Pale Lights

First, Song saw to it that they could hold.

Tactically speaking, this was not overly difficult. Though the Odyssean threw host-corpses down the lift shaft regularly, most of them broke their limbs in the fall and thus she only need leave Tupoc and Expendable to put them down. Spears made easy work of the dead things, enough damage severing the threads of blood-red divinity moving the corpses, but she knew better than to think this state of affairs anything other than temporary.

For now the Hated One threw only half-hearted assaults their way, one or two at a time, but the archives upstairs were a cacophonous orgy of destruction. The Hated One was ripping out the seal on his prison and would turn his full attention on them when he finished. She spared a moment of deep dismay at the thought of so many rare books being so callously destroyed, lore perhaps forever lost to the murderous thing’s tantrum. A petty evil compared to the rest of the night’s work, but an evil nonetheless.

A thought to deplore later, she chided herself.

“How long before it gets out?” Song asked.

Maryam Khaimov cocked her head and hummed, pondering her answer. Song’s friend had long straddled the line between pale and sickly, but now she had fallen firmly on the latter side: she looked feverish, her blue eyes rimmed in red by exhaustion and the ailment of Gloam-work. And though Song would yet describe both eyes as blue, the left one had gone cloudy and so light it was nearly gray. Between that and the traces of spew on Maryam’s collar and chest there was no hiding something in her ritual had gone terribly wrong.

And yet she seemed Maryam still, entirely herself, save for the… addition.

“It’s nearly there,” the spirit said, head rising out of the signifier’s shoulder to speak. “I can taste it in the aether – the veins of red became roots and now they are cracking the stone.”

The spirit was not much changed from when she had saved Song from her would-be killers. Still close as a sister in looks to Maryam, but now there was a… vitality to her that had once been absent. Even knowing her intangible, Song would think that flush true and the way she breathed necessary. Perhaps both were. She knew little of the rules regarding such existences. Song cleared her throat.

The spirit eyed her like she was an idiot.

“We’ve met.”

Maryam sighed.

“She goes by Hooks,” Maryam provided.

“For now,” Hooks added. “Let us dispense with small talk, Ren. The god is about ten…”

“Five,” Maryam cut in.

“Five to ten minutes away from getting out,” Hooks smoothly compromised. “If we were still up there serving as thorn in its thumb it’d take longer, but without us in the way it’s squeezing itself out of the layer like jelly pushed through a hole.”

“Now there’s an image,” Tupoc contributed from a distance.

By common and unspoken accord, all three ignored him.

“Then we plan for five,” Song said. “We’ll need to-”

The door clapped thunderously, something solid smashing into it, and Song had to push down a flinch. It had taken mere minutes for the rebels to get a solid enough bench to begin hammering at the door, which while locked and barred was not meant to resist such pummeling indefinitely. Cressida was pressing down on it from their side, but there was only so much that would accomplish.

A flicker of movement stole another sentence’s start out of her mouth, a steel bar sliding through the gap between the door and the wall.

“Izel,” Tristan said.

“I see it,” the tinker replied.

With admirable ease they moved: the thief caught the bar’s tip between tongs, then the larger Izcalli lined up a hammer blow and smashed the steel back out into the face of whoever side on the other side of the door. Twice now the traitors had tried to pry open the door by breaking the hinges, but the pair had been ready for it.

“We’ll need to prepare for a push through the enemy,” Song finished. “Open the door on our terms then break the encirclement and run towards safer grounds.”

Looking back, she had to wonder if it had been a mistake to retreat into this room. While fleeing down the hall with guns pointed at their back would certainly have cost them casualties, she was not sure that breaking the encirclement and then running down that hallway would do much to keep them down. ʀάΝỐＢÈꞨ

Behind them another corpse-host dropped, this one landing on its knees – only to be speared in the head by Expendable, who was promptly heckled by Tupoc for ‘hogging all the deicide’. The Malani quietly protested, but under his hat Song could see him smiling. She turned away.

“When we first met, you used a large Gloam construct,” Song said, addressing Hooks directly. “Could you use it again to open our way?”

A horse-sized Gloam lizard with six legs, which she has called a smok. It was a certainty that the enemy would have guns pointed at the door to prevent the very breakout they were planning, which meant either sacrificing the vanguard or using one that would not succumb to bullets. Maryam and the spirit glanced at each other for a few heartbeats, the latter grimacing before she replied. Speaking without need for words?

“Not anything as large,” Maryam said. “Dog-sized, maybe smaller. And we’re approaching mania, so if you want us to work something heavy we’ll be out of the fight after.”

A pause.

“For a bit, anyway,” Hooks said.

Song slowly nodded, both filing away the ‘we’ for future interrogation and adjusting the dawning plan in her mind. Lictors, even the traitors, might have the discipline to hold fire after the first few shots into the Gloam beast did nothing. The noble troops might not, though, so the gambit seemed worth it. If the construct ate enough lead, they might make it down the hallway without losing half their numbers to a volley.

“All right, is no one going to address that Khaimov has a spirit popping out of her body to talk?” Cressida Barboza called out. “Because it’s happened more than once now, so it clearly wasn’t a fluke.”

“Don’t be such a rube, Barboza,” Tristan chided. “We’re too busy to indulge your provincial sensibilities.”

“You smug Sacromontan fuck,” the other Mask bit back, “I’ll-”

A politely cleared throat.

“I was also wondering about the spirit,” Izel admitted, then sketched a bow at Hooks. “Greetings, I am Izel Coyac.”

“Hooks,” the entity replied with a nod, then slipping further out so she had a thumb to jut it towards Maryam. “I’m her sister.”

“It’s a long story that I have no intention of telling you,” Maryam flatly told the survivors of the Nineteenth. “She’s here, she’s with me. Move on or be moved.”

“Hooks,” Tupoc called out, while impaling a corpse. “The corpses upstairs that were mangled like roots went through them, was that you?”

“With her help,” the… sister acknowledged, nodding at Maryam.

The Izcalli grinned.

“You know, there’s still room in the Fourth Brigade if-”

“Enough of that now,” Song sharply cut in. Fucking vulture. “Tupoc, Expendable, first we’ll rotate you out with Tristan and Izel. We’ll need you to hit the enemy in the wake of the Sign.”

She breathed out, putting the last touches on the plan in her mind’s eye.

“Our best chance is to make a mess of their formation and move quickly enough they can’t muster a firing line while we run,” Song said.

Odds were still good that some of them would be shot in the back, but there was only so much that could be done running down a corridor with little cover and muskets pointed at you. As if to punctuate her worries, the bench was smashed on the door again. Tristan cleared his throat.

“Khaimovs,” he called out. “If we make it to the garden, can you get us back into that layer?”

Maryam sharply nodded.

“It’s getting battered open as we speak,” she said. “We can find a path, the trouble will be whether or not it’s full of…”

She gestured vaguely upstairs. The ruckus was, if anything, getting worse.

“First we will be making an attempt at relieving Angharad,” Song said. “The deeper palace should still be in loyalist hands, given the defenses there, so we will head there first.”

It was where Evander’s quarters were located, as well as the palace armory. If the traitors had seized that then they would not be bothering with a bench: they’d have wheeled out cannons. Even small pieces would smash right through the door here. Not all seemed enthusiastic at her words, but no one cared to argue. The potential naysayers likely figured squabbling was more likely to get them all killed than her plan, which she privately agreed with.

A passable plan immediately executed was always better than the finest plan hatched after several hours.

“Get ready to rotate on my word,” Song called out. “On the count of ten-”

Yet before she could begin counting there was a sound like a wooden wall being torn through upstairs and weapons were turned on the lift shaft even as the ram hit the door again and Cressida grunted with the effort of fighting it down. Only when silhouettes dropped down the shaft this time it was not corpses. Not, that catlike grace heralded much, much worse than that.

“Evening, lads and ladies,” Lord Locke roguishly grinned.

The devil in his short, rotund shell looked in a fine mood. And blood-spattered, which might explain the mood.

“Quite the pickle you are all in,” Lady Keys added, fiddling with her glasses.

No blood on her, but that was not necessarily for the best. The only thing worse than a devil was a hungry devil. There was a beat of silence. Tupoc and Expendable had drawn back, but not out of fear – they were positioning themselves to cover the rest of them long enough for muskets to be brought to bear before the devils struck. Could they win? Maybe, Song assessed, but they’d lose enough swords that breaking encirclement would be impossible.

She must negotiate, if it was at all possible.

“I told you thirteen is the worst luck,” Tristan muttered.

There would be time to strangle him later, Song reminded herself, if any of them lived through this.

“A pleasant evening to you,” Song evenly said. “I must admit your presence here is unexpected. May I inquire as to your intentions?”

“Why, my good rooklings, we have come to rescue you!” Lord Locke announced. “On the behalf of Lady Angharad Tredegar, who bargained for this siege to be lifted.”

“Welcome news,” Song replied, not entirely sure what proportion of those words was a lie.

“See, I told you my charms won her over,” Tupoc whispered to Expendable.

“Vuthakiwe,” the Malani mildly replied.

Song forced down a twitch of the lips. The direct translation of vuthakiwe was ‘Glare-drunk’, but mostly it was used to mean delirious. She made herself take her hands off her weapons, but it was mostly for show: she trusted Angharad, but hardly these devils. What had her friend bargained for their help, anyway? No, it didn’t matter. She would help Angharad put them down, if it came down to it.

“Oh, there is no need for thanks,” Lord Locke said, deftly ignoring there had been none. “It is the sacred duty of our office to act against this sort of cult.”

“Your office,” Tristan echoed, tone rising in question.

An invitation to gloat, which they naturally embraced without thinking twice. Song was not sure whether or not she imagined the appreciative glance from the devils at having offered them such a fine line to pounce on. He was, she mentally conceded, slowly earning his way out of strangulation.

“Why, my dears, we are of His Infernal Majesty’s own Office of Opposition,” Lady Keys said.

“The OoO, if you will,” Lord Locke happily added.

“I will not,” Song replied, in the tone of someone who had just been offended to her very core.

That they were be terrible murderous creatures casually threatening her she could live with, but this? Sometimes lines must be drawn.

“What is the duty of your office, anyhow?” Tupoc curiously asked. “I expect it is not eating children, as I was first taught.”

“We’ve already filled up on appetizers,” Lord Locke assured him.

“Our mandate is most simple indeed, young man,” Lady Keys said. “The Office of Opposition is to meet the enemies of His Infernal Majesty in the field and frustrate their plans. To foil and crimp and stymie-”

“-to thwart and forestall,” Lord Locke enthusiastically said. “To stump and baffle-”

“To bar and impede and, why, even bedevil,” Lady Keys mused. “In a word…”

“We oppose,” Lord Locke finished theatrically, twirling his mustache.

Tupoc, being a damned soul, saw fit to applaud this. Cressida and Tristan, being professionally ordained liars, followed suit after a beat. So did Izel, but that one Song suspected was just being nice about it. Another corpse-host dropped down the lift shaft and Song snapped a shot through his forehead, because she probably wouldn’t be able to get away with shooting anyone else.

“And if I may ask,” Song said, “what does this rescue involve?”

“Lifting the siege on your command,” Lady Keys said. “Though we are overdue a conversation with Phaedros Arkol, I think.”

“He holds command outside?” she asked.

“Indeed,” Lord Locke said. “Our Ecclesiast is most eager to get the thorn out of his god’s foot – a good stomping of his enemies was promised, I expect.”

Song breathed in sharply. Arkol, the Ecclesiast? It made some sense, and she doubted the devils would bother to lie if the man was right outside.

“You are sure Phaedros Arkol is the Ecclesiast?” she pressed.

Lady Keys clicked her tongue.

“Relief was bargained for, not a guessing game,” she said. “Shall you open the door, rooklings, or shall we?”

Song clenched her fists. She had no real leverage here, they all knew. But if Arkol was the Ecclesiast and he was out there, in range of her musket, then… No, the devils wanted him and foiling them might well see them turn on her command. Besides, Angharad must take priority. They could go after the Ecclesiast after reuniting with her, and if the opportunity passed then she could live with it. She was not here under contract and the Watch had a duty to Vesper but that duty did not mean throwing away lives on off-chances.

“Get ready,” she ordered the others. “Tupoc, Expendable, you have the vanguard. All of us will wheel left the moment the fighting begins. Do not stop until we turn the corner and have cover.”

The devils swaggered up to the door, which shook, and Song found Tristan’s eyes. She nodded and he pulled one bar, Izel pulling the other, before unlocking the door and wresting it open. The four lictors that’d been about to hammer a bench into the door charged into the room with startled shouts, the devils smoothly moving around them, and like that the fighting began.

Song ran one man through the belly and Tupoc’s candlesteel spearhead went into another’s skull before they could even drop the bench – Izel smashed one’s skull in through the helmet, rather impressively, and Expendable cleanly cut the last one’s throat out even as the lictor brought up his blade to parry the flicking spear. Shouting had erupted out in the hall and the blackcloaks shared a wary look. Flicking the blood off her jian, Song gave the order.

“Forward.”

After a beat, they charged out. Locke and Keys had not cleaned up the left side before bowling into the thick of the enemy numbers, so Tupoc was grazed with a shot even as he dropped into a roll. Expendable killed a musketman and a heartbeat later Song put a shot through the forehead of the woman next to him. The last was impaled by a jagged line of Gloam erupting from the palm of Maryam’s spirit-sister, which going by his scream was an ugly way to die.

And then, to her utter surprise, the rest of the hall to the left was an empty expanse.

“Run,” Song hissed, already beginning to reload. “Now.”

And run they did. A few shots whizzed past them, but the devils were keeping the enemy busy. Song slowed her stride, allowing the others to pass her, and risked a glance back. What she found there…

Old devils or not, Locke and Key had run into a thicket of readied muskets. They’d been shot and cut at, but all that’d accomplished was ripping up their shells and clothes until they ripped their way out of them – and then they had begun to move like devils no longer hiding what they were. Song only glimpsed red-strewn carapaces and revolting segmented legs as they went through the rebels, laughing and chittering and ripping out pieces of men to gobble up.

There must have been more than thirty men in that hall, moments ago, and now there were barely a third of that. The stone walls looked like they’d been painted with viscera, the hallway someone had dragged a piece of meat through razor blades. Gods, but not even the worst of men deserved such an end.

At the back of the failing formation, half of the men were already fleeing. Song saw the man the devils had named the Ecclesiast there, even in their terror the soldiers going around him. Phaedros Arkol was richly dressed, a blade at his hip, but nothing that deemed him to be the grand officiant of an evil god – save for the utter calm on his face as doom approached.

He raised a hand and Song could see the power flowing into him, the threads the color of graven earth and fresh blood, the white bone and sea-swept coral. She saw how they coalesced into his palm and he closed his fist with a snarl of effort. The corpses strewn across the hall closed on Locke and Keys with deceptive softness, like the opposite of a flower blooming, and in a heartbeat the pair were encased in prison of writhing death that clawed and bit at them.

Could he both hold them and save himself? The question burned at Song and before she could think twice she raised her musket, aimed the shot – only for a hand to come down on her shoulder. She nearly jumped out of her skin, but it was only Maryam. Maryam whose face was touched by fear.

“Song, we need to go, he’s aboutto-”

There was a great cracking noise, but in that same heartbeat Song realized it was not a sound at all. It did not echo, did not hurt the ear or the air. It was something in the fabric of the Material itself that had shattered, and she felt a swelling in the air that was like the most triumphant of laughs. The private archives shattered, the room crunched like a paper crane in a man’s grip, and the very palace shook around them.

The Hated One was out.

Song ran and did not look back.

--

For a while Angharad was forced to ponder whether it would be impolite to ask the spirit if he was lost, but after the third sudden turn through an empty room she finally understood what was happening. He was not taking random turns.

“You are sneaking us past the patrols,” she said.

Oduromai King, Asphodel’s own patron and the tutelary spirit of sailors and heroes, did not turn. Yet she felt the weight of his attention on her as if it were a physical gaze while they continued making their way through an empty servant dormitory.

“The Newborn cares nothing for the death of his pawns,” the spirit said. “He gains through every death, as his grand celebrant dedicated the night’s madness to his name.”

Worrying, considering that if the Thirteenth had sniffed out the plots correctly there would be battles fought all over Tratheke feeding deaths to the spirit in question.

“Parasite,” Angharad scorned. “Yet I would still know where you lead me, Oduromai King. I must find my comrades, which were last seen in the private archives.”

“They will find you,” the spirit dismissed. “Everything leads to the garden, Angharad Tredegar. That is where the knots of fate pull together.”

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Angharad turned a skeptical eye on the entity. She was Pereduri, so had been taught better than to put stock in spirits who prattled on about fate. There was no such thing, not outside the fancies of poets: Vesper was a test by the Sleeping God, and a test’s outcome could not be determined in advance. One must be able to stand or fall when meeting challenge.

When spirits spoke of destiny, mostly they meant their latest scheme.

“And what would those knots be, I wonder?” she asked.

The spirit’s attention grew heavier, but she turned an unimpressed look on him. If he was irked at questions, then he should have manifested by one of his faithful. She had no faith to offer anything calling itself a god, had not even before she became apprenticed to a guild whose trade was deicide.

“What is required to unmake the Newborn,” Oduromai said. “A challenge, a bane, a choice.”

They slipped out the back of the dormitory, onto a similarly empty hall. It worried Angharad that she had seen no servants throughout her wanderings. Yet surely not even the cult would have dared to commit such slaughter: perhaps the most hardened reprobates among them might have embraced such butchery, but she could not believe the cult’s rank and file would be willing to bloody their hands so horridly. No, they must have fled to some distant corner and remained holed up away from the fighting. Good, she thought. Best they did not risk themselves until the steel was back in the sheath.

It was the duty of nobles to protect servants, not the other way around.

“Whose choice?” Angharad asked, limping after the spirit’s back.

It had best not be her. She’d had choices enough for the night.

“The boy,” he replied. “Cleon Eirenos.”

Her steps stuttered and she shot him an incredulous look.

“What does Cleon have to do with this?” she asked.

“Everything,” Oduromai said. “He is the linchpin, Angharad Tredegar. The last contractor of the Odyssean twice over: the last deal it struck and the last contractor who has not been bound anew to the Newborn.”

She frowned, remembering how Lady Doukas had mentioned at the ceremony that Cleon had never before made a demand of the spirit they all worshipped.

“Because he’s not truly partaken in a ceremony before,” she slowly said. “He has not bought a death for advantage.”

Or rather, because the death he had finally asked for had yet to be delivered and until it had the bargain would not be complete.

“Is he truly so vital?” Angharad asked.

While she had not been deep in the confidence of the cult, nothing in the way Lord Cleon was treated during that ceremony had led her to believe he was considered an influential member. Or, in truth, all that respected by anyone other than the priests.

“He is important,” Oduromai said, “the way a loose strand in a weave is important. He is an opportunity. That is more than most men will ever be.”

She inclined her head in concession at that.

“Then it is careless of the cult to have so neglected him,” Angharad opined.

“Was he?” the spirit said. “You met a young lord hounded even under his own roof, whose closest confidants whispered in his ear of rites that would save him. Speak not of neglect but of his character.”

Angharad swallowed, for she had never even considered that… Lord Arkol had contacts among the valley nobles, she recalled. And Ambassador Gule was treated by Cleon like a distant but trusted mentor. Suddenly the boldness of Theofania Varochas seemed less the desperation of a young woman whose hand was forced by her family’s demands and more the measured gamble of someone who might have received private assurances. Angharad’s jaw clenched, for though Phaedros Arkol and Lord Gule might have been poisonous friends to Cleon could she truly claim to have been any better?

No. Even if one discounted that she had bedded his own mother under his roof, she could not. Another debt she must settle, if she could, and a first step towards that was ensuring some grasping spirit did not intend to murder him.

“And what is it you want of him, spirit?” she challenged.

“To make a hero’s choice,” Oduromai said.

“A vague answer,” Angharad said. “Kindly elaborate.”

This time the spirit did stop before turning towards her. Those eyes were liquid flame, too blue to be anything born of the world material, but the rest of him grew denser. As if by a trick of the light Oduromai’s bronze armor suddenly seemed… worn. The breastplate bitten at by salt and scratched by blades, the greaves dented and unpolished. Even the white cloth beneath seemed dirty, as if not quite washed, and the crown on his brow had grown thicker. Like it was half a helmet, not merely decoration.

More warrior than king or sailor, in that moment.

“You were given an answer,” Oduromai said. “Take it, for you are owed nothing more.”

“That is true,” Angharad conceded.

She gave the spirit a polite nod.

“My thanks for the aid, however temporary,” she said, then cleanly turned her heels and limped away.

“Enough.”

The word echoed, as if spoken in some great hall instead of a hallway, and Angharad felt weight press on her shoulders as if to force her to her knees. Without a word she turned, drawing her blade, and met the spirit’s furious face with cold disdain.

“Lay your power on me again, spirit, and one of us will die for it,” she said.

The spirit sneered.

“I am a god,” he said. “Oduromai King, crowned-”

“He that need claim to be a god is no such thing,” Angharad scorned. “My people know better: there is only one God, Oduromai, and He yet slumbers.”

“I am the guardian of Asphodel,” Oduromai said, and the air shivered of it.

“I am neither your vassal nor your congregant, creature,” Angharad Tredegar said. “Withdraw your power or be called to account – this is your last warning.”

She met that blue fire unflinchingly. The moment hung in the air, a vase about to tip past the table’s edge, but then it snapped back into place. The pressure left her shoulders, as if turned to smoke, though the spirit yet stared her down.

“I remember it still, being but an aspect,” Oduromai said. “The visage facing day while he faced the night. And I remember becoming me, when Hector poured an ocean of gold and faith into my name. Stories and songs and plays, ceremonies and festivals.”

Angharad did not sheathe her sword. He had not earned such courtesy.

“Years of careful tending, that I might forever serve as the jailor of the god that became the Newborn,” the spirit said. “But what men made, men unmade. The prison was pierced by the harpoon and the Newborn crawls its way out as we speak."

"It is a simple question, spirit,” Angharad coldly said. “What do you want of Cleon Eirenos?”

“When it breaks free,” Oduromai said, “the Newborn will be vulnerable in a way it was not as the Sickle. The amalgamation is not yet achieved, and should it be undone before the end a grave wound will be dealt. Grave enough that an ending would no longer be out of reach.”

The spirit flickered like candle flame, its presence burning bright at the prospect of… not killing the Newborn, Angharad thought, but following his nature. Ending a threat to Asphodel, of which he considered himself patron.

“Your games are your own,” Angharad finally said. “They are no concern of mine. But I’ll not let you lay hands on Cleon Eirenos, Oduromai. I owe a debt.”

“I will only offer a choice,” the spirit said. “On this you have my oath.”

The mirror-dancer watched the spirit, looked for the lie in that face, but there was nothing there to be read. It was not a man’s face, only a sculpture moved by the will of unnatural intelligence.

“I will hold you to it,” she said, and sheathed the blade.

The spirit’s presence faded, just a bit.

“Come,” Oduromai said. “This delay may yet prove costly, we must hurry.”

Angharad swallowed the demand that lay on the tip of her tongue, to know where they were headed, for there was only so far she could push such a proud spirit before it lashed out regardless of whether or not it served his plans. She followed behind Oduromai, barely three steps taken before there was a great crack in the… not the air, but perhaps the aether? Angharad felt it like a physical thing, but while aware it was not.

Then the very grounds beneath her feet shook and a faint echo of laughter nipped at her ears.

“The Newborn is free,” Oduromai said. “It rises. The fateful hour begins.”

Angharad was not sure whether he could watch her without turning, so she held back from rolling her eyes. As if she could not have guessed that on her own. Still, she lengthened her stride and ignored the twinges of pain that caused as she hurried on. They turned to the right at the hallway’s end, which Angharad believed was actually leading towards the middle of the palace and thus away from the gardens supposed to be their destination, but as they entered a gallery of busts and portraits – rulers of Asphodel, by the surnames – the spirit suddenly stopped.

Angharad followed suit, then three seconds passed. She cleared her throat.

“If I may ask, why-”

Her eyes widened as the grounds a foot before her disappeared with brutal crunch, dress and hair fluttering from the way two thirds of the gallery was pulverized in an instant. In place of the brass, stone and carpets was a frothy haze that she peered through and found… a desert? No, this was not sand. It was salt. She recognized Maryam’s description.

“That is the prison layer,” she said.

“A shard of it,” Oduromai said. “The Newborn did not merely escape its prison, in its hatred it shattered the whole thing. Pieces of it were scattered across Tratheke, from the palace to the walls.”

Angharad sucked in a breath. The shard before her had pulped solid stone and metal. What would another do, if it landed on a street? What a heinous creature the Newborn was to so casually dispense with the lives of men.

“You want me to enter this shard,” she said.

“An enemy waits within, but you will not be alone,” the spirit replied. “And if you follow the path, you will find the garden on the other end.”

She eyed Oduromai skeptically, but that the spirit still had some need of her was clear. Otherwise it would have struck at her earlier when she challenged it, or at least left. She could trust the need, if not the spirit himself. Breathing out, Angharad unsheathed her blade and stepped through the haze. In a single breath’s span she was through, on solid ground.

It was bleak place, this broken prison.

A land of salt and void, dunes of pale rising in long slopes while on the horizon lay a hollow absence that hurt the eye. Angharad thought she almost began to see brass through that nothing, for a moment, but her eyes burned as if smoke had been blown into them so she tore away her gaze and had to wipe away pained tears. A glance back told her that Oduromai was either absent or unseen and she grimaced. Now, of all times, she could have used directions.

Forward she went, for lack of a better notion.

The salt cracked beneath her soles as she went up the closest slope, hoping that vantage might yield a path, and once she reached the top of the dune she did find something of the sort: in the distance, walking down a slope, was a man. And halfway between them, at the bottom of a hollow, was a great harpoon stuck into the salt. Tall as a ship’s mast, Maryam had described it, and lied not. It was a jagged and thorny tool, with a cruel gleam to its smooth bronze make.

Angharad began to make her way down the slope, mirroring the stranger – whom she was chagrined to see would make it there far before she could, on account of lacking a limp. That did allow her to take a closer look at him, however, for he stood by the great harpoon and studied it while she finished making her way. Angharad recognized the doublet before she did the man, from a distance: that silver-and-yellow doublet in silk had been of such a fine make she would not soon forget it.

Lord Phaedros Arkol, the Ecclesiast, turned a bespectacled glance her way as she gingerly slid down the last of the salt dune. He was unarmed and without wound, save for appeared to be a shallow bite on his right cheek. Not made by human teeth, these. A parting gift from Locke and Key, she imagined, though she would have preferred they take the whole head.

“Angharad Tredegar,” he greeted her. “I assume Petra is dead.”

“Thoroughly so,” Angharad replied.

He looked irritated, or at least his face did. No part of it reached his gray eyes, which were not calm but… confident? Certain, Angharad settled on after a beat. That gaze was kept steady by the utter certainty of a man who genuinely believed nothing could happen to him now. That he had already won.

“A genuine loss. Given her talent with the influence prayer, she would have been a most useful courtier,” Lord Phaedros said.

“It is true, then,” Angharad said. “You are the Ecclesiast.”

“Surprised?” he idly asked. “I will mark it a compliment. It took years to become so harmless, to bury the edge my reputation had in my youth.”

“This will not stand, Arkol,” she said. “Even if you should win the night, the Watch will come for you.”

“So they will,” the Ecclesiast said. “And by the time their ships arrive, the Master will have devoured all of Tratheke Valley. The rooks will come and they will die.”

Devoured the valley? She swallowed. This was no simple mad cult, then, but a thing of genuinely monstrous intentions.

“They’ll come back,” Angharad told him.

“Once more, perhaps,” the Ecclesiast indifferently said. “Then they will deem it too much trouble and simply blockade Asphodel. They’ll not risk another expedition so long as neither I nor the Master seek spread beyond this land.”

“All this so you could rule Asphodel?” she spat out. “What a sea of blood, for such paltry ambition.”

At last something beyond indifference entered his eyes. Irritation.

“Paltry?” he said. “I will rule forever, child, the deathless chosen of my god. This isle will sing the name of the Odyssean from shore to shore, from oldest crone to youngest child, and kneel to me as his champion. I will not be a mere king or lord rector but half a god, endless.”

He smiled, in genuine poisonous joy.

“And I have earned such regard. The Master knows whose hand freed him, who undid the work of petty fearful souls,” the Ecclesiast said. “He will stand by me, as I stood by him in his hour of need.”

“You’re a pawn, Arkol,” Angharad said. “The Newborn’s, and that of those who first put that harpoon in your hand.”

“You know little,” he dismissively replied. “That golden-haired advocate only came to me in a dream, Tredegar, the labor was my own. They’ll have nothing of me, and should they complain of that they are welcome to plead their case to the Master.”

Her teeth clenched. The Ecclesiast, she realized, was not someone on whom reason would have a grip. He was drunk on what he thought fate, on victory, and nothing could topple the throne he had raised inside his own mind. Phaedros Arkol was smiling at her, she saw, as if waiting for further questions. He wanted to tell her about this, she thought. Not to gloat, but to finally share his cleverness with anyone at all after so many years of preparing in the dark.

Had anyone in the cult besides him known anything at all of what he intended? Ambassador Gule had not, for only a fool would have thought the Queen Perpetual would want anything to do with what the Ecclesiast sought of Asphodel. Gule’s very life would become a stain on the High Queen’s name for his role in this.

“All this time,” she said, “everyone was looking at the shipyard. And you never cared a whit for it.”

“Oh, the Master will level it I think,” the Ecclesiast mused. “The devices that congeal the aether make Tratheke unfit to serve as his holy seat. And the capital will be that, after the last sacrifice within whimpers its final breath.”

“You are a madman,” Angharad informed him.

Someone ought to tell him, should he not already be aware.

“It is only to be expected a mortal would believe that,” he told her, then sighed. “And it appears that, no matter how long we talk, your nosy little friend will not follow you into the shard. Unfortunate.”

She blinked.

“What?”

“You are a mediocre conversationalist,” he told her. “Which is only to be expected, since it appears you are also such mediocre bait that the god who guided you here will not deign to enter to rescue you from me. A shame, as trapping him in here would have been delightful irony.”

Phaedros Arkol raised his hand.

“But, alas for you, here we are.”

Angharad moved in without a word, for whether she liked it or not the fight had begun. Six strides between them, she measured and took the first.

The Ecclesiast closed his fist and she heard the ground crack – no, open, as a corpse grasped her feet from below. She carved off the hand but it had cost her time, enough that when she stumbled forward it was to the sight of Lord Arkol holding a shimmering sickle in his hand. Casually, he swiped it at her even though she was well out of range.

Angharad tossed herself to the side without hesitation, wind rustling her dress as something carved into the salt right past her. More hands burst out of the ground, going for her cane and leg. Damn it, how many corpses had he buried here? She ripped her way free of the grasping hands but she had to leave her cane and she grit her teeth as she moved to charge through the last of the distance. The Ecclesiast raised the sickle again and she watched his arm, watched for the moment when she must move aside and-

A spike of oily darkness shot right past her shoulder, nearly impaling Arkol. He ducked away hastily, though it still clipped his shoulder and burned through his doublet. And kept burning, Angharad saw with wide eyes.

“Exoloio,” he cursed, and then to her utter disbelief he turned and ran.

Her own steps stuttered as he fled much faster than she could pursue, leaving her to stand stunned by the great harpoon as the Ecclesiast… ran away. So much for being half a god. Angharad glanced back to find Song and Expendable atop a dune, aiming muskets at Lord Arkol. The fired and the man did not even turn, another corpse ripping itself free of the salt to take the shots for him. To Angharad’s utter disbelief, a tide of blackcloaks swept over her.

Tristan, Tupoc, Cressida Barboza and Izel Coyac. Then, coming down the slope with Song and Expendable, Maryam. That Sign must have been her doing.

“You,” she began, stumbling over her words. “What are you all doing here?”

“Watching you fumble that skirmish,” Tupoc chided. “You really should have expected more than one corpse, Tredegar.”

“Shut up,” Song told the Izcalli, brushing past him.

She drew Angharad into a hug, which she was too exhausted and baffled to refuse even though she did not deserve it.

“Oh,” she finally managed. “Did you come for me?”

Song withdrew.

“We were going to ask the loyalists about you first, but Oduromai King appeared and-”

Angharad snorted.

“He’s the one who guided me here,” she said. “So you were the ‘not alone’ promised.”

Tristan had held back while Song approached, but now he came with Maryam – who, Sleeping God, looked like she had been put through a wringer.

“My thanks for the intervention,” she told the signifier.

Maryam waved it away. Angharad nodded at Tristan, after, and he tipped his absent hat at her. Ever the charmer. A flicker of movement, and she must be going mad because a woman of rather close looks to Maryam had just popped out of her shoulder. It would probably be rude to ask, she thought, if this was some sort of Izvoric sorcery. Best pretend there was nothing unusual about it.

Angharad politely nodded at the… spirit? Maryam’s friend stuck her tongue at her in return, which she took to mean the introductions were at an end.

“Coyac, how’s the harpoon?” Cressida called out.

Angharad pivoted to find Izel Coyac inspecting the massive harpoon. He moved a little stiffy, she thought. Bruised, or perhaps drugged? Still, his eyes were unclouded and if any covenant could make sense of this strange harpoon it was the Umuthi Society.

“Hollow,” the tinker replied, knocking on it.

The empty noise proved him right.

“It’ll still take at least three people to move it.”

“Move it?” Angharad repeated.

“The Hated One is out of his cage,” Song said, which Angharad nodded in assent to. “The harpoon is one of the few means at our disposal to wound it – the very reason, I expect, that Lord Arkol came to take it. We cannot leave it in enemy hands.”

Angharad slowly nodded.

“If we are to fight the spirit, then we also need to find Cleon Eirenos,” she said. “Oduromai insists he is the key to wounding the Newborn.”

Song nodded.

“Then we find Lord Eirenos, for I suspect the… Newborn, as you call him, will not give us a choice in fighting him,” she said. “Let’s get moving, ladies and gentlemen. We are vulnerable so long as we stay in here.”

It took five of them to force out the harpoon, and then against Izel’s prediction four to carry it. Their party hurried across the expanse of salt afterwards, in the same direction the Ecclesiast had run off to. If he had left a trail there was no trace of it left – but it mattered not, because unlike Angharad’s own Song’s eyes were capable of piercing through the nothing that was the horizon of this place. She found them a way out without much difficulty.

“Straight ahead,” Song said as they went down a slope. “I can see bits of the garden through that, we should end up on loyalist grounds.”

There was haze at the bottom of the salt dune, Angharad saw, much like the one she’d entered through. She walked into it without hesitation, second in after Song.

Immediately, someone grabbed her by the collar and dragged her down – she swallowed a groan of pain at the way her knee bent and her sword was halfway out before she realized it was Song. Her captain was kneeling with her, while mere feet ahead what looked like a very expensive sofa burst into a shower of wooden shards and feathers.

“Peace,” Song called out. “We are Watch.”

“Hold your fire!”

That loyalist lictors – and a few nobles, Angharad noted approvingly – had muskets trained on them was no great surprise, but she flinched when a cannon ball hit somewhere nearby and the brass shuddered beneath her feet. The few muskets that had dipped went back up when the jagged tip of the harpoon emerged from the haze, but already officers were intervening. A lieutenant in the lictors and Majordomo Timon himself went around forcing down the muzzles, so Angharad gingerly pushed herself back up.

“Stand down, that’s the Thirteenth Brigade,” Majordomo Timon called out. “They are allies.”

Angharad almost dropped back down when another cannon shot howled as it passed over their heads, hitting the wall behind them about twenty feet too high. The ball bounced off the Tratheke brass, taking the nose off a painted marble statue as it disappeared into the greenery below. They were all, Angharad saw, on a large balcony meant to entertain. It was a broad brass floor with stone railings – fortified by piles of furniture manned by lictors – overlooking the garden, with curving stone stairs on either side.

The balcony was high and near the garden’s edge, for to her left Angharad could see that past an expanse of wildflowers lay the glass panes of the Collegium, that massive cube of glass encasing the heart of Tratheke. And through the glass she got a glimpse of the city below, though one half-covered by smoke: there were fires below, and though the daylight of Asphodel had passed there were so many torches and lanterns below it looked like a bed of embers. Fighting was still raging at the foot of Fort Archelean.

She had been lost in staring, enough that she was startled when Tristan nudged her. While she had been distracted the harpoon was brought through by the other blackcloaks, soldiers moving around so it could awkwardly be laid down across the balcony.

“Come on,” Tristan said. “Let’s find out what kind of mess we stumbled into.”

Majordomo Timon and the lictor officer were taking all the black-clad students aside, so Angharad dutifully joined the lot. Timon, she noted, still looked as pristinely attired as last time. Admirable, in the middle of a coup. Another cannon shot smashed into the bottom of the balcony, getting flinches out everyone. By the time the two of them joined the rest, the talks had already begun.

“- from the city, Captain Ren?” Majordomo Timon asked. “Does His Excellency still live?”

“I left him in the hands of his escort, retreating towards safer ground,” Song replied. “I have every reason to believe he is safe and alive.”

The man sagged in relief, and the lictor by him straightened.

“Glad news,” he said. “It has been eating away at morale not to know. This should kill any talk of surrender.”

The lieutenant at his side looked unconvinced.

“The men won’t buckle so long as they merely bombard us, but in the face of a storm?” the dark-haired man said, lowering his voice. “We are surrounded and there is no telling when reinforcements will come – if they will come.”

Song cleared her throat.

“Am I to understand the rebels are attacking through the garden?” she asked.

“Lieutenant Phos here got the cannons in place in the hallways before they could push us in,” Majordomo Timon said. “That has been enough to see off their charges, so they now seek to flanks us through the garden.”

Phos? Angharad cocked her head to the side, wondering if he was a relation of the girl she’d briefly met on the Dominion. She could see little resemblance, from what she remembered of… Ianthe, had it been? It felt like a lifetime ago, her time on the Dominion of Lost Things.

“Most their strength is out there,” Lieutenant Phos told them. “At least three hundred and several artillery pieces, led by their nobles and that Malani scum. The most we can muster in defense is sixty-odd and now you lot.”

A pause.

“Our position is a losing one,” he quietly admitted. “The balcony must either suffer bombardment without answer or pull our own pieces from the halls and leave them vulnerable to assault.”

“They’ve placed their cannons poorly,” Izel Coyac noted. “By the angle of that last ball they appear to be shooting at you from too close. If you’ve no cannons of your own, why have they not repositioned?”

The white-haired majordomo blinked, then looked at the lictor.

“They’ve holed up in one of the lantern pavilions and a musical hall,” Lieutenant Phos said. “We thought it was fear of us returning fire, at first, but now I’m leaning towards some incompetent being in charge.”

Which was interesting, but not what Angharad must know most of all.

“Sir,” she said, calling his attention. “We must find Lord Cleon Eirenos in all haste. Do you happen to know if he is among the rebel nobles?”

The man spat to the side, which was shocking of such a mannerly fellow.

“He is,” he said. “The vicious little shit slew Captain Maragos and Lieutenant Kolipsis under cover of his contract, then ran off before we could shoot him for it. It’s what let the rebels take the pavilion uncontested - we had men in place to bleed them, but they hit us during the confusion. He should still be in there, along with that bastard Gule.”

Angharad pushed down the urge to inform him that Ambassador Gule was an induna and must therefore be of legitimate issue, else he would not have been counted thus. That was not what he had meant.

“We need to get to him,” she said.

The majordomo eyed her warily.

“They’ve fortified that position, Lady Tredegar,” he said. “I am no soldier but even I know that charging such a-”

The noise was so loud it drowned everything else out, for a moment. And that moment stretched on and on, the din of… sound and metal being ripped open intolerable. Angharad ignored the shouts of surprise and dismay, dread pooling in her stomach as she limped straight to the left edge of the balcony. There she could see past the edge of garden into the Collegium below, the columns of smoke surrounding Fort Archelean.

It was trivially easy to see one of the walls of that fort had just collapsed. It was horrifying to see that a stretch of Collegium streets had just collapsed too, leaving a gaping chasm behind.

A hand that was not a hand but a weave of writhing corpses reached out of the dark below the city. Angharad tried to understand the sheer size, but her mind balked. If a simple hand was the size of a house, how large would the rest be?

She did not have to wonder long for the Newborn, the Hated One, the Odyssean began to climb out.

“Gods preserve us,” Song rasped out, having joined her. “It was physically trapped by the Watch, after the Ataxia. And that officer from Stheno’s Peak told me that if the god ever got out it would emerge down in the cavern under the palace.”

And also under Fort Archelean, Angharad thought as she watched the Newborn savage its way out of the grounds beneath the wealthiest, most beautiful part of Tratheke. Entire streets fell into the deeps, and the manifested spirit – tall as a mountain already, and only swelling from every death he caused – ripped its way out with a triumphant shout. It stepped on the fort, cracking the main keep like an egg, and when cannons were fired at it the spirit picked them out and tossed them away.

Towards the edge of the district. Towards the side of a cube that was, beyond a thin metal lining, made entirely out of glass.

She would not forget this sight, Angharad thought, until the day she died. One panel exploded, torn through by the tossed cannons like a child had tossed a stone at a window, and then the destruction rippled out like a tide. It spread up and down, panes breaking and shattering – and there must have been something in the way the Antediluvians built the Collegium that was fragile, for within the span of five breaths the vibrations traveled across the entire cube and crushed every single pane of glass.

Every single great panel in that grand cube of glass shattered or fell, showering the night air with a magnificent shower of shining shards that fell like rain. Behind was left only a thin skeleton of brass, the frame of metal that had held the panes in place.

The glittering rain fell on the city and the fort, exquisite but oh so deadly. Sleeping God. How many hundreds, how many thousands would die from that?

And ahead of them, the palace gardens – the same palace gardens that had been built over the panes of glass - hung in place for the barest of heartbeats before gravity collected its due. The grounds disappeared, as if whisked away by magic, and tumbled below as layers of earth and flowers and trees and half a dozen buildings went away. The palace itself, built atop a spire of metal, shuddered but did not move.

At least the lift connecting the palace to Fort Archelean remained untouched, for otherwise they might well be stuck up here until they starved.

“They knew,” Song quietly said. “It was on purpose.”

Angharad followed her captain’s gaze, and even as it occurred to her disaster might have struck – that Cleon, out in the garden, would be toppling to his death – she saw that it had not. The garden had not all fallen below. The parts of it that had been built over the metal frames of the Collegium still hung on the metal, though much of it had been drawn into fall by the rest. The pavilion was one such part, as was most the dancing hall. The two positions the rebels had taken.

Song was right, they’d known. They must have.

And below them Angharad watched as the writhing, screaming flesh of the Newborn began climbing metal frame of the Collegium, come to kill them all.

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