bone, climbing away from the foot of the stele and bending inward as it rose.
The other two remained asleep.
“That one,” I said unnecessarily, because it was the only one glowing. “Up we go.”
The road climbed in long, shallow switchbacks that the mountain had no business permitting, smooth pale stone laid over gray rock, and the higher we got, the less the valley below us looked like a place we had left.
The lake flattened into a coin.
The new town smudged into a thumbprint of smoke and ambition at its edge.
NightSwallow lasted four switchbacks.
“Scouting ahead,” she said, and the shadow at the road’s edge took her, closing over the place she’d been without a ripple.
There was nothing up there to scout. The road went where the road went, and she knew it, and I knew it, and I let her go anyway, because a whole boat ride of open sky with everyone’s eyes on her was a tax she’d paid in full and she’d earned a little dark to spend.
The temple came up over the last bend all at once, and I forgot to keep walking.
It was enormous.
The voice had told me three hundred meters, but I couldn’t visualize it. Until now.
Columns the width of towers.
A pediment carved with figures I couldn’t make out from below and didn’t need to, because the not-making-out was the point, the way the eye climbs a cathedral and runs out of detail before it runs out of building. It caught the light off the lake far below and threw it back doubled.
It was beautiful. “Huh,” I said, which was the best my brain could manage.
Lucy came up beside me. She tipped her hat back and looked the whole white immensity up and down, foot to crown, slow, the way you’d appraise a ship you were thinking of buying or stealing.
“That’s a temple, all right,” she allowed. Then, deadpan, accent flat as the lake: “An’ you’re tellin’ me there’s a bigger one.”
“Half again as tall.”
“Half again.” She nodded slowly. “Right. Course there is. Why’d I ask.”
NightSwallow reformed out of the temple’s shadow at the foot of the steps, where the dark pooled deepest, looking marginally restored. “Clear,” she reported, of a structure that could not possibly have been anything but clear. “Big.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I’d noticed.”
We climbed the last of it, the broad pale steps, and stood at the mouth of the thing where the columns made a hall of shade, and past them was the door, and past the door was black.
“After you, Captain,” I said, because I’m brave like that.
“Always,” Lucy said, and walked into it like she owned it, and the black took her, and I followed before I could think better of following, and NightSwallow came at my shoulder without a sound.
The light died behind us.
I turned to look at it die, which was a mistake, because there was nothing to see it do.
One step the day had been at my back, a bright rectangle full of columns and sky. The next step there was no rectangle. No columns. No sky. No seam of grey where the door had been, no gradient.
I put my hand out behind me on instinct and found nothing, just more of the same darkness.
“Okay,” I said, to keep my voice in the world. “We’re in. Everybody still attached to their limbs?”
“Aye.” Lucy, somewhere off my left, untroubled.
“…Here.” NightSwallow, off my right, and I noticed she sounded fine. Better than fine. Steady. Of course she did. Of every person I could have brought into a room with no light in it, I’d brought the one who lived in the dark for a profession and went giddy when nobody could find her.
“Good,” I said. “Then I assume we’re about to get talked at.”
The darkness proved me right.
“Welcome. Two of you,” it said. “Two brave followers of a God-Queen, climbed out of the bright world to stand in the dark and fight for her. She does inspire it. I’ll give her that. Whatever else she is, she is the kind of thing people climb mountains for.”
“She’s standin’ right here,” Lucy said. “Ye can flatter her to her face.”
“I know exactly where she’s standing.” The voice didn’t rise. It turned. “But it isn’t her turn.”
The darkness shifted its attention. “Juliette.” The steadiness went out of NightSwallow like a snuffed candle.
“You,” the voice went on, gently, unhurried, savoring it, “who has worn so many names she doesn’t dare say aloud. The Princess of Shadows.”
“—don’t.”
“The Princess of Death.” A pause, considering, almost fond. “The Dark Lady of the Night. The Eclipse Princess. The reaper of the guilty, who slips the knife in and is three streets gone before the body knows it’s been visited.”
“Eclipse Princess,” it said again, slowly, tasting it, “Dark Lady of the—”
“STOP.” It came out of her cracked down the middle, half a hiss and half a yelp, the most volume I’d ever heard her produce. “Stop saying that. Stop, please—”
The voice stopped. It seemed pleased to have been asked.
“You go by so many names,” it said, “and you give them to no one. And yet you give yourself to her. You serve the Queen. Why?”
The dark waited.
“She’s cool,” NightSwallow said. The darkness kept waiting. “And she’d do the same,” she added.
The darkness waited longer
The rest did not come. NightSwallow had said her piece, all six words of it, and she was done, and the silence could wait until the mountain wore down to sand for all the good it would do it.
The voice let it go.
“And you,” it said, and the attention swung off her and onto the place where Lucy stood. “The pirate queen. Loud as a deck-gun, hat and accent and the whole performance, a captain of crews you summon out of nowhere. You play the jester. The whole company groans at you, and you feed on it like a hearth feeds on logs. Why?”
I braced for Lucy to deflect, or worse, to answer it honestly; Lucy doubled the accent instead.
“Now list’n here, ye disembodied draught,” she said, broad as a barn door, every consonant rolled in tar and set alight, leaning into it the exact way she leaned into everyone’s groan. “I’ve known that woman five years. Five. Through worse rooms than this an’ darker water than ye’ve got the wit to imagine. I don’t owe ye me reasons, an’ I don’t owe ye me manner, an’ if ye think yer spooky cave voice is gonna shake a why outta me ye’ve badly misjudged yer mark. So.” She clapped her hands once, and the sound went nowhere and came back from nowhere. “Quit fishin’. Set the table. We came to do a thing. Get on with it.”
The darkness held for a moment.
“So be it,” the voice said.
And the world came back, all at once, and it was the wrong world.
The dark didn’t lift so much as it broke, shattered into water and wind and a grey-green roar, and the floor I’d been standing on bucked under me and became a deck.
I grabbed for something, and there was something to grab, a carved armrest, polished wood gone slick, because I was no longer standing.
I was sitting.
I was sitting on a throne, a great dark high-backed thing bolted to the planks two-thirds of the way down the length of a ship that pitched and rolled beneath me through a sea trying to climb into the sky.
It was dusk, or the storm had made it dusk. The rain came sideways, hard as flung gravel, and the wind tore the tops off waves and threw them across the deck in sheets, and I was already soaked through and somehow not cold, because the temple had decided I wouldn’t be cold.
It had decided a great many things for me; the throne and the front-row view and not one useful thing to do.
Up at the bow, at the helm, both hands on the wheel and her hat impossibly still on her head, stood Lucy. She was the first of us to adapt.
She always did; the best tester.
She was reading the sea off the heave of the deck, calling something I couldn’t hear into the wind, and the ship answered her, came round into the swell, took the next wave on the shoulder instead of the beam, rode it.
And below the quarterdeck, in the waist of the ship where the rain hammered hardest, stood NightSwallow.
Among a dozen others.
A dozen others in dark leathers and low hoods, twin daggers, masks, the shadow-sleeves over their blades to kill the gleam, her unit, her scouts, the assassins she actually commanded, standing in a loose deadly knot around her and waiting for her word.
“They are copies,” the voice said from nowhere and everywhere, pitched for the three of us. “The crew. The squad. Your sailors are not your sailors, Admiral. Your scouts are not your scouts, Juliette. They will hold a rope and hold a blade, and they will die when they die, and you need not grieve them, because there is no one inside them to grieve. I tell you this as a kindness. Spend them freely.”
I hated it for the kindness more than I’d have hated it for anything.
[Attention! You are in a scenario!]
[Scenario: The Empire’s Gambit]Admiral Lucy transports the God-Queen to a diplomatic summit. The Empire fleet means to end the summit by ending the Queen.
Goals:Admiral Lucy: Protect the God-Queen.Assassin NightSwallow: Slay the enemy Queen within the hour.Both goals must be met to pass.
If the God-Queen falls, she does not return. She dies. Truly, and once. The God-Queen may not act. Any action nullifies the scenario.
[Time remaining: 00:59:59]
The number ticked down.