Chapter 10

Angharad got her arms up in time to cover her eyes, but the scorching wind still sent her sprawling.

Her back hit the cobblestone, smacking a breath out of her, but she swallowed the wheeze and rolled to the side. She had dropped her saber, so she scrabbled for it before rising to her feet. Her hands throbbed and the skin had darkened as if touched by soot. Angharad rolled her shoulder – good, she still had the full range of motion – and immediately reached for Song. Her captain was blinking on her knees, a sooty swath across her face. The skin around the edges of that soot had visibly tanned, the distinction clearer on the Tianxi’s skin than her own.

Song took the hand, letting herself be helped up even as she drew her pistol. Sight was returning to her eyes, they were focusing ahead instead of flitting about blindly.

The monster screamed, but even before Angharad’s eyes snapped to it she found the sound was not the same as its first stone-rattling bellow. It sounded pained, as if surprised that shattering the device had hurt its leg. The leathery gray skin of the limb was smoking, Angharad saw, falling off in patches and revealing beneath flesh wet with black ichor. It was sweating it more than bleeding, as if burned.

Ancestors, but the size of it. At least forty feet tall when rearing on its thick back legs, and that was without counting the horns. Beneath that ashen horse-like head dangled large folds of skin in a grayish flap and in the light of the lanterns Angharad saw that the lipless line of the jaw was akin to a crocodile’s, continuing with a slight curve two thirds of the way through the head. A bite of that jaw, she thought, could likely crush stone.

Any half-formed thought that this might be a test by the Watch was put to rest. A creature like this was beyond even what the Marshal would subject students to.

And it was plain that the students were not ready to fight it. There must have been around seven hundred students spread across the square a moment ago, but now at least a third were on the ground screaming and clawing at their eyes. Whatever that mirror-device had spit out, it had not merely been light and warmth. Time to worry about that later, she thought, for there was more urgent concern. If the creature got its bearings back before the downed students did, there would be slaughter.

“We need to distract it,” Angharad said.

Song straightened, breathed out. Silver eyes narrowed, the mind behind them turning its attention on the enemy. It was almost a physical thing, like hearing a key turn inside a lock with a solid and reassuring click.

“Agreed,” Song said. “Pistols to the hide will not work, I saw a dozen shots fail to pierce it.”

No telling if blades would do better before she had a stab at the problem, Angharad thought.

“Eyes?” she suggested.

“Eyes,” Song agreed.

You hardly ever went wrong with eyes. They moved as one, Song lengthening her stride to keep up with Angharad’s longer legs. They raced through a sea of groaning students and thinning powder clouds, pistols belching out fresh shots sporadically as shouts of fear and dismay echoed the lantern-cut gloom of the square. Some students, Angharad saw with a touch of contempt, were running. Either south towards the ruin-strewn alleys that led to Templeward Street, or east through the wrecked griffon temple. They were going against the tide, elbowing and pushing, and Angharad’s frustration mounted. If it kept up like this…

As she had feared, they were barely halfway through the square and the roiling mass of students when the beast shook off the surprise and turned its head on the half-panicked crowd. It had horse eyes, bulging and with an overlarge pupil, but pale and almost… clever. No mere witless animal. But before it so much as took a step there was a strident call that cut through the chaos. Captain Vivek Lahiri, for once unsmiling, stood atop the dry fountain top in the middle of the square holding a curved, S-shaped horn banded in silver. An Izcalli girl in a cloak and tunic stood besides him.

The creature glanced at them, just in time to catch sight of the shivering Sign traced by the girl, and it stopped. It cocked its horned head to the side, as if listening to something, and let out a soft whine that was still half a roar from the size of the throat emitting it. Captains were shouting up a storm to order the flight, to cease students trampling each other, but neither Song nor Angharad put their hand to that scale. Theirs was a different game, and the First Brigade had bought them the time they’d needed: three heartbeats later the pair were out of the crowd, running at full tilt towards the dazed creature through empty grounds.

Angharad mastered her breath, felt the blood pump through her veins. Song had not given her a plan, because there was no need to: Warfare class had hammered basic tactics into them. Angharad already knew her role was to close distance and serve as bait while Song placed her shot. Most pistols tended to wildly buck their shots past fifty feet, but her captain habitually made targets at eighty with the smoothbore piece she now had in hand. All that Angharad needed to do was get that beast back on four feet and looking in the right direction, the rest would take care of itself.

The old palace of the kings of Sologuer was gutted and bent, carved through as if some great spirit had swung down a sword in its heart and the impact had sucked in the sides towards the wound. It was in that central bed of ruins that the monster stood, but Angharad was not fool enough to approach through the gap. Limited space, uneven and sloped footing, a monster whose reach was longer than she could move in the span of a breath? These were dying grounds.

Instead, as Song continued towards the opening, Angharad veered left. The twog ruined wings of the palace had bent inwards towards the carve like lovers begging a caress, and their heavily windowed and towered facades formed what was almost a ramp. One steeply sloped, with the corner towers running up them like angular spines. She picked the left wing, for the way it would have the closest lantern’s light shining at her back.

Angharad barely had to put spring to her step for her boot to reach the lowest hole in the masonry, using it as a prop to jump up onto an angled windowsill. A heartbeat to steady herself, then she wedged a boot on the upper corner of the windowsill and pushed herself atop the corner of the tower. It was straight line all the way up from here, to a peak about two thirds of the monster’s height. She had barely taken her first step forward when the monster shook off the Sign, smashing at the ground in fury – the tower shook beneath her, masonry crumbling in parts, but she extended her arms either way and hurried up.

More shots fired from the square, and now shouts from older voices – the garrison had come – but Angharad could spare them not a breath for her movement had caught the monster’s attention. It turned its horned head her way and, for a moment, studied her almost curiously. Consideringly. Then, as she kept advancing unflinching towards her doom, it moved startlingly quickly to put its… hands, warped finger-like appendages with thick warts of hide, on the end of the tower. Shit. She glimpsed ahead and-

(The monster pushed straight down, tearing through part of the wall and collapsing the upper half of the tower Angharad stood on)

– her saber slid back in the sheath, to ease the distribution of weight, and instead of slowing down she sped up as much as the ridge let her. It was like trying to break into a run on a tightrope, and even as the monster began to press down on the masonry she raised her voice.

“Song,” she called out.

Two glimpses in quick succession, barely more than a heartbeat each, just enough that she timed her step forward perfectly with when stone cracked and the half of the tower she stood on broke off like a snapped bit of biscuit – and used that last moment of solid ground to throw herself at the surprised creature. Shit, she thought as she sailed through the air powerless, she had judged the height right – was set to land on its head – but now all it needed was to move its head slightly and it would impale her with its frontal horn.

“Song,” she screamed as the creature bemusedly angled its head so she would skewer herself.

The sound of the shot swallowed the end of the name. The wild, equine left eye of the monster burst into wet pulp. Not all the way through, just a thick chunk of it, but as the thick black ichor squelched the monster turned to roar at the source of its pain and Angharad only hit the body of the horn with her shoulder, falling in a sprawl atop the creature’s craggy hide. Rolling down the back of its neck, bouncing off like it was a bed of rocks, she fumblingly drew her blade and hacked at the hide in an attempt to find purchase

After hewing through the upper layer the blade got stuck, like an axe in a too-large piece of firewood, and though it almost wrenched her arm out of its socket Angharad was able to stop her fall using it. Momentarily so, for the monster screamed in anger and twisted, shaking itself, and her blade came loose – the mirror-dancer with it. Angharad flew.

She sailed through the cold night air, about to hit the top of the tower from the other side of the palace, but before she could break at least an arm and likely a leg darkness bloomed in front of her – a ball of Gloam forming with a crisp pop, which she hit head on. It was unnaturally soft, eating the impact, though Angharad struggled to keep hold of it with only one hand free. She slid down, only to realize that the sphere was already dissolving, falling apart like rain sliding down a windowpane, and reforming three feet beneath her.

She landed atop it and, madly, was able to simply leap down onto solid ground from this height of a mere ten feet. Angharad landed in a roll even as the monster smashed through the reformed sphere of Gloam, a man’s voice suddenly crying out in pain, then it began to furiously attack the ground where she had been a moment earlier – but no longer, wind screaming behind her from the monstrous blows as she ran for the open grounds of Misery Square. The beast pursued, by the sound of it, but Angharad could not afford to turn or slow so she glimpsed instead. Saw how the massive lemure caught up to her in barely an instant to- huh.

Angharad emerged from the glimpse and lengthened her stride, knowing she was mere moments away from… just as the titan’s shadow swallowed her whole, telling the tale of how it stood over her, she was swallowed by a flock of Gloam-black birds. Rooks, cawing and flapping and not a single one of them so much as brushing her cloak even as she took a hard turn left. The beast struck at the flock, guessing, but Angharad’s veering meant all she felt was a burst of wind and pressure that sent her stumbling forward.

It smashed more than a few Gloam-rooks, but by the way the creature then screamed it must have felt like kicking a thornbush.

Emerging from the flock, she caught herself on the offered arm waiting there. Maryam pulled her back on steady footing, slowly stepping back as the witch’s cold blue eyes studied on the monster like she was preparing to carve it up on a cutting board.

“My blade did not work well,” she told her friend. “Spears might get through.”

If that dense layer of skin beneath the hide was not too thick, and whoever thrust that spear knew their business.

“Go tell Song,” Maryam replied. “We’re to stay here and contain.”

We, Angharad saw, meant a coven of six Akelarre. Maryam, naturally, then a pair of Someshwari – the man from the Third, something Banerjee, and the Ninth Brigade’s own witch. She bore the same surname, and looked like him enough to pass as a sister. Then there was Qianfan from the Eleventh, already tracing a wobbling Sign in the air, and with him – to her genuine surprise, the Emain twins, who pressed the palms of one hand together while tracing with the other in an eerily simultaneous way.

A heartbeat later, through the simple subtraction of not having recognized Qianfan’s voice as the pained one earlier, she nodded at… Riwik, Ritil? No, Ritwik Banerjee. She nodded her thanks at Ritwik Banerjee for the Sign that had saved her from the fall, getting a surprised nod back in reply.

“Tristan?” she asked Maryam.

“Hasn’t emerged, but he can take care of himself,” Maryam grimly replied, then clapped her shoulder. “Go.”

Angharad caught sight of the Emain twins finishing their identical Signs, which seemed almost familiar. They were, she realized when the monster tried to charge into the plaza but hit what seemed like an invisible pane of glass. It was the same Sign the captain of the Bluebell had once used, which meant… the monster screamed and tried to shoulder its way past the unseen wall, only to bounce off as if pushed. Ancestors, let that hold it.

She continued forward, almost running, as the opposite way came reinforcements for the Akelarre. Armed students gathered into a band of more than twenty. Skiritai and Stripes, by large, and Angharad recognized many of the faces. Musa, Lindiwe, Short Bibek. Captain Nenetl, Ferranda, Tristan Ballester. Yaq from the Twenty-Ninth, and besides him Princess Yaotl. Angharad’s respect for the latter went up a notch at the sight. The chatty Savant from the Ninth swaggered at the back of them, cutlass in hand, and inevitably Tupoc Xical had shown up.

He spared her a wink, which Angharad pretended not to have seen as she hurried to the knot of officers gathering at the heart of the rapidly emptying Misery Square. Already half the students were gone, most crammed and panicking in the streets to the south. She saw the black-cloaked mass slipping on the hills of rubble and uneven heights that were the reason everyone used Crescent Street instead, elbowing and clawing at each other as they tried to flee towards the Triangle and in doing so, blocked the garrison soldiers trying to reach the square.

The clever ones had fled through the griffon temple instead, whose grounds were overrun with warped shadow-touched trees but behind which stood Crescent Street. The garrison men she had heard earlier had come from the north of the square, watching over the tail end of Arsay Avenue, and they were hurriedly redeploying to back the Akelarre students as well – but there were barely twenty of them, and their heaviest armaments were muskets. They would be no salvation.

If answers were to come, it would be from the officers she was looking at now: a small council of brigade captains, urgently talking. Vivek Lahiri from the First and Sebastian Camaron from the Ninth, Guadalupe de Tovar from the Second and Philani from the Thirty-Eight. And among them Song Ren, listening expressionlessly as others talked.

“-keep it contained until the garrison arrives,” Captain de Tovar was saying. “They will bring cannons and senior Navigators.”

“Signs can hurt it, we’ve seen that,” Sebastian Camaron insisted. “We need to kill it now, all in, before it turns tricky on us.”

He saw her approach at the same time Song did, and was faster on the trigger than Angharad’s own captain.

“Lady Tredegar, you return in glory,” he called out, gesturing for her to come closer. “Please, help me talk sense into them.”

Come closer she did, but there ended her gift.

“I return alive through the grace of the Akelarre Guild, mostly,” Angharad dismissed. “And I can tell you this: I swung with most of my strength and good steel at that hide only to barely cut into it.”

Grimaces bloomed.

“We are not armed for this fight,” Vivek Lahiri stated. “Pistols and swords to kill a dantesvara? It will be a slaughter.”

Dantesvara? So the monster had a name. Would that she spoke any of the Someshwari tongues so she might understand what it meant.

“Guadalupe is right,” he continued, “but I say she does not go far enough: we need to prepare a full withdrawal. Hold it until the scholar covenants are most of the way back to the Triangle then retreat after them.”

“If we leave that thing loose in the city, there is no telling where it will strike next,” Captain Philani warned. “It could be waiting on the road to Scholomance tomorrow, or even pursue us while we are split up and running instead of together and on war footing.”

“If it pursues us while we head south, it will run into the garrison’s fixed defenses,” Captain de Tovar said. “I can only pray it makes that mistake.”

Angharad’s gaze bounced back from one to another, as if following a twig carried by the current, but Song caught her eye and motioned for them to step away. None of the other captains commented, already back at their argument. Song spared a moment to squeeze Angharad’s arm, as if to reassure them both she had made it back, then lowered her voice.

“Your assessment on the odds spears could kill it?” she asked.

Angharad did not hesitate.

“They will punch through the hide,” she said, “but I have doubts then can pierce deep enough for a kill.”

She paused.

“If Tupoc has his segmented spear, the one with candlesteel-”

A glance.

“He does,” Song said, casually picking out a minute detail on a single man in the middle of a moving group across a chaotic Gloam-plagued square at night, as if it were nothing unusual.

It was easy to forget, sometimes, that reading contracts was not necessarily the most dangerous part of what Song Ren wielded.

“That I give decent odds,” Angharad said.

“Signs?” Song asked.

“It shook off that daze eventually, and while it clearly hated stepping on Maryam’s rooks…”

“We have no guarantees a Sign could kill it,” Song finished. “Vivek is right, then. We need to withdraw.”

“We could try to blind it in its second eye before we do,” Angharad suggested.

It ought to ease the retreat. Beyond the immediate distraction of pain blinding the dantesvara did not seem to have slowed it much, admittedly, but finishing the set ought to help.

“That won’t do much. The eyes are essentially ichor blood clots that it uses to sense things through the aether. Bursting them won’t blind it, only blur its perception a bit.”

They both startled. Standing right behind them, having approached quietly enough neither of them noticed, was a bespectacled Someshwari. Short, barely Shalini’s height, and slender of frame though her long and beautiful brown hair – kept in a thick three-strand braid – made her look larger. She had streaks of soot on her forehead and clearly rubbed more off her spectacles. Angharad frowned for she could swear she had seen movement around the stranger’s collar, a pale little thing scuttling.

“Ishanvi,” Song greeted the stranger. “You know this lemure? Captain Vivek knew the name from its appearance but precious little else.”

“It is a dantesvara,” the woman who must be Ishanvi Kapadia said. “Also called odontotyrannos, tooth-tyrants. A kind of lemure, dwelling mostly in southern Someshwar and only in large rivers.”

“Not horn-tyrants?” Angharad asked, surprised.

She snuck a look at the dantesvara, who was still raging against the invisible wall put up by the Emain twins – though others seemed to be bolstering their work, hemming it in. The three massive horns curving off the creature’s head were by far the most eye-catching part, two going towards the sides like an ox’s while the third curved forward past the head. Why would the Someshwari instead name it after- the dantesvara blinked its distressingly horse-like eyes, then lowered its jaw and revealed a malevolent ocean of teeth.

None larger than a knife, many slightly curved and jutting out haphazardly of the slavering gray flesh like weeds in a garden. They covered the entire roof of the mouth and the bottom of the throat, disappearing into the dark as the Lord of Teeth bellowed loud enough to rattle the ground.

“Question withdrawn,” Angharad faintly said.

Both were kind enough not to comment.

“What are its weaknesses?” Song bluntly asked.

The author’s narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

“Cannons,” Ishanvi replied equally bluntly. “Armies, if you’re not too picky about the casualties. The Chronicles of Kanore claim silver burns them and they shy away from Glare, but neither will kill it. The memoirs of Raja Padamel claim it is frightened by great joy and great sorrow, but Padamel-”

“Also claimed he was the son of seven brother-gods and could walk on air because he was weighed down by no earthly desires,” Song flatly said.

“- was known to embroider in his accounts,” Ishanvi finished, looking a little irked. “Yes.”

She then cocked her head to the side. Angharad could have sworn she heard squeaking.

“The Lords of Teeth are theorized by some Savituri orders to be broken gods that the Second Empire brought to make war and were left behind in defeat,” Ishanvi added. “If true, then as all gods do they would have a bane.”

It was not that part Angharad honed in on, though she did fit it to her first thought.

“They live in rivers, you said?” Angharad asked.

“Exclusively,” Ishanvi agreed. “Rajas leave tend to leave them alone because they do not breed and they eat other lemures. They are quite intelligent, if not in the same way that men are.”

“I do not know how it ended up so far inland, or why such a creature is on Tolomontera at all,” Angharad said, “but it seems to me it will want to return to water.”

Song breathed out.

“And it is intelligent enough to be tricked by mind-affecting Signs, as when it was dazed earlier,” her captain finished. “If the Akelarre make it believe there is water near, it might well charge that way.”

Angharad nodded with a smile.

“A working plan,” Song said, sliding a look Ishanvi’s way. “Come, we will need to convince-”

The first and only warning they had was twin screams – the sisters Emain, letting out a sound like their nails had just been ripped out.

By the time Angharad had turned to look, there were already three dead blackcloaks.

No telling who, the corpses were little more than red splatter, and in the span of a single heartbeat what a situation handled became utter catastrophe. Plumes of smoke bloomed, the garrison men shooting their muskets as the Lord of Teeth barreled into the vanguard. Angharad swallowed drily as a man was casually stepped on, crushed like a red sugar cube. The jaws snapped open, shut, and blood flew – two more dead, and Sleeping God that was Tupoc missing an arm. It’d not been ten breaths since it got loose.

“We retreat,” Song said, tone forcefully even. “Get Maryam, I’ll get Tristan.”

Angharad wanted to argue, to demand they stay, but all she could think of was swinging her blade at that hide and what little it had done. What could she do when facing the beast, besides mar its hide? She did not have the means, the tools to kill such a monster. No one had come ready for this fight.

“You know where he is?” she asked.

“I know where he was,” Song grimly said. “And if he has any sense, he’ll find me.”

Angharad put down her hesitation, nodded and got moving. Twenty steps to where Maryam stood, to get her out before the Lord of Teeth finished with the vanguard. One, two, three – three strides, seven corpses. The monster did not even crush them with the jaw, just snapped them up to be torn to shreds by the teeth. Screaming. It echoed from inside its gullet, like a dimmed song. Spears punched into his hide, muskets shot point-blank tore through flesh and its eyes were shot so much they flew into chunks but the Lord of Teeth ignored the blows as if they were rainwater.

Fourth stride, death. Fifth, death. Sixth, deaths. Like ants under the boot of a cruel child.