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.”

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.

“Relics?”

“Nobles,” Yong explained, smiling.

There was a calm certainty behind that smile, the look of a man who knew the way the world was headed and that its road would inevitably be paved with the graves of his enemies. And who was the Tristan to argue that? The Tianxi still chopped kings into four pieces, whenever they got their hands on them, and no crown in Vesper had been able to make them stop. Parting ways with the still-smiling man, Tristan flicked a glance Sarai’s way. She was sitting alone, Aines and Felis giving her wide berth, and while Vanesa had not been driven off by the pale skin the bespectacled old woman was sound asleep.

He’d barely exchanged twenty words with her since her face was revealed, Tristan realized. They’d had to run half a day and he’d spent all his time since camp was made seeing to wounds. Perhaps a conversation truly was due, even if exhaustion was catching up to him. Sitting across from Sarai’s pack, the thief popped his neck and let out a little sigh of satisfaction at the ensuing crack. He got an unimpressed look from the dark-haired woman for it.

“You could have done that before coming over,” she said.

“And let you miss out?” Tristan charmingly smiled. “You wound me.”

“Do it again and I just might,” Sarai threatened, but her lips twitched. “I can’t stand the sound.”

“I will take that in due consideration,” the thief assured her.

There was a pause, and as he met her eyes he reached for his thumb with deliberate obviousness and the most obnoxious grin in his repertoire.

“Don’t you dare,” she warned.

“How’s the face?” Tristan idly asked.

“Fine,” she warily said, eye still on his thumb, “the cuts aren’t deep and-”

The thief pulled at his thumb before she could finish the sentence, the small crack of the joint popping getting an indignant cry out of her. He was forced to shield his face with his arms when she began enthusiastically beating him with her veil. By the time she’d finished retaliating, the two of them were grinning. Sarai shook her head, reluctantly pleased.

“The cuts won’t even scar,” she told him. “I’ve had worse shaving my legs. How are your burns?”

“Better than they’ve any right to be,” he honestly replied. “They’re clean and the flesh is red instead of black, which is a good sign.”

That he felt pain around it was a good sign, for great burns bit deep enough you could no longer feel pain there at all.

“The bruise on my side is more of a pain,” Tristan said. “It’s a good thing I already slept on my back.”

“I’ll be doing the same for a few weeks, I’d think,” Sarai grunted. “Shallow they may be, but I can’t rest on them without hissing.”

He nodded in sympathy, the two of them sitting in comfortable silence for a while. It was him that broke it, almost to his regret.

“Are we going to talk about it?” he idly asked.

The secret that’d come out, all the petty little things tied to it.

“No,” Sarai replied.

He cocked his head to the side.

“If we survive the trials?”

“Then I’ll give you my name,” Sarai agreed. “My real one. If you want more, you’ll have to trade in kind.”

A fair bargain, as tended to be her way.

“Past is past,” Tristan shrugged. “I am more interested in what is to come.”

A request for information less dear but more immediately pressing. How far did Sarai intend to go, on this Dominion of Lost Things? Blue eyes considered him.

“By the end of these trials,” Sarai said, “I will be wearing a black cloak.”

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“That is my aim as well,” Tristan replied, pleased and not hiding it.

It meant their alliance could continue until the end. With Yong intending to join the Watch as well, he would have two reliable companions to go into the coming trials with. Sarai passed a hand through her dark tresses, face closing, then let out a sigh.

“This year’s trials,” she said, lowering her voice, “are not like the others.”

He stared at her unblinking.

“Some of us were marked for more than simply joining the Watch,” Sarai said.

He could not muster much surprise. He had known something was off since first setting foot on the Bluebell. Some things were not adding up: Abuela had given him a shot at Cozme Aflor and a pair of Cerdan by sending him here, but there had been other ways. His mentor did not simply want him in the Watch, she had wanted him on that particular ship. Why?

“You are one of those chosen few, I take it?” Tristan asked.

“I am,” she said, smiling faintly. “But so are you.”

Despite their best effort, that knowledge did more to keep him awake than the bruises.

—

The tall grass felt sinister, now that they knew what might be waiting for them hiding behind the stalks.

Their company had taken wounds, enough to smell of blood, and that meant they had to worry about more than the cultists of the Red Eye now that they’d broken camp and resume their march. Lupines would prefer the open plains to the tall grass they were cutting through, but there were many kinds of lemures out there. The first creatures they found, though, were not lemures at all. Early in the morning Aines let out a small scream that had them all going for weapons, but what she had almost stumbled over did not end up warranting such dread: on the ground were a pair of wobbly carapace globes, from which tails with maces at the end protruded. The tails were being waved menacingly, though Tristan would have felt rather more menaced if the creature it belonged to was not cowering blindly inside its carapace.