Chapter 60

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August 23

The orphanage opening had not been a joyous thing.

Such institutions were not, Angharad learned, paid for by the Lord Rector or the local ruling lord but by whoever cared to offer coin to them. It was a very disorganized method, which she thought was sure to allow some of the orphaned to slip through the cracks. No wonder crime had such a grip on the capital, with these ‘basileias’ sprouting everywhere. Failure below could always be traced back to failure above.

At least it had proved an opportunity to speak with Lord Menander Drakos, something that had risen high in her priorities. The sooner this infernal forge business had an answer, the sooner she could begin climbing out of the pit. The older lord was just as eager for a private talk and it proved remarkably easy to get from him an invitation to the manse Lord Gule had mentioned.

The reason why could be summed up in two words: Song Ren.

Song’s heroics were the talk of the entire city, deservedly. She was said to have slain so many assassins her dress turned red and taken a shot for the Lord Rector that nearly killed her. Angharad knew the truth of the story, of course, having been told by a mellow Song the afternoon’s genuine events. A mellowness Angharad had deduced was not unrelated to the love bites the Tianxi should raise her collar higher to fully hide.

Scandalous, if not exactly unexpected. No woman spent as much time talking about someone as Song had about Lord Rector Palliades without having some sort of interest in them. It had been either sex or murder, and murder would have been messy.

Either way, for lack of the proper lineage Menander Drakos had not been one of the lords attending the Landing Day feast. He was thus keen to learn the details of what took place and knew that Angharad, as a watchwoman, would be able to provide them. The consequence of that was that she found herself received in the Drakos manse early in the afternoon of her thirtieth day on Asphodel instead of needing to wait until the regular dinner that Lord Gule had mentioned to her.

A pretext was even arranged for it, given how the ploy with the inheritance rumors would only go so far in erasing the taint on her reputation her visit to the country had left. Lord Menander was one of the patrons for the orphanage, which made him one of the men to speak with should one seek to arrange a charitable donation.

Song had even been willing to loosen the purse strings for it, though rather than out of philanthropic instinct it was because reclaimed brigade funds not spent directly on cabalists were often repaid in full by the bureaucrats of the Conclave. It would make no difference to the children.

Angharad avoided directly sponsoring one despite the offer and it apparently being the common practice, as such a commitment would tie her to return to Asphodel and she was not sure she would be able to. No, instead she donated to the cause of furnishing the children with an education. A more practical application of the funds, in her opinion.

Lord Menander seemed surprised when she sat with him over tea and asked questions as to the nature of the books and tutors that would be acquired, which was puzzling. All the more that he did not seem all that well informed on the particulars and had to send for his majordomo for answers. She hid her disapproval at his taking such a serious commitment so lightly, and let the subject pass after she was satisfied the coin would not be improperly used.

Lord Menander was much more taken with talk of the Landing Day massacre, most interested when Angharad hinted that there might have been Izcalli involvement. In truth there was little doubt those had been the same assassins Tristan warned them of. The Watch had obtained some of the flaky false faces the assassins had worn, and officers in Black House identified the substance as a kind of lemure corpse ash that could be used to make very convincing false skin.

The trick was, it was rumored, a favorite of the Obsidian Order. Between these getting on the wrong side of Song’s wrath and Yaretzi dying to her hand on the Dominion, she was viciously pleased to see the pack of assassins having a lousy year.

Still, now that the mustachioed lord was happily garnished with hints and secrets it was time to pull the rug from under him. Angharad set down her porcelain cup – Tianxi-made, its unique imperfections and details showing it had been crafted by hand in a display of wealth – on the matching saucer and smiled at the man across the table. Agreeable and empty, the way Father had taught her.

“Pleasant as this conversation has been,” Angharad said, “I am afraid that this time I came on Watch business.”

Lord Menander’s brow rose.

“By all means, I am at the disposal of the Watch,” he said. “How may I be of service?”

“It has come to our attention that you might be in possession of an artifact whose ownership is forbidden under the Iscariot Accords,” she smilingly replied.

The older man stilled, then swallowed.

“I suspect you were taken in by a false rumor,” he claimed with false calm. “All my dealings in the artifact trade have been legal and on record, I assure you. My account books are open for perusal if there is need.”

Angharad sipped at her cup. Let him stew.

“You did not buy the artifact in question,” she said. “It is part of the shipyard trove you… salvaged through the hidden passage. The one we assume was first found by your forebears around the reign of Hector Lissenos.”

Part of her, she would admit, enjoyed watching him go white as a sheet. After all the wheeling and dealing, how he had known he was too useful to refuse insights into Watch matters, to now tighten the screws on the man was a petty but distinct pleasure. Lord Menander licked his lips, eyes flicking to the door. Angharad sipped at her tea again.

“You are,” Menander Drakos said in a strangled voice, “formidably well informed.”

“Our brigade has proved to have some skill in matters of investigation,” Angharad mildly said. “Access to palace archives helped, admittedly.”

She drummed her fingers against the table, the small movement drawing the man’s wary eyes.

“While it is within the authority of the Watch to demand access to your collection for inspection,” Angharad said, “such a thing would be an official process. One involving the office of the Lord Rector, given that the justification for the demand invokes an article of the Iscariot Accords.”

And now Angharad had given him two things: first, a reason to fear a formal demand. Bringing in the palace would involve revealing to Evander Palliades that one of his nobles had helped himself to the treasures beneath Tratheke, and that the path to his shipyard was not nearly as secret as he might have wanted. Odds were even that Menander Drakos would die for this, Angharad would wager. Even should he not, he would be ruined.

On the other hand, a formal process would also publicly reveal the identities of at least some the Thirteenth Brigade since the cabal would be the one making the demand. Song, at the very least, would be definitively outed as a watchwoman. It might be that Angharad’s cover would survive the ensuing scrutiny, it might not. Either way the Thirteenth had good reason to want to keep the matter unofficial, and thus Menander Drakos had good reason to trust in their discretion.

It was best when reward and punishment were cut from the same cloth, Father had often said. It helped people grasp the swing of consequence.

“There is no need for such a thing,” Menander Drakos firmly said. “As I told you, I am at the disposal of the Watch. If a dangerous artifact inadvertently made its way onto my hands, it is my civic duty to remand it to the custody of the Watch.”

“A most praiseworthy attitude,” Angharad said, her tone only slightly ironic. “I expect that discretionary funds have been set aside by the Conclave to acknowledge such dutiful behavior, though I would understand if you felt such pecuniary matters to be beneath…”

“I would not risk giving offense to the Conclave by refusing its largesse,” Lord Menander hastily intervened.

It would be unkind, she reminded herself, to judge him too harshly for being so grasping. His house had nearly been driven out of the ranks of the nobility under the Lissenos dynasty, only claiming back a place at court under the Palliades – and reaching a new apex of influence under Menander Drakos himself, by the talk around the capital. Whatever his vices, the man had toiled long and harshly to restore the name of his house.

A respectable enterprise, if undertaken through less than respectable means. What kind of a man robbed his own liege lord?

“It may be that, as you said, this is mere erroneous rumor,” Angharad said. “It should be a simple matter to dismiss the possibility upon an inspection.”

He blinked.

“Today?” he asked, hesitating. “I was not prepared for…”

Of course you aren’t, Angharad thought. That is precisely why I am asking. She said nothing, only smiling pleasantly, and the man’s eyes eventually tightened.

“Of course,” Lord Menander said. “Allow me to make the arrangements, I’ll have a servant refill the pot.”

“That would be courteous of you,” Angharad replied.

It took the man half an hour to prepare, long enough she finished the second pot and some fine finger cakes with it. She’d never tasted that sugary almond cream before, it was a delight to the tongue. When a servant came to fetch her it was to bring her to a parlor on the first floor. Lord Menander was waiting there with a torch in hand, which he pressed against a burning candle to light up.

“Kindly lock the door, Lady Angharad,” he requested.

She did, turning to watch him slide open a wooden panel in the wall that was obscuring a dark and cramped stairway leading down.

“Careful with the steps,” he advised. “Despite my best efforts the stone insists on dampness.”

“Much obliged,” she replied, inclining her head.

Angharad gingerly made her way down the stairs, leaning on her cane. They spiraled downwards on a steep slope, until they reached a level that must broadly be equal to beneath the mansion. She found Lord Menander waiting at the bottom with his torch in hand. Telling that it was not another man doing it for him even when the smell of smoke was sure to cling to his oiled hair. The older lord did not trust even his servants with knowledge of the crypt.

“Come,” Menander Drakos said. “Let me show you the inventory.”

It was a walk of mere steps through the threshold and into a broader space. Though the insides were but a single room, work had been done here to turn some decrepit basement crypt into a showcase of stolen wealth. Red drapes covered the walls and beautiful panels of wood and glass kept pristine the riches obtained from far below Tratheke. Lord Menander lit the four braziers in the room one after another while Angharad limped across a thick Izcalli carpet, combing through the loot.

Much of what was on display here were mere trinkets of Antediluvian make, though even these were often worth a fortune. If not for the wealthy collectors buying them then simply for the materials from which they were made – Angharad found a brooch whose accents were in brumal silver, for example, and thus almost certainly worth thousands of ramas.

Rings and necklaces, bracelets and buckles. A spread of glass pearls containing colored, ever-shifting air. A pendulum whose weight went all the way around, uncaring of gravity. Two sculpted monkeys in Tratheke brass that moved the needles of an obsidian clock without hours. The further back she went, the larger the finds became. Some sort of glittering machine that knit the air in visible braids, though for what purpose she could only guess. A brass writing desk with shifting cogs inside.

And then, tucked away near the corner, the second-largest piece on display: a thing of gray iron, a too-large printing press with corkscrew handles pressing a large slab down on another adorned with so many cryptoglyphs it looked smooth at first glance. The infernal forge. It could be nothing else. Despite its size straining Angharad’s ability to believe it had been brought up through a crevasse, there was no sign of it being scuffed or damaged.

“Is that the one?” Lord Menander asked from her side, stroking his mustache nervously.

“Almost certainly,” Angharad replied. “If I may ask, how did you get it in here? The stairs are too narrow.”

“There is a passage to the Tratheke sewers behind one of the tapestries,” he informed her. “Much broader than the stairway, though I had it sealed to avoid the stink.”

She nodded, mind already spinning. It would be child’s play to obtain a map of the sewers in this part of Tratheke from the palace archives, she thought. And without being seen, too, if she used her daily vision to acquire the knowledge discreetly. She could accompany Maryam on one of her near-daily visits to the palace, find some excuse requiring her presence.

After that it would just be a matter of confirming the path to this crypt and coming here with the right tools. Tools, she thought, that Uncle Osian could obtain without trouble. It is in my grasp, she thought. Ancestors, but it is. She was not sure if the breath that rattled out of her was fearful or relieved. When you stood on the edge of the precipice, the line between the two could be thinner than one liked to admit.

“I believed it some manner of Antediluvian printing press,” Lord Menander spoke into the silence, as if afraid of leaving it empty. “Would be it indiscreet to ask what it truly is?”

Angharad almost told him it was but decided otherwise. Telling him of infernal involvement meant he would be most wary of trying to get rid of the forge or allow it to be stolen – it might be seen as colluding with Hell.

“The device is called an infernal forge and it is illegal under the Iscariot Accords for anyone but the Watch, or Pandemonium, to possess one,” she told him.

The older man swallowed.

“Is it… dangerous?” he ventured.

“Not unless it is used,” Angharad said then paused and clarified. “Not any more than the possession of a rare artifact others might desire generally is, anyhow.”

Especially when Lord Locke and Lady Keys had hinted at Song that the latter was a devil. Angharad might well be looking at the reason those two had come to Asphodel in the first place. If the Watch could hear rumor of such a device being on the loose, why not Pandemonium? Though it does seem passing strange that a treasure tucked away in a basement would cause any rumor at all, she thought.

Lord Menander shot her a wary look.

“I must rely, then, on your discretion,” he said.

“I have no intention of spreading the knowledge any further than I must,” she precisely replied. “Though once it is on a written report, that will be out of my hands.”

“Understandable,” he grudgingly said, the coughed into his hand. “When might I rely on the Watch to take custody of the artifact, do you think?”

“Discretion will be paramount,” she said. “I will personally see to this matter, but it might well be days before you receive word. Until then, I would advise you to forget you ever saw the device.”

“Would that I had never obtained it,” Lord Menander grimly said. “My thanks for your assistance, Lady Tredegar.”

“It was a pleasure,” Angharad replied, inclining her head.

A pleasure to finally know for sure, mostly, but a pleasure nonetheless.

Lord Menander escorted her back up after, visibly eager to have her out of his home under the smooth manners. She did not fight it, allowing herself to be bundled off back into a carriage with absent-minded courtesies. She had much to think on, after all. She had the location of the infernal forge, a discreet way to get to it and two ufudu who wanted it. Now all that Angharad needed was a way to settle all her debts without dragging the Thirteenth into it.

She told Song, that night, not to send the report to Brigadier Chilaca immediately. That the Watch might be tempted to grab it immediately, thus interfering with Angharad’s infiltration of the Golden Ram cult. Song accepted, not thinking twice of it.

Angharad found she avoided her own gaze in the mirror that night. She dreamt of unlocked doors and creatures howling in the night.

--

Today was the tenth attempt, and she had learned much.

By the third try Angharad had begun relying on blowing open the door with a powder barrel, which neatly sidestepped her lack of lockpicking skills. By the fourth she had, mostly, learned to do this without killing herself. Difficulties unfortunately did not cease there. The fifth attempt taught her that too much powder set everything inside the room on fire, which was not ideal when attempting to read correspondence, then the sixth that too little powder only blew up parts of the door.

Which was a problem, as the Sign anchored in it would then keep functioning and eat through whatever flesh passed the threshold. Angharad was getting a little tired of having her arm devoured by Gloam, to be frank.

(The powder smoke tasted thick against the roof her mouth as Angharad limped in.

Chunks of the door had torn up the desk where Captain Domingo’s private papers were stashed but most of the papers were fine, if strewn all over the floor. There was nothing truly useful in the drawers anyhow: only paperwork, formal correspondence and some derivative attempts at poetry.

The locked drawer had cost her the seventh attempt, only to learn that beyond the vicious warding Sign was only a flat stone put there to add weight. She ignored the mess, heading straight for the trunk by the bed. Padlocked and barded with iron, the dead end of her eighth attempt.

She wedged a metal spike into the lock and waited until the warding Sign ate through it – ninth attempt – but the second spike settled in fine. Twice she swung the hammer, wincing at the way it pulled on her leg, and the padlock broke. Having learned her lesson from the locked drawer she lifted the trunk open with a long wooden spoon from the kitchens instead of even a gloved hand.

Nothing. No other Sign. Noticeable one, anyhow. Tristan had warned her of tracking marks.

Inside the trunk were silken clothes, tasteful jewelry, several books bearing no titles but whose first pages bore the sigil of the Akelarre Guild and finally a pouch of documents. Angharad touched that last with the spoon first, but it did not prove trapped either. She went through the papers then and there, reading them in the light from the hall – it was only a matter of time until Captain Domingo arrived, she must hurry.

The first paper was some sort medical recipe, she set it aside. The second was a formal document with a Rookery stamp serving as a promissory note good at any Watch branch for a significant but not unreasonable sum of money. Navigators were said to get some of the most lucrative contracts. The last however, was finally progress: a formal assignment from the ‘Lesser Committee for the Trebian Northwest’.

Skimming through, Angharad stopped cold when she got to the core of the duties outlined. Namely, assessing Brigadier Chilaca for undue influences. In particular that of the ‘Ivory Library’, an informal Watch research association and correspondence society.

Running in the hall. Time had run out.

“What manner of madness is-”)

Angharad breathed out, emerging from the vision, and frowned at the closed door.

That Captain Domingo had been given that assignment by the roster of officers who effectively ruled Scholomance implied either staggering incompetence on their part or good reason to believe that Domingo Santos was not a member of the Ivory Library. Considering that she was used to competence in the upper ranks of the Watch, if also an unfortunate degree of graft and intrigue, that likely meant Song’s deduction that the Navigator was the traitor was false.

Either Song’s other suspect was the one or the real traitor had gone unnoticed.

Rolling her shoulder, Angharad resumed limping down the hall on her way to breakfast. Now that she had answers, something to hold up as a favor done to Song for all the favors she had received in turn, she was finally comfortable having a conversation she had put off too long. Not that Song had broached the subject since her return either.

The captain of the Thirteenth Brigade was not difficult to find. Now that even Brigadier Chilaca had been forced to admit that sending her back to the palace would be effectively sabotaging the Thirteenth on their yearly test, she had been spending much of her free time looking into Lord Hector Anaidon as a prelude to grabbing him for interrogation. In an hour Song would thus be gone in the wind, but at the moment it was time for breakfast.

That rather simplified finding her.

Angharad limped into the eating hall, easing herself into the seat next to Song – opposite a scowling Maryam begrudging the world having been robbed a longer night’s rest – and leaning in for a whisper.

“Not Santos,” she said. “The Obscure Committee has him watching Chilaca for common interests with Tristan’s… acquaintances.”

Song stilled, then slowly nodded.

“I’ll want a full report,” she whispered back.

“Come up to the roof after breakfast,” Angharad told her.

She then leaned forward, helping herself to the plate of sausages. The Asphodelian seasoning had grown on her and using the vision always left her feeling strangely starved.

--

Angharad liked to oil her sword up here.

The view of the city was stunning, the great panes of the Collegium like a waterfall of glass under the light of the Glare, and it was rare for anyone but Navigators to visit and break the quiet. Hard to eavesdrop, as well, given the open grounds. Truly, the great difficulty of it was Angharad having to make her way up the stairs. These days she was no longer out of breath at the end, her lungs almost returned to her, but the weakness in the legs remained.

Waiting for Song, she lost herself in the work. Hers was an artfully crafted blade and Angharad intended to treat it accordingly. She had replaced her old washing cloth with soft sheepskin leather and now oiled the saber every two days instead of three. It was soothing, running the leather down the span of steel to rub the oil into it. Ritual and functional all at once, keeping the hand and mind busy.

She only looked up the once when she heard the steps, long enough to confirm it was Song sitting down by her side on the bench.

“Tell me everything,” the captain ordered.

It was not a long report. She could have recited the exact text of the Obscure Committee’s assignment, but Song was more interested in the contents than the phrasing.

“Not him, then,” the silver-eyed woman conceded. “I misread Shu Gong.”

“What had you set on Captain Santos, anyhow?” Angharad idly asked.

A moment of silence.

“General lack of conspiratorial acumen,” Song finally said. “Watching her be taken for a ride by every street merchant she encountered had me doubting her as an agent on the ground for the Ivory Library.”

“Likely she isn’t,” Angharad mused. “Their society seems influential, but it is hardly all-powerful – given the importance of the delegation to Asphodel, it may be that she was merely the only member they could get into the roster.”

“The reigning theory, now that Santos is discredited as a suspect,” Song acknowledged, leaning back into her seat. “She will at least be significantly easier to intimidate.”

Sleeping God, she ought to be. If Domingo Santos could kill her repeatedly using nothing but traps, she shuddered to think what he might be like in a genuine fight. Oh, signifiers had their weaknesses – direct Glare, for one, which was why so few rose to prominence in Malan – but there were few things that could strip them of their entire power. It seemed intrinsically bound to them in some way.

Sliding her hand down the blade, Angharad took a long breath and broke what was turning into a comfortable silence.

“Before I left,” she said, “I spoke of a conversation overdue between us.”

A moment passed.

“So you did,” Song acknowledged.

She did not raise her eyes from the blade, but then she hardly needed to. The noblewoman could almost hear Song tense, like an already-taut string being pulled to the edge of the snap.

“What truly happened that night, Song?” Angharad asked.

A silence followed, broken only by the sound of the mirror-dancer smoothing the oiled leather down the length of her saber. There was an odd sort of beauty to an oiled blade, she had always thought. One born as much from the satisfaction of the work as the lustrous tint leant to the steel. Song rose to her feet, by the sound of it folding her arms under her chest.

“What you are really asking,” Song finally said, “is how Isabel Ruesta died.”

Angharad’s fingers clenched, only the prospect of slicing leather onto the sharp blade mastering the twitch.

“Do not put words into my mouth,” she warned. “I asked what I asked, nothing more or less.”

There were things she regretted about the aftermath of that vicious trial, but to this day walking away from the Thirteenth was not one of them. She envied what had formed without her, the thought that she could have been part of it instead, but Angharad also knew better. Things had not simply changed after she left. They had changed in no small part because she left.

Not because she had been so beloved of all – ha! - but because her departure was simply too large a hole for the brigade to keep papering over.

“I shot her,” Song Ren suddenly said.

Angharad sharply breathed in, the hand on her blade stopping as her eyes rose to find a silver gaze shying away from her own. She had not expected so blunt a confession. Or for Song to suddenly turn into the sort of woman flinching away from the consequences of the choices she made. If anything, the Tianxi was prone to the arrogance of believing all the choices were hers to make and thus the consequences equally so.

“That is not the whole of it,” she said. “What else?”

Song hesitated and Angharad felt something cold sliding down her veins, halfway between rage and seawater.

“Oh, but would you just end this?” she bit out. “All of this, these… tiresome plays of half-truths and tricks. What is it you are so afraid of, Song? I will not commit violence on you, you ought to know that, and you have already survived standing low in my esteem.”

The Tianxi’s jaw clenched.

“I do not know if I killed Isabel Ruesta,” Song said.

For half a heartbeat Angharad felt like calling her a liar, but then she parsed through the sentence. The spoken and unspoken. I do not know if ‘I’ killed Isabel Ruesta, that was what was being said. Song had not been the only one trying. And Tupoc’s words were yet fresh in her mind. There had been more than one person up on the stairs before the tower, aiming a musket.

“Ferranda shot her as well,” Angharad whispered in horrified realization.

“A heartbeat before I did,” Song quietly admitted. “I shot through the smoke, so I do not know whose bullet slew her.”

The other woman’s tone was small, as if… Angharad didn’t know as if what. And was not sure she cared, because all she could think about was how it had felt that night, to turn and find Isabel Ruesta dead on the ground. How it had not even occurred to her that they might not all be on the same side when facing hollow cultists attempting to murder them all.

How, in that company surrounding her afterwards, there had been more liars than not.

“You watched me go to Ferranda,” Angharad finally said, tone dangerously mild, “and spoke not a word. Even as I tried to make a place with the Thirty-First you said nothing. Knowing what you just told me all this time, you still said nothing.”

Song’s jaw set.

“I knew Ferranda would not ill-use you,” she said. “That she would take-”

“Am I a child, Song?” Angharad softly asked.

The other woman frowned, then shook her head.

“I-”

“You must believe me a lackwit, then,” Angharad coldly interrupted. “Else why would you ever come under the impression that you should get to make that choice for me?”

Ancestors, she had left the Thirteenth believing it to be poison only to reach for another tainted cup without batting an eye. Made a fool again. And again, when Ferranda then judged her too much trouble and cast her out. And again, when she was forced to return to the Thirteenth a beggar. Every time she thought she saw a clear sky there was a storm in it, a bleak spot of Gloam her eye somehow missed. It was as if all of Vesper was conspiring to prove her the worst kind of fool.

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Sleeping God, perhaps she was. She had been led around like one for long enough it might be half a lie to deny it.

“I have done you insult,” Song cast into the silence.

Tone resolute. As if this were a task to approach, a labor to undertake. And that was the droplet that tipped it, really. That Song still thought of this as work. Upkeep for the Thirteenth Brigade, not any kind of relation between the two of them.

“I don’t even care about the insult,” Angharad bleakly replied. “It is the disregard, Song. The… lack of respect.”

She let out a dark laugh.

“You know, even as we parted ways I struggled,” she said. “Because lowered as my esteem of you might have been, there was still respect there – enough to wonder at your reasons, at your choices. You earned that on the Dominion, and I thought I’d earned the same from you.”

Slowly, carefully, she set the saber down on the bench besides her. She itched to make fists, to scream, and though control stayed the impulse the levees would break. All levees did.

“I thought that because you treated me with kindness that meant you were kind,” Angharad said. “Or that because you had lied you were a liar. But you are neither. You were just… taming a horse, weren’t you?”

Neither the carrot nor the stick were a lie, they were just a method. Fool she once again, not to have seen them for what they were.

“Oh, get over yourself.”

The anger in Song’s voice startled her enough that she did not spit out what rested on the edge of her lips. Not until she turned and found Song Ren looking at her with cold anger in those silver eyes – brumal pools, unflinching in the face of her own anger. Good, she thought. Anger, at least, was honest.

“I shot Isabel Ruesta because she had a manipulation contract that she constantly and liberally used on the strongest fighter in our group,” Song harshly said. “I shot Isabel Ruesta because she was a useless parasite who schemed to get rid of other trial-takers and was growing increasingly desperate in her attempts to secure safety at any cost.”

“And you did not think to simply offer that safety instead of murdering her?” Angharad bit back, voice rising.

“No, Angharad, I didn’t volunteer to put my life on the line keeping a mind-altering leech feeling happy,” Song retorted just as loudly. “Mainly, I assume, because unlike you I wasn’t trying to fuck the leech.”

“No, just the Lord Rector of Asphodel,” Angharad scorned.

Song did not bat an eye. Or even acknowledge the hypocrisy.

“Tawang as my witness, but if Ruesta had lived through that I would have still killed her,” Song said. “She was too much of a problem to be allowed to fester.”

“She just wanted to live, Song,” Angharad shouted.

She did not remember getting on her feet, had not noticed before the ache in her knee.

“We all wanted to live!” Song shouted back. “Only either she could not control her contract, which made her a threat, or she would not control her contract – which made her even more of a threat!”

“We were mere days away from Cantica,” Angharad said. “She did not have to die, Song. You just decided that I needed protecting from myself, so you made another choice for me. You wanted a trophy mirror-dancer without attachments you disapproved of.”

She bared her teeth.

“So you shot the attachment.”

Song went red, flushed with anger, and her fists balled.

“Maybe it was not as cleanly tactical a decision as I told it,” she bit out. “I resented her, it’s true, for making a mess of the whole situation. But if you think for a moment I would kill out of resentment alone, then I wonder why you are bothering with this conversation.”

“Because I thought you were my friend,” Angharad hissed. “I thought I had left behind the smiling liars that were using me on the Dominion, only now I find that you were laughing at me the whole time! You never trusted me, Song. Not with any of the secrets you told Maryam, or even Tristan – who even when you looked at him like filth on your boots, you still treated like a man who made his own fucking choices.”

Her breathing was ragged, her hands trembling.

“This entire time, the secrets I have kept have been eating me up,” Angharad raged. “And I blamed myself, I blamed Tristan for being who the world made him into and Maryam for how I could not look her in the eye without seeing my home burning writ a thousand times – but, Ancestors, I looked everywhere but the right place.”

Even through red fury she laughed, the sound ripped right out of her throat like a sob with teeth.

“Sleeping God, Song, the poison was you the whole time.”

But not Song alone. Even with the rage in her blood, she remembered that. And she was so tired of it, the lies and the deception. Let it end. Let it be made clean.

“The Lefthand House is leveraging me,” she said, “like the Yellow Earth is you. They claim my father lived, that he is being held in Tintavel and only they can help me get him out.”

She shook her head.

“They are lying, I expect,” Angharad admitted out loud for the first time. “If not about his survival, then about helping me. But I will give them what they want anyway.”

Because it might be the truth. Because the hope was better than nothing, even if it was a fool’s hope.

“What did they ask?” Song quietly said.

She snorted.

“In what mad world do I trust you enough to answer that?” Angharad replied.

Like a forest fire, the rage had swept through her and left little behind. Ashes, exhaustion, the sense that something beautiful had been snatched away forever. She just felt tired now, too old in a too-broken body and a world that could not seem to croak out a truth no matter how hard you squeezed it demanding one. Song breathed out, smoothed her hands down her sides.

“I have been arrogant,” she said. “And you…”

The Tianxi licked her lips.

“You’re right,” Song said. “I had no right to decide for you. I should have told you everything from the start.”

That was not nothing. And Song had not lied to her, not outright. But the words were so very late in the telling.

“If you had told me that before we reached Scholomance, fool me, I might well have forgiven you,” Angharad bitterly said. “But you sat on it for months. Watched me make a fool of myself with Villazur, halfway kill myself in a layer achieving nothing.”

She clenched her fist.

“Would it have been so hard,” Angharad asked in an all too brittle voice, “to fight for me like you did the others?”

There was no apology in that silver gaze.

“I fought the battles I believed I could win,” Song quietly replied. “You were not one of them.”

The Tianxi passed a hand through her hair.

“It was not a kindness on either of us, for you to be forced back to the Thirteenth,” she said. “We were… you looked happier, when you lived with the Thirty-First.”

“That cottage felt like a prison,” Angharad bleakly said. “It was relief to leave it. But that relief was a lie.”

Song said nothing for a while, then breathed out.

“I won’t ask you to forgive me.”

That is what people say, Angharad thought, when they want you to forgive them anyway.

“You don’t forgive a wound,” she simply replied. “It heals or it kills you.”

She turned, snatched up her blade from the bench and sheathed it.

“I have work to do,” Angharad said. “A meeting to arrange with Lord Gule. It would be best if we did not speak beyond the necessary for a time, I think.”

Song silently nodded. Angharad belted her saber and took her walking stick, beginning the winding path down the stairs. She left Song to drown in that silence, alone on the roof. And though that talk had been a wretched thing – left a scar of disappointment where she had thought the skin too rough for scarring – some part of her felt lighter for it.

A little less like a wolf and a little more like Angharad Tredegar.

///

Chapter 61

New

23 hours ago

“Huh,” Maryam said when the tale was done, honestly a little impressed. “That’s not just a fumble, it’s a disastrous fumble.”

“I am not unaware,” Song replied through gritted teeth.

Oh, she hadn’t liked that.

“A calamitous fumble,” Maryam continued.

The teeth grit harder, but not hard enough. Another log must be tossed into the fire.

“Perhaps even a cataclysmic fumb-”

“Maryam,” Song hissed angrily.

“Fine, fine, I’ll stop,” Maryam lied.

She would give her captain an hour of peace at most. Occasions to hold Song’s feet to the fire until the room smelled of pork were too rare not to thoroughly abuse when they popped up. It was like corn, you had to get your fill when it was the season for the crop.

In a sign of genuine distress, Song Ren had for once in her life refused an offer to sit down for tea when she came to Maryam looking like she did not know whether to scream or throw up. Instead the visibly troubled Tianxi – the visible part was yet another warning sign – had sat on her bed with her knees folded against her chest, holding one of the single dryest historical chronicles Maryam had ever disinterestedly paged through the same way a child would a blanket.

As a good friend, the signifier had refrained from eating the nuts in a bowl on the table since the crunching noise might distract some from the tale being told. Even though she was pretty hungry. Cashews, though. She would be getting back to those later.

“It does not sound unsalvageable, if that’s your worry,” Maryam shrugged. “Say what you will about Angharad Tredegar, but if she is finished with you there will be nothing uncertain about it.”

Neither frosty disdain nor public stabbings left a lot of room for speculation as to the Pereduri’s opinions.

“I may well have killed any friendship there was between us,” Song sharply said.

“Then you killed that back on the Dominion when you pulled that trigger,” Maryam said. “Everything that has been built since that moment was a manor on quicksand.”

She met Song’s gaze unflinching until the silver eyes turned away. Killing the infanzona had not been a moment of pride, whatever else might might be said of it.

“Ruesta was too dangerous to continue letting loose,” Song said. “Even within days of Angharad knowing about her contract she had her charmed and toeing the line of her promises again.”

“All that Malani ever do is toe the line of their given oaths,” Maryam snorted. “They tie themselves up in knots and call it an honor when they figure out how to live with what give there is in the rope.”

She cleared her throat when Song turned an unimpressed look on her. However true, her words had drifted some from the matter at hand.

“You made the decision that Isabel Ruesta should be killed,” Maryam said. “Fair enough. I am not certain I would have made the same - and I know Tristan would not have, if only in the hope that released back into Sacromonte that snake might yet bite other infanzones – but part of the trials was to make those decisions. It was your right to make that choice, and even to hide it.”

That was part of the trials as well, after all. To clip the wings of threats and get away with it, to make the right allies and the right enemies. The Watch was looking for killers and survivors, not would-be martyrs. Maryam did not begrudge Angharad how she had played the trials, trying to save as many as she could and holding to gallantry as law, but it would be childish to pretend hers had been the only valid path.

Tupoc Xical had spent his entire stay malingering, betraying and murdering but the Academy had still welcomed him with open arms at the end.

“That is not how she sees it, evidently,” Song muttered.

“That’s because when the trial ended, you didn’t tell her the truth,” Maryam said, and hesitated.

It did not escape the silver gaze.

“What?”

The Izvorica sighed. She was not eager to get into what lay between the two of them, but she supposed she owed Song as much.

“I’ve sat across a table from Angharad Tredegar quite a bit, over the last month,” she said. “And she’s not… inflexible, at least not in the way we sometimes assume of her. She would not be able to use her contract the way she does if that were the case. You keep missing it because you have the Tianxi blinders on.”

“Pardon me?” Song said, a tad coolly.

“Your people love an absolute, Song,” Maryam bluntly replied. “It’s in the bones of everything you make and do. All are free under Heaven, yes?”

“I don’t follow,” Song frowned.

“Your poetry is always about how that moonlit night is the most beautiful there ever was, that tragedy the most despairing. Your enemies are the most wretched, your affairs the most sensual. Everything Tianxia does is on a bedrock of universal truth.”

“I am unsure whether or not I should take offense to that description,” the other woman admitted.

Maryam rolled her eyes. Only gods and fools took offense to their reflection in the lake.

“My point is, the Malani do not have that,” she said. “All their truths are circumstantial. Limited.”

Song blinked.

“That is madness,” she slowly said. “Malani are famously obsessed with an unbending code of honor.”

“That’s reputation, Song,” Maryam chided. “Look at how they act, though. They qualify every sentence, word them to get around potential lies, say ‘I believed’ or ‘I think’ instead of ‘it is’. The only way they can function is by putting every action they take or witness in a little box that separates if from every other action taken.”

Sometimes she thought that the way they were able to swallow something like slavery so easily was that their honor was not so much about espousing good deeds as containing fault.

“That’s…” Song trailed off. “Well, one of the most interesting interpretations I have heard of Malani customs, but also a different discussion.”

“No,” Maryam said. “Because my point is Tredegar thinks exactly like that. If you had told her at the end of the trials she would have understood you deceiving her as being ‘part of the trial’, a closed garden where that action remains reprehensible but is allowed by the rules. But then you kept lying by omission when the only circumstances between you two were purely personal, so that part she can only take personally.”

Men tolerated things from a practitioner or a king they would not from a brother, even though they loved the brother better. The role mattered as much the act, sometimes.

“I don’t see what difference what you said makes,” Song admitted. “In the end, however roundabout the path the conclusion is still that she is angry at me for withholding the truth from her and acting behind her back.”

Maryam smoothed away the flare of irritation. For someone so clever, so capable of reading a room and turning enemies on each other, Song could sometimes miss the forest for the trees. It was not her fault, though, it was Maryam who was odd. She had to think the way she did because she was far away and surrounded by strangers whose strange ways were opaque. Knowing why people took offense to the things they did was the difference between a cold look and drawn blade.

She did not have the luxury of ignorance, not when her mistakes were always paid for.

“Because you’re not just fighting with her,” she spelled out, “you are in a spat with how Angharad Tredegar sees the world. Tea and apologies and a grand gesture aren’t going to fix this, Song, because that would be two friends mending a bridge and that’s not the trouble you’re in. Not really.”

Song’s lips thinned. Bunched up like that on her bed, the Tianxi was unusually open in her expressions – the layer of calm and control thinned enough Maryam could easily make out the shapes moving beneath the silk. Song Ren was not convinced, but enough of what she had been told rang of the truth she was considering it seriously.

“Then what do I do?” she quietly asked.

Maryam leaned back in her chair and grabbed some of the cashews from the bowl. She’d done good work, wages were owed.

“Prove her wrong by her own rules,” she replied. “Demonstrate that, within personal circumstances, you do trust her.”

“That easy, is it?” Song sarcastically asked.

Maryam popped a few cashews, chewed merrily. Salted! She stole a second handful even though the first was not entirely finished, loudly swallowing.

“Figure it out,” she shrugged. “Look, on occasion I might like Angharad Tredegar but at the end of the day I don’t like Angharad. You understand?”

“We barely speak the same language,” Song snorted, “but I catch your drift. Her being personally agreeable does not change most of your grievances with her.”

Maryam nodded approvingly. She had once thought there was no way the two of them could share a brigade, but she had been wrong in that. Angharad was not… malicious, even at her worst. Childish or selfish, but not with a poisoned edge. That she could adjust, and made an effort to, made her tolerable and admittedly sometimes even enjoyable. In small doses.

Maryam could not see herself ever considering the other woman a friend so long as she did not grasp the evil that lay at the heart of Malan, cloaked in talk of laws and honor, but a brigade was not a sworn sisterhood. They could share a roof and a side without braiding each other’s hair.

Song slowly exhaled, her knees pulling away from her chest as her legs spread on the bed. The book ended up on her lap, only loosely held.

“She said that Ruesta only wanted to live,” Song finally said. “That to kill her was unnecessary so close to Cantica.”

It was unfair to be irritated with her for that, Maryam told herself. For not getting it. Song had to think that deeds were the only that mattered, because it was the only way she could go to bed without weeping. If Song Ren did not believe that actions were what mattered most, that they defined everything and could change everything, then the certainty that had her get up in the morning and pursue the dream of overturning the legacy of the Dimming would crumble like wet paper.

It was just that sometimes that also meant Song thought of everything as things she did right or wrong, like the world was a puzzle box she had to solve correctly. Maryam felt a pang of sympathy for Angharad, who she suspected mostly wanted to know that Song did not think of her as being the Watch equivalent of an expensive warhorse.

“Days away with hollows nipping at your heels and everybody dead tired isn’t nothing. And Ruesta was constantly using her contract after having made a promise not to, the way you told me,” Maryam finally said. “Sure, a promise she was technically no longer bound to, but by that same logic you were no longer bound not to put a bullet in her skull.”

Hilarious that Ferranda had tried the same thing just a moment before, really. The infanzona reminded Maryam of some of her mother’s war captains, the ones with fine reputations and rivals who kept dying on raids.

“It is frustrating she would still defend someone using a charm contract on her even now,” Song admitted. “Enough to make me wonder at her judgement.”

“It was an influence contract, not control,” Maryam reminder her. “There’s a good argument there were insidious secondary effects to it, but I don’t think that the girl with the big eyes and the bigger tits had to do a lot of charming to talk Angharad Tredegar into walking the fine line of a promise so she’d be able to get her hands under that skirt.”

“Maryam,” Song reproached, coughing into her fist.

“That’s a lot of coyness from a girl who went for seconds in the creepy brass house,” Maryam retorted without batting an eye.

Cheeks flushed red.

“I should never have told you that,” the Tianxi muttered.

The signifier grinned. Too late for regrets. Between that and the admission that Evander Palliades was not above getting on his knees to convey his negotiating position to the Republics – and successfully, too, good on him - she had material to work with.

“But as for Tredegar… she’s always going to be who she is, Song,” Maryam told her. “Eager to get pretty girls into bed and trying to protect as many people as she can whether they deserve it or not. I’d think hard on that before deciding how far you want to go to mend bridges.”

Song frowned.

“Whether it is the friendship I want to salvage or whether I still want her as part of the Thirteenth,” she said.

“You talk like you do,” Maryam said. “And I don’t hate the notion the way I did back at Scholomance, I’ll grant.”

The Tianxi studied her for a moment.

“And Tristan…”

“I do not, in fact, speak for Tristan Abrascal,” Maryam drily said. “We argue too, you know. But if I had to wager, I’d say that he will be comfortable with the idea in a Tristan sort of way.”

“Afraid of her, but the danger is predictable and thus makes him feel safer than if there was nothing visible to be afraid of,” Song said.

Essentially. Their captain was beginning to know the man decently. In truth Maryam suspected that her viper rather liked Angharad, simply in a way that involved no true loyalty or investment of emotion. That was the Murk in him, she thought, and this Nerei’s lessons too. He’d been taught it was fine to like others, so long as it was shallow and did not weigh more than a feather on the scales.

“The friendship, at least, I would save,” Song murmured. “It was… I do like her, you know.”

It’s just that everyone else liked her too, Maryam thought, and you liked that almost as much as you do her. She could not even be too angry about that, now when could understand Song’s craving better than most. She had not grasped how much she liked to be liked before being met with casual contempt and distrust everywhere she went. Song had liked to stand by the hearth and bathe in the warmth, even if it wasn’t really hers.

“It is refreshing, being with someone who wants to be good, and she is surprisingly funny,” Song continued. “Even as a captain, I think we are better off with her.”

The Tianxi set down the book on the sheets. Maryam discretely ate a mouthful of cashews in the interval, ceasing to chew when Song’s attention returned.

“Not even because of the blade, though that is no small thing, but she does not compromise as easily as the rest of us do,” Song murmured. “She wants us to do things right – I wouldn’t have thought twice about that deal with the Brazen Chariot, if she hadn’t said anything.”

She discreetly swallowed.

“But,” Maryam said.

“But we won’t always be able to do things right,” Song said. “That is not a luxury we have as members of the Watch. I’m not sure if she will understand that. And, to be frank, I do not always agree with what she feels is right in the first place.”

Maryam said nothing, for she had already spoken all the words she had it in her to speak. While she would consider being the voice of virtue to the Thirteenth a special kind of torment given who made it up, she thought that Song might be underestimating Angharad. The Pereduri was not afraid to twist words to get her way, when she thought something was needed, and she’d not tried to usurp captainship of the cabal even when she had disagreed with Song’s decisions.

Within the circumstances of ‘Song being the commanding officer’, the laws of engagement would likely be quite different from the lines Angharad Tredegar would draw in the sand when it came to her personal life. And she’d proved she could put the job above her pride, in the countryside. It was no small influence on why Maryam had made her peace with the possibility of the Pereduri sticking around.

But all those things she had already said, and would not repeat them. If that bird was to take flight then it was Song that needed to take the steps by herself. To speak to Tredegar about her fear, to extend the trust. Anything else was just delaying the inevitable. And now that she had been a friend, she thought as she polished off the last of the seized cashews, she must be a cabalist.

“The Lefthand House,” Maryam said. “Leveraging her, you said. That’s a concern.”

And not something they could really do anything about in the immediate. Getting the Krypteia involved with the Malani spies would inevitably also mean getting them involved in the neighboring Yellow Earth situation, which Song desperately wanted to avoid.

“Something is off there,” Song frowned. “They are blackmailing her about her father, but for what? If the Lefthand House knew about her having joined the Watch, Lord Gule would not be recruiting her into the cult of the Golden Ram. If they do not know of her joining, then what is it they want from her?”

“The infernal forge,” Maryam suggested.

“Do they need to threaten her for this?” Song replied. “From Lord Gule’s perspective, she is already obtaining it for them.”

“Then it might be the Lefthand House and the ambassador want different things,” Maryam said, more to keep Song talking than because she genuinely believed it.

“The most likely answer, and yet senseless,” Song muttered. “Without the backing of the Lefthand House, and thus implicitly of the High Queen, how could a mere ambassador dare to support a coup overthrowing the Lord Rector of Asphodel?”

“And if they’re not on the same page, why is the man still alive?” Maryam mused. “Obviously they know of the coup to some extent. It’s an extension of Malani policies in the Trebian Sea, it would be absurd for Gule to be acting alone.”

“Perhaps the Lefthand House does not want the forge in the hands of the cult,” Song said.

“It’s not the cult asking Angharad to find it, it’s Lord Gule,” Maryam reminded her. “With the implication that with her having cleaned her slate with the Lefthand House and proved herself he will vouch for her and have her initiated into the ranks.”

The Tianxi grimaced.

“I cannot make sense of it,” she said. “We are missing something.”

“Whatever they want, so long as the coup is being handled by the Lord Rector the Lefthand House can’t do much,” Maryam said. “They are spies, not an invading army. I don’t mind letting that simmer until you’ve either made amends or we can put Tristan on sniffing something out.”

“I don’t like how many of our solutions can be summed up by the word ‘waiting’,” Song grimaced, “but then it would not be a good idea to press her on this.”

“And you need to take care of your Yellow Earth situation,” Maryam bluntly said. “On top of our lingering Ivory Library problem. I tell you now, if we don’t have a solid lead by the time Tristan returns bodies are going to start dropping.”

“I am well aware, thank you,” Song sighed, passing a hand through her hair. “For the latter, I have a final suspect and a notion in how they interrogated.”

“Captain Santos,” Maryam guessed.

“He is meant to investigate the Ivory Library’s influence on the delegation,” Song said. “I might not have the power to order the arrest of a suspect, but he does.”

“If you can convince him,” Maryam said.

“If I can convince him,” Song echoed tiredly. “As for the Yellow Earth, well, not even Chilaca would dare put me out in public again after that Landing Day skirmish. I can pass them general information about the Watch and palace under my discretion as captain of the Thirteenth without it being outright treason.”

It would be a decision Song would have to justify to Wen afterwards, in the reports, but the Watch did not forbid involvement with even the worst of sorts. You never knew when you might need their help to deal with something entirely worse. Song grimaced.

“Then I will tell them that I am no longer the Lord Rector’s escort and can thus am no longer told of any measures being taken by he or the Watch,” she added.

They’re not going to let you off that easily, Maryam thought. Which, by the look of that grimace, Song suspected as well.

“Take someone with you,” she said.

Song blinked.

“That seems unw-”

“Take someone with you, Captain Ren,” Maryam said, and this time her voice brooked no argument. “They have you by the throat, bring someone who won’t just be thinking about their grip tightening the entire time.”

Song studied her a long moment.

“You won’t let me refuse that, will you?”

Maryam smiled sharply.

“Try me,” she challenged.

A long moment passed, then finally Song nodded.

“So I will,” she promised.

--

It took three days for Maryam to figure it out, all in all.

The first day was, admittedly, mostly waiting around. Her report needed to make it to the Lord Rector, who would in turn decide whether or not her request to investigate the palace looking for the ‘cork’ of the Hated One’s prison was to be accepted, along with the implicit access to the regular and private archives that puzzling out the location would require.

Normally Evander Palliades could be counted on to promptly reply whenever a matter involved the Thirteenth, usually by tossing an audience their way in the hopes that Song might thus be delivered to his palace for lusting after, but this time would be different. Maryam had been back from the shipyard for a day now, and gone through all the mandatory debriefs. Which meant Brigadier Chilaca would be headed up to the palace to have a little talk with the Lord Rector.

The one that’d been getting put off, about that coup aiming to knife him and put his old regent on his throne while the cult of the probably-not-Golden-Ram pulled at her strings to rule Asphodel from behind the curtains. Not only was that talk likely to take some time – as would the ensuing panicked preparations to make it harder to seize the palace – but there would be diplomatic talks about the shipyard, sundry negotiations and other matters to occupy the Lord Rector’s day.

There would also be the slight complication that Evander Palliades was going to be made aware that the Thirteenth Brigade had been sitting on information about that coup for some time and even at some point been contractually obligated to mention it to him only for Song to keep quiet about. At Chilaca’s order, admittedly, but that the woman he was so taken with would hide such a thing from him would finally provide weight on the other side of the balance from ‘saved my life twice and saw her naked’.

Maryam was honestly a little surprised when on the morning of her thirty-first day on Asphodel summons to the palace came to Black House. She’d been expecting to be put off for a few days more at least as a show of displeasure. Regardless, with that whole affair with Angharad and its aftermath she was only able to head out to the Collegium after noon.

The first difference was that, instead of being sent to the Lord Rector’s office, this time she was greeted by Majordomo Timon. A bit of cooling in the relations then, though not so much they were being given the runaround with a minor official. Though it might simply be that beyond the majordomo there were few in the palace that could actually voice the permission to access the private archives without it being treason, she then wondered.

Either way, she had permission to sniff around the palace – under escort – and to the general palace archives. To access the private ones again would be only on request. Unfortunate but not unfair. She did have hidden intentions, as a matter of fact, so their precautions were entirely warranted. Maryam had claimed it necessary to inspect the rector’s palace to find where the ‘cork’ of the Hated One’s prison was located, and she did intend to find that.

But allowing the Lord Rector to guard it was not the most important reason why she was after the location.

She had a theory, Maryam did. As a general rule, while aether did tend to mirror the material world laymen tended to misunderstand what that actually meant. The realm of aether was not a single great mirror facing Vesper and reflecting it darkly, it was an endless number of connected mirrors of changing sizes mirroring specific parts of Vesper.

What was a layer, then? It was easy to say that a layer was ‘a lasting impression on aether caused by strong emanations’, the textbook definition, but observed as a phenomenon how could it be described? Language tended to be one of the great obstacles in the study of metaphysics, as the concepts involved frequently had no easy description, but sticking by the mirror metaphor a layer would be as if a particular reflection was frozen in time and made into a place.

That description held up for the likes of the Witching Hour and Lucifer’s Landing, but the strange empty layer that Maryam and Tristan had tread through while chasing the assassin was a different thing. No natural phenomenon could create such an empty layer, it must be caused by an entirely artificial process. Metaphorically speaking? Someone had smashed the mirror with a hammer and frozen a reflection of that.

Given that by nature what resulted would be fragile, unstable and dangerous those pieces were bound to get swept up by the local aether currents if some strong boundaries were not set around them. That was no doubt why Lord Rector Hector Lissenos had been comfortable having the entrance to the Hated One’s prison be somewhere in the palace where he slept. The ‘cork’ to the prison, wherever it was in the palace, would be one of the strongest boundaries on it.

Which meant that somewhere in the rector’s palace Maryam would find a location with a boundary strong enough to let her finish eating the shade. It was just a matter of finding it, and she would keep looking as long as it took.

Majordomo Timon politely accompanied her for a whole minute, then just as politely saddled her with a pair of escorts: a palace servant and a lictor. The latter was a tall, taciturn woman who avoided looking at any exposed skin of Maryam’s while refusing to meet her eyes, the former a smiling young man by the name of Iasos. In his early twenties, fit, curly hair and blue eyes. Charming.

Too polished and pretty, as far as she was concerned. Maryam had no use for anything that would not well weather being splashed with mud.

They began the search with the gardens, which at this hour of the day were well lit. It was not difficult to again find the place she had first slipped through into the layer, past the field of Asphodelian crowns, but groping around with her nav she found only smooth, sterile nothingness. She and the shade had relied on some temporary ripple to enter, then. That made sense, she conceded. While her revelation down in the shipyard had cast in doubt that the shade was a parasite, it was still clearly a creature of the aether in some way.

It would be able to feel unevenness in the aether in ways that not even the most skillful of Akelarre could. No matter how skillful a swimmer a man might become, that did not turn him into a fish.

“Shall we visit the other location designated by the Watch, my lady?” Iasos smiled.

“There’s no point,” she absent-mindedly replied.

The location Tristan had given the Lord Rector would be of no use to her, since the assassin had likely been using some sort of tool to enter from there. It could not be the cork. Which, she now considered, might well mean that wherever the cork was – and thus where the killer had first emerged from - the assassin had believed it too difficult a place to return to the layer through. Inside the palace proper, then, she mused. One of the better guarded sections.

“To the archives,” she told her escorts. “I need to have a look at plans of the palace grounds.”

Captain Wen had done so himself once, so they should not be restricted. It turned out they were not – they weren’t even in the private archives, merely the palace ones – because the plans as available were really more of an outline. While the parts of the buildings used to entertain guests and the likes were highly detailed, private wings of the rector’s palace were essentially outlines with no further detailing. Still, it would do.

Aether engineering on the scale of building a half-layer wasn’t something that could be stashed in a broom cupboard, it was large in scale and relied heavily on the use of conceptual shapes.

The rector’s palace, seen from above, was essentially two rectangles sprouting out from the flanks of a large square. Gardens spun out in every direction, since the palace did not need to have roads leading to it – it was supplied by lift, from below. The natural place for a cork would be the center of the square, with hidden anchors at the four corners of the square to stabilize it. That could not be, however, because she already knew exactly what was there: the lifts leading up from the Collegium.

Constant movement and emanations from the people passing through was the opposite of what you wanted on a boundary pressed into the aether. You might as well build a palisade on a bed of termites. Besides Wen had once told her that the lift to the private archives, which was right above the Collegium lifts, had been built in the days of King Oduromai. The square section of the palace was the first and oldest, built centuries before Hector Lissenos was even born. Considering said Hector was the one to have the Hated One’s prison built, that rather disqualified the section of the palace.

It must be one of the other internal shapes, like the rectangles. As the right wing was mostly for guests and formal receptions it was very detailed on the map, enough that Maryam ended up worrying her lip: the opposite corners of that rectangle were claimed by rooms of sizes that did not match. That probably could still work, if you had the right knowhow, but it had long odds. The left wing it was, then.

She glanced back at Iasos, who had been waiting in silence with an increasingly strained smiled, while the lictor stood there staring at the ceiling in profound boredom.

“Are you familiar with the left wing of the palace?” she asked.

“I am, my lady,” the servant replied.

“Good,” she said. “I need to see the rooms in each corner of the wing.”

Maryam did remember to look up the sewer map that Angharad had requested, though gods only knew why, and traced a Sign to commit it to memory. She would trace it out for her at Black House.

They proceeded to the left wing, and by the second room she knew it wasn’t the correct part of the palace either. The top right corner room was circular, the bottom left room a long gallery hall. Maryam was not Deuteronomicon tinker, or even a Savant learned deep in the lore of aether, but she knew bare bones: contrasting round shapes and corner shapes in aether structures did not work on the scale of a building. They incited the aether differently.

“You seem dissatisfied, my lady,” Iasos observed.

“I am missing something,” Maryam replied in half a mutter, glaring at the wall. “Is there something below either room we visited? An older foundation, perhaps.”

“This level is the older foundation, my lady,” Iasos replied. “This was built under the Archeleans, only renovated during the rule of House Lissenos.”

Maryam squinted at him.

“Which Lissenos?” she asked.

He looked taken aback.

“I do not know,” Iasos admitted.

“Find out,” she ordered.

And there was the thread to pull: it was their old friend Hector who’d done those reconstructions and also he who built the level above them. It was the same for the right wing, and thus Maryam realized her mistake; she had not considered the multiple levels while looking for shapes. This time she had to send for maps from the private archives, and once she finished scribbling what should be the shape if one could see into the palace from outside the results were puzzling.

Oh, there was a pattern. Mirroring rooms in the exact same shape and size, built or renovated under Hector Lissenos. The problem was that the mirroring was not internal to the left and right wings: it was between the different wings, the top left room of one rectangle reflecting the bottom right of the other.

“It can’t be internal to either wing, then,” she muttered to herself, rubbing the bridge of her nose. “It has to be in the central square.”

Only Hector Lissenos had not, apparently, built anything there. Or even changed much beyond sprucing up the throne room some. Hitting the books, it was clear that many of the rulers who’d followed him had their own notions of how to improve the oldest part of their palace – which Maryam had to conceded made sense, since the palace she’d walked through did not look like had been built centuries ago. How could the cork of the prison be in there, if the layout kept changing?

She looked back at a still-waiting Iasos.

“The original structure that palace was built out of is Antediluvian, correct?” she asked.

“The foundation of the central palace and the lifts themselves,” the servant confirmed. “Though, of course, the materials left behind by the Ancient were used for the foundations of the palace expansions as well.”

She paused.

“You only said the foundation of the central palace,” she slowly said. “Who built the upper levels?”

“It is hard to say, my lady,” the servant said. “Presumably King Oduromai and his descendants, who in time were succeeded by the Archeleans.”

Oh, but Maryam was a fool. Hector Lissenos, who seemed to delight in cleverness, had decided to cut a corner: instead of building the cork from scratch, he’d attached his prison layer to something already there. The wings had been built that way to strengthen something that already existed, not serve as the foundation of a new cork.

The private archives were an old gaol in the shape of six rooms surrounding a single hole. And it was said that King Oduromai had locked up his six wives in there to make them into aether spirits that would serve him when he became a god. And assuming he really had used that place in some kind of ritual to press some impression of his mind into a nascent god?

Then by Necalli’s principle of occupancy, that the same discrete quantity of aether cannot hold two affects simultaneously, then the aether in the private archives was probably the single most unbreakable seal on all of Asphodel. So long as Oduromai kept being worshipped then nothing would ever get through that cork. No wonder Hector Lissenos had been willing to sleep so close to a path into the Hated One’s prison, she thought.

“My lady?”

Maryam cleared her throat.

“I need to talk to Majordomo Timon,” she said. “Please arrange this.”

Already she was preparing her wording. It was going to be tricky, convincing the man that she needed to be given time alone in the private archives with no lights and preferably no one close enough to make noise, but it was necessary for what she had in mind.

She’d been eating bites of the Cauldron taken blindly, whatever she could rip out of the shade in the moment, but that was halfhearted work. It was time for her to get her bearings and prevent the bleed destroying the rightful knowledge of the Izvoric, get everything that she could.

Thankfully, no one liked to argue with a Navigator when they started using words like ‘solipsistic contamination’ and ‘inflicted null states’, which sounded very dangerous but were just fancy ways to say it was easier to Sign when nobody else was around to distract you and muck up the aether. Majordomo Timon went pale as a sheet – or her reflection in a mirror – and promised to urgently approach the Lord Rector on the matter.

The letter bearing agreement and the Lord Rector’s seal arrived at Black House before her rented carriage did. Tomorrow evening she would be granted the run of the private archives, as asked.

Now she just needed to prepare for a ritual.