Chapter 43

Chapter 43

It was a tight squeeze, but Tristan limped out into the alley.

He was third out of the hole in the wall the mayor made trying to murder Tupoc – an admirable undertaking, regardless of one’s politics or stance on people-eating – and the two that had come out ahead were as much keeping an eye on each other as the empty alley they stood in. The first, Lord Zenzele Duma, was cut of typical Malani cloth: tall, dark eyes, wide nose. Yet his cheeks were gaunt from grief and his soft noble features were gainsaid by the recent flint to his stare.

He was unharmed save for a bit of soot on his clothes.

In contrast Tupoc Xical, though as eerily perfect as usual, had suffered from the fight. Ironically not from the devils, two of which he had slain with whoops of joy, but from the volley the cultists had unloaded blindly into the Last Rest: he’d been shot twice, one bullet in his right shoulder near the edge of his breastplate and the other in the opposite thigh. Either should have knocked the man out of the fight but Tristan could see that the shoulder shot, from which Tupoc had casually ripped out the bullet, already looked like it was mending.

Not as quickly as it allegedly had in other circumstances, though. Was it because he had two wounds this time? Can the contract only heal a limited quantity of flesh at a time? Either way, while the Izcalli was steady on his feet he had chewed up limbs and his spear needed two arms to use. No wonder he was keeping a careful eye on Zenzele.

Maryam was next out of the hole in the wall that Mayor Crespin had meant to be in Tupoc’s head – with such a keen eye for popular policies, it was no wonder the devil had been elected mayor – and she coughed from the smoke as he helped her into the street. She’d gotten a bad knock on the head when the devil was tossed into the firing line that Tristan had been a nominal participant in, but her eyes no longer seemed as dazed. She nodded her thanks.

“Your leg?” she rasped out.

“Good enough to walk,” Tristan said.

He’d got a bad roll of the dice when he pulled on his contract to force Cozme Aflor to get stuck on their side of the inferno: a chunk of collapsing ceiling had hit the man’s feet, which had flavored his backlash. The spray of wooden shards from a splintering board had hit mostly flesh, but he’d still had to tie cloth around his leg just above the knee to prevent his trousers being soaked in blood. They had not moved far from the hole in the wall, so when the last of them squeezed through he overheard the talk.

“My thanks for the help,” Cozme panted out, patting his clothes into order.

He he’d lost his musket during the chaos, by the looks of it.

“If you had not tugged me back, that chunk of ceiling would have caught my head.”

Tristan winced, which the older man took as sympathy, but was in truth over the prospect of how vicious his contract backlash would have been over that. The thief nodded back at Cozme, too on the edge to feign deeper companionship.

“We need to move,” Zenzele Duma cut in, voice tense. “I do not see Lady Angharad or the others, which means-”

“We make our own way out,” Tupoc cut in with a drawl. “Obviously.”

It seemed such a petty, pointless offence that Tristan was tempted to dismiss it as Tupoc being habitually unpleasant but the watchfulness of the Izcalli’s eyes revealed that to be a lie. A test, Tristan decided. He’s prodding Zenzele to see how close the man is to drawing on him. By how the Malani’s hand tightened around the grip of his sword, the answer was very close indeed.

“The postern gate is on the west side of town,” Tristan said. “The most direct route takes us through a street just short of the town square, however, so I would suggest cutting across town and circling around the north instead.”

“A longer trip will be more dangerous,” Cozme said.

There was crashing sound to their side as another chunk of ceiling collapsed inside the Last Rest, prompting a furious scream from the mayor and panicked shouting from the cultists still contesting the legitimacy of his election. Maryam cleared her throat.

“Let’s argue further away from that,” she croaked out, pointing at the mess.

Sound advice, which they all took. Heeding the thief’s suggestion of cutting east across town instead of keeping west, where the alleys often turned into dead ends meeting the palisade, the five of them fled. Tupoc took the lead, likely as much to keep his distance from the others as because he preferred the vanguard, and while Maryam kept Cozme distracted Tristan drifted towards the back.

Before he could so much as speak a word, Lord Zenzele Duma frowned down at him.

“You are a headache, did you know?” Zenzele said. “Half the people I speak to think you are a champion in the making, the other half that you are a feckless poison.”

Tristan cocked an eyebrow. Not even a poisoner – which admittedly he was – but poison outright. A bold claim.

“And you?” he asked.

“I am uncertain,” Zenzele grunted. “Which is disconcerting for more reasons than you know.”

Oh? That smelled of a contract, a morsel he might have liked to nibble at in other circumstances. Unfortunately, he must keep to greater concerns.

“I am a rat, that is all,” Tristan shrugged. “But, it seems to me, a rat who might share some interests with you.”

Bait had been set out but Zenzele Duma did not bite it. Instead the Malani noble kept silent, eyes flicking back and forth across thin air as if parsing out the invisible. An ill omen.

“What is it that makes you want to kill Cozme Aflor so very badly?” Zenzele suddenly asked.

Tristan stilled. He had been excruciatingly careful never to be outwardly hostile to the man. Even when he had spoken against Cozme during the discussion in the town square, it had been as part of several – and Yong’s broadsides at him afterwards should have distracted most from remembering it besides. Even now, approaching the Malani, he had not given a name. And Tupoc is the one who tried to get me killed for Jun’s death, so he should be the first guess.

This was the work of a pact, and the thought that one might allow Zenzele Duma to see through his every façade was... uncomfortable. Like learning your shirt had been split open at the back the whole time.

“Guesswork,” Tristan said, forcing his tone to be dismissive.

But he had hesitated for a second too long, he already knew, and Zenzele rolled his eyes.

“You want to use me,” the noble stated. “Send me after Tupoc while you go for him so he cannot intervene.”

That was an unpleasantly accurate read of his intentions.

Tristan swallowed, looking for anything at all on the man’s face he could use but finding no purchase. Zenzele Duma’s grief had been open, his hatreds were known and his recent friendships were obvious, yet the thief found through these nothing at all to move him. The thief looked away, deeply unsettled. Everything he had learned, been taught, told him that Zenzele Dum should be easy to leverage. Instead he was finding that the man’s forthrightness had whittled away every grip, leaving him too slippery to move.

“I owe him a debt,” Tristan reluctantly said. “The bloody kind.”

Zenzele considered that.

“As a servant of the Cerdan or on his own account?”

“Oh, very much his,” Tristan murmured.

Zenzele grunted.

“You do not strike me as man to whom hate comes easy,” the Malani said, rolling a shoulder. “I will presume it was earned.”

He spat to the side, into the mud of the street.

“I want Sarai’s help,” he said. “Wounded or not, he might well kill me otherwise.”

Practical of the man.

“She is no fighter even with Signs,” he warned. “But a distraction can be arranged.”

The noble looked like he wanted to push for more, but Tristan was only willing to promise so much and it must have shown on his face. There were other ways to line up his knife with Cozme Aflor’s back, this was simply the most expedient.

“Fine,” Zenzele said. “Signal me when the time comes.”

Tristan nodded back. However tense the conversation he found that in practice they had barely spent half a street quietly speaking. Tupoc had them turning a corner short two streets short of the piled lumber hiding the gaol, to head straight north as the thief had earlier suggested and no one cared to contest any longer. It was there they first ran into more than the distant sound of musket shots: a dozen slaves, bearing makeshift clubs and field tools, filled the street before them. They turned, faces alarmed, and before anyone could so much as raise a weapon Tupoc stepped forward. He lowered his spear, saying something in the same cant he had used earlier, and it gave the hollows pause.

Their leader, a grey-haired woman with broad shoulders, asked something harshly. Tupoc shrugged, replying, and there were a few more terse exchanges before the hollows began to make room for them to pass through the street.

“Tupoc?” the thief asked.

“I made it known we have fought devils as well,” the Izcalli said. “That earned us some goodwill.”

“They will let us cross?” Cozme asked.

“So they said,” Tupoc cheerfully said. “Though I would keep my weapons in hand, were I you.”

The hollows seemed as wary of them as the other way around, both sides eyeing each other until their group of five had passed the former slaves. The five of them hurried once they were clear, the hollows watching them go. Tupoc gestured for them to slow as soon as they had turned a corner.

“They also let us pass because they are heading for the battle,” the Izcalli said. “Their captain seems to believe that the Red Eye cult is winning.”

“Slaves and savages against a pack of devils?” Cozme skeptically said. “It will be a massacre even with the numbers on their side.”

“There are still sounds of fighting in the distance,” Maryam pointed out. “Something must be evening the scales for there to be no clear victor.”

“We saw the warband that is now attacking Cantica when we made our way here,” Tristan slowly said. “They had a priestess with them, a woman the other cultists seemed to fear.”

“Pacts with old gods are dangerous things,” Tupoc said, tone unusually serious. “That which has no restraint in price yields none in power.”

That last sentence had sounded oddly cadenced, likely a quote. They began moving north again, skirting the edge of town to get around the fighting in the middle, but soon ran into cultists against. One cultist, more specifically, marked with ritual scarification from head to toe and trying to harangue a group of cowering slaves hiding out in the garden behind a house into joining their way. He turned his anger and his spear their way, shouting in some cant, but whatever he might have been about to say was cut short.

Cozme shot him in the gut without missing a beat.

He blew the smoke off his pistol’s barrel as the slaves screamed in fear, some scattering while others flattened themselves behind rows of cabbage.

“That should have been bladework,” Tupoc tightly said. “Someone will have heard you.”

“There are shots all over town,” Cozme dismissed.

He did not want his friend in the middle of this.

The bare stone room they sat in was about ten feet long and teen feet wide, a rough square, and there was nothing inside save for the open door leading into the deeper gaol full of shit and straw. Tristan had Zenzele’s lantern at his side, almost entirely shuttered so it could not draw attention.

Cozme still had his sword and knife, but no longer his musket and his pistol had not been loaded since he’d killed a cultist with it. Tristan himself was down to his blackjack and knife. He did have needles in his bag, but a subtle blow with them would be nigh impossible in a place like this.

Cozme Aflor was a fit man with two inches on Tristan, and though in his fifties the soldier was a hardened killer grown long in the tooth doing the dirty work of House Cerdan: in a straight fight Tristan would lose, and what could there be but a straight fight in a room of bare stone?

Fortunately, Tristan still had the last of Abuela’s gift. Two vials: bearded cat extract and medical turpentine.

He palmed his vial of bearded cat extract and quietly uncorked it, dripping the liquid into the shuttered lantern. The entire dose went in there, enough to drive a dozen men mad for an hour, but it would barely be enough for what he needed. The dose he could deliver by a needle or a knife would be too slow to act, but Alvareno’s Dosages was full of interesting notes about the substances it recommended for a poison box.

Like, for example, that when left near a source of heat for the correct amount of time bearded cat tincture turned into a kind of volatile smoke very sensitive to temperature. Tristan discreetly got rid of the empty vial and waited for Cozme to be looking up through the hatch to take off his tricorn. The other hand he kept on the lever that moved the shutters.

“Cozme,” he whispered.

The moment his enemy turned, he pulled the lever. The shutters opened and with the difference in temperature – hot in, cold out - white smoke came billowing out furiously. Tristan covered his face with his tricorn, throwing himself back, but still felt smoke lick at his skin in the few heartbeats before it dispersed. His skin grew red and welted wherever it was touched, the sensation deeply unpleasant.

It was probably why Cozme Aflor was screaming, as it’d gone right into his eyes.

Most of the mind-altering properties were lost when the extract was made into smoke – it caused barely a tingling sensation, instead of hallucinations and violent bouts of emotion – but it did become significantly more acid. Tossing aside his hat, Tristan found Cozme clutching at his eyes and palmed his blackjack, coming closer to aim a blow.

The man moved, though, and what should have been a hard strike on the side of the head instead caught his shoulder. Cozme reacted swiftly, grabbing his wrist and yanking Tristan forward. Keeping silent save for grunt of efforts, the thief wrestled with the old killer. An elbow hit his chin and he hissed in pain, striking at the flesh under Cozme’s ribs in retaliation, but then the mustachioed man headbutted him.

Vision swimming, Tristan rolled away only to hear the sound of a knife leaving the sheath. He kept rolling, Cozme blindly stabbing at the ground where he had just been, and grit his teeth. He’d heard Cozme beat a god in a knife-fight, out in the maze. Even with the other man blind he doubted he would win.

“I knew there was something off about, you little shit,” Cozme snarled. “Who was it that hired you, the Ruesta?”

Tristan drew further back and held his breath, but he knew that would not last long. The older man’s eyes were closed and cringing, but he might still be able to see some and the pain would pass. His gaze swept the room, finding it bare save for one thing. Swallowing, he bet on a gamble: Tristan threw his blackjack against the wall to Cozme’s left, and while the man struck blindly there darted to right. Where he snatched up the lantern, swinging the mass of forged iron Cozme’s head even as the man turned back his way.

It caught him right in the cheekbone, crunching most satisfyingly as Cozme Aflor dropped to the ground.

Oil went spilling, aflame, but hit only stone. It would keep. Tristan dropped the lantern, just carefully enough it wouldn’t spill, and kicked the knife out of Cozme’s hand as the man lay moaning on the ground. He kicked the man in the stomach, making him curl, and took his sword out of the sheath before tossing into the other room.

In the distance, the fires of the blackcloak artillery burned.

Tristan went about it methodically. Boot coming down he broke the right knee, the older man screaming hoarsely. Then he broke the left arm, at the elbow. That should be enough to prevent Cozme overpowering him. Finally baring his own knife, he sat on the man’s chest and rested the blade against this throat.

“Fool,” Cozme croaked. “The bitch is dead, do you really think the Ruesta will still pay you?”

“I have no agreement with House Ruesta,” Tristan said. “Our business, Cozme Aflor, is much older than that.”

The man blinked, eyes red and tearing.

“Who are you?” Cozme rasped.

“My name,” he coldly said, “is Tristan Abrascal.”

It had been years, more than a decade, but still the old killer remembered. It barely took him a moment. Tristan might have cut him, if not for that.

“The violinist,” Cozme said. “Tomas Abrascal, gods. You’re the son.”

“I am the boy who was hiding under a table when you put a bullet in his father’s head,” Tristan told him. “He’d been so strange, those last few weeks. Mother kept crying and I worried, thought he might sick. So I followed him, thinking as children do that I would protect him.”

Cozme rasped out a laugh.

“Manes,” he said. “He was close to losing it, so we brought him in through the trap door. There weren’t any guards in that house - you saw that fucking slaughterhouse, didn’t you?”

If Tristan lived to be five hundred years, he would not forget what he had seen down there. Children in pieces, strapped to stables and hooked to copper wires. Barrels of limbs, pools of blood. Men with more parts sown on than not and that... thing held up in the air by golden chains so no part of it could touch the ground.

“I told them a second entrance was a terrible idea,” Cozme said, “but Ceferin insisted. We couldn’t keep bringing people in through the warehouse, people would ask questions.”

“Theogony,” Tristan said. “That’s what you four called it, when you had your little talk. What were you doing down there, Cozme? What was it all for?”

“I don’t know, kid,” Cozme tiredly said. “I just ran the guards, Ceret was the one with the grand plans. They put me in charge of finding Murk folk who already had contract, then Lord Lorent introduced them to the Almsgiver.”

Tristan stilled, for at long last he had the fifth name on his list. The name of the god that had its filthy hands all over this butchery, that had contracted with his father knowing it would kill him.

“The god that gave out the contracts, this Almsgiver,” he said. “Was it a Mane, Cozme?”

“I don’t know,” Cozme replied, too quickly.

“Tell me,” the thief hissed.

The older man laughed, only laughing harder when Tristan pressed his knife harshly against his throat.

“You’re going to kill me anyway, Abrascal,” Cozme said. “Your threats mean nothing.”

Tristan slashed through his eyes, the man screaming and struggling. Cozme was stronger, but blind and in pain. It was not a straight fight.

“Pain always means something, Cozme,” Tristan replied. “Tell me.”

“I don’t fucking know, kid,” the older man rasped. “I was just ran the guards.”

Whether that was true or not he could not tell, but he sensed he would get no more out of Cozme. A dead end, but he was not yet out of questions.

“You were there when they closed it down,” Tristan said. “Moved out. Where did they go, Cozme? Where are they butchering children now?”

“Somewhere out in the Trebian Sea,” Cozme laughed. “I never asked. Never cared. I’d paid my dues, I was on the rise.”

“Not for long,” Tristan thinly smiled.

Else he would not have been send to the Dominion of Lost Things, risking life and limb for favor.

“Never for long,” the man said. “That’s the way, isn’t it?”

The thief’s lips thinned.

“Do you even regret any of it?” he asked.

Cozme snorted.

“I lived like a lord for years,” he said. “Rich, respected. I might even have married into a good family, if I hadn’t got cocky at the end. Regrets, Abrascal?”

He was laughing.

“You think you’re the only one with mud on your shoes, rat? Regrets, gods.”

The blinded man offered a red, ruinous smile.

“The hungry bite,” Cozme Aflor rasped, “the beggared snatch, the cornered-”

Tristan twisted, cut his throat before he could finish the words. He watched the man gurgle, blood spill out, and said not a word as his father’s executioner died. Father, he had been half-mad at the end. One eye gone yellow, a leg growing warped. It had been a mercy in some way, what Cozme did, and for that Tristan did not make his death slow.

But he did not make it quick either.

And only when the gurgling ended, when Cozme went still and his began to stiffen, did he finally tear his eyes away.

“Three,” Tristan softly counted.

May his father be spun smiling by the Circle into his next life.

He sat by the corpse, silent, waiting for Maryam to join him – perhaps with Zenzele, if the man still lived. And when he closed his eyes, when he thought of the sound of that trigger being pulled and Father’s brains splattering the floor mere inches away from his little feet, of the way he had bit his lip until it bled so he’d not make a sound, the scales felt slightly closer to even.

“Laurent Cerdan,” he whispered into the dark. “Lauriana Ceret. Ceferin.”

All old names, worn from the speaking. And now there was one more to add.

“The Almsgiver,” he tried out.

It sounded, Tristan thought, like a promise.