After weeks and weeks of searching, I finally found Ronia Helker’s battle plans. Several pages of them, anyway. Even though there couldn’t have been too many to start with, Faith had somehow scattered them all over her office – wadded up next to the wastebasket, half-sliding into the fireplace, sandwiched between stick-figure sketches, even mixed into a sheath of old lecture notes that had fallen over the back of her desk and was hiding between it and the wall.
As I crawled back out, I heard her footsteps coming down the hall, which gave me just enough time to shove the papers under my shirt and spring to my feet. By the time she opened the door, I was planted in front of her desk, scowling as if I couldn’t find the student essay I needed.
She wasn’t fooled. “Why, good morning, Isha!” she sang, ambling up behind me to peer over my shoulder.
Instinct made me twitch sideways.
She beamed, as proud as Mother would be. “I’m glad that you decided to help me organize my notes! While you’re at it, can you file those essays over there?” She pointed at a shelf that was shedding graded homework assignments all over her desk. “They should be sorted by the individual students who wrote them.” When I hesitated, wondering what looked the least guilty, she made a shooing motion with her hands. “Come on! Come on! Isn’t that why you’re here?”
Why not play along for now? I actually started alphabetizing the essays by student while Faith drifted around her office, flipping through stacks of paper, tsking and shaking her head and selecting sheets here and there. From time to time, she slanted a glance at me, curious how far I’d carry the charade.
The answer was: just far enough to ascertain that there were no battle plans in this batch of papers. As soon as I finished, I picked up Beetle’s essay on the history of Skovlan to bolster my story – and left with my prize.
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And what a prize it was. With all her trademark ruthlessness, Ronia Helker had laid out exactly how Imperial troops would surround U’Duasha, bombard Sukru’at to slaughter the Houses, demolish the city walls at the four points closest to the spires, and then march straight to them, leveling everything and everyone in their path. The bloodbath would destroy U’Duasha as a political and economic power for decades or centuries, maybe even forever.
Sigmund had been right: Even if other Imperial generals developed a more effective strategy (and I was sure they would; a stealth attack would leave more of U’Duasha’s commercial organs intact, generating more tax revenue for the Imperium in the long run), we would still be better off.
I’d have to search Faith’s office again to track down the rest of Helker’s notes.
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But my demonic crewmate turned out to be perversely committed to her promise to the Helker children that she would prevent the plans from falling into “the wrong hands.” At breakfast in Strathmill House the next morning, she announced to the orphans, “Today’s lesson will be on how to dispose of evidence properly. We’ll go to the canal between Six Towers and Nightmarket as soon as you finish eating and set it on fire.”
Oh gods. Those pages she’d collected while I was distracted by alphabetizing essays.
Her green eyes met mine across the room. Over the children’s whoops, she called, “You’re of course welcome to join us, Isha!”
Of course I did.
Through Charterhall and into Six Towers she chivvied the children, shadowed by a grim Edwina whose job it was to actually set the canal on fire. Throughout that interminable walk, I kept close to Faith, quivering with tension as I watched for a chance to pickpocket, filch, or just plain snatch the papers from her. Forestalling my attempts, she kept a tight grip on them all the way until we approached the canal between Six Towers and Nightmarket. Then, all of a sudden, she tripped over a loose cobblestone, squealed, and waved her arms like a windmill.
The papers went flying.
With an acrobatic leap, I plucked them out of the air.
Behind me rose a chorus of cheers from the children, led by Faith. “Our savior!” she cried, applauding showily. “I’m so glad you saved our incriminating evidence! Wouldn’t it have been terrible if it had landed in a muddy pothole and all the ink dissolved before we got a chance to burn it?”
Edwina, the self-appointed rehabilitator of street urchins, ground her teeth.
Faith turned a guileless smile on her. “Edwina, dear, will you prepare the incendiary devices? I think we want to burn, oh, at least a ten-foot stretch of canal. After all, we wouldn’t want to disappoint the children, would we?”
“No. Of course not,” the tinkerer bit out. Stalking to the bank of the canal, she started spraying the murky water with foul-smelling chemicals.
While the children jumped up and down in excitement, I scanned the pages as fast as I could. But instead of Helker’s angular, slashing handwriting, the sacrificial papers were a dense mass of numbers – Faith’s old arithmetic class notes.
Their author grabbed them out of my hands. “I know how much you love adding three-digit numbers, but let the children have their fun, Isha!” she chided. “I can write up more problems for you later.” She coaxed, “I can even throw in some long division if you want.”
She must have destroyed the rest of the battle plans already. Drooping, I lodged no protest as she handed out matches and passed around the math notes. The children lit the papers on fire and flung them into the canal. As soon as the flames came into contact with the chemicals, the entire surface of the water exploded into a blaze that raced all the way down to the bridge where we’d assassinated Ronia Helker. The children ran back and forth along the bank, whooping with delight, and Faith rewarded our tinkerer with a genuinely approving smile.
At least I was reasonably sure that the battle plan pages I did have covered all of the salient points.
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Probably I should have taken them to Sigmund immediately, but I wanted to consult Mylera on something before I saw him. Plus I intended to use that confidence to soften her up so she’d tell me about the Spirit Wardens, who were still harassing her gang for reasons unknown.
By the time I finished teaching my beginner class, the authorities had left for the day, and the head of the Red Sashes was alone in her office, looking ragged. Wearily, she poured a second cup of coffee and pushed it across the desk.
Cupping my hands around it, I began, “Soooo, I need advice on something, and I feel that you’re the person in the city who would understand my dilemma best.”
“Okay,” she said, warily neutral.
“You’ve probably guessed by now that the senior members of my House are all bound to Ixis?”
“Yes,” she replied at once. “That makes sense.”
“Which means that my brother is bound.” I hesitated, unsure whether to tell her that Sigmund was in town. I couldn’t see any reason she needed to know, so I went on, “I’m concerned that he didn’t fully understand the implications before he agreed to it.”
After all, he had been sixteen at the time, and sixteen-year-olds, even Anixis sixteen-year-olds, weren’t generally known for their clearheaded crucial life choices. Our parents had approved of his investiture – but they, too, were bound to Ixis, and therefore their judgment was suspect.
Slowly, I said, “I think it was presented to him as something he had to do to save Iruvia from the Imperium, and he didn’t have much time to decide. And I think that he still hasn’t had time to process it.”
By now I had Mylera’s full attention. “Hmmm. Okay.”
I forced myself to describe the situation objectively. “Ultimately, he might come to the conclusion that the binding is what he wants – but he also might not. It’s not clear. He never had a chance to decide for himself.” My voice was rising, and I found myself leaning forward and gesticulating with my free hand. Cutting myself off, I sat back. “However, for various complicated reasons, the heir has to be one of the two of us.”
At this point, a non-Iruvian would have wasted time on useless questions and protestations, but Mylera understood Demon Princes and their whims. “Okay,” she repeated, taking Ixis’ decree as a given.
“So…what I’m trying to ask is: Do I have a moral obligation to replace my brother in the bond?”
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“No.” Her reaction was immediate and emphatic and even a little too sharp, as if she were imagining herself in my shoes and giving her own answer. “Why would you?”
I struggled to articulate it. “I don’t know. Because he’s my brother? Because I love him?” My voice cracked on the word “love,” and I stopped talking before I embarrassed myself.
“That’s different.” Frowning into the empty space where She Who Slays in Darkness normally stood, Mylera worked out her thoughts. “I don’t think you’re morally obligated to replace him. You might decide to, but I don’t think you have to.”
“I don’t know,” I objected. “What if he’d be a lot happier here? Living some sort of – ” I gestured helplessly, recalling Sigmund’s joke that was also not a joke – “some sort of bohemian life in Silkshore?”
Mylera absently finished her coffee while she tried to wrap her mind around the image of a future Patriarch crowding into an artist commune on Fogcrest Hill. She gave up on that pretty fast. “Look, I don’t know your brother,” she told me. “But…honestly, I feel that walking away from my House and never looking back has made my life infinitely better.”
“That’s the problem!” I cried. “What if I’m being selfish by walking away myself and leaving him?”
Pouring herself another cup of coffee, Mylera clarified, “But he did make that choice.”
Yes, that he had.
And in so doing, he had set aside our hopes and dreams – and his own sister too, eventually, when I clung to them.
In front of me rose an image of his stunned face when he learned that I’d robbed the House and run away. You betrayed me, he accused, shocked and disbelieving.
You betrayed me first, I replied.
Mylera’s voice shattered my reverie. “I guess all of this is complicated by the fact that it’s Ixis,” she commented, again grasping the bigger picture without needing explanations. “It sounds like you’re worried that your brother got manipulated into it – but of course he did. But presumably, you’re also being manipulated, so it’s all kind of a wash.” She waved a hand to demonstrate.
I winced. It was true. I’d snuck out of my home, fought my way out of my city, fled all the way to the furthermost tip of a completely different isle – and yet, I had still brought my Demon Prince with me.
“Was there ever anyone in House Ankhayat who unbound from Khayat?” I asked, hopeful even though I was pretty sure I already knew the answer.
“I don’t think you can unbind from the Demon Princes,” she answered flatly. “I think you get bound – and then you are.”
“So no one you know has ever walked away?” I persisted.
Mylera had never believed in sugarcoating reality. “Not after they did that, no. Given what I know about demon binding, Signy, you’re the only one thinking rationally and you’re going to have to make this call yourself.”
She was probably – no, almost certainly – right, but that didn’t make it any easier. Slumping, I confessed, “I don’t know if I want to go back, at this point.” Lavish clothing, regular meals, servants, warm weather, a day-night cycle, no ghosts – my mind skipped around scenes from my old life. They resembled yellowing postcards pasted into a travel album. “I don’t know if I would ever fit back in.”
For the ex-leviathan hunter officer, the choice was easy. “So don’t.”
If only it were that simple! “Would you ever go back?” I asked. “If your House offered you everything that you had and wiped out the past?”
“No, because that’s – ” I thought Mylera was about to say “impossible,” but with Demon Princes, who knew? If he wished, Khayat could probably wipe her memories and give her a fresh start. “No, I wouldn’t go back. There is a certain….” She trailed off, and when she spoke again, it was in the measured tone of one determined to be fair. “I appreciate that the House didn’t turn me over to Khuset. I do. But – that isn’t enough to engender loyalty. And now that I’ve had a chance to think about the Houses from the outside, they’re a corrupt mess.” She stabbed a finger into her desk to emphasize her next words. “I’d rather be here in Doskvol as an honest criminal, running my little empire in a way that actually makes sense.”
“But if everyone who felt that way just left, nothing would ever change,” I protested.
“That is one way to look at it, I suppose,” she said, making it clear that that was not the way she saw it. “On the other hand, if you bound yourself to Ixis, I don’t know if you’d effect any change either. Wouldn’t you just perpetuate his plans?”
It was a fair question, and for any other Demon Prince, the answer would be obvious. “I don’t know. Ixis likes my brother and me specifically because we’re willing to defy him. It’s impossible to tell how he thinks.”
That admission actually startled a laugh out of Mylera. “It’s weirdly comforting that even high-ranking members of House Anixis can’t figure out what’s going on with Ixis.”
No, no, it really wasn’t. Especially not when he lurked in the back of your head and offered unsolicited help whenever he felt like it. And claimed, or at least heavily implied, that all your sacrifices and major life decisions were his doing.
“What about She Who Slays in Darkness?” I asked, both because I was genuinely curious and because I wanted to segue to a different topic. “Is she easier to understand?”
Mylera chuckled again, fondly this time. “Yes. She Who Slays in Darkness is very straightforward.”
A perfect match, then. “What does she ask of her followers?”
Mylera barely had to think about it. “She Who Slays in Darkness is a great believer in enacting justice and righting wrongs. And as a person who felt very wronged for a very long time – ” and still did, from her fierce tone – “I found a lot of comfort in her fearless devotion to those ideals.”
Here was my opening. “You probably know this already, but one of my crewmates – Ash – is a devoted follower of That Which Hungers. He mentioned that the last time he went to the Temple, it seemed that there had been some…activity at the altar of She Who Slays in Darkness.”
Mylera’s eyes flew wide open. “Did those two idiots go to the Temple first?” Tripping over her own words, she burst out, “I assure you, Signy, running a gang is like herding cats, except that as much as you try to protect them – actually, no, it’s more like herding sheep, except the sheep are also cats, and if wolves show up, they’re all like, ‘Oh, we’re going to go straight at the wolves!’ And you say, ‘No, go over here, where it’s safe,’ and they’re like, ‘Nope! Wolves!’”
Caught off guard, I blinked at her. With Mylera, I didn’t bother to feign omniscience. Also, I had only the vaguest sense that “sheep” were a type of Severosian creature from which wool was derived. We had neither in Iruvia, but from what she was describing, they couldn’t be very bright.
“Ugh.” Recalling that she wasn’t venting to her best friend, she controlled herself and explained, “Sheep are this animal that the Severosi herd on the steppes. They tend to wander, I guess. The sheep, I mean. There are people whose full-time job is to keep them from getting themselves killed.”
And my full-time job was to keep on topic and get information. “So…two of your sheep wandered over to the Temple?” I prodded. “And then did something that angered the Spirit Wardens?”
“No. Two of my sheep got very angry and did something to anger the Spirit Wardens and then, apparently, while I was trying to get them out of the city to safety, wandered over to the Temple to make an offering before they left. Which is – ” Mylera buried her head in her hands and groaned. “They must not have gotten caught this time, but it’s just the height of stupidity. Those two! They’re hotheaded.”
I cocked my head to a side, inviting her to elaborate.
She must have really missed having a confidante, because she did. “A couple members of my gang who are also very devoted to She Who Slays in Darkness got a wild hair when the Spirit Wardens showed up at the boat. Instead of trusting me to take care of the situation, they decided to murder as many of the Spirit Wardens as they could. Which they did.”
“Oh!”
“Which is awkward,” Mylera continued, “because while we were connected to some ghost activity, I figured that you and yours could smooth it over and I could pick up the pieces.”
I nodded emphatically. That had been precisely my intent when I yelled at Faith to come back to the boat.
“However, with the death of the Spirit Wardens, things escalated. They became concerned that we were up to something untoward.” (Which, to be honest, was a fair concern whenever my crew was involved.) “Now they suspect that we are a cover for some sort of cult, which is awkward because we are not – although many of us are devotees of the old gods in a non-cultic capacity.” Tallying up the woes of a gang leader, Mylera grew agitated again. “It’s been this whole mess, and I had to send the two of them out of the city, and I barely got them out before the Spirit Wardens showed up, and I’m not super happy that apparently they decided to go make offerings before they left instead of just leaving and making offerings later when they got to the Dagger Isles!”
“Huh.” I was rejiggering my mental model of the last score. “I’d assumed that those two Spirit Wardens got eaten by a canal demon.”
“If only,” Mylera groaned. “At any rate, like I said, we have it under control. It’s just been a long week. A very long week.” Like an automaton running out of electroplasm, she went still and her eyes stared blankly past my shoulder at nothing at all.
Feeling a surge of guilt and sympathy, I invited impulsively, “Want to go out for supper?”
Her eyes refocused on my face. “I would love that.”
She locked up her office and alerted Ardashir that she was leaving, and the two of us strolled across the canal to Silkshore for supper and dessert. By the end of the evening, she looked a lot less ragged and even smiled gratefully as she bade me good-night.
Maybe, between the two of us, Ardashir and I could almost replace Xayah after all.
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Back in the railcar, I updated Ash and Faith on what I’d learned.
“So it wasn’t Setarra who got the Spirit Wardens,” I concluded.
Faith clucked and shook her head, disappointed by her nemesis. “A missed opportunity. So sad.”
“Awww, it was sweet of the Red Sashes,” was Ash’s condescending reaction. “Also, a little troubling that they’re just going around murdering Spirit Wardens. That’s only going to attract attention.” Which had an element of dark comedy to it, coming from the assassin who’d insisted on kidnapping, Hollowing, and replacing an Imperial Inspector so we could frame the scion of one of the most powerful families in Doskvol.
To banish memories of Candra Sarnai’s first and only date, I wondered out loud, “How do you kill a Spirit Warden anyway? I thought they were warded like crazy.”
At that, Faith perked up, the fresh chance to torment me dispelling all her disappointment with Setarra. “Well, there are many ways! I hear guns work. Also swords.” (Which was probably how the Red Sashes had done it.) “Also throwing them to a canal demon. Also dropping heavy things on them. Also lightning hooks. Also poisoning. Also falls from high heights. Also exploding clocks – ”
“It would have been easier if we’d done it,” interrupted Ash, “so the bells wouldn’t have rung. I’d love to destroy all the Spirit Wardens too, but we really need to focus more.” At my expression, he amended himself, “Or at least I do.”
Without missing a beat, Faith kept listing off ways to kill the people who protected the entire population of Doskvol from getting devoured by ravenous specters. “Also old age. Also bleeding out.”
Mimicking her rhythm and matter-of-tone to perfection, Ash added, “Also being talked at by – ”
“Faith?” I suggested.
“ – demon women.”
“I think that one might be the most fatal,” I commented.
“I’ll keep away from your mother, then,” our very own demon woman informed Ash.
He just laughed and tipped his cat ears at her.