Chapter 12

Chapter 12

It was an unusual experience, Tristan mused, to be treating others using a poisoner’s kit in ways he had largely learned through study of interrogation. Not that anyone could tell the difference.

“I don’t need a stick to bite down on,” Felis insisted. “It’s just a little pain, I can take it.”

In most circumstances, the man might even have been right: regular use of dust could dull one’s sense of pain. Not so here, however. Aines fretted at her husband’s side but he kept pushing her away.

“I once saw a man bite through his own tongue,” Tristan conversationally said. “It didn’t kill him – it is not usually a lethal wound, you see – but it did seem to be an excruciatingly painful experience.”

The dust addict paled, fiddling with his choppy brown hair.

“Are you much of a singer, Felis?” the thief asked.

The man glared, but he took the stick and placed his teeth against it. Tristan immediately ripped out the bolt, ignoring the half-swallowed scream that followed. It was a nasty little piece of work, the thief thought as he eyed the arrowpoint the hollows had used. Serrated so that it would cut flesh again on the way out. Felis went through spasms of pain, shivering, as Tristan set down the bolt and got to work cleaning the wound. A rag drenched in alcohol, then makeshift bandages made of ripped clothing. The man should be in no danger of bleeding out, but Tristan could not say if the flesh would take sick. Clothes made for poor bandages and they had too few to spare for the thief to be able to change them often.

“It is much as I can do,” he told Felis. “I will give you something for the pain before you go to sleep.”

That made all of them. Vanesa and Aines had gotten away with little more than bruises, Francho’s rib was sprained but not broken and Yong had taken no wound at all. After Felis the worst off was Sarai: pins and needles had ripped at the side of her face when her veils and mask were torn off. Those he had not taken care of: after borrowing alcohol to clean the wounds, she had seen to them herself. Of Lan there was still no sign, not that they would take her in should she return. What worth was there in keeping around someone who would run when the knives came out? Choices must be paid for. Felis spat out the stick and rose to his feet, striding away without another a word. His wife stayed behind.

“Thank you, Tristan,” Aines tiredly told him. “He appreciates it as well, he just-”

Under the weariness and the wear, he could still see the shape of the woman she must have been when she was young. Dark hair and kind brown eyes, a heart-shaped face and slender frame. The kind of looks men of the Murk considered beautiful.

“This place, it doesn’t bring out the best in us,” she finished. “It will be better when we get out.”

No it won’t, Tristan thought. The thief hesitated. He had decided not to involve himself too closely with the pair, wary of getting caught in the inevitable explosion, but now their company’s numbers had thinned and wounds had been taken. If he could nudge their situation into coming to a head a little later, perhaps the second trial, it would be a boon.

“Lan ran off with the dust,” he said. “How long before it gets bad?”

Aines’ smile did not quite hide the shame in her eyes.

“Noticed that, did you?” she said. “I thought you might, you’ve got Murk all over you.”

And they both knew that dust and the other drugs peddled there killed people just as sure as the plague, only slower and uglier. The dark-haired woman worried her lip.

“Two days,” she finally said. “Maybe longer if your extract for the pain scratches the itch some.”

“That could be a problem,” Tristan admitted.

One he did not have much to mend, save if one counted poison a solution. The sound Aines answered by was too bleak to truly be called a laugh.

“Yeah,” she exhaled. “I know. Gods, I know.”

“It seems ill-advised,” he delicately said, “to be taking these trials given his... condition.”

His more than hers. Aines seemed as needful of gambling as her husband was of dust but her body would not rebel at the lack of it: it was an affliction of the mind more than the flesh. He already knew they had not come here by choice, that they had been paid for by others, but tired and grateful as she was a small invitation like this should be enough to get her talking.

“You think we had a choice?” Aines bitterly replied. “We both racked up debts with the Cordero Sonriente, only we didn’t know about each other’s. One of their collectors put it together and came knocking at our door.”

Tristan winced. The Cordero Soriente has begun as a charitable house the infanzones had meant to clothe and feed the poor souls of the Murk, but infamously within a year it’d begun selling goods on the side and running whores in its chapterhouses. The Guardia never raided them, after all, lest the noble patrons be offended. By the time the thief was born the Cordero had branched into loans as well and earned a hard reputation among that crowded trade. They were respectable enough they could afford to pay the redcloaks to come and collect for them and the Guardia did not play nice when it came to the Murk.

“Yeah, that bad,” Aines sighed. “The debt was big enough we would have been bound for the mines until we died, only we have five kids and no one who could take care of them. So when they offered to wipe the debt if we took the trials, it wasn’t much of a choice at all.”

“They would not have made the offer without getting something out of it,” Tristan said.

Aines convulsed, and with some surprise the thief realized that she was crying. It was not the tears that surprised him – he’d choked on bitter sobs in his time – but that she would allow herself to shed them before a man half a stranger. Tristan gently put a hand on her shoulder but did not take her into his arms as an impulse demanded. He knew better than to get attached.

“It’s a sport to them,” she croaked out. “They pay the blackcloaks for the reports, after. So they know what happened in the trials.”

“What did they tell you, Aines?” he pressed.

“They’ll drown my children,” she whispered, “if Felis kills me before the end of the trials.”

Sympathy welled up, but only a shallow stream. Most of his mind was on the talk he had overheard between the two, the way Felis had pushed for them to leave the group. To go off alone. And just as Aines must have come to, he grew sure the Cordero must have promised him something if he killed her before the end of the trials. Red games, Yong had called these. What a pretty turn of phrase for such an ugly thing. He kept Aines company until the tears ran out and she muttered some excuses, returning to her cot like someone who did not know where else to go. Felis began a whispered argument with her within moments and Tristan decided to wait before he went over with the painkiller.

Instead it was to Yong’s side he went, sitting by the man as he oiled and cleaned his sword. The Tianxi glanced his way with an inquisitive look.

“I don’t think they’re salvageable,” Tristan frankly said, careful not the glance the pair’s way as he did. “They were pointed at each other by their creditor.”

“They’re useful in a fight,” Yong just as frankly replied. “I’d be more inclined to get rid of the greyhairs than these two if we must cut weight loose.”

“I’m not saying we cut them,” he replied, “but they can’t be trusted for anything delicate. It’s only a matter of time until one knifes the other.”Follow current novels on novelb((in).(com)

Either Felis for what he had been promised or Aines to avoid the same.

“Come the second trial, they are no longer our trouble,” Yong pragmatically said. “Will they last until then?”

Tristan grimaced.

“Probably,” he conceded, then passed a hand through his hair. “Marriage, huh. What a fool’s game.”

Yong shot him a highly amused look.

“You are speaking,” the Tianxi said, “to a married man.”

“Ah,” the thief coughed. “I mean no offence. I am sure your wife-”

“Husband,” Yong drily corrected.

“- husband is a fine man,” Tristan hastily assured him.

“He is,” the other man replied, but a hint of something lay under the even tone. “But I’ll grant you it can sometimes make for a crowded bed, each other and our pasts all squeezed tight.”

Much as the thief was itching to poke at that, to see what might come out, a look at Yong’s face was enough for him to decide otherwise. It was a closed shutter, and the Tianxi was shifting restless in that way Tristan had come to recognize as meaning he wanted to drink. The earlier violence seemed to have invigorated Yong, enough that he’d not drunk liquor all afternoon, but now the clouds were returning. Best head that off as hard as he could: if the day’s fighting had proved anything, it was that without Yong they were all halfway to the grave.

“I am glad you are now calm,” Tristan said, “for you seemed angry when you first saw Sarai’s looks under the mask.”

“Hollows can’t be trusted,” the Tianxi bluntly said. “If she had been one, either she or I would have left this company.”

“I have not found them any worse than men,” the thief said. “Is this a matter of faith?”

No one, not even cultish Redeemers, denied the truth of the Circle Perpetual – the endless cycle of reincarnation that bound all souls not marred by the Gloam. To be a darkling, hollow, was to be evicted from the Circle and see your immortal soul tarnished into mortality. There were faiths of Vesper who thought this a great sin, something disgusting or wicked, and so thought hollows disgusting and wicked as well. The Orthodoxy should not be one of them, but then in practice Tristan knew precious little of the Cathayan Orthodoxy.

“It is a matter of fact,” Yong replied. “All men go mad when law runs thin, Tristan. When there are no more punishments, the savagery we pretend we’ve never learned comes creeping out.”

His dark eyes looked at something beyond the cast of the lantern’s light, the kind of haunting that could be a world away and still closer than your own skin.

“I have seen men I thought decent rape and steal and kill for no better reason than they could,” he said. “But in the end, for all our cruelties, we are still men.”

The former soldier’s jaw clenched.

“I have found half-eaten children by the road,” Yong said with desolate calm, “where hollows went raiding. I’ve tread over the broken bones of hundreds fed to mad gods, seen the aftermath of ritual so horrifying even the worst of Izcalli candlemen would balk at their use.”

His tone had not grown heated but it’d risen loud enough they were drawing looks.

“We still curse by the Old Night for a reason,” he said, lowering the pitch of his voice after he noticed the attention. “And that is the world hollows would bring back: darkness for all, forever. No trust can or should survive that truth.”

Tristan slowly nodded, keeping his thoughts off his face. He would not argue with Yong, not when the subject drew such fervour from the other man, but he was not convinced. There were entire kingdoms of hollows out there, great empires risen and fallen beyond the cast of the Glare. Scholars were certain that most of Vesper belonged to the hollows, and if Yong were right then the Old Night would long ago have been brought back. No, Tristan suspected that most hollows were no better or worse than men. Shaped differently by circumstance, perhaps, but not made of such different clay.

It was the cults that were things of horror, and a cult was not a kingdom – much less a hundred of them.

“I’ll not argue with killing those Red Eye bastards,” the thief said. “Though I hope you’ll forgive me if I’d rather sneak past them if we can.”

Yong waved his words away.

“So would I,” he said. “And I can only wince at how Sarai must have suffered for her people’s resemblance to hollows. I expect half the people she’s ever met have tried to clap her in chains.”

“Not Tianxi, no?” Tristan asked. “I thought the Republics didn’t hold with slavery.”

“All are free under Heaven,” Yong dutifully quoted. “It’s against all the laws on all the books, it’s true, but it doesn’t stop some of the traders from shipping slaves.”

Ah, Tristan thought. Transporting the ‘merchandise’ was not buying or selling it, he deduced, which allowed the unscrupulous to follow the letter of the law. He was no longer a boy of ten, blindly admiring that the Tianxi had sent all their nobles to the chopping block and dreaming their land a veritable paradise. The Heavenly Republics were just as flawed a beast as the other great powers of Vesper, he knew that. But he was still disappointed, somehow, that men who’d made themselves free would force the opposite on others.

“The slave trade has made Malan rich,” he sighed. “And the man who hates gold has yet to be born.”

The Second Empire had used slaves by the millions and most peoples of Vesper still did – the infanzones might not call them such, but the hollows mining rubies and gold for them were slaves in deed – yet it was only ever hollows that Liergan had kept in chains. That time, that practice, had come at an end. The Kingdom of Malan had grown terribly wealth by stealing men in the north and shipping them to their western colonies, where they toiled raising rich crops under the Glare for their masters. And the tribes below the Broken Gates were very much men, for though they were pale of skin they were not severed from the Circle Perpetual. The Glare did not burn them.

Yong snorted.

“When I was a boy,” he said, “my grandmother told me it was Lucifer himself that made gold, for he knew that even sealed in Pandemonium gold would be enough for men to destroy themselves.”

Tristan could not help but smile. It seemed that no matter where you were born, family tried to scare you with stories of the King of Hell.

“My father used to tell how he invented sleep,” the thief said, “by botching a spell to kill all the world.”

“That’s a clever one,” Yong appreciated, then wiped his sword down one last time. “And a timely reminder of what I ought to do. Francho still has first watch?”

Tristan nodded.

“Good, the greyhairs need to earn their keep,” the former soldier said. “Will you speak with Sarai before turning in for the night?”

The thief cocked an eyebrow.

“Should I?” he asked, surprised.

“Who, if not you?” Yong shrugged. “The two of you have been fingers from the same hand since we left the yiwu.”

He frowned, recognizing the Cathayan word but not the meaning.

He snatched Vanesa by the back of her chemise, half-tearing it, and got her out of the way just as the gravebird began blindly flailing. It was in pain, shaking and screaming, but the quartz was well and stuck. May you burn from the inside, he thought with vicious satisfaction. No lemure enjoyed the touch of the Glare. Vanesa had grown deadened from pain and shock, her eyes empty, but she moved when he pushed and the two of them fell to their knees in the mud of the riverbank. On the other side of the river the gravebird was slashing at the ground in fury, Yong having wisely fled into the water while it was distracted.

“Go help him across,” Tristan ordered a gaping Felis, pulling Vanesa to her feet.

Francho was unconscious, he saw, so he told Aines to get him awake and passed the bespectacled – only half, now, the gravebird had ripped through the glasses to get to her eye – old woman to a sickly Sarai. They needed to take their bags and run before the gravebird rid itself of the quartz or drew something even worse. Going for his own affairs, only then did Tristan realized the prize he’d paid for his throw: down the banks his medicine cabinet lay against a jutting rock, broken and half-submerged. It’d tumbled down the slope while no one paid attention, half its contents spilling into the water or being ruined by it.

He'd have to salvage what he could.

Carelessly throwing all the stuff inside, mourning as he already saw there would be no more painkillers, he flicked a glance upriver and found Yong was being helped out of the water by Felis. On the other side, the gravebird had gone into the tall grass but its screams betrayed it had not yet gone far. Shoving the broken cabinet onto his back, the thief joined the others. Francho was back on his feet, looking half asleep and half dead. The wail had hit him much harder than everyone else, his eyes were still white with dread.

“We have to get moving rightnow,” Tristan said. “Anyone who can’t keep up is left behind.”

No one argued, for all knew that if the gravebird’s scream had not drawn the cult of the Red Eye yet then Yong’s two shots most certainly had.

--

The tall grass was the only reason they lived.

At least three warbands were scouring the land looking for them and in the open they would have been dead within the hour. Instead, by hook and crook, they hid and muddled on. Twice they had to lay down in mud at the bottom of crevasses as hollows passed above them, shadows lingering as they spoke amongst each other in a tongue older and harsher than Antigua. Their path was circuitous, Yong keeping them on grounds that would leave no easy tracks to find as they stumbled on wounded and tired. Tristan had taken just long enough to see to it that his and Vanesa’s wounds would not kill them before pressing on, but while he still had alcohol he no longer had numbing agents.

They would all be feeling their wounds.

Squirming through filth and bushes, they made their way forward. After some hours exhaustion became too much, forcing breaks, but no one slept well of for long. They could not afford to stay in place for too long with the cultists combing through the grass. Their company kept moving through the night, stealing away the odd hour of sleep when it could.

The start of the third day since they had split from the rest was not auspicious, everyone’s exhaustion sharpening tempers and slowing down the greyhairs even further. Felis was prickly as porcupine, constantly scratching at his arms and picking fights with the others. Yong had to threaten to cut out his tongue to get him to lay off Vanesa, who he accused of breathing so loudly she would draw the Red Eye onto them all. The sole relief was that, for all that their pace had slowed to a crawl, Sarai believed they were approaching the eastern bridge across the river.

Halfway through morning they found a toppled column rising out of the tall grass, enough so that when Tristan climbed atop it he was able to have a look further ahead.

“Good and bad,” the thief told them when he came down. “I believe I saw the silhouette of the statue that Sarai chose as our marker. We are at most half a day away from the bridge.”

“And the bad?” Vanesa resignedly asked.

“The tall grass ends soon,” Tristan said. “There is a span of open grounds between it and the beginning of the forest.”

And open grounds could well be the death of them all, if there were any cultists keeping an eye out for them. Their company broke out into murmurs, save for Francho who had laid a hand on the broken column and had gone into his own mind with unseeing eyes. After the others agreed that they should first head to the edge of the tall grass before deciding whether or not to risk it, Tristan shook the old man out of his reverie. Not with his hand, you never knew with contracts, but with the but of his useless pistol.

“Ah,” the toothless professor muttered. “Yes. We are going, I see.”

“You weren’t dozing off,” Tristan said. “You were listening to the stone.”

The old man nodded, quietly coughing into his hand.

“It is not from here,” Francho said.

The thief cocked a questioning eyebrow.

“It was stolen from a temple, brought here by cultists to serve as a watchtower of sorts,” the professor elaborated. “The men who carried them had strong opinions about being ordered to do this, and one broke his leg when it was dropped on it. That was... vivid.”

“You hear their voices,” Tristan slowly said, “as if hearing their old conversations?”

It was in poor form to inquire as to another’s contract, but if the old man wanted to unburden himself who was he to argue? Francho grimaced, shaking his head.

“Not so. It is more along the lines of what their hearts felt, when they touched the stone?” he tried. “I hear resonance of moments that were, nothing exact.”

It was still the kind of contract some would gladly murder over, Tristan thought, if it truly could steal secrets out of stone this way. How many bloody old lies could Francho drag out of graves, should he care to go looking into the past of Sacromonte? Or any city in the world, for that matter.

“Useful regardless,” Tristan simply said, then gestured for him to move. “Come on.”

Their company resumed the march, creeping towards the end of the tall grass with an obsessive care for quiet. Tristan kept an eye on Francho as they moved, looking for the trace of a price for the contract, but found none. Disappointing, but not surprising: gods did not always like their dues easily found. It was because he was watching that he saw the old man suddenly stiffen, looking around for something none of them saw. Mere feet away from the end of the tall grass a stone block was buried, nestled between weeds with only a corner peeking out. The old man discreetly ran his fingers against it while the others halted at the edge of the grass, eyes growing shadowed.

You heard that stone’s voice without pulling on your contract, Tristan thought. Was that his price, then? Francho could hear the secrets of stone, but he could never cease hearing them? A blessing and a curse all at once. Fortuna hummed, having taken an interest when she noticed his. The goddess began idly turning around the toothless old man, looking at him like a haggler inspecting a horse.

“He doesn’t seem like he’s becoming harmonious,” Fortuna wondered, “but he’d have to if he was always listening at everything. His god would be in his head all the time.”

Harmonious, Tristan thought with a grimace. That was how the goddess called turning into a Saint, which she insisted was a beautiful thing.

“There’s probably some tricky clause,” the Lady of Long Odds decided. “Like he can only hear on odd hours or when some other condition is met. Hearing the stuff won’t be his price, either, it’s just how his boon manifests.”

The thief made sure no one was looking at him before subtly nodding in acknowledgement.

“Someone decided to get fancy with him,” Fortuna sneered, tossing back her golden hair as she stalked away. “It’s all very crass, some parvenu god chortling at their own cleverness.”

Tristan could only fervently hope that the other god was not listening and taking offence, though he was distracted from that fresh worry by Yong’s sudden intake of breath. Brushing past Felis, the thief knelt at the Tianxi’s side and peeked out of the grass. There was no need to ask what had made the other man react: the cultists were in plain sight. Running across the flat grounds, a dozen armed hollows were rushing forward as they shouted. No, not forward. Away. They were fleeing the woods, Tristan realized.

“That,” Sarai whispered from behind him, “is not a good sign.”

The second sign they received that trouble had come was the mist. Clouds of it billowed out from the forest floor, almost like a wave of pale chasing the hollows. And from the dark of the trees, crushing trunks and stones in eerie silence, a massive silhouette came striding out. Legs thick as pillars swallowed the distance, chalk white and taller than men. In the cold light of the stars, Tristan glimpsed an enormity of pale flesh with large wriggling heads full of perfectly oval eyes, each mass ending in a great tentacle. The clouds billowed past the fleeing hollows, their screams suddenly going silent for all that their mouths were still open, and the great monster began snatching them up. Under the heads opened a gaping maw full of jutting bone tusks, and there the hollows were carelessly impaled and left to bleed out within the creature.

“A heliodoran beast,” Yong whispered. “Fuck. The captain said it would be asleep.”

“She said it might be asleep,” Tristan darkly replied. “It appears we’re not that lucky.”

They watched, shivering in fear, as the behemoth ate alive half the hollows and crushed a few more to death before wandering away in seeming boredom. The three cultists that survived ran into the tall grass well to the east of their company, heading away as fast as they could. It was only minutes after the great lemure was gone that the last of the mist dispersed and the oppressive silence with it. Tristan ran a tired hand through his hair, worrying his lip.

“We can’t head for the bridge while that thing is prowling around here,” Felis said.

For once, no one argued with the man.

“We need to wait it out,” Yong said. “Hide until it gets bored, then cross before the hollows return.”

“And if they come back before we do?” Aines asked. “We’d be walking right into an ambush.”

Neither was wrong.

“We cannot stay here,” Tristan said. “There’s still warbands looking for us, we need a hiding place.”

And to rest. They were all exhausted and getting worse. If there was a fight, half of them would fold in the first thirty seconds of it.

“The grass is full of cultists,” Sarai bluntly said, “and creatures altogether worse. There is nowhere for us to hide.”

“That,” Francho said, “is not entirely true.”

All eyes went to him. The old man let out a wet cough, then wiped his lips with the back of his hand.

“Several of the stones we’ve come across spoke of water,” he said. “They were taken from an old temple that has been swallowed by a swamp. I believe it was built on a tributary of the river we encountered yesterday, somewhere to our southeast.”

“Are you trying to kill us, you old bastard?” Felis growled. “It’ll be full of hollows just like the first one.”

“No,” Tristan frowned. “Not if they’ve been stripping it for parts. It’s not a sacred place to them.”

“You don’t know that,” Felis bit out. “You’re just guessing.”

“I am,” the thief admitted. “But it seems likely to me. Do you have a better idea?”

He did not, which settled the matter. Tristan ignored the whispered argument at the back of their company, Felis once more trying to convince his wife to leave and strike out on their own. Aines was much curter in her response than she had been last time.

--

It took them an hour and a half to find Francho’s temple, the last half hour spent mostly on finding a way through swampy grounds that did not involve wading waist-high in mud.

There was not a trace of hollows around when lantern light found the first curved gate jutting out of mud and filth, and Tristan could hazard a guess as to why. He’d seen great snakes slithering through the mud and larger shapes still in the water: crocodiles, or some creature that had the look of them. This was not a place friendly to either men or hollows. The old professor, however, guided them from stone to stone without once erring. They took an ancient pilgrim’s path of raised stone across the water, then passed through a dozen more curved gates to reach the temple itself: a squat square of a building topped by a dome that looked like a tulip’s bud. It was, improbably enough, still standing.

The swamp was nestled between overgrown hills, every inch of it infested with flies and croaking creatures. They were all eager to get out of the humid air and into the temple, which looked as if a storm had swept through. It had obviously been emptied of anything not nailed down by hollows, columns ripped out and mosaics stripped of colours. What few streaks of ancient white paint had not been melted away by the elements were covered with filth and grime, the place dripping of it and stinking worse than Pandemonium.

“This is disgusting,” Aines said, sounding like she was about to retch.

“There is a better place,” Francho told them, hopping up to a stone altar split in half with a younger man’s enthusiasm.

Behind it, the professor revealed narrow spiral stairs going down.

“There is a ritual pool down there,” he said, “that is older than the rest of this temple. At its back should be a hidden passage leading to a shrine this was all built over.”

Tristan could only ponder how formidably useful the old man’s contract was proving to be while glancing down at the slick, narrow stairs.

“These are too small for all of us to squeeze through,” he said. “We should send only a pair first.”

“As my old captain used to say: my thanks for volunteering,” Yong drawled.

The thief rolled his eyes. He had planned to go anyhow. He caught Sarai’s eye, silently asking, and she nodded in agreement. The stairs felt like they were sweating, moss growing in every corner, and Tristan almost slipped thrice. There was no grip as the walls were just as slippery as the floor. The chamber at the bottom looked more like a bath than the ritual pool Francho had described, a square hole full of scum water prefaced by cracked tiles while insects scuttled in corners, fleeing the lantern’s light. There were a few columns on a ledge at the back, most of them broken. Sarai caught up to him, steps careful as she avoided slipping. She took a skeptical look around.

“At least the smell is better than above,” she finally said.

“It’s a start,” Tristan conceded.

The reflection of the stone in the water made it look like there was a full wall, but as Francho had promised they found a passage tucked away behind a broken column. It was broad but low, enough that Tristan had to crawl on his hand and knees after handing off the lantern. Sarai followed closely behind. The thief reached the end of the tunnel, dropping quietly onto the floor of what looked like a natural cavern. The ceiling was full of dripping stalactites, a slightly sloped floor leading up to what appeared to a shrine carved into the stone. The cavern wall had been sculpted so it would look like the wall of the shrine, intricate silhouettes grasping each other’s hands and feet in an endless chain.

It cleverly made the shrine entrance look more than the vaguely oval hole in the stone that it was.

He helped Sarai down, the two of them moving up the slope in careful silence. The ground was wet, the stalactites dripping down likes knives dipped in blood, and there were insects scuttling just out of sight. Hand on his last knife, Tristan suddenly gestured for Sarai to stop. He sniffed at the air, smelling smoke, and saw the same conclusion bloom in her eyes as his jaw tightened: they were not alone in here.

“Close the lantern,” he murmured. “We can’t afford to be seen.”

Sarai grimaced, no more eager to be in the dark than he, but still worked the shutter until it closed. The two of them resumed their way upwards, moving with care not to make a sound. As soon as they got a better angle on the shrine door, they saw that there was trembling light inside. Pale, he thought. A lantern fed with Glare oil or powder, which meant this could not be hollows. He knew better than to think it meant they were safe. Pressing onward, they pressed themselves against the sides of the threshold to peek inside.

There Tristan found a camp had been made inside the cramped shrine, bedrolls laid down and packs piled up. There was even a small fire over which a pot was being made to boil, smelling of herbs. Two were tending to the food, and in the fire’s light Tristan recognized them immediately: Ferranda Villazur and her hired hand, the Malani huntsman Sanale.

Utterly surprised, he did not realize there was a third until she moved. The infanzona had not been foolish enough to leave her back unguarded. There was an alcove tucked away to the side of the entrance, just inside, and there someone who had been sitting was hastily getting up. They let out a noise of alarm and the other two immediately turned. Sarai let out a curse and Tristan brushed past her, knife up, pushing the guard against the wall. Holding his blade to their throat even as Sarai yelled for the other two to stay back, Tristan Abrascal froze when a curl of firelight revealed the face of who he’d just taken hostage.

“Well,” Lan mused, blue lips quirking as she swallowed the last of the bread she’d been chewing, “this is awkward.”