Chapter 75

  New

  January 24

  (She pulled the dead man in the way, his flesh taking the sword blow, and ripped the corpse’s pistol free. She aimed a shot at the lictor in the doorway and - a ripple in the air , then her bones began to rattle)

  Angharad Tredegar killed the glimpse and let out a shuddering breath. The corner of her eyes stung, her veins felt like there were heated shards of metal shoved in them. They only hurt when she moved, but it was a reminder that there were only so many times she could pull on her contract before it killed her.

  Lady Petra Doukas was proving to be something of a problem.

  The priestess could only draw shallowly from the spirit she championed, having so far displayed two tricks. One of them had no effect on Angharad: the power that dazed and charmed had run afoul of the Fisher’s pride, as thick a wall as a woman might ask for. It was Lady Doukas’ second trick that she was finding it difficult to get around.

  Seven words spoken in prayer to the Odyssean and a pointed finger would lead to a ripple of power that rattled Angharad’s bones inside her body. It lasted no longer than a second and while it hurt… not insignificantly, it did not appear to do actual lasting physical damage.

  Which it hardly needed to, given that the pain and shakes nearly always toppled Angharad and if she fell to the ground the fight was lost. Without the cane, which she could not spare the time to head to her left to grab first, it was simply too difficult to get back up without first being shot.

  Lady Apollonia Floros had, seemingly, left Angharad in a room with two traitor lictors, a priestess and a pair of still-snacking devils – who did not participate, only spectating and offering the occasional comment from the sideline. Yet from the very first glimpse Angharad had discovered there was a third lictor out in the hall who would rush in should there be noise.

  So not three but four opponents, one of which could call on a spirit’s favor but had no true fighting skill besides. It should have been a grim minute’s work, and perhaps if her leg was hale and her dress strapped into place it would be. But while those two hindrances were in the way Angharad could not run and that kept getting her killed.

  The problem was simple: she could not cross the room quickly enough to close range without being noticed, and she had only one knife to throw and slay someone by surprise. This was her undoing because the lictors were skilled enough marksmen that if they were allowed to fire two shots, the second usually hit her.

  The obvious solution was, then to kill one of them right at the start by throwing the knife.

  When she had first attempted this, however, Lady Petra tagged her with the bone-rattler by the time she closed range with the second lictor. Even while on her knees Angharad had managed to kill the second traitor but found herself easy prey for the third as he rushed in. Shot in the head, right between the eyes.

  So she changed tack and began killing Petra Doukas as her opening stroke instead. It was quite easy to do so, since the priestess kept striding back and forth while paying little attention as she ranted, but nine glimpses later Angharad found herself gritting her teeth in anger as she struggled to push down on slowly rising anxiety.

  The odds were six in nine that one of the lictors in the room would land a shot if she threw the knife at Doukas. Of those six shots only three had been lethal but Angharad was not so arrogant as to believe she could fight off two skilled soldiers while on her knees and bleeding from a shot in the arm or gut. The gut wounds, she suspected, were lethal ones anyhow – just too slow a death to be seen within a glimpse.

  As for the three where she had not been shot? It was doable to avoid both bullets, if she baited the shot of the second lictor the right way. But that took fancy footwork and thus time, long enough for the third lictor to enter. Which meant when the three lictors fell upon her she had killed no one but Doukas and she was still unarmed, allowing them to make easy work of her.

  Her first instinct, she then decided must have been right: the priestess must be ignored and the bone-rattler weathered long enough to kill the remaining two lictors. After two more failed glimpses, she even refined the attempt into a more specific sequence.

  First, kill the lictor on the left with the knife – he was a better marksman. Then, bait the shot from the surprised second lictor. Suffer through the bone-rattling, careful not to leave her tongue under her teeth where she might accidentally bite it off while in the shaking throes and die in a most embarrassing manner.

  Then, even though kneeling on shaky legs, she must move on the corpse while the second lictor drew his sword. The dead body would serve as a shield for the first sword blow, and she meanwhile she must draw the dead lictor’s pistol and shoot the third lictor as he opened the door to rush in. That would leave her with only Doukas and a single man to kill, which she believed doable.

  Only Angharad instead found she could not even get as far as shooting the third lictor. Instead of blindly using her power at first opportunity, Petra Doukas was proving clever enough to wait until Angharad was aiming the pistol to hit her with the bone-rattler. Which wasted the shot and thus left her stuck with two lictors while she collapsed to her knees.

  Angharad had yet to find a way to survive that, and not for lack of trying. Worse was that she was fast approaching the end of her capacity – she had four glimpses left before the bleeding started, she figured, perhaps closer to six or seven if she cut them off early.

  Something she would not have known helped avoid burnout had Maryam not studied her contract so thoroughly, which made it all the more unacceptable that Angharad failing to use that very knowledge to keep her benefactor alive. How long had it been since she began glimpsing? It had to be minutes at least. Ten, fifteen, twenty? How long did she have under the armed traitors under Lord Arkol made it to the private archives and killed Maryam?

  Fingers were snapped before her face, no less rudely than the last time. Angharad blinked, looking up at an irritated Lady Doukas standing before her. What a waste of well-fitted neckline, she thought.

  “Pay attention, girl,” the priestess said. “Gule said he gave you some of the Ram’s blood. What did you do with it?”

  Angharad had been so lost in the glimpses she had not noticed the other woman approaching for what seemed to be another attempt at interrogation. That proximity might change things, she thought. Should she try a glimpse and…

  A knock on the door had Doukas turning away, gesturing for one of the guards to open it. A lictor entered the room, but not the same fair-haired woman Angharad’s glimpses had familiarized her with. This one she did not recognize, and he entered briskly before snapping off a salute at a surprised Petra Doukas. For all her high rank in the cult, she was not used to being saluted by lictors.

  “Lady Doukas,” the man said. “I bring word from Lord Arkol: the barricades in the galleries have been broken through and the soldiers holding them either slain or routed.”

  Angharad swallowed, appalled at the death of loyal men holding their oaths but also from a more personal fear. Those barricades had been all that stood between Maryam and the guns that Phaedros Arkol had dedicated to taking her life. She’d run out of time.

  “Glad news,” Petra Doukas said. “With this we should hold all of-”

  The messenger grimaced, but he seemed afraid to interrupt. The priestess was not so inattentive as to miss it.

  “Speak,” Lady Doukas ordered. “What happened?”

  “We have yet to seize the private archives, my lady,” he said. “There was not only one blackcloak within but a small company. After running into our advance they retreated inside and locked the door. A ram is being brought to bear, but the door is thick. It may take time.”

  Angharad blinked. A company? Song should be down in the city at the moment, settling her accounts with the Yellow Earth. And even if Tristan had found a crack to wriggle through in order to reach Maryam, which was entirely credible, then their pair alone would not be described as a ‘company’. The word ought to mean four at least, but she struggled to think of who else might have made it into the palace.

  Perhaps some bodyguards from the Watch delegation, accompanying Brigadier Chilaca as an escort? No, Angharad decided after a moment. If a brigadier were in the palace then the cult’s men on the inside would have known. There would be no keeping a visitor of such high rank quiet for long.

  “That Tianxi who keeps killing assassins was seen among them,” the traitor said. “You know, Lady Lead.”

  “Song Ren,” Lady Doukas corrected, and the lictor shrugged.

  “As you say,” he said. “Anyhow, Lord Arkol says that means it should be the Thirteenth Brigade.”

  Petra Doukas cast a look Angharad’s way at that. She got a frown back. What did the priestess know?

  “Confused?” the lady smirked. “Don’t be. Our friend Lord Menander was all too eager to reveal what brigade you belong to, Angharad Tredegar.”

  The cultists then turned back to the messenger.

  “I take it Phaedros wants to use her as leverage to dig them out?”

  “Should you be finished interrogating her,” the soldier specified.

  Lady Doukas studied her for a moment, perhaps weighing if tacit admission the interrogation was a failure was worth the achievement of helping along in digging out the other blackcloaks, but Angharad cared not for the cult’s games of clout. She straightened in her seat, one of the lictors raising his musket in alarm at the sight until he remembered she was still visibly bound.

  “How many blackcloaks?” she asked. “Describe them.”

  Petra Doukas blinked in surprise, then looked incredulous.

  “You ignore me for a quarter-hour with a dull look on your face and now you want to sing?”

  Angharad ignored her, eyes on the messenger. The man glanced at the priestess, who snorted.

  “Tell her,” she said. “It might loosen her tongue, and what would she do with the knowledge anyway?”

  The man cleared his throat.

  “The hollow witch, two Izcalli, two Lierganen, some odd-eyed Malani and Lady Lead.”

  Angharad spared half a moment approving of the acclaim Song had rightfully earned by twice saving their host’s life – and what a snappy sobriquet! – before confusion ensued. Maryam, Song and possibly Tristan? The odd-eyed Malani must be Expendable, which implied one of the Izcalli would be Tupoc and thus the second Lierganen most likely the signifier Alejandra Torrero. Yet there seemed to be a second Izcalli along instead of Bait, who was quite noticeably of Someshwari stock.

  Then again the man was calling Maryam a hollow, so he was less than reliable. And Bait seemed prone to… maneuvering his way backwards, when the situation allowed, so perhaps the rebels had not had a good look at him.

  Which still left Angharad wondering what in damnation the Fourth Brigade was doing up in the palace, much less Song. Had she drawn Evander Palliades down to the city only to then stand him up at the brothel? That would be rude of Song, Angharad chided herself. Not at all amusing, which was why her lips were twitching at the thought of getting Tupoc Xical killed fighting cultists and not the delightfully high-handed way a woman many would call a mistress was treating the king of Asphodel.

  Well, Song being Song she had likely left Palliades a polite note informing him of her absence at the brothel so at least he’d not be confused where she went.

  “There are seven of them, Tredegar,” Petra Doukas said. “They’re corpses in the making, not something worth smirking about.”

  Angharad wiped the amusement off her face. She did not bother to answer her captor, to the woman’s visible frustration.

  “And now you go silent again,” Lady Doukas bit out. “You stubborn little…”

  The priestess angrily crossed her arms.

  “Fine, take her,” she said. “I am done beating my head against the wall.”

  And just like that, the last dregs of amusement were gone.

  They intended her a hostage, likely threatening her life in exchange for opening the door, but that was of only middling import. She set it aside. What mattered was this: in a matter of moments the lictors would come to untie her so she might be moved and when they did there would be no hiding the knife in her hands.

  Angharad looked at the four lictors in the room, at the priestess eyeing her with open dislike, and swallowed. She had not been able to win that fight when they were fewer, one outside the room and she had the element of surprise. Now they were all looking at her, alert and wary. Would she even be able to cut all the way through the rope without them noticing? She did not like her odds.

  The messenger took a single step towards her, and in that small movement Angharad saw the beginning of her loss.

  It was over, she had taken too long. She had… The Pereduri swallowed spit. She could see how it would go, now. Either she died here, trying to get out, or she was brought as a hostage and that was just a slower death. Whether or not the Thirteenth bargained with Phaedros Arkol, the man would kill them all. He was either the Ecclesiast or deep in the leading cultist’s confidence, and the cult was sure to take any excuse to kill them.

  They would not tolerate blackcloaks underhand when their spirit was crawling out of its ancient prison, and this time Apollonia Floros was not there to make them behave.

  “Swords out,” Lady Doukas told the advancing lictors. “Crippled or not, rumor has her a fine killer.”

  They were all dead, Angharad thought. Her, the Thirteenth, Uncle Osian.

  And, she realized in a moment that was like a shard of ice stabbing her heart, it was all because of her. Because Angharad Tredegar was the reason any of them were on this misbegotten island in the first place, wasn’t she? Her uncle had told her: the only reason the Thirteenth had been sent to Asphodel, and sent there so absurdly early in the year, was because she had killed Augusto Cerdan.

  That had barred them from Sacromonte, and the Riven Coast contracts as well. To spare her being assassinated, her uncle had once more put his career on the line by hurrying her to the Asphodel test – and in the process Angharad’s righteous anger on the Dominion had dragged the rest of the Thirteenth into the madness now seizing Tratheke. Song, Tristan, Maryam, Osian.

  Without her none of them would be here today. None of them would be in the middle of this fucking mad coup that was going to kill them all.

  And Osian, oh her kinsman she had killed not once but half a dozen times. First when she confessed to her treachery on Tolomontera, then again on Asphodel when she went behind the delegation’s back to find the infernal forge and again when she had him steal the forge on her behalf and again when he handed it to an agent of the Lefthand House last night so it could be smuggled to the Lordsport so she might kill him again by having him charter the merchant vessel called the Golden Tide to carry it to the nearby isle of Imbrada, where he owned a warehouse.

  And, Sleeping God forgive her, all this for what? She was no closer to getting her father out of Tintavel and a bleak laugh escaped from her throat as she realized all this maneuvering to get the infernal forge might well have come to nothing anyway. The Golden Tide had meant to leave with the midnight tide, so it would have been in the Lordsport when the rebel flotilla attacked. It was entirely possible that the ship and the forge with it had sunk to the bottom of the Trebian Sea, which was so fitting an end to this entire madness that she wanted to weep.

  If not weep, then at least scream. The Thirteenth was going to die unless she did something about it. Song, Maryam, Tristan – drowned in lead and smoke, fed to a jeering Hated One. Her fingers clenched. But what could she do? She had glimpsed the skirmish again and again only to find fresh failures. Frustration mounted. If not for her leg, for the mara’s lingering scars on her, she could have…

  No, Angharad admitted to herself. Even in perfect health, this might have been too much for her. It was one thing to face down a pack of disorganized raiders on the Dominion, another entirely to face hardened soldiers like the traitor lictors who bore modern arms and armor. And they had a priestess with them, one who could draw on her patron at least one dangerous trick.

  She tried in her mind to win the same skirmish she had been fighting for what felt like hours, but even crossing the room taking half as long she found the odds remained slim. Little cover, muskets in the hands of men who know how to use them, that despicable bone-rattler.

  A blade was not enough. Angharad had lost not because she had too feeble a sword arm but because there were situations that could not be won by the sword. That was why the Lefthand House had hooks in her, why she was dragging almost every soul who had shown her kindness since she left the Dominion to their death.

  It was the silence that told her what was happening.

  Angharad looked at the lictors advancing towards her blade in hand, at the smirking Petra Doukas, but she was not facing that frozen sight. She was looking down at it. Angharad Tredegar stood on stony shores again, beholding the fate her hands had wrought: a prisoner soon to die, pulling the undeserving with her into the deeps. That was the end of the road she had chosen to walk, the culmination of all her follies.

  The Fisher’s line struck at the world and it rippled, the shadowy waters it was writ upon rippling as his hook sunk beneath the surface.

  Angharad was not besides the spirit, this time. The line was stretched above her head, and though her trembling limbs dared not turn to look behind she did not need to – not when a breath washed against her back like warm, poisonous wind. Angharad stood before and beneath the Fisher, watching a stolen moment painted on water. He said nothing.

  He was the most patient of monsters.

  “You must think me a fool,” Angharad said. “I left the Dominion strutting arrogantly, convinced I had learned my lesson. That I had found the bridge between need and honor, that I could walk the line between both.”

  Her shoes crinkled against the gray stones of this bleak shore.

  “But I had been fooled,” she said.

  Song had fooled her, and Ferranda as well. They had fooled her because Angharad had… made a story of her time on the Dominion, in her own mind, and their roles had not been to fool her so she never even cared to consider they might have.

  “And I followed this new compass into fresh follies, congratulating myself on my cleverness all the while. Dancing on a meaningless line, picking up fresh strings to be bound by as if they were ribbons for my hair.”

  Her fists clenched.

  “I told myself it was all right because I was following the rules,” Angharad whispered. “The bounds of honor. And maybe if I had gotten away with it, I might have kept believing that, but I didn’t – and now I look at what I left behind and what I see is… crooked. Unworthy.”

  “Your work is crooked, Angharad Tredegar, because your hand is crooked.”

  The Fisher’s voice was not a voice: it was the last, desperate scream of a man before they went under the tide, it was the rasp of fire against metal as the last of the lantern oil went.

  “I did not break my word,” she insisted.

  “Oaths,” the Fisher said, “are ballast. Men stack them and pray it will right the ship of their lives, keeping them from tipping into the black waters.”

  He laughed.

  “It does not,” he said. “No amount of ballast can steady a man’s nature.”

  Angharad breathed out. Why had she expected anything more out of the spirit? It was not a man, with a man’s thoughts and notions. The Fisher did not change or waver or doubt. He would be the Fisher so long as he was anything at all. And that… constancy, it felt like a thorn in her throat now. As much from envy as from anger, for she was no spirit – she did not get to be uncompromising, that was not the world she lived in.

  “Shall I throw honor to the wind, then?” she bit out angrily. “Break every oath I ever swore, cut down all who displease me and take whatever I want from whoever I want? Is that your advice, oh great Fisher?”

  The spirit considered her words.

  “You cannot,” he said. “Your hand is crooked.”

  “What does that even mean?” she snarled. “Crooked! What nonsense you-”

  The sound she heard then, there was nothing else in the world like it: the sound bones made when teeth cracked them, chewing into flesh. She could almost see it – the large hand holding up one of those wriggling… things he put on his hook, the way those great teeth would go through blood and bone as if it were barely there.

  The Fisher chewed and swallowed, swallowed something she did not dare consider even in the depths of her own soul, and Angharad fell to her knees on the rocks. She threw up, violently convulsing, as much from dread as disgust. He ate, he ate… Angharad’s mouth tasted like bile and fear, the gray pebbles of the beach broke her skin as she stayed on her hands and knees panting. Blood cold as seawater.

  Silence imparted the lesson: one did not raise their voice to the Fisher.

  “It means,” the old monster said, “that there is no room for victory in Angharad Tredegar because she filled herself to the brim with ballast. Buried herself in it like a cairn.”

  A great head shook.

  “And what useless stone it is,” the Fisher said.

  Angharad stayed there in the dark, by the water, and the words fell against her back like a lash.

  “You swear to the Watch and forsake it.”

  Her oaths when sworn in as an officer in black, a student of ruinous Scholomance. Cast aside to buy a path to her father, for all that she hid from that truth behind a shoddy palisade of details.

  “You swear yourself to your kin and forsake him.”

  Everything for her blood, to get Father out of Tintavel – even consign Uncle Osian to a fate as horrid, spent until there was nothing left to spend. Love a hanging rope tightened by her own hand. Was he not kin as well, her uncle? No less so than Gwydion Tredegar.

  “You swear yourself to a warband and forsake them.”

  The Thirteenth, whom she had left in anger and returned to only carrying poisoned gifts. Whose days she was willing to darken for the sake of her own desires.

  “You swear yourself to necessity and forsake it for principle,” the Fisher scorned, “then you swear to principle and forsake it for necessity.”

  Whatever it took, she had sworn in her grief when she could still smell the fire that had devoured her life. Honor, she had sworn to every time she risked her life for strangers. For the undeserving, for the causes of others. Which was it? Which oath mattered?

  “Your hand is crooked,” the old monster said, certitude ironclad. “It is a maker of crooked works.”

  And why should he not be certain? He dwelled within her, had seen the work of her hands. He was not wrong to call it thus.

  “What do you want from me?” she croaked out.

  “Nothing,” the Fisher said.

  The line pulled taut, ahead of her.

  “You are here to receive your due.”

  And Angharad screamed.

  Screamed as something deep within her leg ripped it up from the inside, scraped it raw. The work of moments and though she wept like a child even after it ended when she touched her leg there was not a drop of blood or even a deformation. But she knew, oh, somehow she knew what the Fisher had done. Bone had become coral.

  “Patience,” the Fisher said, “is not forbearance. I have no use for crooked things.”

  A dead, headless thing was tossed into the great basket at his side, the one full of wriggling wretches, and implication slithered through her veins like a current of ice. Did he mean that all those things were… Were they all contractors that had disappointed the Fisher so he made them into – oh, Sleeping God ward her from this evil she had invited into herself.

  “You changed them,” she heaved out. “The bones of my leg.”

  “I began the change,” the Fisher said. “It is not yet settled. Overcome or perish, Angharad Tredegar.”

  “Overcome what?” she screamed.

  “That which malforms your nature,” the spirit said.

  A great hand seized her, fingers gripping the back of her dress and lifting her almost delicately. If it were a tale, Angharad thought, this would be a test. There would be a boon for her, a lesson to learn. But this was not a story. She had let the monster in herself, bound her soul to his power.

  Her boon would be for the Fisher not to make her into one of those things.

  “Recognize what rules you, daughter of Gwydion,” the Fisher said. “And when you have, answer this true: are you the horse or the rider?”

  And he tossed her into the dark waters, like a catch not worth keeping.

  Angharad did not fight the dark. She let herself sink. She could not even tell if her eyes were closed or open, only that the coolness of the depths was swallowing her whole and within that nothing the only thing that remained was her. She bore nothing but what she had brought in here with her.

  Smoke and screams on the wind. The red ruin of Isabel’s face. Steel and scorn piercing Augusto’s throat. The Thirteenth in that cramped cottage, walls and knives turning on each other. Running away from Imani’s wicked bargain into the layer. Ferranda stiffly parting ways. Tasting her old life at the banquet only to find it sour on the tongue, her uncle’s crushing kindness, Maryam’s rough regard and Song’s atrociously unearned kindness.

  Down here there was no one but her, no one to pretend for, so Angharad admitted to the truth: she was running. She had been ever since her world ended. And the answer demanded of her, the one she found was so awful and uncomplicated that she knew it must be true.

  Fear. Angharad Tredegar was ruled by fear.

  She feared being the kind of woman who would let something like Isabel’s death pass. She feared that Song was still fooling her, that Tristan would be all smiles even while cutting her throat. She feared that there would never truly be an accord between herself and Maryam. She feared that for all her troubles she hadn’t really learned a fucking thing.

  She feared being so ungrateful a daughter she would let her father remain in Tintavel. She feared being so terrible a niece she would destroy her uncle for a dim chance at freeing her father. She feared it might be too late to ever be free of the Lefthand House, she feared what it said of her that she would take refuge in the Watch and then betray it.

  Fear, fear, fear at every turn. Fear was the wind in her sail, the hand on the wheel, her captain in all but name. And now all those precise compromises had come home to roost. She hadn’t tried to gain anything, Angharad realized, she’d tried to lose nothing. A fool’s errand: you always lost something, every mirror-dancer knew that. You had to kill who you’d been to become who you were.

  Angharad’s eyes fluttered open, a screaming ripping itself free of her throat as seawater poured in and smothered it. She was drowning, alone in the depths. The mirror always won, eventually. She should not have forgot.

  She was done, she thought. It was finished, and there was a relief in that. In no longer stumbling from one ruinous failure to the next. And in that moment where there was nothing left to lose, at last Angharad found herself free of fear. At last she saw without its scales over her eyes.

  And she had brought more than just regrets down here with her, for all her follies.

  It’s a choice, to keep count, Song whispered into her ear.

  Why should you get anything for air? Maryam demanded.

  Uncertainty is surrender, the Marshal chided her.

  And beyond them all, an implacable question.

  Are you the horse or the rider?

  The horse, Angharad thought. She was nothing but a vessel for fear.

  But what of it?

  If she did not like who she was, must she then remain so? She would kill that girl and become one who suited her better. And to think she had run all the way to Asphodel, when she’d been given the answer months ago in Tolomontera. Why do we study in the shadow of evil, she’d asked her professor. Why put our lives on the line? He’d spoken then of the voice of doubt, of hesitation. Fear in reason’s cloak.

  And he had told her what was to be done with it.

  Kill that voice, Tenoch Sasan said, smiling with stained teeth.

  So she did.

  The water broke and she gasped as she surfaced, sitting in her seat as the lictors advanced on her. Angharad coughed, spitting out seawater, and the soldiers paused as one muttered a faint what the fuck. She knew what she needed to do. She’d known the whole time but she had shied away because it would mean time, it would mean sacrifice, it would mean waiting to get what she wanted. So she had sought shortcuts, another damned bargain like she had struck with the Fisher. No more.

  She did not need the Lefthand House’s help to get into Tintavel. She’d make her own way there and out, then pay the price for it like she had been meant to from the start. To dedicate yourself to ruin and think to walk away with clean hands was the height of arrogance. No, Angharad would pay her dues with what she had, not the lives of others, and no longer let fear force ugly compromises on her.

  She would do what she thought right, and find honor in that.

  Her gaze rose from the ground, beholding the halted lictors, and she glimpsed.

  (“Honored elders,” she began, turning to the devils.

  The pair promptly burst out laughing. She persevered, ignoring both mockery and whatever words Doukas was speaking.

  “I believe Lord Phaedros Arkol to be the Ecclesiast,” Angharad told the devils. “I request your help to slay him.”

  “Child, we know,” Lord Locke chuckled. “But he’s sure to have a trick or two tucked away for a rainy day, so we’ll let your little friends use them up. Darling?”

  Lady Keys hummed, tipping the serving plate in her hands so the last morsels fell off, then casually tossed the bronze disk at Angharad with enough strength to)

  She winced as she was snapped out of the glimpse. Again.

  (“Honored elders,” she said through the laughter. “What can I offer you for your help against the cult?”

  The devils eyed her with amusement.

  “Going fishing, Tredegar?” Lady Keys drawled. “How very Pereduri of you.”

  Lord Locke then casually picked up a table and then brutally smashed it onto his head, shattering it in a show of senseless violence that-)

  Startled her out of the glimpse. Why did they keep acting so strangely? They had not in the glimpses before. But then she had never asked anything of them in those, had she? She plunged back.

  (“Can you tell I am using my contract?” she politely asked.

  “Please, child,” Lady Keys said, pushing up her glasses. “We were cast by the hand of the greatest scholar to ever exist.”

  “Well shy of concurrent actualization, we are, but we can tell when we are being conjectured,” Lord Locke told her affably. “’tis very rude of you, my dear.”

  Angharad cleared her throat.

  “I apologize,” she said. “How might approach you without offence?”

  “What in the Sickle is going on here?” Petra Doukas demanded.

  “Do not speak down your betters,” Lady Keys said, meeting Angharad’s eyes.

  “Shoot them.”)

  Angharad killed the glimpse. That last sentence by Lady Keys had been as much for her as it was for Lady Doukas. The lictors, satisfied she was no longer throwing up seawater, were mere feet away now. Again. And she must make it count, she could feel she was but a hair’s breadth away from burning out.

  (“This is my fourth time attempting this conversation,” Angharad announced.

  The devils turned to her without a word, and there was no laughter.

  “I would offer you the location of an infernal forge in exchange for your help,” she said.

  A heartbeat passed, the devils in the guise of nobles trading a look.

  “Eh,” Lord Loke shrugged.)

  Angharad breathed out. What? She had been so certain they would want the forge. Why would they not – no, no, it was not the bribe. It was the offer. The devil had looked bored. Tristan had said they spared him because they found him amusing, and both Maryam and Song had spoken of the petty games they had played when approaching them.

  Her eyes slid off the lictors and onto the devils, who were finishing up the last of their plates. They smirked at her, puffing up at the attention, and Angharad knew exactly what she was looking at: what she had thought the Fisher to be. This pair, they were the spirits in a hundred ancient Pereduri tales. The dangerous, capricious monsters that played by the old rules even when it ran against them. And not by nature but by choice, because that was who they wanted to be.

  So Angharad needed no more glimpses, no more tricks. She just needed to play her role in the tale.

  “This is my fifth time attempting this conversation,” she said.

  The devils turned towards her, eyes unblinking.

  “Honored elders, in exchange for the secret of an infernal forge’s location I ask of you three boons.”

  Sleeping God, but they almost leaned in at her words – like hounds savoring a scent.

  “What do you think-”

  Neither she nor the devils paid Petra Doukas any attention.

  “You reek of tricks,” Lord Locke happily said.

  Angharad offered a bright, pleasant smile.

  “What need you fear them, if you are cleverer than I?”

  Neither of their faces so much as twitched, but Angharad could swear she was hearing the clicking of mandibles.

  “Speak your boons,” Lady Keys said.

  And now she must walk the rope. If she demanded too much they would refuse, but it was worse than that: too much cleverness and they would bore of her, too little and they would rip out her throat.

  “I want you to break the siege on the blackcloaks commanded by Song Ren,” she said.

  “Enough,” Lady Petra hissed. “If you think I’ll-”

  A heartbeat later Angharad heard the sound of a throat being crushed followed by swords being drawn. She did not look away from Lady Keys: if she did, if she flinched, they would grow bored. Kill the voice.

  “I want you,” she said, “to tell me of any secret way you know into Tintavel.”

  A wet crunch as someone’s head was caved, a musket was fired. Shouts, someone running away.

  “Oh, that’s an old one,” Lady Keys muttered, smacking her lips as if enjoying fine wine. “My dear, you are a classic. Your last?”

  Angharad leaned forward.

  “I want you to refrain from killing any member of the Watch for an hour,” she asked, not daring to ask for any longer.

  Dawn would have been traditional, but from the way Lady Keys tittered unhappily she could tell it had been the right choice. The devil had been looking forward to slaying her the moment Angharad told her where the forge was, speaking the secret bargained for to her corpse. Would they have killed the Thirteenth after freeing them from the siege?

  That might have gone either way, she guessed, depending on the mood of those old monsters.

  “You bargain well, daughter of Peredur,” Lady Keys said. “Darling, cease disciplining the children would you? You’ll miss the best part.”

  And finally Angharad risked a glance at the rest of the room, finding half a charnel yard. Petra Doukas’ head hung off the rest of her body like a ball at the end of a string, while one lictor’s skull was splattered on the wall and another had seemingly been struck with his own ripped arm. Only two of them remained, one raising a trembling sword while the other was being held up by the throat by Lord Locke, whose doublet was slightly scuffed at the wrists.

  The devil put down the fair-haired woman, dusted off her shoulder and clapped it.

  “And now don’t you do it again,” he lectured, wagging his finger.

  He then sauntered away from the trembling lictors, joining his wife as the two of them stood before her. Grinning too widely for the shells they wore.

  “Your terms are accepted, Angharad Tredegar,” Lord Locke said.

  “Your payment, now,” Lady Keys demanded.

  “The infernal forge is on a ship called the Golden Tide, which should be docked at the Lordsport,” she said.

  “Huh,” Lord Locke said frowning at her a moment before sliding a glance at his wife. “Direct statement, that, no wiggle room. There really was one.”

  “Life imitating art, I suppose,” Lady Keys mused.

  They both sounded rather pleased beneath that posturing, Angharad thought, and though she found it hard to get a read on why she could not help but feel it was not truly getting their hands on an infernal forge that stirred their anticipation.

  “Well, time to get moving if we do not want to break terms,” Lord Locke said. “Those rooklings won’t deliver themselves.”

  He paused.

  “You will have your secret when we have our forge,” he told her.

  Angharad inclined her head. A fair enough clause.

  “And speaking of terms,” Lady Keys said, grinning wide enough another grin could be seen inside it. “How careless of you, Lady Tredegar, not to bargain for your own release. Tut tut.”

  Angharad carefully mastered her reaction, which only seemed to please them further. Lord Locke gallantly offered his hellish wife his arm, which she took, and they strolled out of the room. The devils paused by the frozen lictors, also gracing them with a grin.

  “We’ve nothing more to do with her now,” Lady Keys said. “Do as you will.”

  “Try to have fun!” Lord Locke called out.

  And out they went through the door, not looking back.

  It took a few heartbeats for the lictors to gather themselves and that was long enough for Angharad to cut herself free of the rope. The fair-haired one turned to her first, and for that she died first: she threw the well-balanced knife as she had found best worked through the glimpses, grip slightly loose and wrist angled.

  It hit the lictor’s cheek, not a lethal wound but one that had the other woman dropping with a scream.

  It would have taken six strides to reach the other lictor, but there was no need for Angharad to cross the room: the man had emptied his musket at Lord Locke and not reloaded, so with his blade high he charged her. Angharad limped to the left, grabbing her cane, and sized him up. A tall and muscled sort this traitor was, in lictor’s ceremonial armor: a steel breastplate over a padded red coat, collared in silk, and both his greaves and helm bearing a heraldic owl.

  Unlike the usual lictor armor, there was no mail under the silk collar.

  Even so, she thought, he would have been a dangerous foe had the lingering fear of the devils not made him charge at her like an angry bull. Angharad waited until he was halfway through a stride, then whipped out her cane. The lictor brought up his sword but with one foot in the air he had no strength to his stance – she burst past his guard, even if it cut into the wood of her cane, and landed a full blow onto the junction between the front and side of his throat.

  The lictor dropped, clutching at his crushed windpipe as he began choking to death, and Angharad kept moving.

  The wounded lictor was back on her feet, a curtain of blood dripping down her chin, and she had her sword up. But there was fear in those eyes, the mirror-dancer saw. And fear blinded you. Angharad calmly closed the distance, then feinted bursting forward – the lictor drew backwards, sparing Angharad long enough to bend down to one of the corpses and draw his pistol.

  “Wait,” the lictor hastily said as Angharad brought up the gun, “I-”

  Angharad was no markswoman, so she shot her in the center of mass. The lictor dropped with a shout, proving impressively hardy in not dying, so the Pereduri peeled open the corpse’s fingers to take the sword in them. She rolled her wrist once, testing the weight, and found it a little light but of decent make. It was a backsword, single-edged and shorter than her saber, but the guard was similar to her preference and the point had been sharpened for killing.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  It would do.

  “No, please, I-”

  She pierced the traitor’s throat and ripped out the point, barely sparing her a glance. Cleaning the reddened steel on the gurgling corpse’s uniform, Angharad then limped to one of the chairs and saw to her dress. The outer layer she tied to the duelist’s strap, fastening it close, and then settled the layers below into the fitted hooks that would pull them up to the bottom of her knee. There, she was no more able to run than before but she would at least be able to use footwork more complicated than ‘moving in a direction’.

  Angharad rose, smoothing down her dress, and breathed out before going back for the sheath to match her blade and belting it to her side. Now she had her cane, a sword and a purpose: first she must find the Thirteenth, then together they could slay the Ecclesiast. After the dust settled, she could kill that wretched liar Imani Langa and report her full dealings to the Watch.

  No more hiding, no more truths so precise they might as well be a lie.

  Angharad walked out of the room made graveyard, hesitating at the sight of the empty corridor around her. She must not be in one of the guest wings of the palace, for there was not a decoration in sight. Had they held her in some glorified stockroom? After hesitating a moment, she took a right. The hallway stretched on for longer that way so it might lead to somewhere recognizable.

  A minute’s worth of limping rightward was interrupted by a simple sight: at the end of the hall, facing her, two souls turned the corner.

  A pair of fair-haired nobles, young and richly dressed though at their side they bore rapiers and hunting pistols. That they were twins was obvious, for they shared the same pinched faces and gray eyes despite one being a man and the other a woman. And though Angharad had never learned their names, their faces had been seared into her memory.

  How was she to forget the features of the same Iphine siblings who had named her a liar and a coward before half a hundred noble guests?

  “My, as I live and breathe,” the lordling exclaimed, offering her an empty smile. “Angharad Tredegar, is that you?”

  “Why, brother, I believe it is,” his sister happily replied.

  They eyed her with wolf’s eyes, and Angharad knew why neither felt so much as a speck of fear at the sight of her. It was not her humiliation at their hands, or the blood splattering her face and hands. It was for the same reason neither of their hands dipped towards their blades, instead landing on the ornate grips of their pistols: she was a woman using a cane to walk, halfway down a bare stone hallway without so much as speck of cover.

  They were too far for her to reach them before they fired and she was too far to flee back the way she’d come before they pulled the trigger.

  And maybe if Angharad still had glimpses left in her she could have finessed her way through it, but she had burnt that wick down to the very end. Using her contract again would kill her surely as a bullet and a great deal more painfully besides. The blonde lordling drew first, his sister following suit a heartbeat later, and there was much self-satisfied chortling.

  “Did fear melt your tongue, Malani?” he asked. “I can hardly blame you.”

  “Stop gloating,” his sister said, frowning. “We must decide who gets the kill. It’ll not be believed we both fought her.”

  Oh, the indignity. The shame.

  A bitter laugh ripped its way out of Angharad’s throat, for in the span of a minute she had gone from fancying herself as the cunning heroine in some old Pereduri tale to being… spoils of war, a boast being squabbled over by feckless liars both laying claim to the deed of her death before they could even be bothered to go through with it.

  And the worst part was that she could not even call them fools for it, for what could she do? She stood there, frozen, and no matter where her mind’s eye was cast she found only death. If she ran to them, from them. If she stood, if she so much as bared her sword. She was good, and fast, but no faster than a bullet. Without her contract, without the Fisher’s sagacity, she was just a woman with a sword.

  The old spirit did not so much as stir within her at the thought of his name. Her trial was not yet ended.

  It felt unfair, to be unmade not by some costly mistake or heavy oath or even wicked treachery but the simple happenstance of walking down a hall with no cover when two enemies with pistols ran into her. Nothing grand or meaningful, just… bad luck.

  The Marshal had been right, she thought. How often had Marshal de la Tavarin chided her with word and eye, after her party triumphed against lemures because she had glimpsed ahead? Angharad had sought perfect victories, clean-cut triumphs, and never stopped to consider what the bloody games of the Acallar were for.

  They were not a competition, despite the rewards, but a whetstone. They were dangers for young Skiritai to sharpen themselves against, so out there in the world they might know how to face unexpected foes. Only Angharad had instead fought them expected, and so never learned the skills the Marshal was truly teaching them.

  The dark-skinned noble watched the siblings down the hall, watched how they kept an eye on her and their pistols never wavered even as they squabbled over the prospect of her corpse. Would she know how to face two pistols in an empty hall, if she had fought the Acallar how it was meant to be fought? Perhaps not. Perhaps even Marshal de la Tavarin would have died here, for he too walked with a-

  A cane. That old man in his absurd hat, he fought leaning on his lionhead cane. And Angharad had watched him kill a towering giant with nothing but skill and a single shot. And here she was, facing a pair of sneering vultures too sloppy to pull the trigger before splitting up the spoils, and calling it the same.

  Oh, the indignity. The shame. For not having listened to her teacher when he told them uncertainty was surrender. That a Militant did not look for a path to victory but began with the death of their opponent and traced it back to where they stood. Her mindset, Angharad thought, was one of defeat. She shook her head.

  She did not like the girl she was being right now, so Angharad Tredegar killed her and became another.

  “What a slow learner I am,” she murmured. “My apologies, Your Grace.”

  “Talking to yourself, I see. Have you gone mad?”

  Angharad turned her stare on the girl mocking her, on the pair of them and their pistols. She looked at two corpses, fixed them in her mind’s eye, and walked all the way back to herself.

  Nine strides.

  “You have called me a coward and a liar,” she said. “I will have you answer for that.”

  The lordling snorted, wiggling his pistol.

  “Bold talk to offer a man who holds your death.”

  “No,” Angharad replied. “What you hold, Iphine, is one shot and the prayer it will be enough. For if it is not, you will surely die.”

  The fair-haired man paled, either in fear or anger. Hesitation was surrender, so Angharad took a step.

  “Brother-”

  The muzzle of the nobleman’s firearm followed her and Angharad understood it then, what the Marshal had done. A pistol was being pointed at her and all warriors were taught that meant harm, death. But did a pistol not need to be braced, to be aimed? Must the fingers not twitch, was there not a span between the trigger being pulled and the powder catching, the bullet being spat out? She had feared death not because of what her enemy could truly do but because she had embraced defeat.

  The Iphine lordling pulled the trigger, but he had told her he would before the thought even entered his mouth. He’d shifted his footing, braced his wrist.

  And when he shot, Angharad was not where he aimed.

  A step forward and to the left, leaning on her cane as she walked to their end of the hall. Powder billowed and wind passed by her cheek, rustling her braids. Another step forward. Angharad watched as fear seeped into the woman’s frame, how those gray eyes widened and she exhaled in disbelief. How she raised her hand hastily, how panic guided her aim when she remembered the way her brother’s shot had missed. How she pulled to the left, to catch Angharad when she stepped to the side.

  Click. Roaring thunder, the bullet flying through the air where Angharad was not: why should she attempt to dodge what was not aimed at her but at where she might be? The lead went wide as she took another step forward.

  “Fuck,” the lordling choked out.

  He fumbled for the powder horn, fingers panicked. Angharad eyed him with contempt as she took another step forward, drawing her blade. Song would not have waited until someone else shot to begin reloading and she would already have cleared the barrel by now. Amateur.

  “Iphine,” his sister shouted, drawing her rapier. “Iphine and the Horns!”

  She rushed forward, eyes wide, and Angharad watched as the point of that same too-thin blade was brought up – not for a simple lunge, the mirror-dancer clinically noted, but a rushing arrow. The backfoot was positioned to give the first push, but the drive would come from the front leg’s push. Betting it all on strength and speed, gathered behind a lethal point.

  If you let it gather, anyway.

  Angharad sharply twisted her wrist, seizing the opponent’s blade from below and twisting it. A backsword to match hers would have weathered it, perhaps even taken her in the riposte. But the Iphine noblewoman used a lightened rapier to avoid building up muscle, as Angharad had first observed that night at the manor. The rapier was snapped clean out of her grip, falling, and while she let out a shout of dismay Angharad finished her step forward while sweeping her arm.

  A smooth, firm stroke cut right through the throat and that was the end of her.

  Wet gurgles as she fell, clutching at the wound with disbelieving eyes. Angharad took another step forward. Two strides left out of nine.

  The last of the Iphine twins dropped his pistol at the sight of her reddened blade, snarling, and reached for his rapier. Angharad flicked her backsword at him, stepping forward, and he hastily drew back while the mirror-dancer smoothly transitioned into a rushing arrow. Point up, back foot pushing as the lordling brought up his blade and Angharad’s front leg stomped down to drive her forward and she cleanly drove her saber’s point through his heart in her ninth and last stride.

  He gasped wetly, grip loosening, and she ripped free her blade. The second of the Iphine twins dropped to the ground and she snapped her wrist to flick the blood off her steel, leaning on her cane with pressed lips – that last pushed had pulled painfully on her leg, and she could do nothing but stand there and take the pain. It passed, as did the nobleman.

  Sheathing her sword, Angharad Tredegar spared a glance for the two corpses it had taken her nine strides to reach. Two was not much of a graveyard, but there was yet room in her shadow. She began to limp away, leaning on the cane, but her steps stuttered as a thought occurred to her too late.

  “Ah,” Angharad muttered in mild embarrassment, looking back. “I left no one to ask for directions.”

  She had absolutely no idea where in the palace she was. Was she going to have to wander around blindly? At the pace she moved that would-

  A man was standing by her, looking puzzled. No, not a man. For though he had a man’s shape, messy black hair and old-fashioned armor of bronze, the truth of him peeked through the details: a crown in flowery gold and purple and eyes of impossibly burning blue. A spirit, and one whose likeness Angharad had much heard of.

  “Lord Oduromai,” she politely greeted, inclining her head.

  “You,” the spirit frowned. “What did you do, to become a greater beacon than prayer?”

  But before she could answer, the spirit shook his head.

  “No matter,” Oduromai said. “More of me came through for it. Follow, heroine. Fate beckons and time runs short.”

  He walked away without waiting for her answer. Angharad stared at his back moment, then sighed. Well, she had been looking for directions.

  Close enough.

  “It would not do to be late,” Angharad conceded, and began limping after the spirit.

  ///

  Chapter 76

  New

  Just now

  First, Song saw to it that they could hold.

  Tactically speaking, this was not overly difficult. Though the Odyssean threw host-corpses down the lift shaft regularly, most of them broke their limbs in the fall and thus she only need leave Tupoc and Expendable to put them down. Spears made easy work of the dead things, enough damage severing the threads of blood-red divinity moving the corpses, but she knew better than to think this state of affairs anything other than temporary.

  For now the Hated One threw only half-hearted assaults their way, one or two at a time, but the archives upstairs were a cacophonous orgy of destruction. The Hated One was ripping out the seal on his prison and would turn his full attention on them when he finished. She spared a moment of deep dismay at the thought of so many rare books being so callously destroyed, lore perhaps forever lost to the murderous thing’s tantrum. A petty evil compared to the rest of the night’s work, but an evil nonetheless.

  A thought to deplore later, she chided herself.

  “How long before it gets out?” Song asked.

  Maryam Khaimov cocked her head and hummed, pondering her answer. Song’s friend had long straddled the line between pale and sickly, but now she had fallen firmly on the latter side: she looked feverish, her blue eyes rimmed in red by exhaustion and the ailment of Gloam-work. And though Song would yet describe both eyes as blue, the left one had gone cloudy and so light it was nearly gray. Between that and the traces of spew on Maryam’s collar and chest there was no hiding something in her ritual had gone terribly wrong.

  And yet she seemed Maryam still, entirely herself, save for the… addition.

  “It’s nearly there,” the spirit said, head rising out of the signifier’s shoulder to speak. “I can taste it in the aether – the veins of red became roots and now they are cracking the stone.”

  The spirit was not much changed from when she had saved Song from her would-be killers. Still close as a sister in looks to Maryam, but now there was a… vitality to her that had once been absent. Even knowing her intangible, Song would think that flush true and the way she breathed necessary. Perhaps both were. She knew little of the rules regarding such existences. Song cleared her throat.

  “Captain Song Ren,” she introduced herself.

  The spirit eyed her like she was an idiot.

  “We’ve met.”

  Maryam sighed.

  “She goes by Hooks,” Maryam provided.

  “For now,” Hooks added. “Let us dispense with small talk, Ren. The god is about ten…”

  “Five,” Maryam cut in.

  “Five to ten minutes away from getting out,” Hooks smoothly compromised. “If we were still up there serving as thorn in its thumb it’d take longer, but without us in the way it’s squeezing itself out of the layer like jelly pushed through a hole.”

  “Now there’s an image,” Tupoc contributed from a distance.

  By common and unspoken accord, all three ignored him.

  “Then we plan for five,” Song said. “We’ll need to-”

  The door clapped thunderously, something solid smashing into it, and Song had to push down a flinch. It had taken mere minutes for the rebels to get a solid enough bench to begin hammering at the door, which while locked and barred was not meant to resist such pummeling indefinitely. Cressida was pressing down on it from their side, but there was only so much that would accomplish.

  A flicker of movement stole another sentence’s start out of her mouth, a steel bar sliding through the gap between the door and the wall.

  “Izel,” Tristan said.

  “I see it,” the tinker replied.

  With admirable ease they moved: the thief caught the bar’s tip between tongs, then the larger Izcalli lined up a hammer blow and smashed the steel back out into the face of whoever side on the other side of the door. Twice now the traitors had tried to pry open the door by breaking the hinges, but the pair had been ready for it.

  “We’ll need to prepare for a push through the enemy,” Song finished. “Open the door on our terms then break the encirclement and run towards safer grounds.”

  Looking back, she had to wonder if it had been a mistake to retreat into this room. While fleeing down the hall with guns pointed at their back would certainly have cost them casualties, she was not sure that breaking the encirclement and then running down that hallway would do much to keep them down.

  Behind them another corpse-host dropped, this one landing on its knees – only to be speared in the head by Expendable, who was promptly heckled by Tupoc for ‘hogging all the deicide’. The Malani quietly protested, but under his hat Song could see him smiling. She turned away.

  “When we first met, you used a large Gloam construct,” Song said, addressing Hooks directly. “Could you use it again to open our way?”

  A horse-sized Gloam lizard with six legs, which she has called a smok. It was a certainty that the enemy would have guns pointed at the door to prevent the very breakout they were planning, which meant either sacrificing the vanguard or using one that would not succumb to bullets. Maryam and the spirit glanced at each other for a few heartbeats, the latter grimacing before she replied. Speaking without need for words?

  “Not anything as large,” Maryam said. “Dog-sized, maybe smaller. And we’re approaching mania, so if you want us to work something heavy we’ll be out of the fight after.”

  A pause.

  “For a bit, anyway,” Hooks said.

  Song slowly nodded, both filing away the ‘we’ for future interrogation and adjusting the dawning plan in her mind. Lictors, even the traitors, might have the discipline to hold fire after the first few shots into the Gloam beast did nothing. The noble troops might not, though, so the gambit seemed worth it. If the construct ate enough lead, they might make it down the hallway without losing half their numbers to a volley.

  “All right, is no one going to address that Khaimov has a spirit popping out of her body to talk?” Cressida Barboza called out. “Because it’s happened more than once now, so it clearly wasn’t a fluke.”

  “Don’t be such a rube, Barboza,” Tristan chided. “We’re too busy to indulge your provincial sensibilities.”

  “You smug Sacromontan fuck,” the other Mask bit back, “I’ll-”

  A politely cleared throat.

  “I was also wondering about the spirit,” Izel admitted, then sketched a bow at Hooks. “Greetings, I am Izel Coyac.”

  “Hooks,” the entity replied with a nod, then slipping further out so she had a thumb to jut it towards Maryam. “I’m her sister.”

  “It’s a long story that I have no intention of telling you,” Maryam flatly told the survivors of the Nineteenth. “She’s here, she’s with me. Move on or be moved.”

  “Hooks,” Tupoc called out, while impaling a corpse. “The corpses upstairs that were mangled like roots went through them, was that you?”

  “With her help,” the… sister acknowledged, nodding at Maryam.

  The Izcalli grinned.

  “You know, there’s still room in the Fourth Brigade if-”

  “Enough of that now,” Song sharply cut in. Fucking vulture. “Tupoc, Expendable, first we’ll rotate you out with Tristan and Izel. We’ll need you to hit the enemy in the wake of the Sign.”

  She breathed out, putting the last touches on the plan in her mind’s eye.

  “Our best chance is to make a mess of their formation and move quickly enough they can’t muster a firing line while we run,” Song said.

  Odds were still good that some of them would be shot in the back, but there was only so much that could be done running down a corridor with little cover and muskets pointed at you. As if to punctuate her worries, the bench was smashed on the door again. Tristan cleared his throat.

  “Khaimovs,” he called out. “If we make it to the garden, can you get us back into that layer?”

  Maryam sharply nodded.

  “It’s getting battered open as we speak,” she said. “We can find a path, the trouble will be whether or not it’s full of…”

  She gestured vaguely upstairs. The ruckus was, if anything, getting worse.

  “First we will be making an attempt at relieving Angharad,” Song said. “The deeper palace should still be in loyalist hands, given the defenses there, so we will head there first.”

  It was where Evander’s quarters were located, as well as the palace armory. If the traitors had seized that then they would not be bothering with a bench: they’d have wheeled out cannons. Even small pieces would smash right through the door here. Not all seemed enthusiastic at her words, but no one cared to argue. The potential naysayers likely figured squabbling was more likely to get them all killed than her plan, which she privately agreed with.

  A passable plan immediately executed was always better than the finest plan hatched after several hours.

  “Get ready to rotate on my word,” Song called out. “On the count of ten-”

  Yet before she could begin counting there was a sound like a wooden wall being torn through upstairs and weapons were turned on the lift shaft even as the ram hit the door again and Cressida grunted with the effort of fighting it down. Only when silhouettes dropped down the shaft this time it was not corpses. Not, that catlike grace heralded much, much worse than that.

  “Evening, lads and ladies,” Lord Locke roguishly grinned.

  The devil in his short, rotund shell looked in a fine mood. And blood-spattered, which might explain the mood.

  “Quite the pickle you are all in,” Lady Keys added, fiddling with her glasses.

  No blood on her, but that was not necessarily for the best. The only thing worse than a devil was a hungry devil. There was a beat of silence. Tupoc and Expendable had drawn back, but not out of fear – they were positioning themselves to cover the rest of them long enough for muskets to be brought to bear before the devils struck. Could they win? Maybe, Song assessed, but they’d lose enough swords that breaking encirclement would be impossible.

  She must negotiate, if it was at all possible.

  “I told you thirteen is the worst luck,” Tristan muttered.

  There would be time to strangle him later, Song reminded herself, if any of them lived through this.

  “A pleasant evening to you,” Song evenly said. “I must admit your presence here is unexpected. May I inquire as to your intentions?”

  “Why, my good rooklings, we have come to rescue you!” Lord Locke announced. “On the behalf of Lady Angharad Tredegar, who bargained for this siege to be lifted.”

  “Welcome news,” Song replied, not entirely sure what proportion of those words was a lie.

  “See, I told you my charms won her over,” Tupoc whispered to Expendable.

  “Vuthakiwe,” the Malani mildly replied.

  Song forced down a twitch of the lips. The direct translation of vuthakiwe was ‘Glare-drunk’, but mostly it was used to mean delirious. She made herself take her hands off her weapons, but it was mostly for show: she trusted Angharad, but hardly these devils. What had her friend bargained for their help, anyway? No, it didn’t matter. She would help Angharad put them down, if it came down to it.

  “Oh, there is no need for thanks,” Lord Locke said, deftly ignoring there had been none. “It is the sacred duty of our office to act against this sort of cult.”

  “Your office,” Tristan echoed, tone rising in question.

  An invitation to gloat, which they naturally embraced without thinking twice. Song was not sure whether or not she imagined the appreciative glance from the devils at having offered them such a fine line to pounce on. He was, she mentally conceded, slowly earning his way out of strangulation.

  “Why, my dears, we are of His Infernal Majesty’s own Office of Opposition,” Lady Keys said.

  “The OoO, if you will,” Lord Locke happily added.

  “I will not,” Song replied, in the tone of someone who had just been offended to her very core.

  That they were be terrible murderous creatures casually threatening her she could live with, but this? Sometimes lines must be drawn.

  “What is the duty of your office, anyhow?” Tupoc curiously asked. “I expect it is not eating children, as I was first taught.”

  “We’ve already filled up on appetizers,” Lord Locke assured him.

  “Our mandate is most simple indeed, young man,” Lady Keys said. “The Office of Opposition is to meet the enemies of His Infernal Majesty in the field and frustrate their plans. To foil and crimp and stymie-”

  “-to thwart and forestall,” Lord Locke enthusiastically said. “To stump and baffle-”

  “To bar and impede and, why, even bedevil,” Lady Keys mused. “In a word…”

  “We oppose,” Lord Locke finished theatrically, twirling his mustache.

  Tupoc, being a damned soul, saw fit to applaud this. Cressida and Tristan, being professionally ordained liars, followed suit after a beat. So did Izel, but that one Song suspected was just being nice about it. Another corpse-host dropped down the lift shaft and Song snapped a shot through his forehead, because she probably wouldn’t be able to get away with shooting anyone else.

  “And if I may ask,” Song said, “what does this rescue involve?”

  “Lifting the siege on your command,” Lady Keys said. “Though we are overdue a conversation with Phaedros Arkol, I think.”

  “He holds command outside?” she asked.

  “Indeed,” Lord Locke said. “Our Ecclesiast is most eager to get the thorn out of his god’s foot – a good stomping of his enemies was promised, I expect.”

  Song breathed in sharply. Arkol, the Ecclesiast? It made some sense, and she doubted the devils would bother to lie if the man was right outside.

  “You are sure Phaedros Arkol is the Ecclesiast?” she pressed.

  Lady Keys clicked her tongue.

  “Relief was bargained for, not a guessing game,” she said. “Shall you open the door, rooklings, or shall we?”

  Song clenched her fists. She had no real leverage here, they all knew. But if Arkol was the Ecclesiast and he was out there, in range of her musket, then… No, the devils wanted him and foiling them might well see them turn on her command. Besides, Angharad must take priority. They could go after the Ecclesiast after reuniting with her, and if the opportunity passed then she could live with it. She was not here under contract and the Watch had a duty to Vesper but that duty did not mean throwing away lives on off-chances.

  “Get ready,” she ordered the others. “Tupoc, Expendable, you have the vanguard. All of us will wheel left the moment the fighting begins. Do not stop until we turn the corner and have cover.”

  The devils swaggered up to the door, which shook, and Song found Tristan’s eyes. She nodded and he pulled one bar, Izel pulling the other, before unlocking the door and wresting it open. The four lictors that’d been about to hammer a bench into the door charged into the room with startled shouts, the devils smoothly moving around them, and like that the fighting began.

  Song ran one man through the belly and Tupoc’s candlesteel spearhead went into another’s skull before they could even drop the bench – Izel smashed one’s skull in through the helmet, rather impressively, and Expendable cleanly cut the last one’s throat out even as the lictor brought up his blade to parry the flicking spear. Shouting had erupted out in the hall and the blackcloaks shared a wary look. Flicking the blood off her jian, Song gave the order.

  “Forward.”

  After a beat, they charged out. Locke and Keys had not cleaned up the left side before bowling into the thick of the enemy numbers, so Tupoc was grazed with a shot even as he dropped into a roll. Expendable killed a musketman and a heartbeat later Song put a shot through the forehead of the woman next to him. The last was impaled by a jagged line of Gloam erupting from the palm of Maryam’s spirit-sister, which going by his scream was an ugly way to die.

  And then, to her utter surprise, the rest of the hall to the left was an empty expanse.

  “Run,” Song hissed, already beginning to reload. “Now.”

  And run they did. A few shots whizzed past them, but the devils were keeping the enemy busy. Song slowed her stride, allowing the others to pass her, and risked a glance back. What she found there…

  Old devils or not, Locke and Key had run into a thicket of readied muskets. They’d been shot and cut at, but all that’d accomplished was ripping up their shells and clothes until they ripped their way out of them – and then they had begun to move like devils no longer hiding what they were. Song only glimpsed red-strewn carapaces and revolting segmented legs as they went through the rebels, laughing and chittering and ripping out pieces of men to gobble up.

  There must have been more than thirty men in that hall, moments ago, and now there were barely a third of that. The stone walls looked like they’d been painted with viscera, the hallway someone had dragged a piece of meat through razor blades. Gods, but not even the worst of men deserved such an end.

  At the back of the failing formation, half of the men were already fleeing. Song saw the man the devils had named the Ecclesiast there, even in their terror the soldiers going around him. Phaedros Arkol was richly dressed, a blade at his hip, but nothing that deemed him to be the grand officiant of an evil god – save for the utter calm on his face as doom approached.

  He raised a hand and Song could see the power flowing into him, the threads the color of graven earth and fresh blood, the white bone and sea-swept coral. She saw how they coalesced into his palm and he closed his fist with a snarl of effort. The corpses strewn across the hall closed on Locke and Keys with deceptive softness, like the opposite of a flower blooming, and in a heartbeat the pair were encased in prison of writhing death that clawed and bit at them.

  Could he both hold them and save himself? The question burned at Song and before she could think twice she raised her musket, aimed the shot – only for a hand to come down on her shoulder. She nearly jumped out of her skin, but it was only Maryam. Maryam whose face was touched by fear.

  “Song, we need to go, he’s about to-”

  There was a great cracking noise, but in that same heartbeat Song realized it was not a sound at all. It did not echo, did not hurt the ear or the air. It was something in the fabric of the Material itself that had shattered, and she felt a swelling in the air that was like the most triumphant of laughs. The private archives shattered, the room crunched like a paper crane in a man’s grip, and the very palace shook around them.

  The Hated One was out.

  Song ran and did not look back.

  --

  For a while Angharad was forced to ponder whether it would be impolite to ask the spirit if he was lost, but after the third sudden turn through an empty room she finally understood what was happening. He was not taking random turns.

  “You are sneaking us past the patrols,” she said.

  Oduromai King, Asphodel’s own patron and the tutelary spirit of sailors and heroes, did not turn. Yet she felt the weight of his attention on her as if it were a physical gaze while they continued making their way through an empty servant dormitory.

  “The Newborn cares nothing for the death of his pawns,” the spirit said. “He gains through every death, as his grand celebrant dedicated the night’s madness to his name.”

  Worrying, considering that if the Thirteenth had sniffed out the plots correctly there would be battles fought all over Tratheke feeding deaths to the spirit in question.

  “Parasite,” Angharad scorned. “Yet I would still know where you lead me, Oduromai King. I must find my comrades, which were last seen in the private archives.”

  “They will find you,” the spirit dismissed. “Everything leads to the garden, Angharad Tredegar. That is where the knots of fate pull together.”

  Angharad turned a skeptical eye on the entity. She was Pereduri, so had been taught better than to put stock in spirits who prattled on about fate. There was no such thing, not outside the fancies of poets: Vesper was a test by the Sleeping God, and a test’s outcome could not be determined in advance. One must be able to stand or fall when meeting challenge.

  When spirits spoke of destiny, mostly they meant their latest scheme.

  “And what would those knots be, I wonder?” she asked.

  The spirit’s attention grew heavier, but she turned an unimpressed look on him. If he was irked at questions, then he should have manifested by one of his faithful. She had no faith to offer anything calling itself a god, had not even before she became apprenticed to a guild whose trade was deicide.

  “What is required to unmake the Newborn,” Oduromai said. “A challenge, a bane, a choice.”

  They slipped out the back of the dormitory, onto a similarly empty hall. It worried Angharad that she had seen no servants throughout her wanderings. Yet surely not even the cult would have dared to commit such slaughter: perhaps the most hardened reprobates among them might have embraced such butchery, but she could not believe the cult’s rank and file would be willing to bloody their hands so horridly. No, they must have fled to some distant corner and remained holed up away from the fighting. Good, she thought. Best they did not risk themselves until the steel was back in the sheath.

  It was the duty of nobles to protect servants, not the other way around.

  “Whose choice?” Angharad asked, limping after the spirit’s back.

  It had best not be her. She’d had choices enough for the night.

  “The boy,” he replied. “Cleon Eirenos.”

  Her steps stuttered and she shot him an incredulous look.

  “What does Cleon have to do with this?” she asked.

  “Everything,” Oduromai said. “He is the linchpin, Angharad Tredegar. The last contractor of the Odyssean twice over: the last deal it struck and the last contractor who has not been bound anew to the Newborn.”

  She frowned, remembering how Lady Doukas had mentioned at the ceremony that Cleon had never before made a demand of the spirit they all worshipped.

  “Because he’s not truly partaken in a ceremony before,” she slowly said. “He has not bought a death for advantage.”

  Or rather, because the death he had finally asked for had yet to be delivered and until it had the bargain would not be complete.

  “Is he truly so vital?” Angharad asked.

  While she had not been deep in the confidence of the cult, nothing in the way Lord Cleon was treated during that ceremony had led her to believe he was considered an influential member. Or, in truth, all that respected by anyone other than the priests.

  “He is important,” Oduromai said, “the way a loose strand in a weave is important. He is an opportunity. That is more than most men will ever be.”

  She inclined her head in concession at that.

  “Then it is careless of the cult to have so neglected him,” Angharad opined.

  “Was he?” the spirit said. “You met a young lord hounded even under his own roof, whose closest confidants whispered in his ear of rites that would save him. Speak not of neglect but of his character.”

  Angharad swallowed, for she had never even considered that… Lord Arkol had contacts among the valley nobles, she recalled. And Ambassador Gule was treated by Cleon like a distant but trusted mentor. Suddenly the boldness of Theofania Varochas seemed less the desperation of a young woman whose hand was forced by her family’s demands and more the measured gamble of someone who might have received private assurances. Angharad’s jaw clenched, for though Phaedros Arkol and Lord Gule might have been poisonous friends to Cleon could she truly claim to have been any better?

  No. Even if one discounted that she had bedded his own mother under his roof, she could not. Another debt she must settle, if she could, and a first step towards that was ensuring some grasping spirit did not intend to murder him.

  “And what is it you want of him, spirit?” she challenged.

  “To make a hero’s choice,” Oduromai said.

  “A vague answer,” Angharad said. “Kindly elaborate.”

  This time the spirit did stop before turning towards her. Those eyes were liquid flame, too blue to be anything born of the world material, but the rest of him grew denser. As if by a trick of the light Oduromai’s bronze armor suddenly seemed… worn. The breastplate bitten at by salt and scratched by blades, the greaves dented and unpolished. Even the white cloth beneath seemed dirty, as if not quite washed, and the crown on his brow had grown thicker. Like it was half a helmet, not merely decoration.

  More warrior than king or sailor, in that moment.

  “You were given an answer,” Oduromai said. “Take it, for you are owed nothing more.”

  “That is true,” Angharad conceded.

  She gave the spirit a polite nod.

  “My thanks for the aid, however temporary,” she said, then cleanly turned her heels and limped away.

  “Enough.”

  The word echoed, as if spoken in some great hall instead of a hallway, and Angharad felt weight press on her shoulders as if to force her to her knees. Without a word she turned, drawing her blade, and met the spirit’s furious face with cold disdain.

  “Lay your power on me again, spirit, and one of us will die for it,” she said.

  The spirit sneered.

  “I am a god,” he said. “Oduromai King, crowned-”

  “He that need claim to be a god is no such thing,” Angharad scorned. “My people know better: there is only one God, Oduromai, and He yet slumbers.”

  “I am the guardian of Asphodel,” Oduromai said, and the air shivered of it.

  “I am neither your vassal nor your congregant, creature,” Angharad Tredegar said. “Withdraw your power or be called to account – this is your last warning.”

  She met that blue fire unflinchingly. The moment hung in the air, a vase about to tip past the table’s edge, but then it snapped back into place. The pressure left her shoulders, as if turned to smoke, though the spirit yet stared her down.

  “I remember it still, being but an aspect,” Oduromai said. “The visage facing day while he faced the night. And I remember becoming me, when Hector poured an ocean of gold and faith into my name. Stories and songs and plays, ceremonies and festivals.”

  Angharad did not sheathe her sword. He had not earned such courtesy.

  “Years of careful tending, that I might forever serve as the jailor of the god that became the Newborn,” the spirit said. “But what men made, men unmade. The prison was pierced by the harpoon and the Newborn crawls its way out as we speak."

  "It is a simple question, spirit,” Angharad coldly said. “What do you want of Cleon Eirenos?”

  “When it breaks free,” Oduromai said, “the Newborn will be vulnerable in a way it was not as the Sickle. The amalgamation is not yet achieved, and should it be undone before the end a grave wound will be dealt. Grave enough that an ending would no longer be out of reach.”

  The spirit flickered like candle flame, its presence burning bright at the prospect of… not killing the Newborn, Angharad thought, but following his nature. Ending a threat to Asphodel, of which he considered himself patron.

  “Your games are your own,” Angharad finally said. “They are no concern of mine. But I’ll not let you lay hands on Cleon Eirenos, Oduromai. I owe a debt.”

  “I will only offer a choice,” the spirit said. “On this you have my oath.”

  The mirror-dancer watched the spirit, looked for the lie in that face, but there was nothing there to be read. It was not a man’s face, only a sculpture moved by the will of unnatural intelligence.

  “I will hold you to it,” she said, and sheathed the blade.

  The spirit’s presence faded, just a bit.

  “Come,” Oduromai said. “This delay may yet prove costly, we must hurry.”

  Angharad swallowed the demand that lay on the tip of her tongue, to know where they were headed, for there was only so far she could push such a proud spirit before it lashed out regardless of whether or not it served his plans. She followed behind Oduromai, barely three steps taken before there was a great crack in the… not the air, but perhaps the aether? Angharad felt it like a physical thing, but while aware it was not.

  Then the very grounds beneath her feet shook and a faint echo of laughter nipped at her ears.

  “The Newborn is free,” Oduromai said. “It rises. The fateful hour begins.”

  Angharad was not sure whether he could watch her without turning, so she held back from rolling her eyes. As if she could not have guessed that on her own. Still, she lengthened her stride and ignored the twinges of pain that caused as she hurried on. They turned to the right at the hallway’s end, which Angharad believed was actually leading towards the middle of the palace and thus away from the gardens supposed to be their destination, but as they entered a gallery of busts and portraits – rulers of Asphodel, by the surnames – the spirit suddenly stopped.

  Angharad followed suit, then three seconds passed. She cleared her throat.

  “If I may ask, why-”

  Her eyes widened as the grounds a foot before her disappeared with brutal crunch, dress and hair fluttering from the way two thirds of the gallery was pulverized in an instant. In place of the brass, stone and carpets was a frothy haze that she peered through and found… a desert? No, this was not sand. It was salt. She recognized Maryam’s description.

  “That is the prison layer,” she said.

  “A shard of it,” Oduromai said. “The Newborn did not merely escape its prison, in its hatred it shattered the whole thing. Pieces of it were scattered across Tratheke, from the palace to the walls.”

  Angharad sucked in a breath. The shard before her had pulped solid stone and metal. What would another do, if it landed on a street? What a heinous creature the Newborn was to so casually dispense with the lives of men.

  “You want me to enter this shard,” she said.

  “An enemy waits within, but you will not be alone,” the spirit replied. “And if you follow the path, you will find the garden on the other end.”

  She eyed Oduromai skeptically, but that the spirit still had some need of her was clear. Otherwise it would have struck at her earlier when she challenged it, or at least left. She could trust the need, if not the spirit himself. Breathing out, Angharad unsheathed her blade and stepped through the haze. In a single breath’s span she was through, on solid ground.

  It was bleak place, this broken prison.

  A land of salt and void, dunes of pale rising in long slopes while on the horizon lay a hollow absence that hurt the eye. Angharad thought she almost began to see brass through that nothing, for a moment, but her eyes burned as if smoke had been blown into them so she tore away her gaze and had to wipe away pained tears. A glance back told her that Oduromai was either absent or unseen and she grimaced. Now, of all times, she could have used directions.

  Forward she went, for lack of a better notion.

  The salt cracked beneath her soles as she went up the closest slope, hoping that vantage might yield a path, and once she reached the top of the dune she did find something of the sort: in the distance, walking down a slope, was a man. And halfway between them, at the bottom of a hollow, was a great harpoon stuck into the salt. Tall as a ship’s mast, Maryam had described it, and lied not. It was a jagged and thorny tool, with a cruel gleam to its smooth bronze make.

  Angharad began to make her way down the slope, mirroring the stranger – whom she was chagrined to see would make it there far before she could, on account of lacking a limp. That did allow her to take a closer look at him, however, for he stood by the great harpoon and studied it while she finished making her way. Angharad recognized the doublet before she did the man, from a distance: that silver-and-yellow doublet in silk had been of such a fine make she would not soon forget it.

  Lord Phaedros Arkol, the Ecclesiast, turned a bespectacled glance her way as she gingerly slid down the last of the salt dune. He was unarmed and without wound, save for appeared to be a shallow bite on his right cheek. Not made by human teeth, these. A parting gift from Locke and Key, she imagined, though she would have preferred they take the whole head.

  “Angharad Tredegar,” he greeted her. “I assume Petra is dead.”

  “Thoroughly so,” Angharad replied.

  He looked irritated, or at least his face did. No part of it reached his gray eyes, which were not calm but… confident? Certain, Angharad settled on after a beat. That gaze was kept steady by the utter certainty of a man who genuinely believed nothing could happen to him now. That he had already won.

  “A genuine loss. Given her talent with the influence prayer, she would have been a most useful courtier,” Lord Phaedros said.

  “It is true, then,” Angharad said. “You are the Ecclesiast.”

  “Surprised?” he idly asked. “I will mark it a compliment. It took years to become so harmless, to bury the edge my reputation had in my youth.”

  “This will not stand, Arkol,” she said. “Even if you should win the night, the Watch will come for you.”

  “So they will,” the Ecclesiast said. “And by the time their ships arrive, the Master will have devoured all of Tratheke Valley. The rooks will come and they will die.”

  Devoured the valley? She swallowed. This was no simple mad cult, then, but a thing of genuinely monstrous intentions.

  “They’ll come back,” Angharad told him.

  “Once more, perhaps,” the Ecclesiast indifferently said. “Then they will deem it too much trouble and simply blockade Asphodel. They’ll not risk another expedition so long as neither I nor the Master seek spread beyond this land.”

  “All this so you could rule Asphodel?” she spat out. “What a sea of blood, for such paltry ambition.”

  At last something beyond indifference entered his eyes. Irritation.

  “Paltry?” he said. “I will rule forever, child, the deathless chosen of my god. This isle will sing the name of the Odyssean from shore to shore, from oldest crone to youngest child, and kneel to me as his champion. I will not be a mere king or lord rector but half a god, endless.”

  He smiled, in genuine poisonous joy.

  “And I have earned such regard. The Master knows whose hand freed him, who undid the work of petty fearful souls,” the Ecclesiast said. “He will stand by me, as I stood by him in his hour of need.”

  “You’re a pawn, Arkol,” Angharad said. “The Newborn’s, and that of those who first put that harpoon in your hand.”

  “You know little,” he dismissively replied. “That golden-haired advocate only came to me in a dream, Tredegar, the labor was my own. They’ll have nothing of me, and should they complain of that they are welcome to plead their case to the Master.”

  Her teeth clenched. The Ecclesiast, she realized, was not someone on whom reason would have a grip. He was drunk on what he thought fate, on victory, and nothing could topple the throne he had raised inside his own mind. Phaedros Arkol was smiling at her, she saw, as if waiting for further questions. He wanted to tell her about this, she thought. Not to gloat, but to finally share his cleverness with anyone at all after so many years of preparing in the dark.

  Had anyone in the cult besides him known anything at all of what he intended? Ambassador Gule had not, for only a fool would have thought the Queen Perpetual would want anything to do with what the Ecclesiast sought of Asphodel. Gule’s very life would become a stain on the High Queen’s name for his role in this.

  “All this time,” she said, “everyone was looking at the shipyard. And you never cared a whit for it.”

  “Oh, the Master will level it I think,” the Ecclesiast mused. “The devices that congeal the aether make Tratheke unfit to serve as his holy seat. And the capital will be that, after the last sacrifice within whimpers its final breath.”

  “You are a madman,” Angharad informed him.

  Someone ought to tell him, should he not already be aware.

  “It is only to be expected a mortal would believe that,” he told her, then sighed. “And it appears that, no matter how long we talk, your nosy little friend will not follow you into the shard. Unfortunate.”

  She blinked.

  “What?”

  “You are a mediocre conversationalist,” he told her. “Which is only to be expected, since it appears you are also such mediocre bait that the god who guided you here will not deign to enter to rescue you from me. A shame, as trapping him in here would have been delightful irony.”

  Phaedros Arkol raised his hand.

  “But, alas for you, here we are.”

  Angharad moved in without a word, for whether she liked it or not the fight had begun. Six strides between them, she measured and took the first.

  The Ecclesiast closed his fist and she heard the ground crack – no, open, as a corpse grasped her feet from below. She carved off the hand but it had cost her time, enough that when she stumbled forward it was to the sight of Lord Arkol holding a shimmering sickle in his hand. Casually, he swiped it at her even though she was well out of range.

  Angharad tossed herself to the side without hesitation, wind rustling her dress as something carved into the salt right past her. More hands burst out of the ground, going for her cane and leg. Damn it, how many corpses had he buried here? She ripped her way free of the grasping hands but she had to leave her cane and she grit her teeth as she moved to charge through the last of the distance. The Ecclesiast raised the sickle again and she watched his arm, watched for the moment when she must move aside and-

  A spike of oily darkness shot right past her shoulder, nearly impaling Arkol. He ducked away hastily, though it still clipped his shoulder and burned through his doublet. And kept burning, Angharad saw with wide eyes.

  “Exoloio,” he cursed, and then to her utter disbelief he turned and ran.

  Her own steps stuttered as he fled much faster than she could pursue, leaving her to stand stunned by the great harpoon as the Ecclesiast… ran away. So much for being half a god. Angharad glanced back to find Song and Expendable atop a dune, aiming muskets at Lord Arkol. The fired and the man did not even turn, another corpse ripping itself free of the salt to take the shots for him. To Angharad’s utter disbelief, a tide of blackcloaks swept over her.

  Tristan, Tupoc, Cressida Barboza and Izel Coyac. Then, coming down the slope with Song and Expendable, Maryam. That Sign must have been her doing.

  “You,” she began, stumbling over her words. “What are you all doing here?”

  “Watching you fumble that skirmish,” Tupoc chided. “You really should have expected more than one corpse, Tredegar.”

  “Shut up,” Song told the Izcalli, brushing past him.

  She drew Angharad into a hug, which she was too exhausted and baffled to refuse even though she did not deserve it.

  “Oh,” she finally managed. “Did you come for me?”

  Song withdrew.

  “We were going to ask the loyalists about you first, but Oduromai King appeared and-”

  Angharad snorted.

  “He’s the one who guided me here,” she said. “So you were the ‘not alone’ promised.”

  Tristan had held back while Song approached, but now he came with Maryam – who, Sleeping God, looked like she had been put through a wringer.

  “My thanks for the intervention,” she told the signifier.

  Maryam waved it away. Angharad nodded at Tristan, after, and he tipped his absent hat at her. Ever the charmer. A flicker of movement, and she must be going mad because a woman of rather close looks to Maryam had just popped out of her shoulder. It would probably be rude to ask, she thought, if this was some sort of Izvoric sorcery. Best pretend there was nothing unusual about it.

  Angharad politely nodded at the… spirit? Maryam’s friend stuck her tongue at her in return, which she took to mean the introductions were at an end.

  “Coyac, how’s the harpoon?” Cressida called out.

  Angharad pivoted to find Izel Coyac inspecting the massive harpoon. He moved a little stiffy, she thought. Bruised, or perhaps drugged? Still, his eyes were unclouded and if any covenant could make sense of this strange harpoon it was the Umuthi Society.

  “Hollow,” the tinker replied, knocking on it.

  The empty noise proved him right.

  “It’ll still take at least three people to move it.”

  “Move it?” Angharad repeated.

  “The Hated One is out of his cage,” Song said, which Angharad nodded in assent to. “The harpoon is one of the few means at our disposal to wound it – the very reason, I expect, that Lord Arkol came to take it. We cannot leave it in enemy hands.”

  Angharad slowly nodded.

  “If we are to fight the spirit, then we also need to find Cleon Eirenos,” she said. “Oduromai insists he is the key to wounding the Newborn.”

  Song nodded.

  “Then we find Lord Eirenos, for I suspect the… Newborn, as you call him, will not give us a choice in fighting him,” she said. “Let’s get moving, ladies and gentlemen. We are vulnerable so long as we stay in here.”

  It took five of them to force out the harpoon, and then against Izel’s prediction four to carry it. Their party hurried across the expanse of salt afterwards, in the same direction the Ecclesiast had run off to. If he had left a trail there was no trace of it left – but it mattered not, because unlike Angharad’s own Song’s eyes were capable of piercing through the nothing that was the horizon of this place. She found them a way out without much difficulty.

  “Straight ahead,” Song said as they went down a slope. “I can see bits of the garden through that, we should end up on loyalist grounds.”

  There was haze at the bottom of the salt dune, Angharad saw, much like the one she’d entered through. She walked into it without hesitation, second in after Song.

  Immediately, someone grabbed her by the collar and dragged her down – she swallowed a groan of pain at the way her knee bent and her sword was halfway out before she realized it was Song. Her captain was kneeling with her, while mere feet ahead what looked like a very expensive sofa burst into a shower of wooden shards and feathers.

  “Peace,” Song called out. “We are Watch.”

  “Hold your fire!”

  That loyalist lictors – and a few nobles, Angharad noted approvingly – had muskets trained on them was no great surprise, but she flinched when a cannon ball hit somewhere nearby and the brass shuddered beneath her feet. The few muskets that had dipped went back up when the jagged tip of the harpoon emerged from the haze, but already officers were intervening. A lieutenant in the lictors and Majordomo Timon himself went around forcing down the muzzles, so Angharad gingerly pushed herself back up.

  “Stand down, that’s the Thirteenth Brigade,” Majordomo Timon called out. “They are allies.”

  Angharad almost dropped back down when another cannon shot howled as it passed over their heads, hitting the wall behind them about twenty feet too high. The ball bounced off the Tratheke brass, taking the nose off a painted marble statue as it disappeared into the greenery below. They were all, Angharad saw, on a large balcony meant to entertain. It was a broad brass floor with stone railings – fortified by piles of furniture manned by lictors – overlooking the garden, with curving stone stairs on either side.

  The balcony was high and near the garden’s edge, for to her left Angharad could see that past an expanse of wildflowers lay the glass panes of the Collegium, that massive cube of glass encasing the heart of Tratheke. And through the glass she got a glimpse of the city below, though one half-covered by smoke: there were fires below, and though the daylight of Asphodel had passed there were so many torches and lanterns below it looked like a bed of embers. Fighting was still raging at the foot of Fort Archelean.

  She had been lost in staring, enough that she was startled when Tristan nudged her. While she had been distracted the harpoon was brought through by the other blackcloaks, soldiers moving around so it could awkwardly be laid down across the balcony.

  “Come on,” Tristan said. “Let’s find out what kind of mess we stumbled into.”

  Majordomo Timon and the lictor officer were taking all the black-clad students aside, so Angharad dutifully joined the lot. Timon, she noted, still looked as pristinely attired as last time. Admirable, in the middle of a coup. Another cannon shot smashed into the bottom of the balcony, getting flinches out everyone. By the time the two of them joined the rest, the talks had already begun.

  “- from the city, Captain Ren?” Majordomo Timon asked. “Does His Excellency still live?”

  “I left him in the hands of his escort, retreating towards safer ground,” Song replied. “I have every reason to believe he is safe and alive.”

  The man sagged in relief, and the lictor by him straightened.

  “Glad news,” he said. “It has been eating away at morale not to know. This should kill any talk of surrender.”

  The lieutenant at his side looked unconvinced.

  “The men won’t buckle so long as they merely bombard us, but in the face of a storm?” the dark-haired man said, lowering his voice. “We are surrounded and there is no telling when reinforcements will come – if they will come.”

  Song cleared her throat.

  “Am I to understand the rebels are attacking through the garden?” she asked.

  “Lieutenant Phos here got the cannons in place in the hallways before they could push us in,” Majordomo Timon said. “That has been enough to see off their charges, so they now seek to flanks us through the garden.”

  Phos? Angharad cocked her head to the side, wondering if he was a relation of the girl she’d briefly met on the Dominion. She could see little resemblance, from what she remembered of… Ianthe, had it been? It felt like a lifetime ago, her time on the Dominion of Lost Things.

  “Most their strength is out there,” Lieutenant Phos told them. “At least three hundred and several artillery pieces, led by their nobles and that Malani scum. The most we can muster in defense is sixty-odd and now you lot.”

  A pause.

  “Our position is a losing one,” he quietly admitted. “The balcony must either suffer bombardment without answer or pull our own pieces from the halls and leave them vulnerable to assault.”

  “They’ve placed their cannons poorly,” Izel Coyac noted. “By the angle of that last ball they appear to be shooting at you from too close. If you’ve no cannons of your own, why have they not repositioned?”

  The white-haired majordomo blinked, then looked at the lictor.

  “They’ve holed up in one of the lantern pavilions and a musical hall,” Lieutenant Phos said. “We thought it was fear of us returning fire, at first, but now I’m leaning towards some incompetent being in charge.”

  Which was interesting, but not what Angharad must know most of all.

  “Sir,” she said, calling his attention. “We must find Lord Cleon Eirenos in all haste. Do you happen to know if he is among the rebel nobles?”

  The man spat to the side, which was shocking of such a mannerly fellow.

  “He is,” he said. “The vicious little shit slew Captain Maragos and Lieutenant Kolipsis under cover of his contract, then ran off before we could shoot him for it. It’s what let the rebels take the pavilion uncontested - we had men in place to bleed them, but they hit us during the confusion. He should still be in there, along with that bastard Gule.”

  Angharad pushed down the urge to inform him that Ambassador Gule was an induna and must therefore be of legitimate issue, else he would not have been counted thus. That was not what he had meant.

  “We need to get to him,” she said.

  The majordomo eyed her warily.

  “They’ve fortified that position, Lady Tredegar,” he said. “I am no soldier but even I know that charging such a-”

  The noise was so loud it drowned everything else out, for a moment. And that moment stretched on and on, the din of… sound and metal being ripped open intolerable. Angharad ignored the shouts of surprise and dismay, dread pooling in her stomach as she limped straight to the left edge of the balcony. There she could see past the edge of garden into the Collegium below, the columns of smoke surrounding Fort Archelean.

  It was trivially easy to see one of the walls of that fort had just collapsed. It was horrifying to see that a stretch of Collegium streets had just collapsed too, leaving a gaping chasm behind.

  A hand that was not a hand but a weave of writhing corpses reached out of the dark below the city. Angharad tried to understand the sheer size, but her mind balked. If a simple hand was the size of a house, how large would the rest be?

  She did not have to wonder long for the Newborn, the Hated One, the Odyssean began to climb out.

  “Gods preserve us,” Song rasped out, having joined her. “It was physically trapped by the Watch, after the Ataxia. And that officer from Stheno’s Peak told me that if the god ever got out it would emerge down in the cavern under the palace.”

  And also under Fort Archelean, Angharad thought as she watched the Newborn savage its way out of the grounds beneath the wealthiest, most beautiful part of Tratheke. Entire streets fell into the deeps, and the manifested spirit – tall as a mountain already, and only swelling from every death he caused – ripped its way out with a triumphant shout. It stepped on the fort, cracking the main keep like an egg, and when cannons were fired at it the spirit picked them out and tossed them away.

  Towards the edge of the district. Towards the side of a cube that was, beyond a thin metal lining, made entirely out of glass.

  She would not forget this sight, Angharad thought, until the day she died. One panel exploded, torn through by the tossed cannons like a child had tossed a stone at a window, and then the destruction rippled out like a tide. It spread up and down, panes breaking and shattering – and there must have been something in the way the Antediluvians built the Collegium that was fragile, for within the span of five breaths the vibrations traveled across the entire cube and crushed every single pane of glass.

  Every single great panel in that grand cube of glass shattered or fell, showering the night air with a magnificent shower of shining shards that fell like rain. Behind was left only a thin skeleton of brass, the frame of metal that had held the panes in place.

  The glittering rain fell on the city and the fort, exquisite but oh so deadly. Sleeping God. How many hundreds, how many thousands would die from that?

  And ahead of them, the palace gardens – the same palace gardens that had been built over the panes of glass - hung in place for the barest of heartbeats before gravity collected its due. The grounds disappeared, as if whisked away by magic, and tumbled below as layers of earth and flowers and trees and half a dozen buildings went away. The palace itself, built atop a spire of metal, shuddered but did not move.

  At least the lift connecting the palace to Fort Archelean remained untouched, for otherwise they might well be stuck up here until they starved.

  “They knew,” Song quietly said. “It was on purpose.”

  Angharad followed her captain’s gaze, and even as it occurred to her disaster might have struck – that Cleon, out in the garden, would be toppling to his death – she saw that it had not. The garden had not all fallen below. The parts of it that had been built over the metal frames of the Collegium still hung on the metal, though much of it had been drawn into fall by the rest. The pavilion was one such part, as was most the dancing hall. The two positions the rebels had taken.

  Song was right, they’d known. They must have.

  And below them Angharad watched as the writhing, screaming flesh of the Newborn began climbing metal frame of the Collegium, come to kill them all.