Pale Lights

Chapter 67

Chapter 67

The knock on the door would have woken up Song, if she were asleep.

Instead she was sitting in the dark in her uniform, a treatise on Izcalli titles lying open in front of her – ‘tetehcutin’, it read, is the highest semi-hereditary rank under the Calendar Court, ruling the broad equivalent to a Lierganen coun- in a silent reproach, the page unchanged for the last hour. Song’s eyes burned with exhaustion but she could not sleep. There was another knock, soft but urgent. Toc toc toc. Shaking out her empty-eyed trance she rose to her feet, leg knocking against the writing desk, and made for the door.

She wrenched it open, hoping for Maryam or Angharad or even Tristan. Instead what she found was a nervous-looking Someshwari with a plain face decorated by brass spectacles.

“Adarsh Hebbar,” she said.

“Bait,” he retorted. “Let me in before someone sees.”

Too surprised to argue, she moved aside and he hurried in as if some angry hound might nip at his heels out in the hall. Song closed the door, and after a moment of the man looking lost remembered it was complete darkness in here for someone without her eyes. She moved to light one of the lamps, striking the match. Hebbar looked relieved by the light, arms loosening their grip around the packet he was clutching like a buoy.

“Bait,” she said. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

He passed her the packet, cloth tied up by rope, and her wrist dipped under the weight. Heavy. Piles of paper, by the feel of it.

“There,” Adarsh Hebbar said. “All our reports, along with Alejandra’s tracings of the symbols in the temple and the drawings I made of the layout. You have two hours at most before I have to put them back or Tupoc will surely notice.”

“And what brings on this bout of generosity?”

“Tupoc’s going to refuse your deal in the morning,” Adarsh said. “Said he wants to see if he can make you and Imani squabble first. So here it is.”

Song cocked her head to the side, saw how his fingers were twitching and there was an expectant cast to the angle of his wobbly chin.

“I would praise your sense of duty,” she said. “But I expect that’s not why you are here.”

“Fuck duty,” Bait cursed. “Tell Abrascal that we’re square after this. Slate clean.”

The Someswhari licked his lips.

“You can tell him to stop, right? You’re his captain. Tupoc’s been keeping a closer eye on all of us since the Eleventh tried to play Alejandra, if he notices that I’m being hit up by Abrascal of all of people then…”

“I can,” Song slowly said.

She was slightly more than half sure this was true. Would it stop Tristan from looking into further blackmail on the man now that he had found a weakness in the Fourth? Oh, gods no. But she was confident he would agree to wiping the slate clean of the current chalk. Behind the brass spectacles hopeful brown eyes implored her and she sighed.

“Consider it done,” she said.

The man nodded, sagging with relief, then shuffled awkwardly on his feet.

“Can I, uh, stay here while you read?” Bait asked. “They might notice if I keep coming in and out of rooms.”

Song stared him down. He wilted instantly.

“I’ll be quiet,” he hurried to assure her. “You won’t even notice I’m there.”

After a moment she nodded.

“Feel free to read anything I left out,” Song conceded. “Though do not move any of the markers I left.”

“I would never,” Bait strongly replied, sounding almost offended now of all times.

Ah, right, Adarsh Hebbar was a Savant. She never had been given a clear idea of his area of interest within the Peiling Society, however. Song waved him away and he settled by the lamp after having gone through her pile of books, picking one on the anatomy of lemures. One of her attempts to stay ahead when it came to Teratology. With him occupied, she settled back at her writing desk and cleared the abandoned book off before carefully opening the package.

It irritated but did not surprise her that Tupoc Xical had beautiful handwriting, a genuine pleasure to the eye. Even worse his reports to his patron and the Obscure Committee were clear, concise and structured in a rather intuitive way. It might actually be better than the template she used, which had her gritting her teeth. No, copying the pattern would be letting him win. She would need to come up with something better. Righteous anger aside, Song skimmed through the lines quickly to get at what she wanted.

There it was, the itinerary taken by the Fourth. Once they’d made shore on the eastern third of Asphodel they had quickly gone northeast through the lands of House Florin, Chontos, Florin again and then the major stretch in the lands of House Arkol. It had been Arkol troops that shadowed the Fourth Brigade on their hunt, eventually being dispersed by the Ladonite dragon. Song had held her suspicions, but it was good to have it confirmed.

It meant the hidden temple was somewhere near Arkol lands and that Lord Phaedros Arkol, a social acquaintance of Angharad’s, could potentially be approached to obtain information on it. Lords might not concern themselves with old country legends, not courtiers like Lord Phaedros at least, but there would be someone in that household who would know something.

With that lead unearthed Song moved on to the part second most of interest, the temple itself. Tupoc theorized in his report that it had been as much a mausoleum as a place of worship, as the structure was built to emphasize of a ring of large stone caskets buried around the shrine to the unnamed god. He also added that while he had earlier in his report mentioned his belief that the temple had recently been visited by grave-robbers, there were also signs of the temple having been forcefully shut down some time ago. At least decades prior but potentially much longer.

He noted that while some symbols remained carved into the walls near the altar, what appeared to have once been names and scripture had been rendered forcefully unreadable in the rest of the complex. Tupoc identified several broken chunks of stone he believed had been the bottom of steles and there were signs of mosaics having been ripped out and colors scrubbed. He added that considering the symbols found…

There Song set aside the report to refer to Alejandra’s tracings of said symbols. The first traced was a stone casket, like those described in the report. Some sort of ritual reference? The second had her eyes narrowing, though, for it was a sickle. She returned to Tupoc’s writing, where he wrote he believed the artifact taken from the shrine would have been a sickle going by the iconography and dust pattern on the altar. That, Song grimly thought, did not strike her as a coincidence.

The sacred sickle of a faded death god went missing, then a leashed remnant bearing such a sickle began appearing in Tratheke committing murders? Whether or not it had been grave-robbers who first found that temple, the sickle had since fallen into the hands of someone with greater ambitions than turning a profit.

The rest of Tupoc’s report on the temple was a methodical description, paired with Adarsh Hebbar’s fine drawing of it. She glanced at the Someshwari, finding him engrossed in his book, and revised her opinion of his talent upwards. It led into Tupoc’s formal recommendation that the Watch take custody of the temple since it had likely been used for human sacrifice in its heyday.

He based that recommendation on the outer graves, which were long rectangular stone pits filled with earth but some of which had lain empty. Unlike the caskets, which he proposed had been reserved for priests since there were ashes inside but no bones, the pits had been used for mass burials and the skeletons the Fourth unearthed had all been killed the same way: a single blade wound through the back of the neck. A familiar description to Song, that.

It was the same way the leashed remnant killing in the city took its victims.

Song set the papers down, leaning forward to set her elbows on the table and close her eyes as she rested her chin on folded hands. Another piece of the puzzle. She could now be mostly certain of what the killer the Nineteenth was pursuing truly was: the remnant of the nameless sickle god, leashed by means of a sacred artifact. But who held the leash, and why?

The Nineteenth had been convinced the killings were arbitrary but Song doubted it. The sickle alone would not be enough to set a remnant loose, there would have to be some attendant ritual – potentially a pricey one. Not the sort of thing one used to cause random deaths. Unless the randomness is the point. It creates fear in Tratheke, fear that the ambitious can exploit. But if that was the case, why not use the knife slightly more discriminately when causing that chaos? No, something was still missing.

But she was closer to solving the mystery now, she could feel it. On the very edge. Now what she needed was a look at Imani Langa’s own reports, the ones about the sinister rituals out in Tratheke Valley, and for Tristan to return with the secrets he’d gathered. Someone out there knew about the remnant, because they’d warned the man Tristan had saved – a certain ‘Temenos’ – that he might be a target. What did that person know, and how did they know it? That was the thread in need of pulling to unravel this entire conspiracy.

Song itched to wake Maryam and Angharad, to shake answers out of them and force them to look at all this, but both had returned late to Black House and gone to bed instead of seeking her out. Those late returns were half the reason she’d been unable to sleep, considering Maryam was set on a dangerous ritual that might well kill her and Angharad had been infiltrating the cult – successfully, one presumed, given that she had not returned until the small hours of morning.

But now she was spinning again, clawing at the walls of her own mind. They needed their sleep, the same rest she should be taking if she had any sense. She had what she needed from the report, time to end this.

“I am finished,” Song said.

Bait nearly leaped out of his skin at her words, having entirely forgot where he was. His spectacles almost fell off his face and he fumbled catching the brass frame, which would have hit the floor if not for getting caught on a belt ornamentation. He hastily shoved them back on and rose to his feet, which made the book still on his knees fall, and when he just as hastily bent to pick it up his spectacles almost fell again. Song watched the entire debacle from beginning to end with what she could only call morbid fascination.

“Right on,” Adarsh Hebbar forced out, coughing into his fist. “Nothing left to read?”

“I am finished,” Song repeated. “Thank you for your help, Bait.”

He cleared his throat.

“And Abrascal…”

“Consider the matter he used against you permanently buried,” she said. “You will hear no more of it.”

The naked relief on his face almost made her feel bad about the precise phrasing of that sentence. How very Malani of her.

“I’ll take care of the wrapping,” he said, “there’s a trick to it, to avoid someone not of our brigade doing exactly what I did. It was a pleasure doing business with you, Captain Ren.”

“And you,” Song replied, inclining her head.

She did not sleep well, after he left, but she did sleep. It was better than nothing.

--

Refraining from ambushing her cabalists in their own room the moment they woke took a great deal of self-control, but Song mastered herself. Hand on the chisel. She went down to breakfast with them, seating herself by Captain Imani Langa just in time for Tupoc to stroll in and theatrically announce that he must decline their bargain, wary of his secrets being spread too broadly, but that he might accept sharing with one of them.

Song painted anger over her face, noticing the satisfaction on the Izcalli’s, but the moment he was out of earshot she turned to Imani.

“I will cede you the right to his information for a favor,” she offered.

Imani studied her.

“You don’t have much use for the information,” she said.

Song knew the beginning of a negotiation when she saw it, though, and got to work. It was fairly straightforward to accomplish, given that Imani had relatively little leverage and Tupoc was the one forcing the choice so the Thirteenth couldn’t be accused of being the problem. Song used the opportunity to secure the trade of their own reports, too, just after breakfast.

Though it would not be immediately read, considering she had higher priorities. Her eyes drifted to Maryam and Angharad, who sat on the opposite side of the table and had watched the negotiation with all the interest of someone who might begin to care when they had finished their morning tea but not a moment sooner. Maryam, in particular, looked like she might collapse at any moment.

But she wasn’t speaking in tongues, so at least her ritual had not taken a turn for the very worst. It shouldn’t have, when she said that last night was a trap and tonight would be the murder, but with Gloam there was no certainty save harm.

“After breakfast,” Song began, “you are to join me in my room for a-”

“Captain Song Ren?”

She turned, frowning, to see one of the liveried servants smiling at her apologetically. She smoothed the displeasure off her face. They had done nothing to earn it.

“Yes?”

“A guest requests your presence, ma’am,” the young man said. “You and Warrant Officer Maryam Khaimov.”

She blinked.

“And this cannot wait until we are done eating?”

“He said no, ma’am,” the servant said. “And he’s an officer, ma’am. Captain Traore.”

Song stilled. That was the name Colonel Adamos of Stheno’s Peak had given for the Savant he was sending to the capital to debrief them. She gulped down the last of her almost-scalding tea, then gestured for Maryam to follow.

“About your letter,” she explained when given a quizzical look.

“Ah,” Maryam muttered, slowly rising. “My own fault then.”

Angharad raised expectant brows, but Song shook her head. This was not to be the kind of conversation where one went without summons and Angharad had not been named. Likely if Maryam had not sent a letter of her own to Stheno’s Peak she would not be attending either.

“In my quarters after breakfast,” Song simply said.

After a beat of hesitation, Angharad nodded. The noblewoman had begun avoiding her like the plague again, since their confrontation, but she did not refuse direct orders. Even when angry she tended to her duty with care. Maryam shambled up to Song’s side and after one last look Song nodded at the servant to guide them. They followed him into the depths of Black House, the silver-eyed woman slowing her steps so she could address Maryam without being overheard.

“Will you be fit for conversation?”

“Of course,” Maryam said, wrinkling her nose.

Under Song’s steady, unblinking stare that false confidence began to wane.

“I’m not at my best,” the signifier conceded, “but I am capable.”

Song hummed.

“Your health?”

“Fine, Song,” Maryam snapped.

“Captain Ren,” Song coldly corrected, “if rank is what it takes to get an honest reply. Answer, Warrant Officer Khaimov. You undertook a dangerous Gloam ritual against my recommendations last night. How is your health?”

Blue eyes hardened, and Song saw the sharp reply on the tip of her tongue. Whatever it was that Maryam found on her face, though, it gave her pause.

“It would be best if I slept in a Meadow soon,” she conceded.

“Then you will be sleeping on the roof this afternoon,” Song ordered. “At least three hours.”

“I was going to anyway,” Maryam muttered.

But she did not argue. By the stiff way the servant ahead of them was now walking he’d overheard some of that but Song was too tired to be embarrassed. They were soon brought to what she realized after a moment of uncertainty was the very same room where yesterday she had watched Captain Santos strike deal with the traitor Ledwaba. It was exactly the same inside when they were bid in, down to the water carafe on the buffet.

“Good, you did not waste time. Sit.”

Captain Traore, who must be the man who’d just addressed them, would have been one of the shortest Malani she ever saw were he Malani at all. He was not, for though very dark of skin he had a lilting accent and elaborate earrings inscribed with a prayer pattern. He was Jahamai, like Commander Salimata back on Tolomontera. Would Maryam know the difference, though? By the stiff look on her face, she did not.

They both sat as instructed and since the small, almost fragile-looking man offered no refreshments Song cleared her throat.

“A pleasure to meet you, sir,” she said. “I only received the letter from Colonel Adamos yesterday, it was delayed by an encounter with Cordyles ships.”

“The roads through the valley were no better,” Captain Traore told her. “Lemures are wandering the paths and there’s even been talk of them attacking farms. Whatever has them stirred up, it is only getting worse.”

“There have been rituals in the hills,” Song carefully said. “The Eleventh Brigade is investigating this.”

The captain waved that away.

“The colonel sent one of our cabals to look into it as well,” he said. “Whatever it is, our Skiritai will have it shot full of silver and salt soon enough. Much more dangerous is what your brigade has been up to.”

“Pardon?” Maryam said, her first word since the talk began.

Were she less tired, Song thought, she would better hide the general antipathy she felt towards any Malani holding authority over her. But she was exactly tired enough not to. Lucky for them, Traore either did not notice or did not care.

“Not you,” the man dismissed. “In particular at least. Though the letter you sent about the Asphodel crowns and their effect on the local aether has our own Akelarre in a frenzy.”

Maryam blinked in surprise.

“Was it not a documented phenomenon? I reached out to consult their records of it.”

“It wasn’t a phenomenon at all, as of last year,” Captain Traore flatly said. “It still isn’t on the northern edges of the valley, but the closer to the capital a signifier approaches the fuller the phenomenon becomes. We had it tested, it fully coalesces about a week from Tratheke by horse.”

Song shared a look with Maryam, sensing gravity but not exactly what it meant.

“I am a Stripe, and largely untrained in such matters,” Song tried. “Could you explain for my sake?”

The man shrugged.

“We do not know what it means, exactly,” he admitted. “At the very least, such a large-scale disturbance in the aether means that something concerning the emanations related to those flowers is undergoing a significant change.”

“Those flowers are a symbol of Asphodel,” Maryam quietly said, “but also of the god Oduromai. Do you think…”

“Our leading theory is that the god’s association to the ruler of Asphodel in particular is the cause of the disturbance,” Captain Traore said. “That the local aether is reacting because the first steps of a civil war for the throne have been taken, yet unseen.”

Song was rather beginning to wish she had taken Angharad’s report last night regardless of the Skiritai’s inclination to wait until morning. She kept that thought off her face.

“Which would be why the phenomenon centers on Tratheke,” Maryam muttered. “The throne is here and it’s happening here.”

Captain Traore inclined his head in agreement.

“Has the question been answered to your satisfaction, Warrant Officer Khaimov?” he asked.

Maryam nodded, saying no more.

“Good,” the small man said, then his face turned harsh. “Now, I must ask you – what in Caged Hell went through your minds when you committed the epithet of a god under aether seal to paper?”

Song cleared her throat.

“Maryam had nothing to do with that.”

“I saw your brigade roster,” Captain Traore replied, unimpressed. “You have a sneak and swordarm filling the other seats, did you truly not think to consult your sole reliable source of lore on such a matter before writing to Stheno’s Peak?”

“Given that she had recently been harmed by contact with the aether seal, yes,” Song flatly replied.

The older man shook his head.

“Then you are a fool,” he said. “You are now under formal order of the commanding officer of the Asphodel garrison to never again mention the Hated One until granted authorization by said officer or the Conclave.”

Song frowned at him.

“A colonel does not have that authority,” she said. “Unless…”

“Unless the whole matter was put under seal by the Conclave’s own order in the first place, yes,” Captain Traore said. “You are allowed to file a petition to access the appropriate file, though I wouldn’t hold my breath.”

Neither would Song. Getting the petition to the Rookery might take weeks, but actually getting it in front of the Conclave would take even longer and have no guarantee of success.

“The matter concerns our contract with the throne,” Song said. “Surely the Lord Rector at least-”

“The colonel has decided that if House Palliades lost that knowledge, it’s on them,” Captain Traore said. “All the better for the work.”

“But we, at least, are owed an explanation,” Maryam pressed.

“Enough of one to fulfill your obligations,” the man conceded. “What I can tell you is that after the Ataxia, Lord Rector Hector Lissenos hired the Watch to build a prison and an aether seal over the entity now known as the Hated One.”

“So it was the same god that drove the Ataxia,” Song pressed.

He nodded.

“The entity is a manner of thanatophage, a death-eater, so the protracted civil war paired with entrenched worship made it effectively impossible to kill at the time,” Captain Traore said. “The Watch deployed twenty cabals under Commander Estefania Estay to trap it in a massive Antediluvian cavern beneath the capital long enough to imprison it inside an artificial layer.”

Meaning Hector Lissenons had reigned for a few years with the Hated One trapped under his capital. No wonder he had been willing to spend a fortune to import brackstone and the machinery necessary for an aether seal. There was a mad god dwelling beneath his feet. And now Song finally had a name: Commander Estafania Estay, who must be the ‘C.E.’ from the letters with Hector Lissenos. Maryam suddenly stirred.

“That cavern,” she said. “Was it brass or stone?”

The man frowned, as if looking for a reason to refuse information, but seemed to decide there was none.

“Stone,” he said. “Though given the sheer height of the ceiling it can only have been dug by the First Empire.”

“And it’s accessible by the palace lift,” Maryam continued.

The captain leaned back into his seat. For the first time that morning, Song found surprise on his face.

“And how would you know that, exactly?” he asked.

“I was part of the delegation that went to the shipyard,” Maryam said. “To feign us being on the road, the Lord Rector’s men had us going around in rings in a massive room. One that wasn’t brass. It must have been the same one.”

Captain Traore hummed.

“Interesting,” he said. “Our knowledge of that cavern’s existence is why we dismissed the possibility of the shipyards being directly beneath the capital. We had not considered what proved to be the truth, that the facility was in a deeper layer.”

Most likely, Song thought, because the rulers of Asphodel had not known about it either. Some predecessor of Evander’s must have discovered it by happenstance and begun the work of restoring the shipyard.

“Yet the god is no longer physically in that cavern,” Song said. “It is in the prison layer, and under an aether seal besides.”

“Should the layer break, that is the most likely location for the entity to emerge into the Material again,” Captain Traore said. “But despite your report of some local agitators having stumbled onto a way to traverse that layer, we don’t believe it at risk of being breached. The entity has been starved for over two centuries and is still under seal, it is thoroughly contained.”

“Water always gets out,” Maryam retorted.

“Don’t quote Totec the Feathered at me, girl, I’ve read his books too,” Captain Traore grunted in amusement.

By the befuddled look on Maryam’s face, she had read no such thing.

“The colonel dispatched a cabal to check on the prison layer and sent word to the regional headquarters in Lucierna asking for the Akelarre Guild to send a team of specialists for a full inspection. That harpoon you mentioned was deemed worrying, we’re looking to extract it.”

He paused.

“What we do not believe is that a theistic leak is in any sense imminent,” he took pains to make clear. “A god held under such conditions for centuries will not simply spring out at the first opportunity, it is very much a salted slug: even should there still be life in it, it would take watering for it to even wake up. Nothing so simple as a few sacrificed beggars, either.”

They then went through the song and dance of trying to ask more about the Hated One – well, Song did at least, Maryam looked two thirds dead and acted half – only to be reassured that the situation was being handled. It became clear after several rounds of this that she would not be getting any more information out of Captain Traore. The officer then presented papers for them to sign, little more than an acknowledgement that they had received Colonel Adamos’ orders on the matter of the Hated One.

Song extracted in return a signed acknowledgement that the Thirteenth Brigade was allowed to mention the entity’s existence as part of its obligated contract duties, including reports. The captain must have assumed she only meant her reports to Wen and the Obscure Committee, but she had in practice secured an exemption to pass some knowledge of the Hated One to the Lord Rector should she wish it.

Not that she was sure if she did wish it, or to see him again at all.

She was to meet the Yellow Earth at noon, besides, and did not want to answer Evander’s letter before she had heard what the revolutionaries wanted of her. She doubted it would be anything pleasant.

“I will be at Black House for another day or two,” Captain Traore said. “Should you have any concerns over this matter, you may send for me.”

“Thank you, captain,” Song replied, inclining her head.

Maryam jolted out of her half-sleep to imitate her. He inclined it back.

“You are dismissed.”

She took her leave, tugging Maryam along. The earlier burst of energy at the mention of the cavern had long faded, leaving Song in the company of a moderately mobile corpse. She stopped her halfway to the room, in an empty corridor, and sighed.

“You are in no state for a debrief,” Song said.

“M’fine,” Maryam grunted, but the protest was weak.

Song knew that Maryam’s stubbornness was the only reason she had made it this far. She only wished it was not so likely to be the reason she stumbled having gotten here.

“What happened up in the palace?” Song asked.

“I got what I needed,” Maryam said. “Tonight I finish it.”

Song gritted her teeth. Recklessness upon recklessness.

“Look at the state of you right now,” she said. “You are not fit for anything strenuous. Won’t you at least wait a day to-”

“Will that be all, Captain Ren?” Maryam evenly asked.

Song looked into those blue eyes, wondering how many before had seen what she did: determination like bedrock, as likely to move as the mountains. Maryam was set.

“Fine,” she bit out. “You are to have at least three hours of sleep on the roof garden, then seek me out for a debrief should I be back.”

“Back from where?” Maryam blinked.

“That will be all, Warrant Officer Khaimov,” Song pettily replied.

The satisfaction was like a struck match, there long enough to burn but not to warm. So be it.

There was work to do.

--

They sat in Song’s room for the debrief, with tea and cakes, but when Angharad ceased talking her first thought was that she should have sent for something stronger than tea.

“Four days,” Song said. “We have only four days until the coup.”

“That is what Lady Doukas claimed,” Angharad confirmed.

Song closed her eyes to blot out distractions. It had all been important information, or close enough, but beyond the timeline what was the crux here? Lord Gule confessed to being one of the five heads of the cult, she decided. That confession and the nature of the ceremony that Angharad had witnessed should be enough for the Watch to commit to the risk of arresting an ambassador of Malan. Bleeding a god was not forbidden under the Iscariot Accords, but buying murders off one like plums at the market most certainly was.

If the Kingdom of Malan was given solid enough evidence, they would let Gule disappear quietly rather than taint their reputation around the Trebian Sea by letting it come out their ambassador had been up to his neck in a coup and a murder cult.

Lady Doukas? Even easier, as she did not have the Queen Perpetual standing at her back. The Watch could pick her up within the hour, if Song asked, but was that the right call? She was not sure. Silver eyes opened, finding Angharad sitting patiently with her hands folded in her lap. That face might as well be blank, Song thought. The pleasantness there was just the badge of office Angharad Tredegar felt she owed life to wear, as a black cloak for what the noblewoman thought she owed Vesper.

They’d been closer than that, on the Dominion. Before Song pulled the trigger and lied about it. Before she dug a second grave for that friendship trying to fill the first one.

“Once more, your success is worthy of praise,” Song said.

Angharad shrugged.

“I did my duty,” she replied.

“Anyone dutiful can do that,” Song replied, unwilling to let her wiggle out of it. “It takes skill to do it well.”

The dark-skinned noblewoman coughed into her fist, seemingly embarrassed.

“My thanks, captain,” she got out.

Captain. That would be it how it was between them until Angharad found another brigade. Unless Song did something about it. She had been chewing on that decision all night, but she felt no closer to making it. To knowing what was the right choice to make.

“That said,” she made herself continue, “Captain Wen and Brigadier Chilaca must immediately be informed that we have a day for the coup.”

She gave it even odds that the Thirteenth would get chewed out for having waited until morning as it was. Angharad cocked her head to the side.

“I expected as much.”

“Which will mean explaining how you won Lord Gule’s trust,” Song elaborated. “I can no longer delay the report mentioning the infernal forge, no matter your reasons.”

Angharad’s face went entirely blank. Song studied her, looking for anything at all, but whoever had taught the Pereduri had taught her well. Angharad was not a guarded person by nature, but when her guard was up it was nigh impenetrable.

“Of course,” Angharad simply said.

Was that relief in her eyes, in the way her fingers loosened, or was Song misreading her? She must be, for what was there to be relieved about? If the Lefthand House was able to grab the forge under the Watch’s nose because the Thirteenth had delayed in telling the blackcloaks about it the blame would fall on all of them but on Angharad most of all.

“We have enough to begin acting,” Song continued, “but now we must consider how.”

A fine brow rose.

“Should Maryam not be here for this, captain?”

A funny thing, that the same word in Tristan’s mouth and in Angharad’s could feel so different. A gift in one, a wall in the other. Between that wall and the ice in Maryam’s eye, Song found failure wherever she looked even as the Thirteenth’s time on Asphodel finally neared success.

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“Maryam is barely fit to walk up stairs at the moment, much less plan,” she replied. “I will consult Captain Wen, naturally, but I would hear your thoughts first.”

Angharad hesitated, then nodded sharply.

“When we strike, we must strike everywhere at once,” she advised. “If Lord Gule is arrested it is not impossible the cult will launch its coup early in fear of his betraying them. The same holds true of Lady Doukas, though she is less public a figure.”

“We are in agreement then,” Song said.

While she remained certain that Hector Anaidon was involved with the cult of – well, the Odyssean as it turned out - the man was in the wind. Doukas and Gule were the targets left to them, and if the ambassador was grabbed the rest of the capital would know before the hour was out. There was no keeping that under wraps. Doukas might be feasible to arrest quietly, but first she would need to befound.

If they were lucky the priestess would be in her manse out in the southeastern ward. If not? Then matters grew tricky, because arresting an ambassador of Malan was open thing but keeping him was another. They would need Lady Doukas to sing if they wanted to finish this.

“We are?” Angharad asked, sounding surprised.

“Delaying too much would be dangerous, but so would striking in haste,” Song said. “I will be sitting with Wen and Chilaca within the hour, if I’ve anything to say about it, and formally request the help of the Garrison forces on Asphodel to deal with the matter. We were hired to unmask a cult, not step into the middle of a civil war.”

The noblewoman nodded in approval, then caught herself and wiped her face clean of her thoughts. She coughed politely.

“If I may make a suggestion…”

“I am listening.”

“This morning, while you and Maryam were speaking with that officer, I was informed that yesterday evening a letter came for me,” she said. “There is to be a concert and banquet at the rector’s palace tonight, which Lord Menander invites me to attend as his guest. Given the implied exclusivity of the guest list, I expect Lord Gule would be in attendance as well.”

“Meaning we could grab him there, possibly even quietly,” Song said. “We just need to find Lady Doukas, unless…”

“I do not know if she is to attend,” Angharad frankly replied. “But though she is a personality of some renown at court, her holdings are not particularly wealthy and she has no title beyond that of her birth.”

A court office, Angharad meant. Evander was known as tight-fisted with these, in large part because the magnates would raise a ruckus if the ministers got privileged access to the Lord Retcor through such appointments – and the ministers would raise the same if someone not nobly born received such a title, however ceremonial. Song hummed.

“Apollonia Floros should be there, however, if it is a banquet for the most influential,” the silver-eyed woman said. “The coup answers to the cult, but she is still the figurehead they aim to put on the throne. Arresting her should make their more opportunistic supporters reconsider taking up arms.”

“Or it could outrage the nobility enough that twice as many rise in her name,” Angharad warned.

Not if she’s tarred with association to a cult outlawed by the Watch, Song thought. But that was not a decision for her to make, or even Brigadier Chilaca – though by dint of his rank and the urgency of the situation he might well end up making it anyway. There was no time to wait for the Conclave’s opinion on this, and Chilaca not only outranked the colonel in Stheno’s Peak he had also been granted a mandate to negotiate with the Lord Rector on behalf of the Watch. It would be stretching the bounds of his authority to make such a bargain, but not outright overstepping.

Not unless the Conclave didn’t like the way the aftermath turned up, anyway. Then they would come down on him like a vengeful storm.

“Either way,” Song finally said, “I must speak with the brigadier urgently.”

She breathed out, sipping at the bottom of her teacup and getting more air than taste for it. Angharad half-rose to her feet, but the Pereduri searched Song’s face and found none of the expected dismissal there. On the contrary, like a fucking child Song was biting her lip and flinching. Again.

“Captain?” Angharad prompted.

“I need a favor,” Song blurted.

The other woman’s face blanked again.

“We are not,” she slowly said, “on terms to be trading these.”

“I know,” Song said. “I have to ask anyway.”

She saw from the way Angharad’s jaw clenched the thought of refusing outright, of closing the book, but either manners or curiosity won out.

“Ask,” Angharad flatly said.

“The Yellow Earth summons me at noon,” Song said. “At a place of their choosing. They have, I expect, finally run out of patience with my silence.”

Or they know something is happening and they want to squeeze what out of me, she thought.

“I can only advise that you do not meet them alone, given their demonstrated willingness to commit violence on you,” Angharad said.

She swallowed.

“Maryam, well – before we started arguing, anyway – Maryam said something along those lines and it was good advice,” Song admitted. “So I am.”

She bit her lip.

“Asking not to go alone, I mean.”

Angharad stilled.

“If they coerce you and you accept,” the Pereduri slowly said, “then I will be unable to lie when asked about it. I will, at the very least, likely learn what it is they hold over your head when they threaten you with it.”

“I know,” Song said.

“If they bare blades, I will bare mine as well,” Angharad told her. “Whether or not you give the order.”

“I know,” Song repeated.

There was an angry cast to the dark-skinned woman’s jaw, as if she tasted something sour.

“Why would you trust me with this now?” she challenged. “You never have before. Do you think I will be appeased with a gesture, Song? I am not a child to be distracted from our history by some… tossed bauble.”

Song’s eyes rose to find hers. She swallowed, the roof of her mouth dry.

“I don’t even trust myself, right now,” she admitted. “It is all… I thought I was making it simpler, cutting the knots, but now the ropes are choking me. What I do know is this-”

She squared her shoulders.

“You won’t bend if you think that what’s happening is wrong, Angharad,” Song said. “Not even if it makes my life easier. And I think I might need that more than I do anything else.”

Angharad held her gaze for a long moment, then looked away.

“I have made my own compromises with honor,” she said. “More than you know. I may not be alone in paying the price for them, either, though I have taken measures to ensure otherwise.”

Song’s jaw clenched. She knew – or at least suspected – a lot more than Angharad figured. She was not blind, and the other woman had told her it was the infernal forge that the Lefthand House wanted. Put that together with how she had asked that Song delay the report revealing the forge’s location and the small argument she’d had with her uncle back in Port Allazei? The picture painted itself.

But that path, it was a dead end. She could not shame Angharad into staying by her side, or offer to clean up her mess for… friendship, respect? Admiration, part of her suspected. She wanted someone she believed exceptional to think well of her, to look up to her. It was why it had been so easy to fall into the habit of trying to fix things for Angharad. It let her give something back, protect Angharad from herself.

Accrue a debt that would force her to stay by Song’s side. That was the ugly kernel beneath the dross of justifications. She wanted Angharad – and the others, but Angharad most of all – in her debt. So they would have to stay. Song swallowed again. It went against ever screaming instinct, everything she had been taught, but she made herself say it.

“I wanted you to owe me,” Song said. “It was not the only reason I pulled that trigger, but I think it might be what tipped the scales.”

Angharad’s forehead creased.

“Owe you what?”

“The nature of the debt didn’t matter,” Song said. “Just that I’d be owed. It was…”

She licked dry lips.

“It was the only way I thought it would work, being captain of the Thirteenth,” Song said. “I thought that if you were all indebted to me – because I ignored weaknesses or proved to be the finest leader around or most of all helped tidy over your troubles, then you would all stay in the brigade. Even though my name will be a noose around my neck until the end of my days, a curse in every way.”

Dark eyes studied her, unblinking.

“I did not have to be that way,” Angharad finally said.

“It is what I know,” Song said. “I do not attempt excuse the act, to be clear. I still stand by the decision to kill Isabel Ruesta, if not the decisions that sprang in its wake.”

“I treated you as a friend,” Angharad said, voice tight. “Why would you think it necessary to use me when I freely offered you my hand?”

She sat ramrod straight, a coiled string. Pulled taut.

“I thought better of you,” Angharad said. “That you were unlike all the…”

There she trailed off. All the others seeking to bind her, Song thought she meant. All the charlatans offering a helping hand and a kind word now that she had reached safe harbor, now that she no longer needed either.

“Because you are exceptional,” Song honestly replied.

The Pereduri startled and began to wave away what she would dismiss as compliments but this time Song wouldn’t let her.

“You are, Angharad,” Song cut through. “This is not flattery or exaggeration; it is a fact. You are learned, engaging and clever. You are one of the finest blades I ever met and wield a powerful contract. And even all these aside, you are…”

She paused looking for the right word. Angharad was blushing hard enough it was visible – though the tip of her ears was much pinker than her cheeks – and biting her lip.

“Principled,” Song settled on.

Those principles were not always kind or just, but they always were.

“I looked at you,” she continued, “and saw everything I wanted in a comrade. In someone I would share years, decades with.”

Song exhaled.

“I also knew others would see it when we reached Scholomance,” she said. “Captains whose surname would not be despised by millions, who could offer wealth and comfort and connections. How long did it take, Angharad, before the first offer came?”

“You say you think highly of me,” the other woman replied. “And in the same breath decide I would go back on my word and leave the Thirteenth? You were my friend, Song.”

And that Song Ren laughed, though there was no mirth in it.

“That’s not enough, Angharad,” she said, honest in a way she had not been in years. “It’s never enough. You think they turned on my family the first day? My parents, my kin, they had friends and relatives and allies across half the republics. And they all swore they would not leave us, that we ought not to be punished for a mistake that was solely my grandfather’s. That they would stand by us, defend us.”

She passed a hand through her hair.

“Most had gone silent by the time I was old enough to notice,” Song said. “But I still saw the last gasps of it: fewer visited every year, or sent letters or even acknowledged they’d ever known us. Because there was a price for it, a real tangible cost to a point of principle, and when sentiment goes against the world the world always wins.”

Even among the Ren her family were given wide berth. They were the blood of Chaoxiang, the line that had brought ruin down on all of them.

“I did not believe you would step off the ship and leave,” Song told her, looking away. “But you would have left. It is not a weakness of character, when people do. It is… gravity.”

“So you wanted me in your debt,” Angharad quietly said.

She silently nodded.

“No longer,” Angharad pressed.

Song looked down at her hands, clenching them.

“I don’t think a brigade can truly stand, thought of like that,” Song quietly admitted. “How should I measure them up, all our troubles? Are the Jigong students who tried to murder me better or worse than the cabals that tried to abduct Tristan? Maryam intends to break in an altar while lying to the palace, you are beholden to the Lefthand House and now the Yellow Earth comes to threaten me. It’s…”

She laughed, soft and bitter.

“So many things,” Song said, eyes finding the ceiling. “It was supposed to be simple. I was to excel, we were to excel, and we would become… legends, I suppose. A great enough good to even out the evil tarring my family’s name. Instead it was all eaten up by the act of counting debts, and now here I am left sitting and wondering – does it even matter?”

“I don’t follow,” Angharad murmured.

“Does it really matter, if one of us brings more trouble than the others?” Song asked. “There is no ledger to balance, Angharad. Trying to shove one into the Thirteenth only put something between all of us. We will not ever be anything if that is how we go on.”

Song breathed out.

“We can’t simply all be standing on the same side of a line,” she said. “We have to just… be a side, and there can be no notion of debt in that.”

“There are always debts,” Angharad quietly said.

“I don’t believe that,” Song said. “It’s a choice, to keep count. And that means I can choose to stop.”

“You don’t know what I have been doing,” she said.

I know your uncle wasn’t at breakfast this morning, Song thought. That last night there was too long between the arrival of your carriage and when you returned to your room, that you must have stopped elsewhere. She could have told Angharad all of this, but did not. It wasn’t the point, just another line in a ledger that ought to be ash.

“No,” Song agreed. “I don’t. But I can choose to trust you. Because that’s what it comes down to, isn’t it? There comes a day where that choice has to be made.”

It was Angharad’s turn to look away.

“I fear,” Angharad finally said, “that this island has not brought out the best in any of us.”

“No,” Song softly agreed. “But then maybe that’s exactly when the choice should be made – when it’s truly a choice and not just a gesture.”

Silence hung over the room in the wake of her words, not a knife’s edge but a shroud. Soft but covering everything, a layer of snow. Angharad slowly rose to her feet, went for the door.

“Meet with the brigadier,” she finally said. “I’ll arrange for our carriage.”

Song did not feel triumph at the words, for it was not a victory. There was nothing to be won here, no more than you could win a crossroads.

But there had been a choice, and not one either of them would forget.

--

Thunk went the blade, cleaving through flesh and bone until the edge hit wood.

The butcher eyed the cut with a grunt, pushing aside the scraps and gesturing for his apprentice to pick up the leg. He had to grunt again, louder, for said young man was lost in thought considering a very important matter. Namely, how Angharad’s coat pulled flatteringly against her buttocks while she bent over to take a closer look at lamb chops. The boy’s eyes widened at the second call and he scurried away to work under his master’s displeased frown.

The butcher, an old man in his sixties with a neat pointed beard and a pristine topknot in the Sanxing style, then shared a commiserating look with Song.

“Nothing to do with them at that age,” the man sighed. “Might as well try to put a dike on the Heavens.”

“As you say,” Song replied.

She would have been offended at the apprentice hardly sparing her a look, given that all three of them were Tianxi and she was hardly uncomely, but Song had worn enough coats to know she did not fill them quite like that. Fair was fair.

“They’ll be ready for you soon,” the butcher assured her. “Just need to get the water boiling.”

She inclined her head in thanks, ambling away. When the Yellow Earth had sent her an address without a description, she had expected an abandoned warehouse or maybe some sort of teahouse. Instead, when they turned the indicated street corner, she and Angharad had found a large two-story butcher’s shop. It would be unfortunate to assume that the butcher and his apprentice were Yellow Earth merely because they were of Cathayan stock, but, well. They were.

Song strode past a row of hanging hams and piles of sausage to find Angharad now looking down at a basket full of chicken feet with a puzzled look on her face. She cleared her throat.

“I thought Malani ate those too,” Song said. “Why the surprise?”

“It is a very Malani dish,” the Pereduri replied, looking a little nauseous. “Though at least they are peeled and grilled. These do not appear to be prepared for it.”

“Tianxi marinate them,” Song said. “In Mazu after they are fried and steamed, though I am told that in Jigong they are served cold in a rice vinegar sauce.”

Angharad politely refrained from expressing the disgust plain on her face.

“Maryam tells me that her people boil and cool them,” Song idly added, “to make some sort of meat jelly.”

“Foot jelly?” Angharad plaintively asked. “Really?”

“I’d still try that over a hundredth variation of Lierganen salted ham,” she snorted, glancing around.

There were few meats here prepared in a proper Tianxi manner. Lierganen meats, mostly, which was not unusual on a Trebian island. The Second Empire’s hegemony had thrived by devouring whatever customs existed before it, and nowhere had that policy been more thoroughly applied than the waters of the Trebian Sea.

“The lamb is fine cuts, as I have come to expect of Asphodel,” Angharad diplomatically said, then she leaned in and pitched her voice low. “Have our hosts given notice?

“Soon, allegedly.”

The dark-skinned woman nodded, casting a bemused look around.

“It does sound like the beginning of a violent joke, does it not?” Angharad said, picking at her tricorn. “A Ren and a Pereduri noble are invited by the Yellow Earth…”

“And it’s to a butcher’s shop,” Song drily finished. “Yes, the thought occurred.”

Mind you, strictly speaking Angharad had not been invited. Regardless of the old butcher’s words, Song wondered if her presence was not the true reason they had been idling in the front of the shop for the better part of ten minutes now. Though Angharad wore what she called her ‘disguise’ clothes, a thin doublet with a high collar matched with hose under a somewhat ill-fitting longcoat, there was no missing the saber sheathed at her belt. Or the walking stick she used to get around. Between that and the dark skin, the Yellow Earth would not need to ask Angharad Tredegar’s name to know it.

Song had elected for simple clothes as well, taking from the Black House stocks in an effort to avoid going around in the blacks of a watchwoman. The faded greens of her tunic and hose did not quite match and the brown cloak whose hood she had pulled down was ragged at the rim, but the shabbiness had meant greater discretion. So she reminded herself every time her eye caught the mismatch, along with the necessity of the cloak to keep her knife and pistol hidden.

A cleared throat had her turning. The white-haired butcher jutted his thumb towards the back door.

“They’re ready for you,” he said. “Down the hall, door at the end.”

It was not a long walk, though the narrow corridor forced them to move one at a time. Song knocked once on the painted door and it was immediately opened. Her throat caught at what she saw inside, even as she stepped in, and Angharad breathed in sharply.

It was a slaughtering room.

For pigs, one of which lay on the stone floor with an open belly. A young boy with a knife was taking out the intestines, putting them in a bucket as his gore-slicked hands dripped red onto the stone. The blood flowed through channels in the floor towards a grid in the heart of the room, where the wetness disappeared beneath the shop.

The Yellow Earth had come in strength today. On either side of the room hung butchered pigs on hooks, and among the dead flesh five living men and women stood with watchful eyes. All dark-haired and plainly dressed in loose brown hanfus, armed with blades and pistols. The boy kept butchering the pig, paying them no mind, and Song’s eyes went to the center of the room. To the small table by the bloody grid where, tending to a steaming pot of tea, Hao Yu waited.

The small, plain-faced man wore a yellow sash over his worn robes today. Declaring his allegiance to the Yellow Earth for all to see. His hairless face revealed nothing but calm as he silently gestured for Song and Angharad to sit down across from him. The silver-eyed captain swallowed, glancing at Angharad – whose face was a mask of ice, but was gripping the head of her walking stick like a woman intent on shattering it.

Neither of them were fool enough to miss the implicit threat here.

“Do not mind the boy,” Hao Yu said, glancing at the youth carving away at intestines. “His uncle set him to the task, he will leave when he finishes.”

“We can return then,” Song evenly replied.

“You could,” the small, hairless man agreed.

He cocked his head to the side.

“Will you?”

No, she knew, and so did he. The Yellow Earth had a greater knife than mere violence to press against her throat. A blade her fool of a brother had handed them, because it wasn’t enough for him to fail their family now he had to try and drag her down to… Her silence had gone on too long, she knew, and from that glint in Hao Yu’s eyes he knew it too. She licked her lips, looking for a response, but instead-

“Are we meant to be impressed, Tianxi, by a bloody pig and a handful of thugs?” Angharad said.

That cool, almost disdainful tone was like a bucket of cold water. Besides her the Pereduri stood tall, glaring down at the leader of the Asphodel sect.

“We have faced gods and devils with steel in our hands,” Angharad Tredegar scorned. “Serve your tea, by all means, and know petty theater does you no favors.”

Hao Yu laughed.

“Impressed?” he said. “No, Mistress Tredegar. It is only a reminder.”

He reached for the pot and began pouring, again inviting them to sit.

“We are all meat, in the end. The clothes we put on, the titles we give ourselves, the grand causes we invoke?”

The man shrugged, his perfectly plucked eyebrows and shaved head eerily smooth to the eye.

“None of it makes any difference to the knife.”

“You sound like a Jixian,” Song said.

It had been a small thing, Angharad cutting in, but it had mattered. It had dragged Song out of the spiral and given her back her wits – enough that she could go on the offensive. She moved towards the table, watching Hao Yu’s face, but he did not seem offended by her suggestion.

“Do I?” Hao Yu replied. “And to think I consider myself one of the tamer heads.”

Some chuckles from the watching partisans. Song made a point of drawing the chair for Angharad, which finally got a reaction out of the man – his face tightened oh so slightly at the sight of a Tianxi offering that courtesy to a nobly born daughter of Malan. Angharad, seemingly not noticing, cleared her throat even as Song sat by her.

“Jixian?” she asked.

“The Jixi School is a radical offshoot sect of the Orthodoxy,” Hao Yu said. “Based on the more esoteric sections of the Fangzi Yongtu, it advances the argument that since souls are perpetual to kill for a principled reason is not a sin.”

He poured the last two cups of tea, first for Song and then for Angharad, and set them down before each.

“The nature of men being what it is, the philosophy became popular with assassins and hired killers of all stripes,” he finished.

Song’s gaze was drawn by the noise as the boy withdrew his knife from the dead pig, dropping the last of the intestines in the bucket with a wet slurping sound.

“I am in fact a practicing Feichist,” Hao Yu finished. “Which is one of main currents of Tianxi Orthodoxy, Mistress Tredegar. We believe that only by abolishing all chains can we be saved, for the Gloam is nothing but the darkness of mankind reflected into the aether.”

What a pretty way to put it. A shame that was not the reality of Feichist Orthodoxy.

“There is no such thing as a unified Feichist practice, Angharad,” Song told her. “They are a hundred squabbling temples, most of which believe that bloody revolution is the only path forward.”

Her words earned scoffs from some of the watching partisans. Well, it was no surprise yellow sashes would prefer the most militant of the great creeds of Cathayan Orthodoxy. It’d had a resurgence in strength in northern Tianxia after the Long Burn, as it tended to in the wake of any war with the neighbors of the Republics.

“Interesting,” Angharad said, and seemed to honestly mean it. “I must confess that I was taught little of the Orthodoxy beyond the most infamous squabble.”

The Grand Lie, she meant. The Imperial Someshwar’s claim at being the seat and arbiter of the Orthodoxy since the fall of Second Empire, as if the priesthood of the collapsing Liergan had not fled with all its gold, icon and gods to southern Tianxia. The Kingdom of Cathay had been the strongest and wealthiest of the successor states when the Succession Wars began, welcoming the fleeing best and brightest of Liergan with open arms.

It could hardly even be measured, how much the arrogance of kings had cost her people in the following decades.

“Though I would enjoy a conversation on the nature of Universalist beliefs – unless I peg you incorrectly there, Mistress Tredegar?”

Angharad shook her head and he let out a pleased hum.

“-it would be best to settle our matters first,” Hao Yu said.

He sipped at his cup, set it down.

“I take it from your companion’s presence, Song Ren, that you trust her with such talk?”

Song thinly smiled.

“I do.”

“Then I will be frank,” Hao Yu said. “We discussed an arrangement, you and I. Silence over the matter of your brother’s defection to the royalists, for which I would receive some understanding of the measures being taken to prevent a noble conspiracy from taking over Asphodel.”

“This was discussed,” Song acknowledged.

“My silence was kept,” the plain man said. “You, on the other hand, have provided me nothing at all.”

Song sipped at her cup.

“I am too low in rank to be told what the Watch intends regarding the conspiracy,” she said, “while my personal association with Lord Rector Palliades has largely come to an end. I cannot give you insight into his thoughts.”

“You can,” Hao Yu calmly replied. “Oh, I doubt he gave you a report but given your access you could easily have obtained that information.”

He smiled mirthlessly.

“It appears, however, that you did not choose to,” he said. “That is unfortunate.”

There was a stir among the partisans, but none drew. Angharad still swept them with her gaze, those brown eyes moving with slow, unhurried grace. Song knew that look. The mirror-dancer was killing them inside her mind, crafting the steps of the deaths like a painter putting ink to the scroll. There were five hardened killers in here with them, along the boy and Hao Yu, while Angharad still used a cane and Song only carried a single shot in her pistol.

At no point in her browsing of the room did Angharad Tredegar ever give the impressions she doubted she could kill everyone in it.

Song’s belly clenched with want. Not the bedroom kind, but almost something like greed at the thought of having someone so exceptional on her side. Someone with the skill and confidence to beat the odds, to go against the tide of the world and win. Someone who could help her make the Thirteenth into a legend, into a name that she could wield against the curse devouring her family. But that thought was where it all begun to unravel, she’d realized.

A swordhand was still a hand. And it belonged to Angharad Tredegar, who was not merely a chivalrous mirror-dancer needing some polish to fit into the Watch. The Pereduri was just as much of a walking ruin as the rest of the Thirteenth, for all that she hid it better.

“I am surprised to hear you speak of that bargain as a done deal,” Song said, “when that very same night your second savagely ambushed me in an alleyway.”

Hao Yu’s face stiffened. He sipped at his tea, savoring the thin brew too much for it to be true enjoyment. The gesture of someone buying time, but Song only stared at him. Was he feigning that, pretending Ai had acted on her own when it truly had been at his order? He was a hard man to read.

“If such an encounter took place, it was not at my order,” he finally said.

“If,” Angharad coldly spat. “I helped wash those bruises and you would call her a liar?”

“That is not what I did,” Hao Yu evenly replied.

“Then your contracted attack dog is off the leash,” Song slid in, before the talk could spiral. “How can I deal with the Yellow Earth when it seems unable to restrain itself from attacking me as I do?”

A long moment passed.

“An understandable concern,” Hao Yu conceded.

He sharply nodded at the boy cleaning up the pig, the youth scampering away to the front of the shop. Hao Yu then set down his cup, rising smoothly to his feet. A few strides had him at the door left open by the boy and after sliding it open he called out Ai’s name before withdrawing. The contractor padded through the doorway silent feet moments later, her loose gray daopao robes kissing her ankles as she did.

She passed the two rooks, offering Song a smirk and Angharad a look of casual disgust before turning to cock an eyebrow at Hao as she stood at his right. Ai looked unworried, Song thought. Unafraid of consequences. Which made little sense, for even if the two of them were feigning this her handler would make a show of saddling her with some punishment. The lack of fear would make a deception obvious.

DONGMEI, the golden letters read atop her head. Song focused on that as discreetly as she could, trying to get a better read on the contract. It had been used against her once and might yet again. The god holding that contract was… The Eighth Judge of the Court. One of the punishment deities under the Red-Robed Official, scourging souls clean so they could enter the Circle without burden. A minor god, subordinate to another, but broadly worshipped as one of the Nine Judges. Not the kind of deity to offer a shoddy contract with an easy weakness to exploit.

“I thought I was to be put away like dirty linen for this one,” she drawled. “What gives?”

“Not an inapt comparison, given what I have just learned,” Hao Yu replied, tone sharp.

His jaw was tight.

“I have just been told,” Hao Yu continued, “that you assaulted Song Ren.”

“I put her in her place,” Ai corrected. “What of it?”

Song’s fingers clenched.

“I offered her a hand in good faith,” Hao Yu said. “Your pointless temerity has undone my every effort to establish trust.”

“There can be no trust, Hao,” Ai sighed, as if addressing a child refusing to grasp a simple truth. “She’s a Ren tangled up with half a dozen yiwu. Let us cease to pretend friendship and treat her like what she is: a tool to be used.”

“That is not your decision to make,” he sharply said. “You do not lead this sect.”

“That is true,” Ai conceded.

“Kneel and apologize,” Hao Yu ordered. “Then swear there will be no repeat of your reprehensible behavior.”

“Now there,” Ai easily replied, “we must disagree. Nothing I did was reprehensible.”

“Obey,” Hao Yu coldly said, “or be abjured.”

“I thought you might say that,” Ai mused. “There is a troubling pattern of you lacking the will to act, Hao.”

She folded her arms behind her back, began to stroll around the table. Price, Song thought as her eyes read through pages of golden characters. What’s your price? There. An exchange contract, with a simple price paid upfront. The phrasing was poetic, threading in in ‘blossoms and fragrance’, but the meaning was mostly clear. Ai, whose true name was Dongmei, had traded away her ability to feel both pleasure and pain. No small thing, Song thought, but nothing that could be used.

But there must be a weakness, there must. In the particulars of the power granted, perhaps?

“When we found out the magnates were making guns to rebel, what did you do?” Ai said, circling the table. “Nothing. You left them to it, offering no help.”

Song’s eyes narrowed. Was the Trade Assembly rebelling in its own right, not as a few traitors going over to a noble conspiracy? Ai clicked her tongue.

“When the cult of the Odyssean approached us, offered to help overthrow the nobles? Nothing again, even though they proved they have a man in the palace.”

Angharad stiffened, as well she would. Just last eve she had been at a ceremony where the same cult claimed it was about to lead an entirely different coup. More importantly Hao Yu’s eyes were too cold, Song thought, for this to be theater. The small man was genuinely furious at how much his right hand was revealing here and now.

“And now that we have a blade to cut Evander Palliades’ throat with,” Ai continued, gesturing at Song, “still you dither. Refuse to pull at the leash even though we have it wound around her neck.”

“You lack foresight,” Hao Yu bit back. “Backing coups that are certain to fail will not aid the cause in Asphodel but damn it – a republic of Tratheke will not last out the year, you fool. It does not have the force to seize the surrounding valley, much less the island.”

“It will, when the Republics send a fleet,” Ai smiled.

“That would mean war with Sacromonte and likely Malan as well,” Hao Yu flatly said. “Something we are incredibly ill-prepared for even were it desirable, which it is not. I will not repeat myself, Ai: recant yourself, here and now, or face abjuration.”

“I’d hoped it wouldn’t come to this, Hao,” Ai said. “I truly did. But the time for meekness is past.”

He rose to his feet, knee hitting the edge of the table in his haste, and sneered.

“Pistols out,” Hao Yu said. “Ai, I abjure you from this sect. Surrender yourself or-”

He paused, interrupted by the same thing Song was hearing: silence. Not a single one of the killers in yellow sashes so much as moved a finger. They only watched, faces hard as stone.

“You can’t abjure me, Hao,” Ai gently said, “because as of this morning Ambassador Guo gave me permission to abjure you in the face of your continued incompetence. This was your last chance and you just threw it away.”

The hairless man swallowed.

“You-”

The change was almost instantaneous: Ai’s gaze turned cloudy green, a shell of green-glazed pottery forming over the front of her body as she moved. Her armored hand was on the back of Hao Yu’s head in a heartbeat and she slammed him down on the table. Gods, Song saw with horror even as she drew to her feet with a pistol in hand. The first hit didn’t kill him, only shattered his nose.

So Ai slammed him down again, and a third time to be sure.

The last hit broke the table, sent the pot and cups toppling all over, but the sound of a wet crack made it plain the skull had been split open. Angharad’s saber was in her hand and Song had her pistol raised, aimed at the hungry ghost mask now painted over Ai’s face.

“Oh, stop that,” the distorted voice sneered.

The shell began to thin, then it was sucked into the body in the blink of an eye. Left behind was Ai, untouched save for a slight disarray in her hair.

“This is Yellow Earth business, rooks,” Ai said. “Put those down before I make you put them down.”

“I think not,” Angharad coldly said. “What is the word of a murderer worth?”

“Still more than yiwu’s,” Ai snorted.

Song raised a hand, though the pistol in the other did not waver.

“Our weapons stay where they are,” she said. “Talk, if you insist.”

“The rector’s palace sent you a little letter yesterday,” Ai said. “Boy wants another taste of Tianxia, I’m guessing.”

“You assume much,” Song coldly said.

“And what are you going to do about it?” she asked, amused. “I don’t care if you grew sense and decided to stop fucking the enemy, you’re still going to agree to meet him again.”

She leaned in.

“Down here in the city, where we can pick him up nice and easy.”

“You are mad,” Song bit out. “I’m an officer of the Watch, I cannot-”

“Dear people of Tianxia,” Ai said in a mocking, high-pitched voice. “Did you know that the Ren are royalists and they did the Dimming for the rajas, and also all this other evil shit that we need to blame someone for?”

“That is a lie,” Angharad said.

She sounded genuinely aghast, as if despite holding the Yellow Earth’s ideology in utter contempt it had still been a line too far to assume they would be liars.

“It’s a lie Yellow Earth sects will have shouted in every village square from Caishen to the Sanxing,” Ai replied. “Hey, Ren, tell me: which do you think will die from the Gloam curse first, your mother or your sisters? My money’s on the oldy lady. I heard she almost died in the birthing bed last time, that what came out wasn’t a child but…”

“Enough,” Song hissed.

Golden letters unfolded to her eye. The shell Ai wore was not solid aether manifested by the contract. Instead the power granted by the god transmuted already existing matter into the green-glazed pottery, though what exactly was transmuted was unclear. When the shell was undone, that substance was transmuted back. Blood, flesh? The contract did not replace what was lost, so it could not be too essential – if it were Ai’s heart that was transmuted, she would drop down and die. Ah, if the shell is broken clean through it forced to transmute back and then must be brought up again.

That was… slightly better than nothing, considering most weapons that could breach the shell would kill the contractor anyway.

“Yeah, it’s enough,” Ai smiled. “Enough pretending this is a choice. Do it or die. Either way I’ll call it a good day’s work.”

“You think you can get away with threatening women of the Watch like this?” Angharad asked.

The word used was not transmutation, exactly, but ‘calcination’ and the matter calcinated was only referred to as ‘fuel’. There should be a limit to the solidity, Song thought, given that the shell was made from a limited substance. But then a stone wall could break too, it spoke nothing to the strength of the shell. Wait, nothing in here forces her to put a shell only over the front of her body. Which meant Ai was concentrating the contract’s effect, which meant it was… well, not a rampart. More like a heavy oaken door.

Which still meant little short of cannon fire or at least sustained musket shots in the same spot would affect it, meaning that avenue was a dead end. There must be another angle. Where did the strength and quickness come from?

“I think that by the time you ladies are done whining your way up the ladder to someone who matters, it’ll be our friends running this shithole,” Ai shrugged. “You think the Conclave will piss off the people who have their hands on an Antediluvian shipyard to soothe your hurt feelings?”

Ai sneered.

“The Watch takes no part,” she mocked. “You rooks pick and choose the evils you fight, like our good friend Hao did. Always talking about making a tower of small victories, about picking the fights we can win and biding our time.”

Ai bared her teeth.

“Only evil’s real, girls,” she said. “And it’s not waiting patiently for us to build towers. It’s out there in the streets with fancy hats on, beating and robbing and raping, strutting around like it owns the place because it fucking does – and it’ll keep on owning it unless someone does something about it.”

Hard smiles from the thugs and she carelessly kicked the table wreckage away. Song found the lines she was looking for. Nothing pleasant to read. The body was not augmented in the slightest by the contract, but it didn’t matter because it was not the body that moved when Ai used her contract. It was the shell, and the shell moved as quickly as Ai could think it.

Part of Song admired the way she must have trained herself for years, learning how to use her contract like she did. It was not easy, to wield your own thoughts. The rest of her raged that there seemed nothing capable of killing this contractor except artillery at the end of a narrow alley.

“So you’re going to roll over and take it, Song Ren,” she said, “like the world has been doing for the same yiwu you’re fucking. You tell Palliades this: tonight at six, in that same brothel the two of you visited before.”

“Or what?” Song replied, because she needed to hear it.

“Or I send a letter and by the month’s end the Republics will know Haoran Ren is a royalist,” she said.

Ai took a step closer.

“Or I will personally snap your traitor neck,” Ai said. “After making you watch while I pluck the limbs off every member of your little brigade.”

“Or,” Angharad mildly said, “we kill you here and now. I must confess that I am growing quite partial to that idea.”

Without looking, Song put a hand on her arm to restrain her. Angharad was a fine enough swordswoman that if the Pereduri was at her best and they were both armed for the fight, she might be tempted to try. But Angharad still needed a cane, Song only had a pistol and there were five more Yellow Earth partisans in the room. Perhaps more outside.

Besides, there was something… off about the way Ai was going about this. She’d not been shy about choking Song out last time and she evidently feared neither of them or the consequences of violence. So what was holding her back now?

“Song?” Angharad asked.

“We don’t fight her,” she said. “It’s what she wants.”

Ai smiled.

“Yeah, Tredegar,” she said. “Listen to your captain. Take one for the brigade. Lie down and think of the Bitch Perp-”

“She’s provoking us on purpose,” Song said, and cocked her head to the side. “Because she can’t attack us first. Can you, Ai?”

Ai laughed, but the sound came just a little too quick.

“You asked the ambassador permission to kill Hao Yu,” Song continued. “But he did not give you permission to attack us. That’s why you want us to strike the first blow, so you have an excuse.”

“Oh, Ren, I do have permission,” Ai smiled. “I just need to wait for it a bit.”

She shook her head, as if amused.

“Off with you, rooks,” Ai said. “You have the time and place, Song. You have the terms. Give us the Lord Rector and your traitor brother is kept quiet.”

“How can I trust you would keep your end of the bargain?” Song replied.

Her eyes moved through line after line of gold, reading through the contract again and again. Sifting through the text for anything at all she might use. Nothing, damn her. Not a single thing, a weakness or angle. It was all airtight.

“Because you don’t matter, Song,” Ai said, smiling. “Not compared to the shipyard, what it means for the Republics. You’re just an eyesore and I won’t care when you’re no longer in my eyes. Deliver us Evander Palliades, spare us the cost of grabbing him, and I might even be moved to mention you’re not a complete traitor to our friends in the homeland.”

“Your position isn’t as strong as you seem to think,” Song told her.

“Even if that were true,” Ai said, shrugging, “it wouldn’t change anything. Yours is just that weak.”

The contractor gestured at her soldiers and they moved, Angharad tensing even as Song mastered herself. She had all she would get out of this place, down to the precise wording of Ai’s contract.

It was time to leave.

Song spared one last look back as she led Angharad out, eyes finding the broken table and Hao Yu’s corpse among the wreckage. His face was red pulp, bleeding out in the channels. Man’s blood joined with pig’s blood, disappearing below.

The stone could not tell difference and neither could Song.

--

Without needing to agree on it, they waited until they were three streets away before talking. You never knew where there might be ears listening, in this rat warren of a city.

They found an alley out of the way, and where even by roof it would be hard for anyone to eavesdrop on them. They stopped there, as much in deference to Angharad’s panting from their hard pace leaving as because the weight of the silence was becoming unbearable. Song braced herself for remonstrations or an interrogation, but what she received instead was Angharad grasping her arm and squeezing it in comfort.

“I am,” Angharad gently said, “sorry to hear about your brother.”

And Song’s mind went blank. The answers she had half-composed when walking, the fear and the forced calm, they were swept away in a heartbeat. She swallowed. That was… Song closed her hand, lest her fingers tremble. When was the last time someone had been sorry for her family? Said they were and really meant it? Song let out a choked, exhausted breath.

“It was supposed to be him,” Song croaked out. “In my boots, standing where I am. Or if not the Watch then one of the militias, or at least a mercenary company fighting the Someshwari. They raised him to it. Raised all of us to it.”

Her eyes closed. She could not remember his face as well, now. Just the outlines, and that cast to his brow. The anger that never quite left, even when he was at his happiest.

“My eldest brother, it broke him,” Song said. “He couldn’t bear the weight. Haoran, though, he always felt he was being punished. Maybe he was.”

She swallowed.

“I thought he’d just left to find his own way, to escape the name,” Song said. “I never thought he might…”

Become a traitor, she could not quite bring herself to finish. And a part of her wondered how Haoran could be called a traitor to Tianxia, when the Republics had never once thought of him as deserving. Her eyes burned so she squeezed them shut until the ache started, until she had killed the tears before they could begin, and only then did she dare open them again.

“His reasons do not matter,” Song said, tone even. “As Ai said, should word of his going over to the royalists be spread it will be the end of my family. They won’t live long enough for the curse to kill them.”

They would be arrested and put on trial, the outcome of which was already decided. If they were lucky magistrates would handle the matter and order them executed out in the country, but odds were the local prefect would be ordered to send them to Mazu to stand trial before the republic’s general assembly. Or, worse, all the way to Sangshan so the Ministry of Rites could organize a grand trial like the one that had seen her grandfather lashed to death.

“You believe her threat to be genuine, then,” Angharad said.

“I do,” Song tiredly replied. “I can’t afford not to.”

The dark-skinned woman rubbed her wrist.

“It is different, for me,” she admitted. “The Lefthand House does not threaten my father’s life, only to withhold help and sufferance should I return to free him.”

“Who holds him?” Song softly asked. “You never said.”

“House Cadogan, in practice,” Angharad said. “But the prisoners of Tintavel are held on behalf of others. Someone sent my father there.”

“Someone who can make requests of an influential house and have them accepted,” Song finished.

Angharad grimaced, nodding.

“Our histories that only one man ever escaped that prison-fortress, and it was done with the help of Lucifer himself,” she said. “Even with the Lefthand’s House help the odds are… stark. Without it?”

“There is no chance at all,” Song said.

“Close enough,” Angharad murmured.

Part of Song itched to ask about the price, about whether her suspicion about the infernal forge was right, but she forced it away. Trust was a choice, and she had made hers.

“Would the Lord Rector even come down?” Angharad asked. “If you ask and he does not, Ai might…”

That the Pereduri could not risk finishing a sentence ascribing mercy to Ai was telling. It did not matter anyway.

“I believe so,” Song said, not quite looking the other woman in the eye.

Angharad’s brow simply rose.

“He is, I think, taken with me,” she delicately said.

Had been even before she took him to bed. Or, well, table. And wall.

“And you?”

Song grimaced.

“I like him,” she admitted. “If we were different people maybe more, but-”

“You are not,” Angharad finished.

It was a sweet indulgence, but it could not be more. Song suspected it would not be half as sweet if it were.

“He’ll come if I ask,” Song said. “And they follow the letters, they would not know about the correspondence he sent me otherwise."

"So if you do not send the letter, they will know,” Angharad said. “They do not appear aware of the contents, however. You could send a warning instead of summons.”

“They haven’t shown that they know what was written,” Song said. “That doesn’t mean they don’t.”

If she were Ai, she would not have made that demand without having a way to know. It was lending the enemy power they might not truly have, but could she afford to take the risk it was otherwise? Angharad slowly nodded, then craned her neck to glance up at the roof.

“Sleeping God, that contract,” Angharad muttered. “I will never look at bhuqefileyo the same again.”

Song frowned, translating the Umoya. Trinket-corpse? Her confusion must have been obvious, for the Pereduri cleared her throat.

“It is the informal word for bone pottery,” Angharad said. “My mother had a glazed pot in slightly darker green in her parlor when I was a girl. She loved the piece, always said that…”

The other woman then looked faintly guilty. Usually the sign she realized some amusing anecdote from her youth seemed rather less inoffensive when retold outside the confused of the peerdom of Peredur. Song’s lips twitched.

“That it was made with the bones of someone important, like an old king of Cathay?”

One of the oldest and proudest tricks of Mazu hawkers. So many king’s bones had been sold in that port you would think Cathay grew them on trees.

“The merchant who sold it claimed so,” Angharad defended. “And not a king, merely a duke.”

“Oh, if it was only a duke then that’s all right,” Song teased.

The small touch of levity was like fresh water, after earlier. A woman as traveled as Angharad’s mother had not likely believed that even a ‘mere’ duke’s bones were incinerated for use in the recipe instead of, say, cattle bones but – huh. Incinerated. Did that mean…

“We should return,” Angharad spoke into the silence. “We both have preparations to make.”

Her for the concert, Song for… whatever lay ahead of her. She shook her head, but the idea would not quite leave. The thought that she might have glimpsed a weakness after all. The noblewoman began hobbling back towards the main street.

“You didn’t ask what I would do,” Song said, the words tearing out of her before she could think better of it.

Angharad paused, turned back. Looked at her for a long moment.

“Trust is a choice,” she finally replied.

And though she was on the edge of the pit, balancing as the winds picked up, that was enough to warm Song all the way to Black House.

There, though, anger flared: Song’s bedroom door was open. Someone was in her quarters, and after the day she’d had that felt like the droplet that tipped over the vase. Her knife was out in a flash and she strode past the threshold, ready to take another eye off Tupoc, but then she stopped. Angharad almost ran into her. Sitting at her writing table, looking thoroughly exhausted, a curly-haired man was feeding an enormous magpie bits of crushed grapes from a bowl.

“Good afternoon, ladies,” Tristan Abrascal grinned. “Sorry I’m running late, you wouldn’t believe how hard it was to get a carriage.”