Angharad went dressed in men’s clothes: hose and a doublet under a long coat with a tricorn pulled down as far as she could, her hair bundled up. There was no hiding the walking stick, but being let into Lord Gule of Bezan’s mansion through the servant entrance ought to keep most eyes off her.
As the ambassador of the Kingdom of Malan the older noble had been assigned large and luxurious quarters near the heart of the Collegium, the upper levels of the edifice a series of well-lit galleries of brass and glass that were as beautiful viewing from as viewed. Angharad, however, was not led to those salons and windows. Silent liveried servants bid her in then led her through empty kitchens and a well-stocked larder. At the end of it a heavy door needed unlocking and in the cold room beyond waited two men.
Lord Gule of Bezan was richly but comfortably dressed, in pale gray-and-orange silks with a hand on his sculpted cane – a length of smooth, polished sandalwood. That stick was likely worth as much as all the clothes on her back, Angharad idly thought. Lord Gule inclined his head in greeting, ushering her through the door with a simple gesture.
His attendant, stone-faced Jabulani, was seated on a stool with a slate and a stick of charcoal on his lap – an indication he was here as ufudu and not a servant, for none worth the name would have sat when their master stood.
“Lady Angharad,” Lord Gule said, putting his hearing horn to his ear. “I am pleased to see you again so soon.”
“And you, my lord,” she replied. “I know we discussed meeting anew after the feast, but…”
“But you cleverly made your way in using that orphanage opening,” the older man praised. “I take from your presence that you did find something.”
“The very device you sent me to look for,” she agreed.
“That remains to be seen,” Jabulani said, eyes unreadable. “I have questions. You will answer.”
Angharad swallowed her distaste at the lack of courtesy and curtly nodded.
“What pattern did the gilding display?” the ufudu asked.
She blinked. There had been no gilding, what did he – ah. He was trying to trap her, to verify if she had truly seen an infernal forge. Insulting, but the Lefthand House lived in a world without honor.
“There was none,” Angharad replied. “And this will be quicker if I describe the device instead of dance through your traps, so I shall.”
Lord Gule covered a yawn with his hand, or perhaps a smile. She described the infernal forge as well as she could from memory, the ufudu not interrupting, but it could not be so easy at that. He still asked further questions afterwards. Three, all traps, though this last one she might in truth have answered mistakenly had she not studied the device closely enough.
“The surface was so thickly covered with cryptoglyphs it almost seemed smooth from a distance,” she told the spy.
Jabulani slowly nodded, making a note on the slate. He then looked down on it, breathed in slowly and wiped it clean before exhaling.
“I am satisfied,” the ufudu said, rising to his feet. “Lord Gule, the matter is now entirely in your hands. I see no need for myself or the House to have further involvement.”
The older man nodded back pleasantly, and to her surprise Jabulani sketched the barest of bows when passing her on his way out of the room. Her brow rose, drawing the ambassador’s eye.
“Jabulani has a suspicious mind, as befitting a man of his duties, but he is not unreasonable,” Lord Gule laughed. “Infernal forges are rare and depictions of them almost as, so such a detailed description is unlikely to come from anything but your own eyes.”
“He did not ask where the hidden room is in the house,” she said.
Lord Gule snorted.
“Beneath it, no doubt, as are most in this rat’s warren of a capital,” he said. “Besides, we are…”
He paused, pawing at his silks and producing a golden watch whose ticking was nearly noiseless.
“Nearly running late,” Lord Gule finished. “He may have further questions for you, but a written account will be enough – and at a time where it will not delay us.”
She cocked her head to the side.
“Delay us, my lord?”
Lord Gule glanced at the servant still holding the door open and the man bowed before gesturing to someone out of sight. A young girl bearing a lantern offered them both a curtsy before stepping into the cold room, slipping past the izinduna and walking to the back wall to pull at what turned out to be a steel latch hidden behind stacked stalks of celery. Three latches slid to the side, one after the other, and then a door popped open. A hidden door, behind which lay stairs.
Again?
“Did you think I received you in the cold room to keep the hams company?” the ambassador drily asked.
Ancestors, she thought. Did every mansion in this misbegotten capital have a hidden passage of some sort? The lantern girl took the lead, gliding down the stairs as Angharad and Lord Gule followed. The older noble was in a fine mood, and a talkative one.
“Under the late Archeleans there was a craze of hidden rooms in the Collegium and the southwestern ward, which at the time was where most nobles dwelled,” Lord Gule told her. “They fell out of favor during the Ataxia, as they became the favored tool of assassins to enter mansions.”
Ah. Yes, that would tamp down on the enthusiasm some.
“But not this one?” she asked.
“It leads only to what I suspect was a room dedicated to concubinage,” Lord Gule said, “so they never bothered. Digging a passage from there to the tunnels beneath the city took my staff several months.”
No doubt more out of the need for discretion than physical difficulty, Angharad mused. The room at the bottom of the stairs was much as advertised, essentially a large bedroom though it currently stripped of any furniture. It also displayed with a gaping hole in a Tratheke brass wall, the presumed path forward.
Through there the lantern girl led them through a cramped tunnel angled slightly downwards, dug through stone and emerging into an underground passage not unlike a hallway. For five minutes they walked through the dark, until they emerged what should be… west of the mansion, at a guess, but far below? Water must be close, for there was a sense of dampness to the cool here.
Her suspicions proved correct, as at the end of the hall a smokeless lamp hung over a narrow canal of dark water. An even narrower boat waited there, tied to a ring of steel nailed into the ground. It had two seats and a paddle waiting across them. Angharad’s eyes strayed to a crate under the lamp, on which two brown hooded cloaks and two pairs of deerskin gloves were neatly folded.
“I took the liberty to prepare clothing for you as well,” Lord Gule informed her. “Though I’m afraid I will have to prevail on you to bring us to our destination.”
Angharad silently inclined her head, smothering her excitement. Hoods and gloves? There were only so many reasons for Gule to seek to hide their faces and hands. The cloak was of fine make and the gloves delightfully soft. Angharad stepped onto the boat first, taking the paddle, and watched as the servant girl helped the ambassador down onto the other seat before passing him the lantern and withdrawing.
“Forward,” Lord Gule instructed her. “Ours is the easiest of all the routes, a straight line to the shrine.”
There was a faint current to the water, headed the same way they were, so Angharad hardly needed to do a thing to propel them across the water. A droplet splashed on her face revealed, to her surprise, that the wet was not cold but lukewarm. Odd, given the coolness down here. The islet of light cast by the lantern felt fragile, but Lord Gule’s continuing volubility propped it up.
“The ceremony we are to attend takes place every lunar month – the Coral Moon, that is,” he specified. “While the red crescent can no longer be seen from Asphodel, it was above the island during much of the Second Empire and it is believed that in a century and a half it will begin to journey back towards Tratheke.”
Angharad nodded as if she had understood. She had never heard of the Coral Moon, and the few moons she was familiar with were much closer to Malan. Save for the Leviathan’s Tear, anyhow, which was the guiding light for sailing journeys to the western lands if you knew how to see it - which precious few save the captains of Malan did.
“Am I to take from the hoods that initiates keep their faces hidden even from each other?” she asked.
“To some degree,” Lord Gule replied. “The most prominent among the cult have long been guessed at, including myself, and to lead or openly participate in the ceremony one must reveal their face. The small nobles and officials clutch their secrets, but it is difficult to rise to prominence without ceding some hints.”
“So there are ranks,” Angharad probed. “Means to rise.”
“Not yet initiated and already so ambitious,” the ambassador teased, but he sounded pleased.
Angharad dipped her head, feigning abashment, but he only chuckled.
“Most of the society are mere pawns,” Lord Gule said, “and know nothing of the mysteries save a few signs to recognize each other and the promise of power to come. Your attendance to the ceremony will make of you an initiate, one who glimpsed the powers wielded but works under a head of the cult.”
A pause.
“I am one such head, and you will naturally be employed at my discretion.”
She did not hide her surprise.
“You stand high in the ranks.”
“Not so high as you think,” Lord Gule warned her. “The five heads hold great sway, but ours is a power earthly. We have authority because of means and influence, because we are needed for the advancement of the society’s schemes. That is, I fear, temporary authority. The true power lies with the priesthood, the officiants of the spirit, and their master who founded the cult and still leads it.”
Angharad hid her thrill. At last, progress! Learning the identity of that master as well as that of the mentioned five heads should see the Thirteenth’s contract to the throne discharged. There was finally a clear path out of the mire.
“He is known as the Ecclesiast,” the ambassador added, perhaps anticipating the question. “I met him only once and do not know his true name, for pains were taken to hide his identity.”
Even a title, now. The Ecclesiast. She almost rolled her eyes at the pretentiousness.
“Will he be in attendance?” Angharad asked.
“Such rites are beneath him,” Lord Gule scoffed. “His acolytes attend in his stead, priests one and all – though their priesthood is by virtue of the spirit’s favor and not genuine virtue. None I have seen would be fit to serve the Sleeping God.”
Though she did not turn, Angharad could feel the weight of his eyes on her back.
“I expect you will recognize some of those attending and perhaps be recognized by them in turn, despite our precautions,” the izinduna said. “Discretion will be paramount in this matter.”
She nodded silently.
“Good,” Lord Gule muttered. “We are nearly there, so mind your hood.”
Angharad saw nothing that separated the dark stretch of canal she was guiding them through from any other, but there must have been some mark for the older man proved right: the canal abruptly ended, leading into some kind of large underground reservoir. At its heart was an island, as if a cluster of basalt had grown out of the water like a mushroom, and atop that rocky shore stood a worn shrine.
It had neither doors nor walls, steps roughly hewn into the basalt leading up to driftwood columns holding up a large, thick square roof that seemed made up entirely of broken wood. Masts, oars and spears, shattered prows and painted idols. Dull, warm lamps were strewn all over the shore and inside the shrine. They cast the shadows of the small boats moored by the dozen and of the quiet assembly standing within the shrine. At least three dozen were there, in hooded cloaks ranging from vivid red to a gray so dark it came close to infringing on the rights of the Watch regarding black cloaks.
Angharad guided her boat to one of the empty stretches on the shore, wincing as she got onto the stone with uncertain legs. She was passed her walking stick by Lord Gule and leaned on it long enough to tie the boat to a thick figurehead of bronze and help the older noble onto the shore. They were late in the coming, she saw, but not the last: there were two more boats out in the water, torchlight heralding their approach.
As Lord Gule began the walk to the shrine, she lingered a moment to take a sniff of the air. Frowning she knelt by the shore, angling herself to hide her hand within her cloak while she took off a glove and dipped a finger in the water before bringing to her nose. It truly was salt water; she was not going mad. Was this place somehow connected to the Trebian Sea? She had been wondering where all the water of the Tratheke canals came from, given that no river fed the city.
Angharad put the glove back on and pushed herself up. Her eyes went to the driftwood shrine, and she wondered if there might not be another explanation for the waters here turning from fresh to salt. Powerful spirits, the elders of their kind, could change the world around them merely by being. The Golden Ram does not have such power, she thought. It did not even at its height. So who is it that rules here?
She followed behind Lord Gule, standing in his shadow as a retainer would, but under the hood her gaze swept the place. It was only a moment before she entered the shrine that she noticed it – a bit of pale in the roof of broken wood, easily mistaken for one of the painted idols.
A skull. A human skull, and now that she knew what to look for she saw others. Scattered bones among ruined wood, at least several men’s worth. She shivered and forced herself to follow Lord Gule without further delay, for already some hooded faces had turned her way. She came to stand by the izinduna’s side, among a line of quietly murmuring figures all facing the heart of the shrine: a polished stone floor, at the heart of which forged chains held down a single prisoner.
And that prisoner was not a man.
The Golden Ram, for what else could this be, was aptly named: a great horned sheep with a golden mane, twice the size of a warhorse. But though the sight of that spirit out in the wilds would have been a fearsome thing, down here in the ancient shrine it was… Sad, almost. It was bound in chains of forged silver and deep glinting spikes were driven deep into its sides, but Angharad could see it had been sick even before that.
The spirit was malformed, with a leg that ended in a stump and another shriveled like a twig. Its coat had the luster of gold, but rivulets of rust-like ichor dripped down from its wounds and peeled away both coat and skin with them. Its large, curved horns were fully formed but a wound had clipped one and broken it, showing they were hollow inside. Like empty shells.
The Golden Ram barely breathed; its eyes closed as it lay on the stone floor marked with a mess of overlapping circles that all surrounded it. Boundaries, she remembered from her Theology class. They would not stop it walking it out, were it healthy, but they would muddle and diffuse its power.
“It is no pretty sight, I will grant,” Lord Gule murmured, leaning her way.
“I have never before seen a spirit so misshapen,” Angharad replied as quietly. “Is it… healthy?”
She got an incredulous look from the ambassador and coughed into her fist.
“Beyond the obvious wounds,” she elaborated.
“Ah,” Lord Gule said. “Well caught. The spirit did not come to be in a proper way, I am told. Our fellows caught it as a middling thing, granting small boons and barebones contracts, and used the properties of the local aether to force it to manifest physically.”
They made cattle to bleed, Angharad thought, keeping her disgust off her face even under the hood. It was one thing for a Redeemer like Lord Gule to be indifferent at the sight before him, but that was not the faith she kept to. Evil done onto spirits was still evil, for all that their nature was not that of men.
“The society keeps to a greater patron,” she probed.
Lord Gule smiled approvingly.
“You will see soon enough,” he whispered back. “The taste of health we gave you is the least of it.”
He then gestured for silence, however, as the last attending had arrived. The last three figures hurried up the stairs under the silent disapproving stares of most everyone else, their body language embarrassed even under the cloaks. It appeared that even in murderous spirit cults punctuality was expected, Angharad amusedly thought. With the last finding a place in one of the rows facing the inside of the shrine, a hush fell over the assembly and even whispers died out.
The line of becloaked cultists in the back of the shrine parted to allow through another figure, one that did not hide her face and had Angharad stiffening in surprise. While the usual flattering dress and stylings had been traded for a simple cloth robe and sculpted bronze bracelets, there was no mistaking that face and figure.
“You who stand in the hall of the Odyssean,” Lady Doukas spoke in a resonant voice, “kneel.”
It took a heartbeat for Angharad to adjust to the sight of the flirtatious lady Tristan had caught having a tryst in a closet during a banquet with the solemn priestess now standing before her. Long enough that Lord Gule tugged at her cloak and she hastily knelt by his side, leaning on her cane. Only when all had knelt did Lady Doukas speak again.
“The Cunning King receives your submission,” she announced. “All may rise.”
Angharad swallowed a grunt of pain as she did, having leant on her knees a little too much today. Still, there was no helping it. She had already learned much and the ceremony had yet to even begin. Sleeping God, Lady Doukas? The noblewoman had been one of the suspects on the original list, it was true, but Angharad had all but dismissed her. The admittedly handsome older woman seemed a lot more interested in bedding young men than anything conspirational.
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Less so now, simply dressed but with a dim sense of power rolling off her in waves. It caught the eye almost like a naked flame, beckoning and searing all at once.
“We gather here beneath the lights of Tratheke to remember the original truth of Asphodel,” Lady Doukas said. “That which was forged in death can only through death be preserved.”
Only through death, around half the assembly echoed. Lord Gule did not, the way he stood beneath his cloak hinting at a certain distaste for the ritual. A Redeemer like him, Angharad thought, would find this entire affair to smack a little too much of religion. Spirits could be bargained with, but they should never be worshipped. In this, they shared opinion.
“There are none in this land who can resist the might of the Odyssean,” the priestess, for that was what she must be, told the assembly. “Behold before you the Golden Ram, a god chained and bled. Behold now the blade of the Cunning King, and how it carves even the divine.”
Lady Doukas gestured at cultists behind her and a pair carried forward a cushion on which rested the aforementioned blade. Angharad had expected a cutlass, the kind of pirate lord the likes of which Odyssean had been in life might wield, but instead what was brought into the light of lamps was a sickle. Bronze, with a dull handle but a gleaming curved blade.
She frowned. Since when was the sickle a symbol of the Odyssean? Much less one without any ornaments. Maryam had spoken gemstone eyes and the ancient spirit’s hoard of treasures, but never of such a plain blade.
“Let the daring step forward,” Lady Doukas called out, “and wield their ambition as a blade. Let the worthy come into the gaze of the Odyssean. Who will answer the call?”
There was heartbeat of hesitation, then a silhouette stepped out of the row to Angharad’s left. Another two had begun to move, but just a breath too late. The figure in a roughspun cloak of wool took two steps towards the smiling priestess, whose smile broadened when the man pulled back his hood and revealed his face to the entire assembly. Angharad breathed in sharply.
“I will,” Lord Cleon Eirenos replied.
Her heart clenched. She had hoped, even knowing now that his contracted patron was the spirit worshipped by the cult, that he would not be part of this. But the chance had always been slight.
“Honored be Cleon Eirenos,” Lady Doukas said, smiling in something like triumph. “He who stands young among you, but long in the care of the Cunning King. Never before has he asked favor, only giving faithful service.”
Honored be, the crowd sang back. The hooded attendant stepped up to Lord Cleon, offering up the sickle, and the young lord deftly took up the blade from the cushion. Cleon Eirenos was a huntsman, Angharad knew, and skilled with a blade. She did not believe him a cruel man by nature and when he moved it was with care and precision.
It still left an ugly taste in the mouth watching him cut into the helpless spirit’s side.
The Golden Ram’s flesh parted without resistance and the sickle’s blade came away red. After Cleon drew away Lady Doukas knelt by the bound spirit with a wooden cup and captured the fat, rusty droplets that bled. The Ram never even stirred. The priestess then raised the cup for all to see, smiling ecstatically.
“Cleon Eirenos cut a god for his ambition,” Lady Doukas said, “and the god bled. Name now the price of the ichor, honored Cleon.”
The young lord’s face hardened.
“The life of Theofania Varochas, of the Meda’s Rock Varochas,” he coldly said. “I grant my share to the Odyssean, that he may share this death with me.”
Angharad tensed, for in the moment that followed wind billowed sharply across the temple. Lamps flickered, and on the air was the faint sound of screams and clashing arms. Only instead of the clean, burning scent of salt Angharad caught something like… rot? A sickly-sweet reek, and also a whiff of the smell of wet earth. She had to keep her hood in place with a gloved hand, and when she could spare attention again she saw that the sickle in Cleon’s hand was now bare of red and half the ichor in the cup was gone.
“The price was accepted,” Lady Doukas announced. “Death will find your enemy.”
The crowd exhaled, Angharad among them, and Cleon set the sickle back down on the cushion. He kept his hood down, as if disdainful of secrecy, and returned to the side. Lady Doukas launched into a sermon exalting the might and virtues of the Odyssean, but Angharad felt too sick in the stomach to listen. Never before had he asked favor, Lady Doukas had claimed.
Was this on her head? This ceremony appeared to be some kind of… death ritual, sacrificing ichor to the Odyssean to buy the death of one’s enemies in what could not be called anything but a form of murder. Yet Cleon, who must have known of this for years, had never before made such a sacrifice. Was it because of the humiliation Angharad had allowed to be inflicted on herself at the Eirenos manor?
She had known he felt trapped by his unwanted suitor, by the way the neighboring nobles were hemming him in, but to ask for that girl’s head was… She had attacked him first, Angharad reminded herself. Not by wielding a blade at him, but it was no less an attack to chase away all his potential matches and try to impose herself as a wife. It had all begun long before any Tredegar knew this isle, years ago.
And yet she could not shake the feeling it was her deception under his roof that had led him to this… threshold of decision. This mistake. Dishonor bringing only further dishonor.
But Angharad had her duty, and wallowing in guilt was not it. She must try to find if any of the other heads were in attendance, or even other priests with bare faces. She eyed the crowd carefully as Lady Doukas continued exhorting them, finding that while there were some matching cloaks like hers and Lord Gule’s none of the silhouettes under them stood out recognizably.
She could guess at gender from height and shoulder width, but only that. Perhaps someone who better knew the grandees of the court might be able to, but how might they… Angharad breathed in sharply, and sunk into her contract. She did not stay long in the vision, just long enough to take a long look at the crowd around her.
It would be enough to fix the sight perfectly in her memory.
There was a shiver of cold on the nape of her neck when she let the contract lapse, almost like the Fisher was laughing against the skin. An unsettling thought, and she was glad to that Lady Doukas’ sermon did not go on much longer –what followed demanded her full attention, stopping her from thinking too much about what that distant satisfaction that echoed truly meant.
“Only the chosen may stand in this holy place,” Lady Doukas reminded the crowd with a smile. “The most beloved and trusted hands of the Odyssean, those who will rule when the hour of our triumph comes.”
The smile widened.
“And that hour,” she purred, “has grown near.”
A breathless, excited shiver ran through the assembly. Even Angharad, who was here to see these traitors clapped in chains, felt a strange joy rise in her. A feeling like when the blade cut into flesh at the perfect angle, like… leaping into the dark and landing on solid ground. The reservoir had been still as a grave before, but now there was a faint breeze and she thought she heard waves lapping at the shore of the island. The spirit is here, she thought with dread. Or at least its attention.
“Our brethren in the rector’s palace have sent word,” Lady Doukas said. “At last our agents are in place: the throne is in the palm of our hand, and as soon as our soldiers are mustered it will be time to close our fist.”
Excited murmurs spread while Angharad’s stomach clenched. How long before the coup - hours, days?
“The Ecclesiast has spoken,” the priestess said. “On the night of the thirteenth, as night falls, we will take our rightful place atop Asphodel.”
The thirteenth of the month. Angharad counted up the days – they were currently the eighth. Five days. There were five days left before the fuse hit powder, before the knives came out.
Five days to get the infernal forge out of the city and put her affairs in order.
--
Maryam proved her theory within three minutes of walking into the private archives.
It wasn’t all that difficult to test aether elasticity when you knew how, which she did. It was only a matter of tricking yourself into feeling something while you felt out your own emanations with your nav, and she was feeling nervous enough she didn’t have to do any tricking. She’d been right: this place had to be the cork on the Hate One’s prison.
She’d not noticed when tracing a Sign here the first time because the local aether was so solid and stable it didn’t feel all that different from the barren emptiness of the rest of the palace until you looked closely. There was no give here at all – the amount of faith in Oduromai permeating the island of Asphodel made the cork so frightfully dense it felt like it wasn’t even there until you pushed against it. Maryam watched the last of the archivists leave down the lift, the lights below go out, and took a deep breath.
Three minutes, that was all it’d taken until she had the answers she had told the Lord Rector she must come here to find out. The answer to Song’s flat question of how much this visit was about her desires and how much about her duty was left uncomfortable bare and in the open, like a dead fish on the shore. Maryam wrestled the thought down. She would take no lecture from Song Ren in this, considering the mess the other woman had in her hands. It was time to set the distractions aside and do what she had truly come here for.
It would be easier in the dark.
Captain Totec had explained it as an effect of observational solipsism, a reduction of the metaphysical impurities that came from the Material being observed by a lucent mind. It was a provable conclusion, measured and recorded and stripped clean of anything the Navigators deemed to smell of mysticism. The Akelarre wanted no uncertainty in their Signs or the principles guiding them.
Practitioners of the Craft spoke instead of sympathy, about the thinning of thresholds between world and Nav and how the soul-effigy became eminent by straddling is and could-be. It was an intuitive answer, meant to guide the mind along thought-paths that reinforced themselves. A craft of words to make craftsmen of those who heard it.
Maryam preferred to think of it as emptying herself.
To wield the Gloam was an act of will, whether that will was used to trace the resonant solidity of the Signs or to sculpt intention into act as the Craft did, but ‘will’ was not an absolute. It was a finite resource. Humans were animals, embers of divinity trapped inside beasts, and the beast weighed it all down. Will could not be made greater save by time and training, but the beast could be lulled into sleep. Drowned in the dark, where its savage instincts could not drag down the practitioner.
Darkness and silence let you empty yourself of everything but you, until there was nothing but yourself and the Gloam. And so Maryam Khaimov sat alone in the dark, eyes closed, at the heart of the private archives.
She sat neither high nor low, above the earth but beneath firmament, utter silence and the absence of light turning her body into a ship sailing a dark sea. Hours passed until a heartbeat was an eternity and the turn of an era but a single breath, the creeping teeth of the Gloam eating away at time until it was more nothing than not. She could no longer hear her own breath. Her limbs were numb and her awareness was a keel parting black waters, a smooth cut that left no trace behind it.
Her lungs exhaled, her lips blind to the passing of the breath, and Maryam traced a word with her nav. A Sign, consecrated syllables carved out from the death rattle of existence: OIDE
Imperial declaration of knowledge, complete and self-contained. Autarchic. That thought-path was meant to be looped, invoked at the begin and the end – knows she, she knows – but Maryam Khaimov was an empty vessel. She did not wield herself under the cannibal crown but made herself into the dark sea. Slick like oil, perfect and still. Reflecting the hidden thing facing her. Maryam declared that she knew, and so she did, for she was the mirror to secrets thought lost.
And as a mirror she reflected everything that the Cauldron was, thus knowing it fully for a single terrible moment.
She saw the harrowing disorder of it, ages of secrets and cheats and glorious lies thrown haphazardly into the confines with no thought to use or deservedness. Blood-drenched violations dripping onto the most mundane of crafts, terrified howls woven into braids with the laughter of children and tricks to delay sleep. There was so much, and all of it made sense but not in the same ways or with the same words, and it was all jumbled and jagged. A hand reaching within would be torn to shreds.
Then the moment passed and Maryam Khaimov fell forward onto her knees, loudly throwing up on the wooden roof. She could not see in the darkness, but somehow she knew the bile was black and would turn into shadowy vapor. Her ragged breath tore at her lungs, her very soul aching at the terrible magnitude of what she had mirrored – not even held, not even owned, merely mirrored! – for an instant. Her forehead dripped with sweat, feverish, but this was not mania. There was no joy in this, no heedless energy. Maryam was a rag wrung dry, not a pitcher filled to the brim.
“They raise them from birth to hold the Cauldron, you know? Mother cut corners. So very many of them, near the end.”
And there was the scavenger come to haunt her. As expected. Inevitable, really. All living things were beholden to the tyranny of their own nature, even a parasite such as this. Maryam pushed herself back onto her ass, the wood under her fingers slick from her own bile. The shade was seated by her, legs folded, like a friend holding her company. Maryam could not see in the dark but she knew that much with utter certainty.
“We already knew that,” Maryam rasped. “She told me the risks, that it might shatter parts of me.”
The Cauldron was not a thing lightly borne, but borne it must be: it could be bound to the skull of the last Keeper of Hooks for only so long before it began to fade. And it was useless without a Keeper, anyway, mostly indecipherable. Maryam had thought that because of the grand eldritchness of the secrets held within, the lightless depth of the whispers, but now she knew better.
It was because without a Keeper’s mind to organize the Cauldron the entire thing was just howling, senseless cacophony of screams.
A hiss, someone pulling away. Maryam opened her eyes in the dark, beholding light. A late autumn day in the burnt husk of an ancient forest, raised stones cracked by heat with their painted faces streaked in ash. A pit that fled deep into the belly of the earth, belching out a warm breath tasting of sulfur. And a young Maryam Khaimov, cradling her bleeding arm as her mother frowned down at her with a long silver needle in hand.
“Steady, meda,” Izolda Cernik chided. “Your will must not wane, no matter what comes.”
“It won’t,” the young Maryam swore.
The fear behind the words was obvious now, looking at the child. Maryam wondered if it had been as obvious to her mother as it was to her.
“It didn’t,” the shade said.
“Of course it did,” Maryam said, mouth tasting vile. “I was too afraid to lose myself, it prevented the joining.”
“Did it?” the shade asked. “We have the Cauldron. It was passed.”
“You stole the Cauldron,” Maryam bit out. “Stole it, you thing. That is not passing anything.”
Izolda Cernik wiped the bloody needle against the pad of her thumb, smiling as she traced a red streak across the bridge of the young Maryam’s nose, and it was like a convulsion. Seeing Mother like that again, blue eyes smiling along with the rest of her. She was not a handsome woman, Izolda Cernik, with mousy brown hair and a face that looked it had been carved by a journeyman. She had all the curves of a dead branch and teeth just a little too large to miss how they were yellowing. But when she loved you, when it came to the fore of her, it was like basking in the Glare itself.
Gods, Maryam thought, tears picking at her eyes.
Then Izolda Cernik batted at the air near her ear, as if chasing off a horse fly that did not exist. She looked out into nothing, frowning, then snarled at the empty air.
“Silence,” she shouted. “My daughter, mine. Be silent or I will wring your necks.”
A different fear flickered across the young Maryam’s face. That child had only been far enough down her journey to hear even the barest hints of the souls bound to her mother, back then. Maryam wondered if she had now grown enough she would be able to hear the words, to truly know that Mother had not truly turned into a violent madwoman who screamed at empty air and lost herself in thought for hours at a time.
“Mother,” the young Maryam whispered, tugging at her sleeve. “I’m ready.”
Izolda turned, face serious.
“Of course you are, meda,” she said. “You will not let me down.”
“I do not want to watch this,” Maryam quietly said, stomach clenching.
To watch herself fail again.
“Then why are you wake-dreaming it?” the shade asked. “My hand does not guide our nav.”
She had no answer to that. The preparations had taken so long, in her memory, but Maryam watched the ghostly scene pass in mere seconds. Watched as Gloam slunk out of her mother like a living thing, the gargantuan limb of a leshy reaching into the depths of the pit and plucking out the skull of the last Keeper of Hooks like a delicate flower.
“Look into her eyes when she gives it to you,” the shade said. “Watch, Maryam, and you will see hunger. I will never mistake that, when so much of me is made from the same.”
“She needed me,” Maryam bit out. “She prepared me as best she could, kept me from taking the oath to Mother Winter. I was supposed to succeed her.”
There was no good end to being wintersworn. It was not a gallant or beautiful thing, a daring deed worthy of telling. It was fear and spite and hatred that had seen the hundreds by the river swear their death to the cause, their wriggling souls committed to the hide-bag of Mother Winter so that their deaths could be turned into a curse. A black thing that the dreadmost goddess would drown the invaders in should they fail.
Curse them and their children and their children’s children, forever until the last of those accursed lines had ended or the last of the sworn souls lay spent.
Maryam had been held back that day by the river, forbidden from taking the oath, because already Mother had meant her for the Cauldron. To inherit the sum of the Craft and bring about the spring in the wake of a great winter as the Keeper of Hooks. To renew the Izvoric, be the sprouts in the ashen grounds. She watched as her mother punctured her cheeks with needles, as gently as she could, and red trailed down.
Watched as Izolda Cernik bit her own thumb and… traced it on her own right eyebrow? Then did the same to young Maryam’s left. There was still enough of the mirroring left in Maryam to know that was wrong. That it added another headwater to the river trying to break the dam, made everything more fragile.
“Did she get it wrong?” she said.
“She had bound to her the souls of all the remainder of the Ninefold Nine,” the shade said. “Izolda Cernik might have been raving mad, but she did not make mistakes in matters of Craft. Not even there, at the end.”
“But she made the shape of the joining more fragile,” Maryam whispered. “And she didn’t know about you.”
“I did not even know about me, back then,” the shade said. “How could she?”
“That’s how it went wrong,” Maryam said as she watched her mother press a bone-white skull against the young Maryam’s forehead, chanting words of power. “That’s how you ended up getting the Cauldron. I was afraid and it was fragile and you were there.”
She was almost grateful when the dream died with the last of her sentence. Spared the sight of her failure, Mother’s disbelief slowly turning into fear and then a dozen different thoughts as the other souls bled into her. The screaming as she tore up the sacred stones, shrieking in grief at what had been lost. Instead Maryam was sitting before a candle, and though her mind knew she was alone and in the dark on the other side of that false candlelight sat the shade.
It was wearing the same colorful robes Mother had that day, hair held back by a headband of thick colored beads. Still putting on a face that could have been a sister or a cousin.
“It was an accident,” Maryam finally said. “You didn’t mean to take it.”
“I don’t mean to do anything,” the shade hissed. “I was dreaming, unknowing, until you brought me to an aether well. And even then all I could do was what you threw away.”
Maryam swallowed, slowly stitching the details together.
“You tried to break the gift Angharad received from her uncle,” she said.
“How you hated it, that someone loved her enough for that when she did not deserve it,” the shade said, grinning toothily.
A thought she had pushed down, decided was unworthy of her. A dark impulse. The shade had first been seen at the chapterhouse when she had wanted to go but decided she was too exhausted, then seen out at night when she had been curious about the forbidden parts of Allazei but forced herself to set that curiosity aside. And when the shade had saved Song…
“You told yourself it was fine to leave her with Professor Kang,” the thing facing her completed. “But you didn’t think that, not really. You were afraid for her, wanted to check on her. And I cared for her then, because you were angry enough that you didn’t let yourself feel it.”
“But out here you do what you want,” Maryam said, “because the aether currents on Asphodel are unstable. They swelled you like they do the local gods. Made you more.”
“I was always more,” the shade replied. “You know that now. You felt it the last time you ate from me.”
The fear she had felt in the aether, the emanation that had not come from Maryam Khaimov and could thus only have come from the shade. Only a mere shade would not have been able to emanate that way. She was looking at a living thing. One, Song had forced her to admit, that she intended to murder to take back the Cauldron. Or at least some of it.
“You think that changes anything, that you live?” Maryam asked.
“Doesn’t it?”
“Piglets live too, and they are jolly little fellows,” the signifier said. “I still love a good cut of pork.”
“See?” the shade smiled. “You have to make me less, for it to be palatable. An animal.”
“Because that’s what you are,” Maryam hissed. “The ram I need to sacrifice on an altar to get the Cauldron back. To finish what Mother meant for me.”
“You know better than that too,” the shade said. “You saw it, how tangled up the knowledge is. If you keep taking bites out like you have you will make it even messier and the whole thing comes apart. Muddles itself irreparably. You can take what, a tenth? Then it becomes babbling.”
“No,” Maryam said. “I believe I’ll take half.”
The shade grew angry.
“You can’t-”
“You are part of the weakness,” Maryam told her. “Not a fit container, more than a skull but less than a woman. You are… too pliable, a waterskin that will rip when I drink too deep of it. But I can change that.”
She clenched her fingers. All this time, she had been so careful. Avoided what she was about to do, been so wary of doing it by accident. All that so she could now do it on purpose. As always the gods owned the last laugh.
“You called yourself a princess of Volcesta,” Maryam said. “I deny you this.”
“That is not your right,” the shade hissed.
“You called yourself the first and last of the Ninefold Nine,” Maryam said. “I deny you this.”
“Then who, you?” the shade mocked.
“You called yourself the Keeper of Hooks,” Maryam said, “and it is untrue but there is a bone of truth to the claim. You keep nothing, you are no steward of wisdom. But the knowledge is there inside you.”
She grinned sharply.
“I name you Hooks,” Maryam Khaimov damned her. “For that is what you are, the tyranny you labor under: to bite and be dragged but never be, tearing that which moves you.”
The creature shivered, firmed. Became something more.
“What did you do?” Hooks hoarsely asked.
“I made you into a person,” Maryam said. “And now that you are one, you can be my enemy.”
She rose to her feet.
“Grow your shell,” Maryam said. “Sharpen your bite and your tricks and your fear, Hooks, for I will return to this place when I am ready.”
Gloam boiled around her fingers, eager and ready. The stronger the shade became, the firmer its personhood, the more Maryam would be able to take from the Cauldron before it broke. And half… half was a tragedy, but it was still half more than she held in her hands today. The wintersworn had failed, in the end. The curse stillborn, Mother Winter slain by swordmasters.
Even with a mere half a victory scraped together, Maryam would still be coming out ahead of the rest of her kind. It would be enough, it was enough. It had to be, for what else was there? Leaving the Cauldron in Hooks forever, letting it devour her nav and condemn herself to being less until the end of her days? No, Maryam would not let herself be mediocre. She would not let herself fall behind, she would not let the Malani ruin her again from all the way across the sea.
“I will return and crack you open like a skull,” she lovingly said. “Drinking as much if my inheritance as I can before putting an end to you at last.”
“It would be murder,” Hooks told her, appalled. “You made this into murder by your own hand.”
Her fingers clenched until the knuckles ached. It didn’t mean anything, that Song had said the same thing. Of course her enemy would grasp at straws.
“Aye,” Maryam Khaimov agreed, “it will be murder.”
Like curls of blood in the water, she felt Hook’s plumes of fear spread in the aether.
“And this time, I will be right end of the knife.”