Pale Lights

It was not a pleasant surprise to be woken up in the middle of the night and the quality of the ensuing surprises had only since worsened.

“If we go to Captain Wen right now,” Angharad said, “we could have them all in graves by morning.”

Song hissed, trying to push away Maryam as the other woman dabbed at her bruises with a wet cloth. Half of their captain’s face was swollen red and a stripe of cheek skin had been scraped right off. No tooth had cracked, thankfully, but Angharad suspected she would have a hard time speaking for a while. The Pereduri had experience being struck in the mouth often to not be unfamiliar with such injuries.

“No,” Song got out, her tone thick. “Can’t.”

Maryam, losing patience with being pushed off, took the Tianxi’s hand and slapped the wet cloth down on her palm before making her press it against the cheek herself.

“Angharad is right,” Maryam replied, to their shared disbelief. “Just because they didn’t kill you doesn’t mean the Yellow Earth hasn’t crossed a line. We take this to our superiors and guns will come out.”

“Can’t,” Song hissed. “They have something on my brother.”

Angharad swallowed the sympathy on the tip of her tongue. An overflow of that would beg questions she did not dare answer. Maryam looked about to ask Song about the incriminating information, but the noblewoman gave her pause by putting a hand on her arm and shaking her head. They locked eyes, for a moment, and after a sigh Maryam visibly made the decision not to take issue with Angharad having laid a finger on her. She hastily removed her hand anyway.

“Can you tell us what they asked of you?” Angharad tried instead.

The answer to being leveraged over your kin was not to spread around the ugliness that leverage came from. One could, however, try to get around the demands made of them.

Angharad was certainly trying.

“Reports,” Song exhaled. “About coup defenses. They want to keep an eye on it.”

That was passingly clever, she thought. Song Ren stood at the confluence of knowledge about what the Watch, the Lord Rector and the conspirators were up to. No doubt there were souls on Asphodel who could give the Yellow Earth information more on depths about parts specific, but precious few who could give them a better bird eye’s view of the situation.

“All the more reason to cut all their heads off,” Maryam grunted. “Corpses cannot hold anything over your family.”

Much as Angharad agreed with that, Song’s fear was easy to discern. The Pereduri stepped in, taking pity on her swollen mouth.

“If even a single one escapes, the Yellow Earth will have the information and a grudge that ensures they will use it,” Angharad said. “Moving on them now is a risk.”

“Passing information to a pack of mad zealots that beat her face like a carpet is even more of a risk,” Maryam bluntly shot back.

“No,” Song croaked. “It’s bad. My family would be…”

She swallowed.

“Cannot involve the Watch.”

It was a rare thing for Song Ren to present herself as anything but immaculate but in the trembling candlelight of her room, sitting on her bed, she looked like she was coming apart at the seams. Her face bruised – one eye sure to blacken – while her hair had come loose and her forehead looked like it’d been dragged through gravel. Her eye not forced to close by the swelling was wild, wide, and she moved little. Like a girl hoping that if she went still the world would still with her, buying her time enough to think.

Angharad ached to see it. She still remembered what that felt like: she herself had been numb and silent most of the way down to Asithule, when House Madoc had smuggled her in that cart. Even on the first ship out of Malan, she had been half a ghost.

“Need to think,” Song rasped. “Please.”

Angharad shared a look with Maryam. Neither of them were eager to leave her alone, but to interrogate a woman who could hardly talk was pointless. They had as much as they could have of her until the swelling went down. She rose, reluctant.

“We will be close at hand,” Angharad told her.

“And we’ll talk in the morning,” Maryam added.

There was no room for negotiation in that tone. Song only jerkily nodded. The two of them left her to stare at her wall in dying candlelight, loath to leave but with nothing more to offer. Maryam caught her eye out in the hall, passing a hand through brown tresses.

“My room,” the pale woman suggested.

Angharad silently nodded. Maryam lit a lamp before claiming a chair and the noblewoman closed the door behind her.

“I’m half convinced we should go to Wen anyway,” the signifier bluntly opened.

“Once it is in his hands, it is in the blood,” Angharad said.

She got a frown in response, awkward silence spreading between them.

“I don’t know what that means,” Maryam finally said.

Angharad flushed, coughing into her fist. Not a Lierganen saying, then. That would teach her to translate directly from Umoya.

“I mean that we would no longer control where the information ends up,” she clarified. “It may very well make its way to Brigadier Chilaca.”

A man currently locked in a struggle with the Thirteenth over his constant meddling in their contract with the throne of Asphodel. It would be naïve to assume he would not immediately turn such knowledge to his purposes. There was a saying in Malan that a swordmaster killed you with a single cut but a diplomat a hundred. One could be just as ruthless with a pen as with a sword. Maryam cursed.

“Chilaca is a problem,” she admitted. “Did Song brief you on the troubles Tristan is in?”

Angharad shook her head. Her time with her uncle had run late – they had needed to plan a way for her to seize, hide and then smuggle out the infernal forge in Lord Menander’s possession – and by the time she emerged it was to word that Song was napping and not to be disturbed. Napping in anticipation of a late night where she had been savagely beaten, it turned out.

“The bastards from Allazei followed us,” Maryam said, then laid into the tale.

A mere minute in and Angharad was left to wonder why the Nineteenth Brigade were not all currently dangling from gallows, but the revelation that there was another traitor higher up the ranks made it plain why the whole affair had not been brought into the light. At least Tristan had been able to kill one of the traitors, good on him.

“So until we know if Brigadier Chilaca is the traitor, we cannot take the risk of bringing him into this,” Angharad summarized.

“Song’s sure he’s not a member of the Ivory Library, but almost as sure he was bribed to look away from their business,” Maryam added. “Apparently he’s quite corrupt. We need to keep him in the dark until we have some manner of proof.”

That too should fetch the noose, Angharad darkly thought. Yet how could she castigate any rook with shoddy loyalties when she had been charged with treason by the Lefthand House not once but twice? The second time unknowing of her wearing the black, but to be made a sneak twice over on the behalf of ufudu really was quite the surfeit of treason.

“I thought better of Kiran Agrawal than this,” Angharad admitted. “But then I hardly know the man.”

The rest were not disappointments, insofar as she had never held them in particular esteem. She had no admiration for Izel or Captain Tozi, and Cressida Barboza had only ever fetched wariness. There was anger in that one, the kind that gnawed at your bones, and it had turned her into a hound all too eager to bite.

“As far as I’m concerned this should end in the four of them in a locked barn we set on fire,” Maryam grunted, “but Song’s not wrong that Tristan will gain more by pulling out the roots of this Library than just cutting off another questing finger.”

Angharad inclined her head. That was true enough. Getting rid of this Ivory Library would be a greater boon than simply having another batch of their hirelings exiled or slain.

“Thank you for telling me,” she politely said.

Maryam eyed her with a sullen expression.

“It’s worse because you do have good sides,” she brusquely said. “And that makes you an excuse for the rest, part of the pretty tale of themselves Malani put out in the world for others to believe.”

Maryam breathed out through clenched teeth.

“I do not owe you a thing,” Maryam Khaimov sharply stated, as if expecting an argument. “But the axes I have to grind with you are best left buried, at least while we’re all in this mess.”

“I am not sure I understand,” Angharad admitted.

“You’re trying,” Maryam said. “So I’ll try too. That’s all.”

Angharad swallowed.

“I,” she tried, then hesitated.

She was not quite sure what to say.

“Thank you,” she finally settled on.

“Don’t thank me, I’m putting work on your back,” Maryam said, looking away. “Tomorrow morning I’m leaving for the shipyard visit and that’s a week of me in the wind, so it’s all going to be on you.”

The Izvorica groaned, rolling her shoulders.

“You’re going to need to watch our for Song,” she continued. “She was already biting at the inside of her cheek over selling out Palliades when she’d like him with his clothes off, this Yellow Earth business is going to make it all worse.”

“Her family is the chink in the armor,” Angharad quietly agreed, then cleared her throat. “How serious is that affair with the Lord Rector?”

“She’s taken,” Maryam said. “He’s smitten enough I’m pretty sure he’s boning up on calligraphy to impress her. It would all be quite charming, if it was not also a lit powderkeg placed on top of the larger powder barrel pyramid that is this misbegotten capital.”

She paused, then smirked.

“My advice was that it was her republican duty to take him for a ride so thorough she’d ruin him for all noblewomen, but she went into that, you know…”

“When she slams the portcullis down inside her head,” Angharad finished.

It was sometimes eerie to watch, the way Song would smother her turmoil and make herself care only about the immediate. The noblewoman frowned.

“You truly believe tryst is the right idea?” she asked.

“I think half the reason they’re so smitten with each other is that it’s all dreamy sighs and butterflies,” Maryam said. “I expect finding out he farts in his sleep or uses too much tongue will make Evander Palliades less of a delicious forbidden fruit and more of a pretty boy with a crown on. That she’ll have no trouble with.”

“He is not even particularly pretty,” Angharad muttered.

Maryam shot her an amused look.

“I expect he’s a little light on tits for you, yes,” she said with twitching lips, then turned serious. “Just keep an eye on her, please. Keep her from doing something she’ll regret.”

Angharad slowly nodded.

“I could pass word to Tristan as well, if you would like,” she offered.

“Tristan will be fine,” Maryam sighed. “He’s not going to stop until he feels like he has a knife at the throat of anyone that could be a threat to him, but he’s out there swimming in waters he knows well.”

“And yet,” Angharad gently said.

The other woman passed a hand through her hair.

“Tell him to be careful,” Maryam finally said. “Every time we take a look around this city, it’s like some fresh plot had grown out of the stone. Knowing him, he’s apt to trip into a fresh one.”

Angharad snorted, as much at the words as the fond look on the other woman’s face. There was something endearing about the way the two of them had taken to each other, ever since the Dominion. She had envied the bond, for a time, but come to realize it was not the friendship she envied but the trust. The lack was in her, not in them. How could she complain of others being at a distance when she stacked a wall of secrets between herself and the world?

Suddenly disgusted with herself, Angharad pushed off the wall.

“I will pass it along,” she swore, then flicked a glance at the door. “We had best get some sleep, I think.”

Maryam nodded, looking as tired as Angharad felt.

“Good night, Angharad,” the pale woman said.

She swallowed.

“And you, Maryam,” she got out.

Angharad mastered herself enough to leave the room instead of fleeing it. She was a fool, she told herself. For whom but a fool would spend so much time with a brigade she had come to this isle intending to deceive, to use as cover while she stole from the Watch and pawned a foul device to the damned souls of the Lefthand House? If she had kept her distance, if she had made them into strangers…

But not they were not that, not any longer. And part of her balked at the thought of the woman she had just left in her room looking at her with disgust and hostility once more. With the thought of the bleakness it would bring in Song’s eyes, how Tristan would smile while his eyes marked her for the grave. Yet what was she to do, abandon her own father?

There was no graceful way out. Angharad had ensured as much the moment she began to like being part of the Thirteenth Brigade. Sleeping God, the madness of that. Song had shot an ally in the back, Tristan was an avowed thief and Maryam would bury all of Malan under the seat given half a chance!

They deserved better. Her uncle deserved better.

Everyone in this wretched tale did, except for her.

She went to bed, but what little she slept was consumed by dreams of looking in the mirror and finding her face to be a wolf’s.

--

Including Maryam, the Watch delegation numbered six.

Two Umuthi society tinkers, one from each branch of the tree. An Arthashastra scholar specialized in cryptoglyphs, a Stripe who’d served as an officer at the largest Watch shipyard for a decade and second Arthashastra member who was not a scholar but a diplomat. The latter of these, Captain Elena Cervantes, was informally the head of the delegation even though Commander Osian Tredegar outranked her.

She had also spent half a day coaxing Maryam about what she was and was not allowed to do while on the visit so that the Lord Rector would have nothing to hold over the Watch. In truth Maryam had expected the captain to resent her presence being forced onto the delegation at the last moment, but instead she found Cervantes to be rather pleased.

“I asked for a Navigator to be included in the delegation from the start, but the Lord Rector refused us,” she told Maryam. “You are a welcome addition, so long as you do not end up causing a diplomatic incident.”

“I’ll do my best to refrain,” Maryam said. “The trick is to force my way past every door with guards, yes?”

She ended up paying for that with half an hour of being drilled about the legal definition of self-defense, which was too high a cost.

In the early hours of the day they took the Black House coaches to the Collegium, all the way to the fort raised around the bottom of the lift that led to the rector’s palace. There they were met by Majordomo Timon, the head of the Lord Rector’s household, who led them to the physician’s room where they were to be drugged.

As Evander Palliades did not want them to be know the path to the shipyard they would be going under for six hours, after which they would be allowed to wake for a meal and a physician’s checkup at a roadside fort before being put under for another six hours. After that, there would be pause for the night allowing the delegation to recover from the drugs and they would resume the journey in the morning.

The process would repeat until they had reached the shipyard, at which point they would be allowed to study the location under escort. The estimated duration of the journey was seven days: three to reach the entrance, one spent visiting and then three to return to Tratheke. Speculation was rife among the delegation that the Lord Rector was padding the time to throw off those seeking to find the path he was using.

They would be split into two carriages, three on each, while a detachment of lictors and physicians came along in another larger coach.

Maryam had heard worrying things about Lierganen medicine, but the Watch had been allowed to know the composition of the drug and deemed it safe enough for use. A bearded old man handed her a cup to drink and told her to lay down on the bed, where she stared at the ceiling for the better part of a minute wondering why it wasn’t-

-the summer heat was not so suffocating, on the riverbanks, but the heavy robes and red cloak still had her sweating in the sun. Not that Maryam would dare complain, not with all these grim-faced bearded lords and high-collared ladies dripping in gold all standing in silence, watching as the Malani were dragged to the mud.

Seven, men and women, ragged and bruised.

Lords and ladies of the devils from across the sea, not so fine now that they had been grabbed out of their manses and taken far beyond the protection of their cannons. One of them was her age, a boy whose eyes were red from weeping.

Mother raised the ashen effigy, calling out to the dreadmost goddess, to Mother Winter herself, and as her voice rose the first of the Malani was forced face-first into the river. The woman struggled, panicking, but the warrior held her face under the tide and eventually she stopped.

Mother’s voice rose, calling Winter to witness their oaths, and the second lord was-

“It always comes down to death with them, doesn’t it?”

Maryam gasped awake in a carriage, almost striking the man next to her. Osian Tredegar, faced by Captain Cervantes. But what should be the empty seat across from her was filled with a flickering, buzzing silhouette.

The shade, wearing heavy robes and a red cloak. Even the ribbons in her hair were the same.

“What?” she croaked.

“Gods,” the shade said. “It always comes down to death, with them. Taking it, dealing it, warding it away. Everything they are rests on a bed of bones.”

Maryam breathed in, reined in her panic. The others, she saw, were still asleep. The shade spoke quietly, almost a whisper, so whoever drove the carriage would not hear her.

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

“What do you want?” she hissed.

“When your eyes close, mine open,” the shade said. “Mother was not as clever as she thought, in the end.”

The thing tugged at a red ribbon, pulling out the knot, and they both watched it flutter down to the floor.

“One cannot bargain with the inevitable,” the shade sighed. “Pay attention, Maryam. Time is running out.”

The carriage shook, hitting a rock, and in that blink of an eye the shade was gone. There was a groan to Maryam’s side as Commander Tredegar woke, sounding nauseated, and after that Cervantes was not far behind. She was groggier than the other when they began taking stock of where they were, but her mind was mostly there.

Their carriage was rolling on a road, bucking against bumps and rocks, but they could not see outside. There were metal shutters, pulled tight, and the doors were sealed and locked. Commander Tredegar busied himself finding the source of fresh air, finding that beneath their benches were compartments with angled holes in them. These holes were angled so that no one inside the carriage would be able to look outside through them, which all agreed was an impressive commitment to secrecy. The most they learned about their surroundings was that sometimes the wheels rolled on rocks that went flying, and dry wood snapped.

Fortunately for them, Maryam was not entirely bound by walls.

The other two blackcloaks moved away from her as she closed her eyes and focused, sending out her nav. The aether around them was not calm, but it was nothing like the wild chaos of Tratheke. There was a single, overwhelming current here – slightly curving, not that it would mean anything in the material. The lack of ‘reefs’ to dash her soul-effigy against had her bold, at first, but she quickly learned better.

If she sent her nav too far out, the current would rip it right out of her.

Neck beaded with sweat, she proceeded with only the utmost caution. Ahead and behind she felt aether emanations, most likely the other blackcloaks and their drivers as well as the coach sent by the Lord Rector. The lictors were ahead, she figured, for there the emanations were stronger there. She didn’t have long, perhaps ten minutes until the carriage came to a halt and Captain Cervantes quietly ordered her to stop.

The carriage slowed and turned, as if pulling in somewhere, and eventually there was a knock on the doors.

“Out, rooks,” a lictor called out as he opened half a dozen locks before opening the door. “Time for your check up.”

They were in some sort of barn, Maryam found as she exited the carriage with the others, or perhaps stables? Dirt and straw beneath their feet, and in the corner the physicians from this morning were waiting. One after another the blackcloaks had their check up, tongues checked for swelling and pulse for having slowed, but there were no complications.

Maryam would have tried to glimpse under the barn doors while they were served meals of porridge, if not for the two lictors standing guard there grimly. She could see torchlight on the other side at least, and hear some talk. They must be inside an Asphodelian fort.

Shortly after she was made to drink the drug again, and under she went.

Would that her sleep had been dreamless, but she had hat horrid nightmare again – the one about being strangled and eaten alive. When she woke hours later, sweating and clutching at her neck, she took the time to calm herself before feeling out the aether again.

The current was just as strong out here, so instead she kept her nav on the carriage ahead – trying to get a feel for their emanations. They sat close enough together, though, that it was hard to tell them apart. Were the aether still as a pond it would be easier, but as things stood she was reading smoke signs in a thunderstorm.

They stopped for the night in what she could only describe a crypt, a stone basement with a locked door where cots were laid out on the ground. They did not even get to enter it while awake, having been carried in while still asleep. In the morning the physicians drugged them again, and-

-the captain pointed his sword, pale teeth bared in a snarl.

“She is a wanted criminal,” the Malani said. “Yield, blackcloak. You have no authority here.”

Maryam swallowed a sob, dragging herself back to her feet. The men in black where only a handful, the Malani were half a hundred with slavering hounds pulling at the leash. They would give her up. She had to run, to try and get ahead again, but she was so fucking hungry.

“I have authority everywhere,” the kindly man said. “Its name is power.”

His fingers traced oily darkness, but a handful of strokes, but Maryam’s breath caught in her throat. DEATH, she read. DEATHDEATHDEATHDEATHDEATH and the Malani they screamed and wailed and wept, the hounds whimpering, and just as suddenly as it had begun it stopped.

“Go back,” the kindly man said. “While you still-

“I think we came to trust him so quickly because he reminded us of Mother.”

Maryam gasped hoarsely. She met the eyes of the shade, who sat starved and pale and ragged. Across from her.

“He was all I had,” Maryam hoarsely replied. “What could I do but trust?”

“You wouldn’t have,” the shade said, “if he had not first shown he could be cruel. That’s the face of power we grew up with – kind to its own, but cruel to the enemy. We’ve never trusted kindness alone.”

“There is no we,” she bit out.

“No,” the shade agreed. “We are cruel, instead. That was the lesson we learned.”

“Riddles will not spare you,” Maryam said. “Cease this.”

“Do you remember what it was like, going hungry?” the shade softly asked. “It’s always like that for me. And here, in this place, it’s… everywhere. Like a poison poured into the world.”

She frowned.

“What are you talking about?”

A noise to the side, Captain Cervantes stretching out, and when Maryam’s gaze returned from the glance it was to an empty seat. The diplomat asked her if she had said something, and Maryam lied.

What followed was a tedious repeat of the previous day.

The drugs had them all groggy and with persistent headaches, which killed conversation and made Tredegar snappy whenever it was attempted. She stuck her nav on the carriage ahead half for the excuse not to pay attention to the other two. It struck her during the morning meal that since the lictors and physicians were the same attending to them during their time out of the carriage, she could get ahead by feeling out their presence there.

Putting a face to the emanations, thus helping to split them in her mind later. She could even slide past the door to where the rest of the lictors were waiting out in the fort to do the same with them, though not all that far.

It was enough for her to discern that some of the lictors in the carriage were replaced during the first break of the second day, traded for fresh souls from whatever outpost they had stopped at – not a barn but a stripped-bare temple, this time, just as thoroughly sealed as the rest. She kept up her game half-heartedly, mostly for lack of anything else to do, through the rest of the second day and night.

Which was how she noticed the switch at the first break of the third day.

She had not dream, the third morning, and so warily kept an eye on the aether the entire time she was awake. That led Maryam to staring at the door of the granary they were eating their gruel in, flatly disbelieving. It was only when Commander Tredegar cocked an eyebrow at her she realized she was drawing attention to herself and hastily looked away.

“Khaimov?” Captain Cervantes asked, leaning in.

“Not here,” she whispered back.

They went back under, waking that evening to a stripped out building of obvious Antediluvian make – it was the of the same brassy alloy Tratheke was made of. They were informed that the entrance to the shipyard had been reached, that they were underground and that tomorrow morning the last bit of journey to the shipyard would be taken.

They were left alone for the night, after that, and Maryam was taken aside by Captain Cervantes and Commander Tredegar – who was, she suspected, too high in rank for Cervantes to be able to refuse his curiosity.

“I have been tracking our guides with my logos for the whole trip,” Maryam said.

“So you have said,” Cervantes agreed. “And?”

“Something impossible happened,” she said. “On the second day, come that first break, some of our lictors were traded for fresh ones.”

“Not so surprising, if we have been moving through roadside forts,” Osian Tredegar noted.

“No,” she agreed. “But what did surprise me is when this morning, on the first break, I found some of the lictors that had switched were back.”

Neither of them were slow to the catch the implication.

“You are certain?” Captain Cervantes intensely asked.

Maryam cleared her throat embarrassedly.

“One of them is a woman on her monthlies, and not having a pleasant time of it,” Maryam said. “It is very distinct.”

A beat.

“We should have heard horses if any came along,” Osian Tredegar opined. “They are not quiet beasts.”

“A fourth carriage would be even louder,” Captain Cervantes muttered. “Which means those lictors were somehow at the destination before we were.”

“I think we’ve been going in circles for three days,” Maryam whispered. “None of us ever saw firmament, have we? And the current in the aether had stayed largely the same.”

“It might be we never even left Tratheke,” the captain breathed in. “We’re just under it. And all this theatre of secrecy…”

“Is to keep everyone looking out there in the valley when the Lord Rector has been building up under the capital all this time,” Commander Tredegar said, sounding reluctantly impressed. “We must be at some sort of halfway point on the way down, which he furnished with the necessities for this whole charade.”

Song, Maryam thought, ought to be proud. She had so thoroughly gotten under a king’s skin that he had fumbled his own state secret trying to get her back in the same room. No wonder Evander Palliades had not wanted to risk a Navigator going with the delegation. He must have bet that Maryam would be too green to figure out they were underground, and in his defense he’d been right.

He’d just not accounted for boredom and the shift rotations of the lictors.

“Not a word of this,” Captain Cervantes ordered them both, but her eyes were bright.

She whispered praises and something about a commendation, mood immensely lift, and why not? She had already proven her worth.

If only she could stop having that damn dream.

--

Tristan had made it through his week, so now came the prize.

Temenos didn’t make a formal announcement, the traveling men was not that sort of outfit, but the old man picked him out of the line for the Lordsport crew as one of the regular picks instead of at the end when all the ermanos got split between the crews. It was a statement, for those who cared to hear it, and it got him a few dark looks from other newcomers. Everyone liked the Lordsport runs, if you weren’t one of the drivers you could nap on the way back to the capital.

That day the old man reeking of tobacco introduced him to the guard officers and dockmasters when they reached the port, which he never had before, and though Tristan was told to keep his mouth shut he got to listen as Temenos haggled for an early slot on the list to use the lift down the cliff and then for a cursory inspection of the crates being unloaded instead of one that’d result in the true fees being paid.

The thief waited for the bargain to be struck with the dock mistress, a one-eyed woman with a saltbitten face, before asking the question itching at him.

“I don’t understand the loading fee,” Tristan said. “It’s like setting a tariff on your own exports, which sounds mad.”

Temenos spat to the side, the thick spit blackened from his latest bout of snuff.

“Minister Floros fucked all the merchant families, back when she was regent,” the old man said. “She made it mandatory to have royal licenses to deal in some goods, then bent over the Trade Assembly on the prices.”

The balding man offered an ugly grin.

“Nobles didn’t need to buy them licenses, of course,” Temenos added. “They were born with rights.”

The sneer accompanying that word would have done any soul from the Murk proud, the thief thought. Us and the rest, the old words went, but Tristan thought it truer to instead say ‘them and the rest’. Every land had their own infanzones, the men with the boots on everyone else’s fingers and the guns to make you keep your eyes on the floor.

“I thought Palliades was softer on regular folk, though,” Tristan said, putting on a puzzled frown. “At least that’s what they say.”

“Sure he is,” the old man said. “Licenses aren’t mandatory anymore and nobles have to pay for them too. But if you don’t have a license there’s a cap to how much tonnage can trade in the goods.”

Tristan’s eyes narrowed.

“But you can pay the ‘loading fees’ so the dockmasters don’t look too closely at how much we’re actually sending out,” he said.

“Clever boy,” Temenos grinned. “And that coin’s Lordsport revenue, not tariffs, so the Council of Ministers’ got no say in how it’s used.”

Evander Palliades, the thief thought, really was quite canny. Not only was he filling the Palliades treasury instead of Asphodel’s with that ploy, for all the broad application of the fees they were in practice very targeted. If he put the cap on tonnage high enough – which Tristan suspected he would – then the vast majority of merchants wouldn’t be affected by the fees and simply go back to the way things had been before Apollonia Floros.

The wealthiest magnates of the Trade Assembly though, those most dangerous to him, they’d get squeezed for coin. Yet less than his regent had squeezed them, and in a way where they could still stick it to the nobles, so they’d near thank him for the privilege of having their purse riffled through. Tristan could respect a fine racket when he saw one.

Were he a betting man, which he was, he’d bet that on the down-low their good friend Evander sold some of those magnates a license on the cheap to play off the Trade Assembly against itself. The magnates might make common front against the ministers, but at the end of the day they were still merchants competing against each other. They weren’t any better than the nobles, really, their coin just wasn’t old enough to be a title yet.

“So we pay for wool cloth, obviously,” Tristan muttered, feigning as if he had been considering that the whole time. “Marble too?”

“No, the Kassa don’t sell enough for that,” Temenos snorted. “But we have to for the fruit of the shitpits, the tonnage on that is violent low.”

Tristan blinked.

“The fruit of the what?”

“Saltpeter,” the old man said, lips twitching. “You make it by burying shit in soil with wood ash and straw mixed in. Then you leach it out after a year and you’ve got saltpeter. There’s dozens of pits for that spread around the Reeking Rows, the Kassa own a few.”

Saltpeter was used to treat breathing and wantonness as well as fertilize ground, but its most famous use was arguably that it was one of the main ingredients in blackpowder. No wonder the Lord Rector did not want too much of it leaving his borders. Temenos then frowned at him.

“And enough of this we business, boy,” the old man said. “We might be Kassa men, but we’re not Kassa. You let them trick you into thinking otherwise and they’ll work you to death without batting an eye.”

Tristan cocked his head to the side. He was under no delusion that a magnate would care a whit about those working for their profit, but this was the first time he heard Temenos hinting at a similar opinion.

“I thought you liked the Kassa,” he tried.

“I like them fine, Ferrando,” Temenos grunted. “And I’d rather cut off a hand than go over to the Anastos, don’t get me wrong. Maria Anastos is more shark than woman.”

“But,” Tristan said.

“But back when the injury fund was run with Kassa help, they skimmed off the top,” he said. “They’re not bad sorts, really, but they’ll always reach for the coin if it’s there. They don’t look out for us.”

A finger prodded against Tristan’s chest.

“We look out for us, Ferrando,” Temenos said. “That’s why we make friends with the weavers and the fullers and the warehouse hands: so when Stavros Kassa come sniffing around for corners to cut, it’s not just some of us crossing our arms.”

Chloris Kassa was the head of the Kassa family and the owner of most their properties, but she was also old and enfeebled, if still mostly witted. She had handed off much of her work to her four sons, the leader of the pack the eldest and aforementioned Stavros. The sons were not thought of nearly as well as their mother, and for good reason. Where Mistress Chloris had grown the family fortune by seizing on opportunities, they were instead intent on ‘trimming fat’.

Like the pay of their workers.

“I had no idea we had friends in the workshop,” Tristan admitted.

“Some other places, too,” Temenos vaguely said. “A traveling man’s a traveling man no matter who pays them. It’s only good sense to have a drink with the other outfits once in a while.”

The thief almost let out a whistle. The old man might be better connected than he had thought. And if he could lean on those contacts to ask around about the assassin, well, that was his job out here done. He was getting close to the end.

“You’re still a little green for that, though, so put it out of your mind,” the old man said, spitting another gob onto the pavement. “Let’s get this run done and our carts back up the cliff, we’ve had enough chitchat.”

They were done within the hour, around noon and thus early, so they stopped at one of the cheap eateries in the upper half of Lordsport before setting off. The traveling men had a deal with the owner, a meal of whatever leftovers were there for a single copper a head so long as at least ten came to eat. The Kassa, and most the men working for trading families, had such arrangements all over Tratheke and the Lordsport.

It was one of the perks of working for the magnates, something setting apart from the masses of day workers who had no name behind them.

Much as Tristan would have preferred to avoid what would come after the day’s work, he could not afford to. The ermanos were usually invited for drinks only once a week while the veterans went out to their favorite tavern, the Black Dame, every other day. Tristan being extended an invitation to accompany them on those nights was an initiation, and no matter his dislike for drink he must attend. Temenos had implied the traveling men were much better connected than he had thought, which made it all the more important to get in good with them.

The place was a dive, tucked in a corner near the border of the northwestern and southwestern wards. Half a basement, it had rickety tables and vaguely smelled of mildew but the drinks where cheap and not too watered down. Alas. A little over twenty of the Kassa traveling men and woman squeezed in, filling two thirds of the tavern. The two matronly sisters owning and tending the place traded familiar taunts with the crowd, which they nearly all knew by name.

Tristan, as the new man, was ‘volunteered’ to buy the first round of ales while Temenos presented him to the sisters. He’d already spoken to them once on his other visits, in truth, but now he was being introduced as someone instead of a filled seat. If he was to have his purse emptied, though, he would at least ask why the Black Dame’s sign would display a black bale of wheat as its mark.

It was Nikias, his former foreman, who told him.

“Sacromontan,” the man snorted. “It’s a tribute to the Awn-Dam.”

It took a moment for Tristan to follow the trail. The Awn-Dam was the Asphodelian goddess of grain, cattle and fertility. She dabbled in nature as well but had wilder rivals there. She was said to take the shape of a cattle-mother, a dam, made of wheat. An awn, Tristan had learned, was the bristly part at the end of a stalk of barley and many other grasses. Black Dame. Black Dam, hence the black wheat. It’d been wordplay.

“That’s terrible,” he groaned, to mixed cheers and jeers from the table.

The crew got easier to navigate once they were a little drunk, but Tristan noticed they were well disposed from the start. Temenos vouching for him settled the matter as far as they were concerned, and as drinks flowed and talk continued the thief could not help but noticed how the old man sat at the head of the table, enjoying subtle deference from the others like some family patriarch.

Half of them were drunk by the first hour’s turn, quaffing ale and wine like it was water, and even though he discreetly got rid of as much drink as he could Tristan was not unaffected either. It had him clenching his teeth whenever he noticed the thickness of his tongue or the way his wits slowed.

It was easy enough to make good with the crowd. Throw in a few stories from working on the docks at Sacromonte, a coterie tale about idiots knifing each other over arguing about different men with the same name, and he had them laughing loud enough to shake the shutters. Nikias, in particular, kept clapping his back. The mustachioed older man was the loudest and most boisterous of the lot, insisting he had seen potential in Ferrando from the start.

But at the turn of the second hour a wheel came off the cart.

“Enough drinking,” a skinny man called Heirax said, slamming his tankard down. “It’s not a proper initiation until we’ve taken him to the Orchard, and a man’s gotta be sober for that.”

There was no need for Tristan to ask what the Orchard was: the way Heirax grabbed his crotch and wiggled his hips was explanation enough. Taunts promptly came from the few women at the table, the loudest of them a stocky, broad-shouldered older woman named Timandra.

“Throw those girls a fish instead, at least they’ll get a meal after the useless flopping around,” she mocked.

“You confusing me with your husband, ‘Mandra?” he clapped back.

That got him a drink thrown at his head and the sisters owning the place coming down on everyone before a fight could erupt properly. Unfortunately for him, that wasn’t the end of the brothel talk. Now that Heirax had put it on the table, near half the men present were urging for it. Some even offered to pitch in together to buy him ‘one of the prettiest girls’, Tristan’s attempts to decline and get drinks instead dismissed as him being shy.

He supposed asking the working girl to make noise for the coin and let him take a nap wouldn’t be the worst way to end the evening.

Only then Nikias came back with a brace of liquor, challenging everyone to drink, and while the table cheered the mustachioed man clapped his back again.

“He’ll have forgotten in a minute, and he’ll be too drunk when he remembers,” Nikias quietly said. “You’re fine.”

Tristan shot him a wary look and prepared to lie when the older man shook his head.

“I know what you are,” Nikias said.

His eyes narrowed.

“And that is?”

“My nephew also prefers men,” Nikias told him. “Nothing wrong with that, Ferrando.”

Well. He’d still take that over the brothel visit. Tristan feigned embarrassment.

“It is true, I can’t resist chest hair and…” what do men like in men, come on think of something anything “…cocks?”

Shit. Why had that sounded like a question? Fuck, this was why he didn’t drink. Behind him he heard Fortuna biting down on her fist in an effort not to burst out in a hysterical cackle. Nikias burst out in a bawdy laugh and clapped his back again. Built like that man was Tristan was going to bruise, but after failing to come up with something better than cocks he somewhat deserved it.

Having handled that will all the deftness of a drowning bird, Tristan coasted on the distraction provided by Nikias and bought another round of liquor. The price for salvation was listening to the mustachioed man’s complaints about how the man his nephew was seeing was wrong for him, a poet layabout who thought he'd strike it rich, and some hints about Tristan coming over for dinner sometime.

The thief decided to think of it as having paid in advance for his next sins.

Once the liquor was out it was never put away, replacing ales and wines, and it sunk its claws quickly. Temenos, who had only sipped at his ale, drank the grape liquor like a fish. Against Tristan’s expectations he did not hold his drink particularly well, either, and when the old man began looking green he seized on his way out. He volunteered to walk Temenos home, leaning on the aspect of being grateful for being brought in, and even got a few approving nods for it.

He got directions from Timandra about one of the Kassa warehouses near here, as apparently Temenos never went home where his grandchildren might see him when he drank, and after she handed him the key away they went.

Within minutes they stopped for the old man to empty his stomach in an alley, which at least sobered him up some.

It was not a long walk to the warehouse, which in truth was a two stories house packed with some empty crates and rusted metal parts. There were two straw beds in the room on the second story, though, with sheets and a barrel of water from which hung a ladle and a bowl. Tristan helped Temenos into one of the beds, ignoring how the old man kept muttering and calling him Bion. He pulled the covers over him, then stepped away grimacing.

He had never liked being around drunks. Still, at least the night was done. He put the key by the barrel and went down the stairs, headed back to the street. If not for the drinking he might have considered having a look at the Nineteenth, but as things stood he-

“Tristan.”

The seriousness of the tone had him stopping cold, and he turned to find Fortuna standing at the top of the stairs. Eerie still as she looked into the room, a figure painted in blood and gold and marble.

“What is it?” he whispered.

“Something is coming,” the Lady of Long Odds said.

A carving knife was the most he could carry without suspicion: in a heartbeat, it was out and in his hand as he crept back up the stairs.

“A lemure?” he asked, coming to stand by her side.

Temenos was under the covers, snoring. The room was empty save for piled crates, the beddings and the barrel of water. Fortuna laid a hand on his arm, a false warmth.

“It’s… hungry. But it does not see you.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re mine,” the goddess said.

He frowned. What did she mean by- It was like the flicker of a flame, the way the glint reflected off copper for a heartbeat before being gone. There was nothing, and then something stood.

No part of Tristan Abrascal dared to call it a man.

It only loosely bore the shape of one. Tall, stooped, hair like seaweed matted with blood. It wore clothes, loose rags and a breastplate of iron. A helmet scarred with deep gouges. But its skin was craggy earth, the cracks spilling out wooden groans, and its bare feet melded with trailing ropes that dripped rotten blood. At the end of the ropes, being dragged was… Tristan’s eyes shied away from it. Something precious, something enviable.

The god’s breath sounded like screams, like shouts, like shrieks, and in its hand it held a curved bronze cycle.

It took a single step towards the sleeping Temenos and Tristan swallowed at the sight. Should he- the sound had the god turning towards him, quick as a snake, and he got only a glimpse of empty sockets from which dangled precious blue stones before cursing.

He pulled on his luck as hard and deep as he could, releasing it that same instant, which was the only reason he lived.

Tristan tripped backwards down the stairs, falling with a shout of pain, and heat licked at his face – slicing past his nose and into his hair. He screamed his back hit the wood, making a racket as he tumbled down the stairs, and as he hit the last step it broke under him – rotten, or just old. Shard went through his shirt and into his back. He was stuck with his legs up, like a helpless turtle, but he caught a glimpse of the god turning away. Back towards Temenos.

He moved on instinct, ripping out his shirt and scrambling up the stairs in time to see the god leaning over a stirring Temenos, hand drawing back. On instinct he threw the knife, but the moment it left his fingers he knew he’d missed. It did not spin but fly like dart, missing the god’s back entirely and instead taking an angle and hitting – oh, Manes.

It hit Temenos in the leg, right above the ankle, and the old man woke up with a shout of pain and terror. The old traveling man’s eyes widened as the sickle came down, but the barest of moments before the blade could cut through his head there was a flicker.

And the reaping god was gone, just like that.

“Temenos,” he shouted. “Are you-”

“Gods,” the white-haired man babbled, “oh, gods.”

He moved closer, wincing at the sight of the blade he’d thrown in Temenos’ leg. It was a shallow wound, at least.

“Sculler spare me,” Temenos hoarsely said. “Stavros Kassa wasn’t lying: there really is an assassin out there coming for our necks. There is no choice.”

“No choice for what?” he asked.

“Joining them,” the old man said, licking his lips. “The revolutionaries.”

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