Chapter 34

Chapter 34

As usual, Angharad Tredegar being decent proved to be very inconvenient.

Instead of the hour or so Tristan had planned on waiting until the crew began crossing the shattered hall, he had to wait more than the double. Though he never came close enough to see more than their silhouettes in the distance – too much of a risk, with Song Ren around – he caught a glimpse of them leaving and let out a breath of relief. Finally. The thief had learned patience but never learned to love it. Once they were out of sight, Tristan set about his work: finding Augusto Cerdan’s passage back to the Old Fort.

Listening to the man’s blathering had yielded a vague idea of where it should be located. Though the infanzon had been careful not to mention where the crevasse he’d fallen in actually was, he had been all too eager to boast about how quickly he had made his way through the mirror maze itself. Tristan had memorized the directions he’d allegedly gone in, significantly narrowing down the locations where the crevasse could be. It had been the part of the infanzon’s words he truly narrowed in on, only lending half an ear to the rest.

The thief’s fingers clenched. If he had listened to the rest more carefully, heard the hints, then maybe...

“Glaring at that slab of crystal won’t move it,” Fortuna advised him.

Well, certainly not now that she was sitting on it.

“You know I’m going to be climbing that,” he said.

Instead of getting out of the way as was the implied request, the goddess stretched like a cat and posed.

“I thought you’d be happier after getting to pop a Cerdan,” Fortuna said. “Is Vanesa’s last hurrah still spoiling the taste?”

Tristan’s face went blank.

“There were hints, in retrospective,” he evenly said. “Abuela was right: I let my guard down and immediately things began to slip my notice.”

Fortuna snorted.

“Yeah, because that’s what you’re torn about,” the golden-eyed goddess mocked. “Sure. You’re a tough ol’ rat, much too tough to be sad about the nice old lady that you liked offing herself.”

He gritted his teeth.

“Taunt all you like,” he said, “you can’t deny that-”

“She was already dead, Tristan,” Fortuna cut through. “She wasn’t going to get that leg amputated no matter what you said. She just couldn’t see a live worth living with one leg.”

Quicksilver anger rose, swift and blinding.

“You think I don’t know what?” he snarled. “One eye, one leg – she would lose her shop even if she went back.”

He passed a hand through his hair, anger still clenching his jaw tight.

“She had to know I’d give her the poison if she asked, Fortuna,” he said. “That I wouldn’t balk at getting rid of Ocotlan, that I’d dose it right so he died out in the maze instead of at the fucking kitchen table with everyone watching. She did it this way because she wanted to be caught.”

A part of that, he figured, must be so the blame couldn’t fall on him if it came out the poisons were his. But the greater part had been that Vanesa simply did not want to live past that morning. She had not wanted imprisonment or pain, so she had drunk the poppy and confessed to a man bearing a pistol and the duty to use it. He cursed and felt like kicking the slab of crystal even though it would do nothing but bruise his toes.

“There was no place in that decision for you to stick your nose in,” Fortuna said. “She picked her dice and rolled them – what came after that was between her and the table.”

“I am not so much of a hypocrite as to deny someone the settling of their dues,” Tristan tiredly said. “But she was worth more than an Ocotlan.”

You could find the likes of the bruiser at any tavern of the Murk: strength paired with cruelty was a coin no city ever grew poor with. Kindness, offered unstintingly to strangers? That was a rare good.

“It wasn’t an even trade, that’s all,” he murmured.Read latest chapters at novelhall.com Only

“Sometimes you just have to take the loss,” Fortuna replied, not unsympathetically.

But not, he thought, with sympathy either. She was a goddess, the Lady of Long Odds. Fortuna would never be able to see the world through anything but those lenses, and it was not in her nature to truly mourn a loss. How could she, when the bone of her was to roll the dice until that one a in a thousand victory came roaring into life? Losing taste for the conversation, Tristan opened his bag and put on the leather gloves.

He had work to do and he was already behind on the timetable.

--

It took a little under an hour to find Augusto Cerdan’s saving grace.

The search grew easier once Tristan was certain the man had lied, which given that he was dealing with an infanzon he had assumed was the case anyhow: his lordship had not gotten anywhere as far in the mirror hall as he had claimed. As the outskirts of the shattered grounds were the easiest to get around in, this proved to be a stroke of luck.

The crevasse in questions was long and thin, like a slicing wound in the earth, and half-covered by a crumpled wall. The wall had broken into pieces when a chunk of ceiling fell onto it, which made reaching a part of the crevasse broad enough to pass through simple – if exhausting – work. Tristan dragged away sharp chunks of crystal, glad for the thickness of the leather gloves, until there was room enough to see into the depths. Which were, he was somewhat amused to see, not all that deep.

Lantern light revealed the fall was only seven feet or so. It also confirmed he had the right place: he spied a stray brass button that had not a speck of dust on it, unlike the rest of the floor. Someone had recently gone through here.

Tristan lowered himself down and pocketed the button – that made three, added to the stone pair from the pillar he’d split between his pocket and his boot – before tugging the rope down after him. The space down here was a narrow crypt whose ceiling was so low he had to stay on his knees, empty tombs flanking him from both sides. After maybe thirty feet of cramped crawling, the crypt ended and there was drop into a much larger room.

Larger and rather unusual: there was nothing in there save for a bridge over dark, oily waters. The floor was paved, faded grey and yellow tiles with geometric shapes within. On the opposite side of the bridge was a closed door of a metal so worn the thief could not tell what it was.

Tristan did not have to be told to know a god dwelled here.

This must be the seat of the test Augusto Cerdan claimed to have beaten. Shimmying out of the crypt, Tristan dropped onto the tiled floor and took a moment to catch his bearings. Dusting off his shoulders the thief rose, lantern high, and cleared his throat.

“So how might one go about earning the right to cross the bridge?” Tristan called out.

Movement caught his eye. It looked like a stray dog – the same faded grey as the tiles, its eyes and teeth the same yellow – but he knew better than to believe what he saw. The god might be pretending it had been nestled against the back wall on the other side of the bridge, just now rising, but the thief would not have missed it were it truly there. The stray dog, stray god, trotted to the middle of the bridge before stopping. It lay down there, almost lazily.

“Supplicant,” the god greeted him.

Its voice, he thought, sounded like a brush against a tile. Like someone painting.

“God of the land,” he replied, bowing his head.

“You may take my test to earn passage,” the dog told him, “or you may pay the toll and cross.”

He cocked his head to the side.

“Your test being?”

“There are six circles hidden among the tiles,” the god said. “Find them and you may pass through here as you will.”

That, he thought, sounded like one of those tests that would be much harder than they seemed.

“And the toll?”

The dog opened its maw happily, the teeth – yellow but in a way that defied the description of dirty, too uniform in color and perfectly formed – it showed licked by a grey tongue.

“I need paint,” the god. “Fresh paint. The colors fade.”

Tristan was not a fool.

“You want my blood,” he stated.

“Three drops,” the dog god said. “You smell of an interesting life. Your hue will not soon fade.”

The thief swallowed.

“The man who came here before me,” Tristan said. “He paid the toll, didn’t he?”

The dog nodded. The thief mentally tipped his hat to Augusto Cerdan – he had, in truth, been more inclined to believe the infanzon a victor than not. It ought to be amusing to find out how long he’d kept up the lie around the maze crew.

“It was shallow paint,” the god said. “Too much of the same, easily yellowed. Yours will be a grey, I think. That always takes time.”

Giving a god blood was not as dangerous as the faint-hearted assumed. Tristan had done so infrequently to the Rat King when offering prayer and twice to the Capricious Bones when he’d had to swim near the bottom of the canals in the Old Town - the Mane was a vicious thing and not above snatching those that dwelled near the depths it claimed as its domain. Besides, Augusto Cerdan had not visibly taken ill from paying the toll. Tristan, however, knew things about this maze that the infanzon did not.

“Is it him?” he asked.

It was not the stray dog he was addressing. Fortuna stepped past him, fanning herself as she glared at the god on the bridge.

“It is utterly deplorable manners,” she sneered, “to defile a remnant in this way. A god of your age should know better.”

The dog lazily turned to look at her. Directly at her, Tristan saw. As if it could see her standing there.

And then it changed.

Its skin bubbled and melted, peeling away in chunks. Thd heard warped, grey and yellow bending and blurring until a wet redness squelched out – coming back together into a shape that was like a hound’s heard traced in tendrils of red, grinning wetly. The sight had him shivering in disgust, the inherent wrongness of what he beheld repellent beyond what words could express.

“A stray thing that does not know when to die,” the Red Maw said, and laughed.

Tristan’s limbs were shaking. He almost fell to his knees. That voice, that... no, it hadn’t been a voice. It had been like a mouth against his ear, sucking out the wetness inside his skull and feeding upon it. He could feel it still, a susurrant disease lingering inside his brains. The thief convulsed, but it was not his stomach that wanted to throw up – it was his soul.

“You have decayed,” Fortuna said, and her voice like was fresh water at the height of summer.

Tristan, only now realizing he was on his knees, let out a gasp. He had been drowning on air and never even known.

“There is a sickness in you, as if your very root grew out crooked,” the Lady of Long Odds mused. “Whatever is it you are a god of now it is not what you were born for.”

“The Masters are gone,” the Red Maw grinned. “I can eat my fill.”

A hand caught Tristan’s wrist. He blinked in surprised, watching his own curled fingers as Fortuna looked down at him worriedly. He had been about to claw at the side of his head, he realized. To dig and dig through the flesh, until he could rip out the poisonous warmness slithering in through his earholes like an unguarded gate.

“Focus,” she told him. “Think of a coin spinning.”

Mouth dry, gums bleeding against his ragged tongue, Tristan forced himself to see it. To hear it, feel it. The ring of gold as it spun, the glint in the light. The satisfying snap as his thumb sent it spinning. The flat sensation as it landed on his palm. He could feel himself breathe, his heartbeat fearful and steady.

“- work will not hold me,” the Red Maw said. “The Lightbringer’s bastards broke the Work but they cannot rule it. The seal will fail. I will grow and take, take, take taketaketaketa-”

The pressure built against his eardrums like he was at the bottom of the sea, drowning, and as he vainly covered his hears Tristan screamed. Screamed until his throat was raw and his lungs burning, his lips cracked.

He came to on his knees, weeping as his feverish forehead rested on the cool tile beneath.

Fortuna was stroking his back. Whispering soothingly.

“It’s all right,” the goddess said. “He’s gone now, Tristan. He left.”

“I,” Tristan croaked out, tasting copper on his cracked lips. “Gods.”

He felt like a child again, a wail welling up inside his throat in the face of the unfairness of the world.

“What did he do?” Tristan asked.

“He looked at you,” Fortuna quietly said. “All of him, just for a moment. But you didn’t crack, Tristan. Your mind held.”

The thief blubbered out something that was both relief and terror. Had he truly held? He could not tell. Could not be sure what he had been like, before that awful sound. It felt like he was stained from the inside, like there was rot he would never be rid of.

“He’s gone now?” he asked.

Begged.

“When he turned his eye on you, the gods of the maze bit at him,” Fortuna said. “Now he must bite them back. His gaze won’t return here for some time.”

Tristan forced himself to his feet. The lantern had tipped over, some oil spilling out, but he did not even try to clean it and harshly yanked it upright.

He fled across the bridge, into the deep halls, and kept fleeing all the way back to the Old Fort.

--

It was as if he’d been in a trance: Tristan, for the life of him, could not have described the path he took to return. It was a blur, a vague sense of movement and stumbling forward.

It only began to swim back into focus when he was past the shrines, on the open grounds leading to the ramparts. The steadiness of his boots against the stone helped, but the thief felt tired to his very bone. As if life had been wrung out of him. The dull ache pounding away at his skull did not help any. By the time he reached the hole in the ramparts he felt halfway like a person again, but patting away at his hair and straightening his clothes had not been enough. The watchmen on guard both raised their musket at him.

“Don’t move,” the sergeant ordered. “Hands away from your weapons.”

He flicked a glance at the Aztlan watchwoman by his side.

“Get Basset. He looks like a breach.”

The young woman saluted, throwing him a pitying glance before she left. Tristan had to blink away sleep twice, but even though he was swaying on his feet the watchman’s gun never went down. The Aztlan came back with a young Malani watchman, who was half-dressed and still blinking sleep out of his eyes. He yawned.

“This the one?”

“Do you see anyone else?” the sergeant flatly asked.

The Malani – Basset, a strange name - rolled his eyes but took a step closer. Tristan eyed him warily, especially when the other man began sniffing at him.

“Still only one contract,” Basset said. “Could have had a brush, but the scent of his spirit is so strong I can’t tell.”

A breach, the sergeant had said. They were looking to see if the Red Maw sunk its hooks in me. How tired was he, for the realization to have taken so long? The sergeant grunted, but after a heartbeat finally lowered his musket.

“You can come in,” he said. “Watch your step, rat. No one’s in a trifling mood after the debacle earlier.”

Tristan slowly nodded, pinching the inside of his own wrist when no one was looking. The pain woke him some, though it would not last long. A debacle? Something to look into when he was more awake. It was hard to tell the time, but by the looks of most lights being out it must have been night. Though more than ready to drop on his bedroll and tumble headlong into sleep, Tristan did not get the chance. One of the curtains further down was moved aside as he approached, Maryam’s head popping out. Blue eyes widened when she saw him.

Swallowing a groan, Tristan obeyed when she gestured for him to come.

“You, going through my things,” he called out. “What’s your name?”

The blackcloaks blinked at him in surprise.

“Er,” she said. “Dulcia?”

“Dulcia,” he repeated. “While you’re still in there, do you happen to see the brand?”

A moment of silence.

“No,” Dulcia conceded.

Tristan turned his gaze back to Lieutenant Vasanti.

“Fancy that,” he said.

She snorted.

“So you hid it somewhere else,” Vasanti said.

“I could have done that, yes,” Tristan easily said. “I could also be the King of Izcalli. Are we dragging people out of their beds in the middle of the night for coulds now, lieutenant?”

Wen bit into his pastry, which was more than halfway finished, and loudly swallowed. There were flakes all over his chin.

“He’s not wrong,” the Tianxi lieutenant said. “You have a key too, Vasanti. How close of an eye did you keep on it?”

The old woman turned on the other officer, face twisted with anger.

“Are you implying one of us did this?”

“I am stating that anyone could have used your key, or his for that matter,” Lieutenant Wen evenly replied. “You want us to execute a trial-taker on grounds this thin? We’ll all answer to Commander Artal for it.

He paused.

“Unless you’re asking for us to send falsified reports about the whole business,” Wen said. “Is that the case?”

“Of course not,” Vasanti said.

A little too quickly.

“Then make a better case,” the Tianxi advised. “I’m not getting another black mark on my record just because you want to pin the blame for today’s fuckup on some Sacromonte rat.”

That had hard eyes turned on her, but it did not last.

“Eleven of us died, Wen,” Lieutenant Vasanti said. “Now you want to let the only person with answers walk away?”

The mood, which had been going Wen’s way, turned sharply back her way. Vasanti wasn’t leaning on reason, Tristan thought. She was using anger, and anger always got a bite. Most of the people here must already have black marks on their record to have gotten this assignment in the first place, he thought. It’s not as strong a deterrent for them.

“Don’t go putting words in my mouth,” Wen dismissed. “You want answers? By all means, get them. But this playacting is wasting everyone’s time. By morning either we’ll have a legitimate reason to put a bullet in his skull or we’ll have to let him take the trial.”

A pause.

“So are you going to drag him in a corner for a real interrogation,” the Tianxi said, “or are you going keep pissing away my good night’s sleep pretending you’re some kind of magistrate?”

Lieutenant Vasanti glared at the other officer, but she saw the same thing Tristan did: Wen had convinced them. The Watch was not a mob or a coterie, it had rules – and Vasanti had not given them good enough a reason to break them, not when there was a way to get answers that wouldn’t get their superiors coming down on their heads. This was, Tristan thought, the best Wen could do for him.

Getting him out was simply not in the cards, not with this many angry souls out for a scapegoat, so what the Tianxi could offer was to get him away from the mob. To put him in a room with only a few, where he could wheel and deal behind closed doors.

A swell of gratitude, barely marred by the fact that Wen had essentially just suggested he be tortured for answers.

“Fine,” the old Someshwari hissed. “If you don’t care enough to get answers for the dead, I will.”

“Oh, Vasanti,” Lieutenant Wen mildly said, “I do care. Unlike you, I knew their names. It’s why when Commander Artal has you shot for getting more of us killed against his explicit orders, I’ll be sitting in that room with another of these pastries.”

The fat Tianxi smiled, swallowing the last piece and licking his fingers.

“And I’m sure it will taste delicious.”

Tristan never met his eyes, did not even look at him, but in his mind’s eye he thanked Wen for this last gift.

He’d just been told something that might save his life.

--

The fist dug deep in his belly and Tristan folded, throwing up all over the floor.

It was not the worst beating he’d ever had. The watchmen were professional about it, hitting places where the damage would not be permanent and measuring their strength carefully. He would hurt, he would bruise, but there would be no broken bones or hidden bleeding.

“Back in the chair,” Lieutenant Vasanti ordered.

They forced him back up even as his stomach trembled and bile rose.

“A little to the left,” Fortuna whispered into his ear.

He followed her suggestion when he threw up again, drenching the legs of the watchman most satisfyingly. The man cursed and shoved him into the chair, backing away. The other one laughed, pulling up Tristan’s chin so he was facing Lieutenant Vasanti. The old Someshwari’s gaze was cold, unmoved by the sight of the violence she’d ordered.

“Where is the brand, Tristan?” she asked.

“Are you familiar with the poetess Iliria’s works?” the rat asked.

“Again,” Vasanti said.

The blackcloak who’d pulled his chin up slapped him, open-palmed. His cheeks were so red by now he barely felt it. They would rotate back to his inner thighs soon.

“Where is the brand, Tristan?” Lieutenant Vasanti asked.

“There’s this poem in her Little Lies,” he said. “The Court of Cats.”

The Someshwari sighed.

“Choke him.”

The big man seized him by the throat, toppling the chair, and he smacked against the wall. Fingers like sausages squeezed as he tried to breathe. Tristan went into himself, eyes unseeing. He thought of the grave he was in, the shape of it. The feel of the stone under his fingers, the coolness. How his feet pushed against the bottom, how he would have to fold his legs to get out.

“-enough, he’ll die.”

Tristan gasped, air flooding back into his lungs, and began to cough. The blackcloak he’d thrown up on looked at him carefully, then drew back.

“He’s fine.”

Lieutenant Vasanti leaned forward.

“Where is the brand, Tristan?”

“So the second verse,” he rasped. “It goes like this-”

The fingers went back around his throat, not even needing an order.

“To leave the court of cats

is even simpler done,” he got out before the squeeze.

He gasped blindly, trying to breathe through the grip.

“Stop,” Vasanti said. “Let him finish.”

He croaked out a broken laugh when the fingers released him.

“For when their hunger comes

rats are ever sport.”

A long moment of silence.

“Give me the room,” the lieutenant said. “I know what will make him crack.”

Liar, Tristan thought, smiling a bloodied smile. The pair of toughs – for that was all they were, regardless of the color of their cloak – traded surprised glances but obeyed their superior. The door closed on the small dark room, the only lantern lit casting its flickering glare between the two of them.

“I catch your drift. You want assurances I won’t kill you when I have the brand,” Vasanti said. “Why should I even believe you know where it is?”

“Because you want to,” Tristan rasped. “Getting your hands on it is the only way you’re living through the month.”

The Someshwari’s eyes narrowed. Ah, had she thought he wasn’t listening? Vasanti herself had told him she was no longer allowed to try the pillar, that the attempts on the cog room had gotten too many watchmen killed. And now she had another eleven corpses to answer for, going against explicit orders. She was going to get shot for that, as Wen had said.

Unless she had something to show worth that many deaths.

“You really are a nasty little rat, aren’t you?” she said. “Always scurrying around everyone’s business.”

He snorted.

“Come on,” he said. “How many reasons are there for you to get reckless enough for an assault? You think you figured out the tile combination that will open the front gate. You need the brand because you think it’s what will get the device working.”

The tile device in the room just past the one where he had found the brand, the one where the god had almost killed him. Vasanti must have figured them out even though the matching tiles on the iron gates had no symbols on them. The old woman stared at him for a long time.

“I was right,” she suddenly said. “I can’t let you into the Watch. It’s too late for you.”

Tristan blinked, for an instant lost.

“You think you’re the only one Nerei ever trained, boy?” Vasanti harshly said. “You’re the third I’ve met. And both were fucking monsters, just like their maker.”

The Someshwari leaned forward.

“I took it easy on you, tried to nudge you off the trials so you could return to your old life, but always you doubled down,” she said. “The disease is already in the bone.”

He closed his eyes. Anger had not come to him so far, not when he was in the grave and he had yet to buy his way out. Anger, fear, they did not help. But now it came anyway.

“It wasn’t even about me.”

His eyes fleshed.

“Everything,” he said with excruciating calm, “was part of your pissing match with someone not even on this fucking island.”

The old lieutenant sneered.

“You have no idea what-”

They were past that now.

“I don’t care,” Tristan laughed. “And I don’t need to, Vasanti, because you’re going to give me what I want.”

“Should I call the boys back in?” she coldly said.

“It doesn’t matter if you do,” he said. “Because at the end of the day, Vasanti, you’re a coward. You’re afraid of Abuela, afraid of what you’ve done, but most important of all you’re afraid to die – and I’m the only one who can tell you where the thing you need to live is.”

And under the black cloak, under the years and the authority and all the arrogance of someone used to being on the right side of the gun, Tristan knew what he was looking at.

Vasanti was a rat.

“I have people searching,” she said. “Do you think stashing things in a ruined bastion or one of the holes outside will work?”

“I can wait,” Tristan replied. “Longer than you, I reckon.”

Vasanti got up, walked out. Moments later, the two thugs walked in. Tristan closed his eyes and thought of the grave.

--

And hour later Lieutenant Vasanti returned.

She bought her way out of her grave and with that same coin Tristan bought his way out of his. After Vasanti declared him innocent of everything to the Watch garrison, Remund Cerdan’s evil deeds were revealed. He had stolen Tristan’s key and hidden the brand, a location the thief obtained from the infanzon before his death in the maze. He told the lieutenant where the brand was after and she flew into another rage.

After all it was in the Watch’s own armory, just as he’d asked Sergeant Mandisa.

Tristan watched the relief on Lieutenant Vasanti’s face afterwards, how it stayed there, and wondered if she would figure it out before the end. Tomorrow, come morning, Vasanti was going to get those iron gates open and then go through them with every blackcloak still loyal to her. Go plumbing the depths of the pillar for secrets and wonders that would be worth eleven corpses in the eyes of her superiors.

That expedition should serve as a perfectly serviceable distraction for when Tristan pushed her right back into her grave.