Pale Lights - Book 2: Chapter 17

Musa Shange and his three were the first down.

Angharad would give him this: the man might be arrogant, but he was no coward. It was but moments after he disappeared down the stairs that the jockeying began, not for seats but for alliances. Now that it seemed certain all of them would journey down into the Acallar to fight everyone wanted to stand with the strongest they knew. Shalini pulled close, almost as if staking a claim, and Salvador had been sitting to their side the entire time.

“We should look into a fourth,” Shalini quietly advised. “Best to fill our ranks as much as possible.”

“Agreed,” Angharad murmured.

She did not believe herself unskilled with a blade, but there were monsters against which blades only helped so much. She flicked a glance as Salvador, who grunted in agreement. Good, she could begin looking for-

“Hello.”

Angharad’s hand still went for her saber after she saw who it was addressing them. Shorter than her and almost skinny, the Malani boy that Tupoc had introduced as ‘Expendable’ wore a particularly thick cloak and a wide-brimmed black hat that was pulled down to hide as much of his face as it could without obscuring his vision entirely. There was a hunter’s spear trapped to his back and an unusually thick pistol at his belt. Despite the hat Angharad could still see a slice of those strange eyes, black and amber like a wolf’s.

Even as he spoke and faced them, Expendable stared squarely down at the ground.

“Good afternoon,” Angharad stiffly replied.

One’s affiliation with Tupoc Xical was not sufficient reason for rudeness, against all odds.

“Tupoc said I should go to you if there’s fighting,” the Malani said. “That you owe him for the Dominion and for saving you earlier in class.”

“Untrue on both accounts,” the Pereduri coldly replied.

Expendable shifted uncomfortably on his feet.

“He says,” the boy coughed into his fist, “that it’s bad manners to be a welcher.”

Angharad twitched and her saber was an inch out when Shalini caught her wrist.

“Not here,” the gunslinger said. “We’re causing a scene.”

The noblewoman’s lips thinned as she realized that dozens were looking at the scene she was causing – Muchen He from the Forty-Ninth, was smirking – and she had likely chased off half their prospects for a fourth squadmate. Reluctantly, she sheathed the blade.

“That and he knows something about the death of someone called Isabela Ruest,” Expendable continued.

He had not so much as flinched, Angharad belatedly realized, even when she moved to bare steel. Had he not seen it for his staring at the ground? No, he must have.

He’d simply been unafraid.

“Do you perhaps mean Isabel Ruesta?” Shalini asked.

Expendable let out a noise of relief.

“That’s the one, yes,” he said. “Lierganen names, you know?”

“Preaching to the converted,” Shalini drily replied.

“What does he know that would matter?” Angharad demanded.

Expendable shrugged.

“He didn’t tell me,” the Malani answered. “But if you take me on for today, he’ll say.”

Angharad frowned. Isabel had died in battle, had she not? Tupoc had been there that night, but not anywhere near her as far as she could recall. Yet while the Izcalli was a liar and a man without honor, usually he bargained in good faith – if only so that others might bargain with him again. And if he offers this in bad faith, the noblewoman thought, I would be rid of any ties to him. She turned a look on Shalini, who sighed.

“What can you do?” the curvy Someshwari asked.

“I am good with a spear,” Expendable said, “and I have salt munitions for my pistol.”

“Contract?” Salvador rasped out.

“Yes,” the Malani flatly replied. “But it would best I do not use it.”

Curious as she was, Angharad did not step across the unspoken line.

“Fine,” Shalini said. “We’re looking too messy to draw in anyone good at the moment, so we might as well get someone whose death I would not mourn.”

That was a rather savage thing to tell a strange, the noblewoman thought, but Expendable did not seem moved in the slightest. Considering what Tupoc had named him, perhaps that should not be surprising. Salvador caught her eye and nodded, which along with Angharad’s own agreement settled the matter. There was no more time to talk, however, as someone let out an exclamation and she found that down below Musa Shange’s squad was readying for a fight.

The Marshal, showing no sign of leaving, let them pick their cage and opened it himself before getting out of the way.

After the onjancanu Angharad had expected some other great brute, but instead what came out was a blur of movement. Musa’s squad had been lying in wait and the two with muskets took their shots, but they hit nothing save the insides of the cage. It was the fourth, a woman with two silvery hatchets, who let them all get a good look at the lemure when she put them up just in time to catch the snapping jaws of a feathered, winged serpent.

It was an entirely different sort of fight from the Marshal’s. The lemure – which looked not unlike some of the drawings Angharad had seen of great Izcalli spirits – was no lumbering giant but a darting, poisonous little thing. It was no larger than a sheep and had no arms, but the feathers of its long tail were razor-sharp and its jaw was powerful enough to snap a musket when it caught one of the students unwary.

Several were cut, though the wounds were not too deep and they all avoided that deadly bite.

To Lord Musa’s honor, he quickly grasped that having spread out his squad was a mistake and that the creature would try to pick them off one by one. He gathered them all together, and when the lemure still risked an attack they finally caught it. The woman with the silver hatchets threw one, which missed, but then there was a flare of silver and the hatched came spinning back to her hand. The lemure banked down to avoid it, towards the floor, and there Musa caught it with his blade.

He went for the wings, prudently, and after the winged serpent could no longer fly a quick and inglorious death followed.

“I wonder why it did not try to flee,” Shalini mused. “No one could have stopped if it flew up.”

“Spirits can’t leave this place,” Expendable quietly said.

He had only looked at the fight with small glances, never a stare. Angharad frowned his way.

“Why?”

“I don’t know why,” the Malani replied. “I just know.”

Expendable spoke like a man from the Isles, not someone raised abroad, so she refrained from outright calling him a liar in the privacy of her own mind. He would have been taught better. Tough Angharad suggested they be the next down the stairs, but Shalini instead suggested they wait another two fights to get an idea of what the lemures faced might be like. It felt like profiteering to her, but the others were in agreement so she conceded the matter.

The second fight was much quicker: the lemure was a horse with two curved horns, and though it proved dangerous when it breathed out a gout of flame at the squad facing it the four killed it with practiced efficiency. Shot in the sides with muskets, then a spear to the head. It emboldened the next squad to venture down with only three.

Only one got out, and missing a leg.

A seemingly harmless lemure, looking like a boy whose lower half was a goat’s – though the upper half only seemed human, the way the muscles moved beneath all wrong – brutally took them apart. It danced out of the way of the shot that opened the fight, stole a blade and a cut Someshwari’s girl throat with it before she could even scream. Another of the three slammed a spear into its neck as he did, but the lemure stabbed him in the eye in return.

The neck was half-cut, head dangling listlessly, but there was no ichor in that flesh. Only cartilage.

Only when the last student shot it in the belly did the lemure let out a scream, a mouth opening in its belly with teeth like a goat’s horns, and it tore through the last student’s leg before the girl stabbed into it enough it ceased moving, screaming and weeping all the while. She had to be carried out by the blackcloaks keeping guard behind the grate, unconscious. Two more came and carried out the corpses as the Marshal waited, silent.

“Next,” he simply called out, looking at the stands.

A deadly stillness had fallen upon them as the corpses were carried out, every last whisper silenced as they faced the reality that their professor had watched two students die and third be crippled for life with polite disinterest. There was no secret safety here, no ancient device preventing deaths or making any of this safe.

This wasn’t a class, it was a culling.

Well, nothing for it. Angharad pushed off the railing, adjusted her coat and the sword at her side before checking her pistol. Perhaps she would even use it.

“Shall we?” she asked the others.

She got blank looks in return.

“Two and then we descend, that was the arrangement,” she reminded them.

“It was,” Shalini softly agreed, then licked her lips. “All right.”

Salvador’s face was a mask of calm, and as far as she could tell Expendable was only barely paying attention. Angharad nodded their way, then took the lead down the stone steps. She could feel the weight of the stares on their back, and again when she emerged out onto the broken grounds of the Acallar. The others followed behind, none of them in the mood to chatter.

The Marshal waited for them at the heart of it, and laughed when he saw them.

“Of course it would be you four.”

“I don’t follow, Marshal,” Angharad frowned.

“You’re a mirror-dancer, girl,” the old man said. “Unlike those children up there, you were never under the illusion that your life might not be on the line.”

“I expect disservice is being done,” she calmly replied.

The Marshal shrugged, then wordlessly invited her to choose a cage. Glancing back, Angharad found that none of the others seemed inclined to do so. The noblewoman eyed the closest cage and-

/a large golden lion prowled out, unblinking red eyes set in its fur/

-decided it would do.

“This one,” she pointed.

She knew not the beast, but she would much prefer something committed to the ground rather than bearing wings. The odds of her contributing to a victory with her pistol were unfortunately low.

“I will take the front,” Angharad said. “Shalini-”

“I’ll hold back until you have it in place, then unload,” the Someshwari said.

“I go with you,” Salvador said, catching Angharad’s eye.

She would have objected, but he shook his head.

“Hard to kill,” he smiled.

It would have been an insult to refuse him, so she set aside her concern.

“Then I will hit the flank,” Expendable muttered. “After-”

The cage opened, Marshal de la Tavarin having wrenched open the gate before retreating out of sight, and just like in Angharad’s glimpse a great lion prowled out. Expendable’s voice caught.

“Please let me kill it,” he suddenly said. “Cripple it and let me kill it.”

Eyes turned to him, baffled.

“Why-” Angharad began.

“For my contract,” he said. “It’s… I might be able to leave the Fourth if I kill it. Please.”

Shalini cursed.

“I make no promises,” Angharad said, then hesitated. “But if the opportunity comes, I will hold back from slaying it.”

A roar told made it plain that the time for talk was over.

The noblewoman shot forward, drawing her blade as she did. The monster, she saw, was closer in size to a bear than the lions of Malan – and inside the hair-like man unblinking red eyes watcher her approach even as it yawned, revealing its fangs. Its tail swept behind casually as Angharad closed the distance, choosing her angle, but to her surprise Salvador ran past her with his blade in hand.

“I’ll distract,” he croaked out.

Before she could reply the man turned blue and hazy – or so she thought, before realizing that Salvador was the same but leaving a trail. Contract. She adjusted her approach, circling towards the left as most of the lemure’s eyes turned to the Sacromontan. What followed she almost missed, so quickly did it happen.

Salvador had gotten close, enough to dart in with his sword, but the lion lazily stepped past the blow. Then one of the red eyes burst, spit out like dart of blood that hit the Sacromontan in the stomach and ripped right through. Angharad would have shouted, but the man flickered blue and heartbeat later he was elsewhere entirely.

Behind her, when he had first stood when he’d begun leaving a trail, and entirely unharmed.

Angharad’s eyes widened at the implication, but she had no more time to spare than that. The lemure had turned its attention on her, leaping, and a glimpse told her to follow her sidestep by a roll as another eye burst and tried to clip her shoulder. Instead she rose into a strike at the beast’s back leg, scoring a blow on skin that proved tough as old leather. She cut it, but not deep enough for ichor.

Roaring, the lion turned to swipe at her and that was when Shalini Goel unloaded into its side.

Four shots, in such quick succession Angharad could barely tell them apart. The lion screamed, but she could hardly hear it with the racket made by dozens of cages suddenly being rattled by the beasts inside them. Salvador had returned to the lemure’s back, hazy once more, and Angharad spared a heartbeat to notice that he seemed exceedingly careful about never stepping in his own trail.

After that, it was a dance with the mirror.

The beast was fast and tricky, once almost tearing Salvador’s throat out after he snapped back to the beginning of his trail, but Expendable was keeping an eye on them – he shot the beast in one of its eyes, then forced it away with his spear. They were quick on their feet, however, and Shalini was one-woman artillery. She never ventured too close, waiting until they trapped the beast to tear into it with her pistols.

Soon the lemure was bleeding from every side, more meat than monster, and to Angharad’s disgust it began to fall apart. The same red it had shot at them with began wriggling out of control, an entire leg turning into a puddle of blood suddenly, and after a few more careful blows from the lion was soon no more than a wriggling, pulsating mass of flesh and blood.

It was no longer fighting, at least, and the others joined her to catch their breath. They had a few scrapes and Expendable’s coat was ripped, but otherwise they were unharmed.

“I am unsure how to kill this,” Angharad admitted, eyeing the red. “Salt munitions?”

“No need. I’ll end it.”

She turned to Expendable, who for once was standing straight. He began advancing towards the lion, undoing his cloak and letting it drop before tossing his spear and pistol the same way.

“What are you doing?” Angharad called out, baffled.

“Using my contract,” Expendable replied, and took off the hat. “Don’t come close, I won’t be in control.”

His eyes, Angharad saw, were no longer like a wolf’s.

The Malani boy even took off his tunic and his boots, advancing in hose towards the wriggling lion remains. He looked a madman, until the first spasm. As he screamed hoarsely Expendable’s right arm wrenched back and burst into claws and fur with a wet squelch. Convulsing, screaming in pain, another form burst out of the boy one squelch at a time. Long clawed legs and a striped coat, a thick chest and large triangular ears a dog’s muzzle.

It would have looked like a hyena, if they grew the size of carriages.

No, Angharad knew what this was and so she did not dare to move so much as an inch. The black stripes on the monster’s coat rippled like living shadow, snaking along the ground, and as the creature let out a cackle she blurred – and emerged at the tip of the extended shadow, sending a shiver down Angharad’s spine.

“Gods,” Shalini whispered. “What is that?”

“Doom-caller,” she whispered back, dry-mouthed. “Ukusini.”

The Slow Death, they were called by some, for the ukusini took their time slaughtering caravans – snatching and bleeding, not because they could not murder their way through the lot in moments but to make the caravan into a larder of meat and terror. Ancestors, how had this boy come into a contract that turned him into one? The monster fell onto the wounded one with relish, tearing into the flesh and gobbling it up.

It didn’t make it quick.

The ukusini turned towards them, when the last strip of flesh was devoured, and let out a shuddering cackle. Angharad swallowed, taking a careful step back. Would the Marshal step in, if it were a student attacking them and not a lemure? She was not to find out, for instead of advancing the creature let out a dismayed cry and began to convulse. It was the horror they had seen earlier in the reverse, flesh and bone and tendon sucked into a too-small body as the ukusini was forced back inside Expendable.

The boy was left lying on the ground, completely naked.

Angharad had thought that the end of it, for a moment, but Expendable kept convulsing. Things moved under his skin as he wriggled on the ground, gasping, until the sudden end. He stayed there for a moment, until he closed his eyes and slammed his fist against the ground.

“Fuck,” he snarled. “Fuck. How is it not strong enough, Sleeping God fucking damn you.”

When he opened his eyes they were wolflike again and he looked set to weep. He gathered himself to sit with little regard to his modesty.

“It’s done,” Expendable tired said. “Thank you for trying.”

Shalini brought him his cloak and hat, something like pity on her face, and they picked up his affairs before leaving together. They were taken to the guardhouse, patched up and sent back to the stands. They sat there, watching as the hour stretched and cages opened one after another. By the time the fights ended, six people had died and three were wounded badly enough they had to be taken away.

When the Marshal called them down, the sixty-six remaining students were silent as the grave they were standing on.

—

“Do you know our words, Maryam Khaimov?”

Captain Yue looked like ease put to canvas: she was barefoot and wearing a billowy white shirt, lying back on a black coat laid atop the grass. With her thick black braid pulled to the side, Maryam could not see the burn scars she knew were on her cheek and ear. And the older signifier’s brown eyes, however half-lidded their gaze, studied her without blinking.

“Beyond the Horizon,” Maryam recited.

She sat cross-legged in the grass facing the other woman, cloak pulled tight around her like a shield.

“That’s right,” Captain Yue agreed. “We inherited those, did you know? I’ll spare you the twists and turns of history, but our lineage as a guild can be traced back to Second Empire officials called the cazadores.”

Maryam frowned. She had known of the Akelarre Guild’s ancient roots but its rise to prominence had only begun well into the Succession Wars – why cling to such a distant past? Her bemusement was visible enough to warrant answer.

“They weren’t Gloam-users but mapmakers,” the captain said, sounding strangely amused. “Their role was to explore past the borders and chart the lands there so that the emperors of Liergan might better plan their conquests.”

The blue-eyed woman mulled over that.

“So when Liergan grabbed everything under Glare they could reach, that meant going out into the dark,” Maryam said. “They turned into Gloam-users.”

“That and a mystery cult,” Captain Yue said. “The Orden de Cazadores got into its head that it was going to save us all by finding a land beyond the horizon where the Gloam could not reach, a paradise beyond even the reach of gods.”

It sounded not unlike what her people called the Nav – but that was a land for the dead, not the living.

“I have not heard of such a place,” Maryam said.

“They found Hell instead,” the Tianxi drily replied. “Bit of disappointment, I imagine.”

Maryam twitched, surprised that even through her nerves she could be amused. Captain Yue did have a way about her. It was the calm, the Izvorica figured. The older woman seemed so deeply unmoved by the world around her you could not be helped to be drawn into her pace.

“If they failed, why do we keep their words?” Maryam asked. “The Guild has folded hundreds of practitioner cults into itself over the years. Surely one would better deserve the honor.”

“The words stayed because they don’t mean the same thing they used to,” Captain Yue said. “After they found Pandemonium, the Orden cult broke. It only knit back anew under a new dream.”

The Tianxi theatrically swept her arms out.

“To find the edges of the world,” she said. “It is only logical, Maram: we have firmament above and the ground below our feet, but Vesper has walls. Limits. The last of the cazadores and those who came after themwanted to chart the entire world, know the span of it and hold it in their palm.”

She shrugged.

“So a-chasing they went.”

“And we carry that dream still?” Maryam asked, honestly surprised. “That is not much like Captain Totec taught me, or even what I learned on the Blind Isle.”

“Some of us do,” Captain Yue said. “But that dream bled out, Maryam, for the same reason so many other things have: the Succession Wars.”

The shadow cast on every lesson about mornarichistory, the great wars that had ravaged their realms and scarred them deep. The Triglau had known war, both within their peoples and with the broken kingdoms beyond the Dead Lands, but never anything so shattering. What rank madness it would be, to lessen the lights of the world when there were already so few.

“War took away the taste for such pursuits, I take it,” Maryam said.

“It did a lot more than that,” Captain Yue smiled.

She had not moved an inch, yet the Izvorica could not help but feel there was no longer anything casual about the way she was lying on the ground.

“When half of Old Liergan went dark, it ripped the veil off our delusions of supremacy,” the Tianxi said. “The Watch, it was born from that sudden anguished realization that we’ve been at war with the encroaching dark since we first fled down into Vesper and that, despite our most desperate efforts, we are losing.”

The simple, heartfelt belief in that last word shivered across the Meadow. Captain Yue had spoken it without room for a speck of doubt. The older woman pushed herself up, legs crossing in a mirror of Maryam’s, and rolled her shoulders.

“But listen to me rambling, and after saying I’d spare you the history!” the Tianxi sighed. “Here’s the important part: by the reckoning of the finest minds of our order, only somewhere around a third of Vesper exists under the Glare.”

The blue-eyed woman felt her stomach clench in unease. She had never heard a number put to such a thing before, and the one she was being told was distressing. Maryam not thought most of the world would be under light, but surely at least close to half? A mere third sounded… fragile. Captain Yue, far from distressed, seemed enthused.

“What you have to understand, Maryam, is that the rest of the Watch are poor doctors,” she said. “They hunt the evils of the world and measure them as if it that can save anything, but all that attends to is the symptoms.”

She shrugged.

“It is not unworthy work, and some of necessary, but at the end of the day they cannot face the reality that two thirds of the world is the province of Gloam,” she said.

And that let Maryam put it together. Captain Totec had not come to the land of her birth as an explorer, not really. And there was a reason he had taken her under his wing even knowing it would offend the Malani.

“But we do,” she said. “The horizon in our guild’s words, it’s not one that can be sailed to.”

“No,” Captain Yue agreed, sounding pleased. “It’s the horizon that’ll find us, sooner or later: the last third going dark. And when that day comes, if there is anything to remain of us, then we need to have mastered Gloam. Made it ours. Else none of us will ever see what lies beyond that horizon.”

She raised her hand, clenched it into a fist.

“The Signs, all they are is an alphabet,” the captain said. “One that in time will make the words of the language that will be mankind’s salvation.”

The Tianxi opened her fist, revealing a ball of roiling Gloam that she snuffed out with a single breath.

“But that work will not be finished in our time,” she said. “We pass it on, Maryam. We learn and write and pass the book so that those after us might finish the page.”

The Izvorica kept silent. She could already smell the refusal, or worse. What could she add to this Akelarre book? She doubted there was a single signifier in the Abbey that could not make at least twice as many Signs as she.

“That’s why Baltasar is wrong about you,” Captain Yue mildly said.

Blue eyes snapped to her.

“He’s a brilliant signifier of the Watch, and a fine instructor, but that is all he is,” the older woman said. “I imagine he was quite dismissive of whatever Triglau tradition saw you obscure your brain before puberty.”

Maryam swallowed, mouth gone dry.

“He was.”

Not unkindly, but he had been.

“That’s where he fails,” Captain Yue smiled. “He sees that, sees how your Grasp and Command are absurd, and sees someone who cannot excel at what he is to teach.”

The captain folded her arms.

“He should be wondering, instead, what it is you weremade to excel at,” she said. “There is a mystery in you, Maryam Khaimov, and mysteries have been the death of many a signifier.”

The dark-eyed Tianxi bared her teeth.

“But they’re also how we fill the page.”

“And what would that mean, for me?” Maryam quietly asked.

“You give me two afternoons a week,” Captain Yue said. “I’ll assign you readings and exercises. Sometimes, I will take measurements.”

“But you’ll fix my signifying,” the Izvorica said.

“Oh, I’ll do more than that,” the Tianxi chuckled.

She leaned back, fingers riffling through the pockets of the coat on the grass. She slid out a folded paper, which she handed Maryam. The blue-eyed woman opened it, throat catching as she read the lines. It was a report from a garrison officer, a lieutenant describing the encounter he’d had last night near a red line in Port Allazei.

And unless there was another pale-skinned signifier on the island, it was her being described out there in the middle of the night.

“I had it buried,” Captain Yue idly said. “Officially, you were out on business for me.”

And you’ll keep burying it, Maryam understood, so long as I do what you say. She licked her lips. That alone was enough to leverage her even if she were not already desperate.

“Can you really help?” she asked.

“I’ve been called a lot of things, over the years,” Captain Yue said. “Witch, bitch, the butcher of Caranela, a hundred different variations of madwoman and even ‘Necalli with tits’ the once, but there’s one thing they’ve never called me and that’s a liar.”

There was a glint in her eyes, something and dark and cold but not cruel – at least no crueler than a deep river was when it drowned the unwary.

“Help me understand why you have twice lived through something we believe to be certain death,” she grinned. “And I’ll make sure you’ve mastered enough Signs to stay on next year.”

Maryam chose the side of the coin she could live with, and shook the devil’s hand.

—

Hage was cleaning the counter when Tristan came in.

The devil glanced at him, cocked an eyebrow and then went around the counter. Mephistofeline was sleeping by the front window, his dainty snores blowing off little motes of dust with every breath. Fortuna hurried to him immediately, trying to wake him with a sudden shout that had Tristan tensing but the cat only flopping belly up and stretching a bit without ever ceasing to snore.

“You have made a deadly enemy today, Prince Mephistofeline,” Fortuna hissed. “I’ll have you know an entire language was once crafted for the sole purpose of making hymns in my name and that-”

Fighting down the secondhand embarrassment and habitually glad no one else could hear the goddess, Tristan slid into a seat facing Hage. The devil set down his rag, leaning a single elbow against the counter and cocked one of those impressive eyebrows.

“I read my dossier,” Tristan said. “What do you want to know?”

“What did your father do for a living?” Hage asked.

“They have him marked a cellist.”

The devil hummed.

“Who put a price on your head and why?”

“The Ivory Library,” the thief replied. “And it didn’t say why, but it did mention that Officer Nerei complained that it was an abduction of a Watch member for the purposes of experimentation.”

His face remained unreadable. Tristan supposed that was easier, when the only facial expressions you had were those you faked with mandibles under skin.

“Tell me an Item of Interest,” Hage said, “for another member of your cabal.”

Tristan widened his eyes and put on an offended air.

“Why would you think I looked at their private matters?” he said.

The devil leaned in.

“Is that your final answer?”

The thief grimaced.

“Song’s family is so hated a curse-god is forming from that hate,” he said.

Hage hummed again.

“Why did you not simply ask Wen instead of making an elaborate plot with a fire?”

“Because if he refused he’d be on the lookout for me and all my other guesses at where dossiers are would be much better defended,” Tristan honestly replied.

The devil had mentioned four transcripts. Hage would have one as a Krypteia teacher, Wen would have one as patron of their brigade and likely that office in the port with all the papers would have one as well. The most likely guess for the fourth transcript was the Ninth Brigade, whose princeling might have leaned on the local garrison to get a copy of the Thirteenth’s transcripts after Angharad batted around their finest swordsman.

No, it’d been Wen or Hage from the start and however clever the bespectacled Tianxi was he was nowhere as dangerous as the old devil. Said devil wiped the wet rag across his counter once more.

“You qualify for my lessons,” Hage conceded.

Tristan hid his relief.

“You will work afternoon shifts here twice a week as a cover,” the devil said. “And I will assign you work to fulfill on your own time.”

The thief’s brow rose.

“Am I going to be paid for the labor?”

“Poorly,” Hage happily replied.

It figured. Fortuna, having tired of swearing gruesome revenge on a sleeping animal whose brain was the size of a handful of nuts, drifted their way. She slumped on the counter theatrically, hair sweeping to the side.

“We must retreat,” she told him. “I need to summon my legions, Tristan, for these insults cannot be borne. We may have to burn this place to the ground.”

The gray-eyed man cleared his throat.

“Are we done for the day, then, sir?” he asked.

“No,” Hage said. “And there will be no burning my shop.”

It took him a second for the words to truly sink in. Tristan stilled, blood going cold, and as Fortuna pushed herself up to look at the devil the ancient monster lazily stretched out his hand and flicked her forehead.

And without a sound, she was gone. Disappeared.

“You could see her,” Tristan choked out. “Hear her. This whole time?”

Hage gave a twofold smile, teeth behind teeth.

“Why were you ever so sure I could not?”

The thief licked his lips.

“She’s…”

“Dismissed,” Hage said. “I expect better manners of her should she enter the Chimerical again.”

Would it have hurt? Could Fortuna hurt, the way a human could? Even when they had faced that sliver of the Red Maw, she’d not seemed on the back foot the way she had been just now.

“There are some Masks on this island who would take you on simply because of who recommended you,” the devil said. “That is the worth of Nerei’s name. But I’ve found that while she has a knack for finding exceptional prospects, she doesn’t really prepare them.”

Hage studied him.

“She breaks off the part that wouldn’t fit under the mask, then tosses them our way,” the devil said. “I rather dislike that method.”

That last sentence, Tristan thought, had been spoken in the same venomously casual tone he thought the devil might use while chewing on someone’s leg.

“Entering the Krypteia should always be choice, not a shipwreck,” Hage said.

“Was it for you?” Tristan quietly asked.

“Oh yes,” the old devil smiled. “Hell did not cast me out, boy. I walked out of Pandemonium’s gates with my head held high.”

He licked his lips.

“Why?” Tristan asked. “The Watch was besieging Hell, wasn’t it? They must have called you a traitor when you walked.”

“To tell you the stories that would let you understand a genuine answer might take days,” Hage said. “But a simplification is this: I believe in what the Krypteia is.”

“And what’s that?” the thief asked.

Tone forcefully casual, but the question was utterly serious. Hage laid a hand on the rag, though he did not wipe with it again.

“Our world, Tristan Abrascal, is a graveyard.”

The devil leaned in, voice smooth as silk.

“There are empires in the dark whose rise and fall you shall never hear a whisper from, wonders and horrors buried beneath our feet whose like we will never see again,” Hage said. “We built our homes on the ashes of a hundred broken kingdoms and for those who know how to listen the wind still echoes of that merciless fire.”

The devil’s fingers clenched around the rag,

“The great powers forget, as all power does, the sea of blood that saw them rise,” he said. “In every corner of Vesper ambitious souls sharpen their swords and dream of empire, unheeding of the simple truth that they can only hold the world if it is made small enough to fit the palm of their hand.”

Tristan thought of the grim look on Professor Iyengar’s face, that morning. Of that matter-of-fact tone. More soldiers died in the first two weeks of the Succession Wars than over the entire span of the entire Kuril Dance, she’s said.

“Izcalli burns while Sacromonte butchers,” Hage scorned. “Tianxia apes broken miracles and Malan tries to steal entire kingdoms out of sight. The Imperial Someshwar? If it breaks, it breaks Vesper with it – and it would be worse if it did mend itself.”

All five of the great powers cut in a handful of sentences, though by some counts the Watch was considered the sixth and the devil had spared it.

“All of them digging and digging and cutting deals with whatever god might listen so that when wars comes – not just war but the war– they’ll be kings of the ashes.”

“And our spying on them will change that?” he asked, disbelieving.

Hage shook the head he wore.

“The Krypteia are not spies, Tristan, though we spy. Nor are we thieves, though we steal, or even assassins though we have murdered men like a man cuts grass.”

The devil’s voice was flat.

“We are gravekeepers.”

“That could mean anything,” the gray-eyed man challenged.

“It means,” Hage said, “that we make sure the things that should not be exhumed stay buried deep, that all those grasping hands never break the seal on the wrong tomb. We tend the grounds, cutting the throats of the intrepid and burning the libraries of the too-curious, so that the horrors we half-broke the world to murder stay sleeping in their graves.”

Tristan swallowed.

“Without us, there is no Watch worth the name,” Hage said. “Every other part of it, covenant and conclave and companies, they are the limbs and blood of the beast. We are the duty, the reason it was born.”

The devil put away his rag, temper soothed – though not before he had torn strips with his grip.

“You will not get to be proud and brave and true, Tristan Abascal,” Hage calmly said. “To swagger like a Militant or earn a Stripe’s accolades, to make and learn like a College man.”

Those were never a choice, Tristan thought. He was no soldiers, no scholar, not even a captain. He’d half-tried his hand at it once and how many of those he had banded with on the Dominion made it through?

Only the one already a blackcloak.

“We will ask damned, ugly things of you before this is done,” the devil said. “The kind you won’t even find it in you to whisper to those you love in the small hours of the morning.”

There was something almost hypnotic about Hage’s voice, the way he spoke.

“You will be taught to stare into every shadow and find the lie in every miracle, to trust neither love nor blood and taste even the finest meals for poison. What we teach will wound you, somewhere deep, in ways that you cannot yet understand.”

“And this,” he said, dry-mouthed, “is meant to entice me into joining up?”

“No,” Hage said. “This is.”

The devil caught his eyes.

“Here is the promise of our order: we will use you, Tristan Abrascal, to snuff out a hundred Theogonies.”

The boy’s fingers clenched.

“To slit their throats and set their works aflame,” Hage said. “To bleed out the poison they would spread. In that work we heed no border and obey no law, care not for crowns or gods or how many bodies pile up.”

The old devil’s voice was almost gentle.

“We will barter everything of what we are, what you will be, save for one thing: we hunt the night, and all that would bring it.”

Hage stepped back.

“Think on it,” he said. “Come back tomorrow.”

Tristan had hardly spoken, but he was the one who felt out breath. But it didn’t matter, did it? Time was of no use to him, it was already too late. When I found you, Abuela had said on the ship, our hunt was already carved into your bones.

“There’s nothing to think on,” Tristan said, laying a hand palm up on the counter. “The choice was already made.”

His hand was larger than it had been back then, he thought.

Maybe one day it would mean more than grasping a larger tile.

—

‘What purpose does the Academy serve?’

Song pondered Colonel Cao’s question as her fellow students tried and failed to answer it. Some tried to get clever – ‘to teach’, ‘to make Stripes’ – while others attempted more elaborate answers that were more seriously entertained by both their teacher and the assembly. In the end, however, it was an unfortunately familiar place that elicited a reaction from their teacher.

“The Academy is the true ruling organ of the Watch,” Captain Sebastian Camaron said.

“Oh?” Colonel Cao exhaled. “I did not expect anyone to come so close.”

The man, to his honor, did not outwardly preen. He simply smiled and leaned back into his armchair like a satisfied cat. Were he less pretty it would have looked smug, but he had been blessed with good looks so instead it looked confident. There was nothing worse than a pretty boy who knew it, Song thought.

“It can be said that the Academy’s purpose is to run the Watch,” the colonel elaborated, “and that is the first half of the answer. The second half, naturally, is the why.”

She gestured at the room around them, drink in hand.

“Is it ambition that drives us as a covenant?” Colonel Cao asked them. “Duty, tradition, any of half a dozen other pretty words?”

No one quite dared to risk an answer as the older Tianxi set down her drink

“It is not a simple question to answer, but the effort is worth it. We begin with the two contrary, unpleasant truths of our order: the Watch needs to exist and the Watch cannot be governed.”

That was a bold statement to make, and it landed into utter silence.

“Consider how the order stands,” Colonel Cao invited them. “The Conclave rules us, but who is it made of?”

She flicked a finger at her drink, the noise resounding in the room.

“The captain-generals of free companies spread across half of Vesper, who if not for the rules of the cloak would be as likely to war with each other as the night,” the colonel said. “The many lieutenant-generals of the Garrison, each a jealous petty king elbowing at their rivals for a greater cut of the treasury.”

Song was amused to notice that quite a few faces in the room had soured. As well they should, considering who had sent them to Scholomance.

“Even if the Conclave had half as many seats it would struggle to make decisions,” Colonel Cao said. “It hasn’t been able to elect a Grand Marshal since the Century of Dominion, and smirking men will tell you it is all on purpose, that this way more power remains in the hands of the Conclave, but that is a shallow conceit.”

She sneered.

“No one would be able to get one elected even if they tried, the votes simply split too many ways.”

The colonel raised a finger, as if to ward off objections.

“That is why we have committees, you will say,” she said, and indeed there was a faint rumble of agreement. “The Conclave is too large, goes the argument, so it gives authority to smaller, leaner assemblies that may exercise its will.”

Colonel Cao did not hide her disdain at the notion.

“As if that were not merely cutting up fresh fiefdoms in an order that’s made up a thousand too many.”

That argument, Song noted, was landing better with the free company students than the Garrison ones. Not unexpected, considering the Garrison was much closer to the Conclave as a rule – most of its funding came through it.

“You’re not to be Laurels so we don’t get lost in the philosophy, and you’re not to be Masks so don’t go chasing shadow plots,” Colonel Cao said. “Authority is a coin minted in gold and steel, and if you follow these you will find that the Watch creaks because it is ever pulling itself apart.”

A hard smile.

“The free companies chafe under the rule of the distant Conclave, which they say takes gold and gives precious little back. They fight and die on foreign shores while bureaucrats feed their rewards to ingrate militias.”

More than a few smiles from the free company crews, but that was unlikely to last.

“The Garrison complains that they must clip their wings to appease the captain-generals, who hoard wealth and glory so they might have no rivals. All the while they suffer insults for doing the duties glory hounds cannot be bothered to.”

As if a lever had been pulled, the smiles moved to the other side of the room.

“The Conclave complains it faces a hundred demands and no compromises, both sides of the abyss complaining of the tightrope it must walk.”

No one seemed taken with that particular position, Song mused, which in a way went to prove the colonel’s point.

“At the end of the day,” Colonel Cao said, “policies that benefit the free companies often hinder the Garrison and the reverse is equally true. Compromise displeases both sides and appeasement only whets appetites.”

She took her drink in hand again.

“So why hasn’t the Watch come apart at the seams? You wonder.”

She drank, set it down.

“We are why,” the colonel said, and though she did not raise her voice something about it had everyone sitting at attention.

“There is a Stripe in every free company, every fortress, every session of the Conclave,” Colonel Cao said. “We sit at every table, speak at every council and conspiracy of the black.”

She leaned forward.

“We do not merely raise officers but induct them, for when one gains great success they are invited to study at the Academy,” she said. “We bring in the influential and stack committees, teach Stripe to promote Stripe. We’ve spent centuries and mountains of gold on making the Watch a culture, from something as simple as the color of our cloaks to establishing jargon enough it might as well be a different dialect.”

The colonel smiled, unpleasantly.

“We are not a covenant, children, we are aconspiracy.”

And despite the severity of her expression, whispers bloomed at that. How could they not?

“You want to know what our purpose is? The Academy is the largest, richest and best organized conspiracy on Vesper and its sole purpose is to ensure that the Watch keeps functioning.”

The colonel laughed.

“It’s why we’re larger than all the other covenants put together, why every time we overstep and offend the others never sink the knife too deep,” she said. “Because they know that, for all our arrogance, without us it falls apart.”

The dark-haired woman leaned back against the counter.

“We make free companies share bids instead of fighting for contracts,” Colonel Cao said. “We make garrisons send their powder to their rivals instead of hoarding them, break deadlocks and broker compromises and do everything necessary ensure that the cogs keep turning no matter how many grains of sand get stuck.”

The older Tianxi wagged a finger in warning.

“It doesn’t matter who sent you here, whom you owe and what they want,” she said. “You are Stripes, now. You have a higher calling, a duty to make the decisions that need to be made so that the wall between Vesper and horror keeps standing.”

The colonel snorted.

“Look around you,” she ordered. “Some of those faces will belong to rivals and enemies, for that is the nature of ambition. But do not ever forget, not for one moment, that those enmities are personal. That they must be set aside for the greater good of the Watch, no matter how bitter the pill to swallow.”

She drank the last of her drink, bringing down the cup.

“And you will swallow that pill,” Colonel Chunhua Cao flatly said. “Or soon you will find yourselves out in the cold, and believe me – after being inside, there is no worse place to be.”

—

Marshal de la Tavarin sat on his wall, the rest of them standing beneath him on the same grounds where six of them had died over the last hour.

“As the man charged to initiate you into the Skiritai, I am meant to teach you our ways,” he informed them. “As all the teachers sent by covenants will, each of them giving you tests and speeches and sharing little secrets.”

He snorted.

“Nowadays, well, the Watch isn’t what it used to be,” the Marshal said. “Like an old lion grown more mane than mangle. We’ve been at the top too long, children, it’s made some of us tack on some fancy notions to the truth of what we are.”

He idly twirled his cane.

“Now, the Stripes they like to think they run the Watch and through it the world,” he flashed a grin. “Most of the time it’s worth it to let them keep thinking that so you don’t have to deal with the forms.”

A sigh.

“The College is all questions,” the Marshal said. “What’s this light, law, this clock? And yet somehow they forget to ask the most important question of all.”

He leaned it, to the very edge of the wall.

“Who’s paying for all this?”

There was a spatter of laughter in which Angharad did not share.

“Masks are spies you don’t get to hang, which is the worst sort of spies,” the Marshal continued. “You’ve got to rattle their cage now and then, remind them that blackmail only works if the other side doesn’t put a bullet in your brains.”

Only for the end of the list did he straighten.

“The Akelarre, our cousins in the Guildhouse, they’re sensible enough,” he praised. “You can count on them in a tight spot, if they don’t end up melting their brains.”

He wrinkled his nose.

“The trouble is their witch’s circle is older than the Watch, and sometimes they forget they’re part of it. Don’t complain too much about that, though, since they pay most of our bills.”

The laughter was even thinner on the ground. Nervous would only squeeze so much out of them.

“All these other covenants, they’ll tell their children they’re what keeps the Watch going,” Marshal de la Tavarin informed them. “They’re the most important part, the crowning glory. I’m not here to tell you that, because the truth’s a little simpler: in every way that matters, you are the Watch.”

This time when he smiled there was nothing roguish or foolish about it. It was a cold slice of ivory and silver.

“Everything else exists to serve us,” the Marshal said. “The other covenants were made to arms us, to inform us, to find our enemies and bring us where we need to be to kill them. They are the spear-carriers of the Skiritai Guild, nothing more or less.”

He exhaled dismissively, mustache fluttering.

“Our order’s gotten long in the tooth so all these philosophers sprang out of the woodwork to tell you all the special things that the Rooks are,” he contemptuously said, “but those are just words. Our order is a gun, and you are the bullet: without you there is no point.”

It sounded true, Angharad thought. And sensible enough

“You are Militants: the god-reaping sickle, the silver swords of Iscariot. The army that thrice slew Lucifer and shut the gates of Hell.”

Angharad straightened, as did many around her. Thrice? She had only heard of two.

“Look around you, at this fine fellowship of valor,” the Marshal encouraged. “Take it in.”

It was a hesitant thing, but smiles were shared. They died at the words that followed.

“By the time you leave Scholomance, half of those you see will be dead.”

You can’t be serious, someone called out, and many mutters matched it. Not that the old man seemed displeased.

“Why, children,” he grinned in silver, “did you think we came by all those fancy titles by accident?”

He set his cane on his lap.

“It takes seven years of flawless service or a victory against impossible odds to be considered for the Skiritai, out there in Vesper,” the Marshal said. “Scholomance is different, you’ll tell me. We are the finest, the handpicked, the chosen.”

He shrugged, as if conceding the point.

“That you were,” he agreed. “You were chosen to undertake a process that makes only two things: corpses and silver swords.”

Angharad was not sure she would truly have believed him, had she not seen blackcloaks drag out six corpses in the span of an hour. Now she knew better.

“They gave me five years to make Militants out of you, and that leaves no hour to spare for kindness,” the Marshal said.

His tone was mild, conversational.

“I will burn weakness out of you, children,” Marshal de la Tavarin said. “Cruelly and ways that will scar you for the rest of your days. But it will never be without purpose, and those of you who survive will be worthy of being called Skiritai.”

This time he did not get so much as a whisper.

“I tell you true, this is your first and last warning,” the old man said. “So go back to your beds, children and decide if the reason you’re here is worth risking your head. I will allow students to withdraw until the hour of tomorrow’s class.”

His mouth smiled, but not his eyes.

“After that, the only way out you can leave is in a coffin.”