Chapter 23

They met the Twenty-Ninth Brigade at the square in front Scholomance a quarter before noon, Captain Emeni Maziya and her three cabalists proving punctual.

That was common with Malani, Song had found. While they tended to loop in a turn of phrase so they would not be lying should they happen to arrive late, generally speaking they abhorred not being on time unless it was tradition that they should be. It was a refreshing change compared to the Watch and Tianxi bureaucracies, which were rightly infamous for chronic lateness.

“Captain Song,” Emeni Maziya greeted her, offering her hand.

Maziya was cut from the same cloth as Angharad, physically: tall and shapely, with the muscled arms of someone trained for hard combat. Her hair was pulled into four large Malani knots that must make wearing a hat impossible, the rest of her head appearing nearly shaved.

“Captain Emeni,” she replied, shaking it.

Their tones were cordial, but neither pretended anything beyond that. While the Stripes were not so many that they did not all know each other by name, Song had only rarely crossed paths with Emeni Maziya. The Twenty-Ninth had been careful to stay out of the rivalries between the leading companies, hewing closest to Ferranda’s brigade and what had been Captain Anaya’s Twenty-Third before her death at Misery Square.

“We secured the discussed supplies without difficulty,” Captain Emeni told her. “Any trouble on your end?”

“Everything is in hand,” Song replied.

It had been unfortunate that the price of rope in town had mysteriously doubled the day before the exploration was to begin in earnest, but not for Song. She’d bought her within day of Misery Square.

“As I recall, Ishanvi Kapadia is meant to be waiting close by,” the other woman said.

“She should be at the gates,” Song agreed. “Shall we?”

“By all means.”

She could almost feel Maryam rolling her eyes at her, and from Emeni’s lot there were a few amused looks. She turned a scowl on her friend – so what if Stripes liked their formalities? It was important to maintain the appropriate degree of professionalism when working with another cabal. It was a quick walk across the square, which was nearly deserted. By now the morning classes were finished and few students lingered in the school’s shadow any longer than they had to.

Ishanvi stood before the gates exactly as promised, though only one of half a dozen underclassmen waiting around. They talked a little too loudly, Song thought, laughed just a tad too shrill – and their eyes never quite left the entrance, the façade and the great open gates of stained glass behind which lurked eldritch lights. You could almost smell the fear on them. It’d been five days since classes had begun: the way Song had it told to her, already four first years had been taken by the god in the walls.

The Someshwari girl extricated herself from conversation with a smile, Song raising an eyebrow in approval as she saw how thoroughly equipped the Ishanvi was. That she would be in fighting fit was only to be expected, but Ishanvi had come bearing a blunderbuss, a pistol and a large curved blade almost too short to count as a sword. Khadga, Song recalled it was named. She had thought them ceremonial weapons meant solely for religious rites, but evidently not.

“Good afternoon,” Ishanvi called out.

Looking rather less disheveled than when they last met. She was holding up under the pressure, then.

“Ishanvi,” Song greeted her back. “Allow me to make introductions. You already know Maryam and myself, of course.”

The Laurel inclined her head in confirmation, offering a friendly smile.

“A pleasure to see you both again,” she said.

“You’re not dead,” Maryam noted. “Good work.”

Considering Ishanvi’s cheer did not so much as waver at that, it was a shame the girl was history track among the Arthashastra Society. The diplomats had lost a promising recruit.

“Leading the Twenty-Ninth Brigade, Captain Emeni Maziya,” Song pressed on.

The woman in question nodded a greeting. Captain Emeni had been skeptical about the addition of a first year to their delving crew, but been convinced when Song mentioned Ishanvi’s claim to have read the old Watch records from when the Glass Repository was last accessible.

“Silumko of Malan,” Song said. “Krypteia.”

The Mask inclined to tinkering, a tall and twitchy Malani with a broken nose and brown eyes. Tristan liked him, having described him ‘an eminently practical man’. He’d also been about her own Mask’s match in a fistfight last year, so unless he’d sunk a great deal of time training up then even Maryam was likely capable of taking him in a brawl.

“Well met,” Ishanvi nodded.

“That blunderbuss,” Silumko lightly said, “is not a Watch pattern.”

“So it isn’t,” Ishanvi cheerfully agreed.

And added nothing else. To Song’s muted amusement, the Mask actually seemed to approve.

“Yayauhqi of Izcalli,” Song said. “Skiritai Guild.”

The man in question was even taller than Izel, his heavily scarred cheek lending him a grisly look. Song thought his preference for Izcalli leaf daggers was almost incongruous given that he was a mountain of muscle.

“Call me Yaq,” he said.

“And their fourth-”

“Cemelli Popo,” the woman in question cut in. “Peiling Society. I believe we came across each other at the welcome ceremony a few nights back.”

“When you explained the Ossuary boards with Andreu Claver, yes,” Ishanvi confirmed.

“I am a physician by trade,” Cemelli told her. “Most of my pack is dedicated to the purpose, so feel free to call on my services as we delve.”

The small, thick-waisted Aztlan hadn’t been anywhere as friendly with Maryam or herself, Song noted. That was College societies for you. She personally found Cemelli interesting, because the girl in question not only spoke Antigua without any trace of a Centzon accent but her hair was pulled back into a perfect Mazu topknot. That and she was contracted to a goddess Song had never heard of before for the power to slow or accelerate the flow of blood at a touch. A useful skill, for a physician.

The Twenty-Ninth was one of those brigades that Song struggled to place. They had ranked twenty-first in Colonel Cao’s rankings, firmly in the middle, but Captain Emeni did not seem in a hurry to change this. Her brigade did not have an obvious specialty, either, looking at its makeup. Song saw few intersections to their skills, and the one she thought most likely was thorny if true – and strange for a Malani to be taking up, besides.

With everyone here the seven of them proceeded past the gates into the antechamber, then into the great hall where the exploration crews had already begun to gather. The gates in the back that had led to the throne room for graduation were long gone, but Song could see how three doorways out of the hall had been forced to remain in place by metal spikes in the ground. The garrison must have arrived early and put in the work, because none of that had been there yesterday morning.

In the center of the hall stood two dozen garrison soldiers, including those bearing the large devices known as yatrameters, and few Akelarre guildsmen stood with them. Song only recognized the one, Professor Balthazar Formosa. As the head instructor for the Akelarre students, he was the best-known face of the Navigators in Allazei even if it was Captain Yue who headed the lodge.

The students steered clear of the garrison men, leaving an unspoken moat of empty room around them, and unlike the meet at the Colored Arches there was little mingling this time. Nerves and wariness had everyone keeping to their own delving crews, maintaining a healthy distance from one another.

Song suppressed a grimace at the sight of Vivek Lahiri and Captain Philani quietly chatting near one of the doorways to the right. Of all the alliances here, these two were going to be the most difficult to beat to the Repository. Imani Langa was eyeing the pair from across the room, perhaps thinking the same, though she had to look away when something Tupoc drawled forced her to turn his way with a scowl.

Well, if two Stripes had ever deserved each other.

Finding Nathi Morcant and his Forty-Ninth was as simple as checking where Maryam was glaring. The Pereduri was in a corner, surrounded by his brigade and addressing what had to be at least ten spellbound first years. Most of them were independents, several Skiritai. Captain Emeni, who walked at her side, let out a thoughtful hum when she caught Song looking.

“He’s an ambitious little prick, that one,” Emeni Maziya said. “He’s secured an invitation to our next supper, in case you were unaware.”

Song had been, but she offered the other woman a mysterious smile instead of saying as much. Bad news. The informal supper society that the Malani nobleborn had formed did not have much influence, but it did provide connections and that was the last thing she wanted Morcant to get more of. I will have to talk to Angharad.

“You do not seem enthusiastic at the notion of his company,” she said.

“The Morcant are the worst kind of social climbers,” Captain Emeni scorned. “I hear they gave their children Malani first names as part of an attempt to have their house taken out of the Pereduri peerage and added directly to the rolls of nobility.”

Which was, going by her tone, apparently a grave sin. It sounded like complete yiwu nonsense to Song, but she would consult her specialist on the matter and hope that shed some light on the dramatics. She hummed thoughtfully, as if considering the implications, then changed the subject.

“We should stake a claim on a doorway as early as we can,” Song suggested. “Better to have the other crews nipping at our heels than barring our way.”

“Sensible,” Captain Emeni approved.

There were two doorways on the right, but the two largest alliances of second years – the First and Thirty-Eighth on one hand, the Fourth and Eleventh on the other – were already lounging by them quite aggressively. The sole doorway to the left, tucked in behind a pillar, had only the Eighth Brigade and a gaggle of first years near it. The choice to be made here was clear. Their alliance closed ranks and moved forward together.

Saran Pillao, captain to the Eighth Brigade, was a passing acquaintance of Song’s but did not look particularly happy to see her approach. The Someshwari ground his teeth, eyes flicking across their number with growing frustration.

“It would be best if you took a walk, Saran,” Captain Emeni lightly said.

“We’ve parity in Skiritai,” he replied.

Song lightly laid her hand on the pommel of her jian.

“That won’t be enough,” she told him.

Captain Saran’s slender mustache trembled in anger. He was not, Song saw with some trepidation, looking like a man about to fold. Must she-

“Zama. Get your logos out or fuck off – we’re serious about taking point.”

Maryam took a step past her, hood still down, and locked eyes with the Eighth’s mute signifier. A long moment passed, then Zama Luvuno sighed and shook his head. He clapped his captain’s shoulder and walked away, to Saran’s visible startlement. It took the wind out of the Someshwari’s sails, and though he shot them a glare he was too taken aback to keep it up. He followed after his Navigator, still looking a little disbelieving.

A moment passed, then Song cleared her throat.

“Get your logos out or fuck off?” she repeated, a little disbelieving herself.

“I’m sorry, Song,” Maryam said, tone heavy with sarcasm. “Should I have said ‘would you kindly present your logos to my unworthy eyes, Master Luvuno, or perhaps fornicate outwards’?”

“Well,” Song said. “So long as you know.”

There were a few choking sounds behind her. Ah, right, the Twenty-Ninth was still present.

“So that’s why they’re training up a Laurel,” she heard Cemelli whisper.

“I think Abrascal is their main diplomat right now,” Silumko whispered back.

“The snail poison guy?”

Clearing her throat, Song forced herself to cease listening. Their crew spread out around the doorway, the few first years that had been lingering retreating further away at the sight. Song spared a look at what lay past the door: beyond the threshold she could see narrow stairs going up in a spiral, but little more. She was startled out of her study of the stairs by Maryam leaning in close.

“I’ve just been asked for a chat,” she murmured. “I’ll be right back.”

Song slowly nodded. She leaned back against the wall and kept an eye on her Navigator, talking with Captain Emeni to keep it from being obvious. Maryam walked towards the center of the room and, as if by happenstance, within moments was joined by Amaru Wayar and a Lierganen signifier that Song did not recognize. They spoke quickly, Maryam laughed and then they parted. Had she not been told, Song would have thought the entire meeting coincidental.

Song cocked an eyebrow at her friend when she returned.

“Two things,” Maryam said. “Professor Formosa will make announcement that the delve starts in a few minutes, and it would be best if we do not move towards the center of the room when it happens.”

“Why?” Song frowned.

“Because every crew without a Navigator along is going to be given a stark lesson on why that was a mistake,” Maryam said.

She then cleared her throat, looking at the other captain present.

“No need for concern, Maziya,” Maryam said. “The Akelarre have set terms of engagement – so long as you stick with us, you’re protected by them.”

Emeni Maziya’s face was unreadable.

“Duly noted,” she replied.

It unfolded like Maryam had said: Balthazar Formosa soon called for their attention and pointed out the three captured doorways as the starting paths. Many of the students present approached the center of the hall to hear him better – but not, Song noted, any of the second-year alliances.

“Officers carrying yatrameters will follow along behind you but they will not endanger themselves beyond the strictly necessary,” Professor Formosa said. “Proceed with care.”

He waved his hand after that, adding a casual ‘dismissed’ without even bothering with a wish of good luck, but the crowd was in no place to mind.

The moment the last syllable had left Balthazar Formosa’s mouth, students began to drop.

Song watched with horror as an unseen current went through first and second years alike, toppling them like domino tiles. A few realized what was happening, drawing blades or pistols, but there was no obvious opponent. Within thirty heartbeats of it beginning, every single student without a signifier in their crew was on the ground, eyes open and breathing shallowly. Stuck in a daze.

On the other side of the room, Amaru Wayar and the Lierganen from earlier gripped wriggling, trembling glyphs of Gloam.

“Don’t make noise,” Maryam quietly said. “It’s an easy Sign to spread, but it’s just as easy to break.”

Well, that was one way to secure a head start.

Professor Formosa looked utterly unsurprised and sent out the garrison soldiers in small squads. Four men led by an officer carrying the yatrameter joined them quickly enough. The young Malani lieutenant introduced himself to the crew as ‘Felicity-of-the-Faithful’.

“Aptronymist, huh?” Captain Emeni sympathetically asked.

“My family is,” the man sighed. “I am not particularly religious.”

Ah, another Redeemer cult. Song thought she might have heard of this one before – they argued that names shaped nature, and thus children should be named what they would become. Evidently Lieutenant Felicity had elicited not to become a sangoma, one of the infamous Redeemer priests, so the doctrine was about as sensible as it sounded. The lieutenant and his four fellow soldiers, who carried heavy packs on their backs, followed their party up the stairs. It was a mere minute before they reached the summit, and at the end waited a dark chamber past a doorless threshold.

Song stepped in, lantern high, and checked for immediate dangers. There were none, thus room was made for the lieutenant to come up and check the room with his device. Lieutenant Felicity took one step in, glanced down at the yatramater then nodded.

“It’s a path forward.”

Song took point with the lantern in hand, Silumko at her side. The room looked unremarkable: an abandoned antechamber that had once held decorative busts, though now all that was left were the six stone plinths on either side. She took her time, checking the ceiling – which was strangely arched in a way that did not well fit the chamber, a hint that Scholomance had meddled with the room – and then the walls, but there was nothing out of sorts. The door at the end was thick wood with a lock. The two of them slowly crossed the room, the rest following behind, and came to stop before the door.

There Song crouched, halfheartedly wishing that Tristan was here, but Silumko produced lockpicks of his own. Leaning closer to the lock, she glanced at the inside and-

“Don’t,” she said, catching the Mask’s wrist.

“Ren?”

Moving them both to the side, she unsheathed her jian and poked at the edge of the lock. Immediately two thin needles punched a foot forward out of the lock, their points coated in something oily. Without batting an eye she smashed down the pommel of her sword, snapping the needles off.

“There’s no room to turn a key inside the lock,” she told Silumko. “Only the mechanism popping these out. It must open some other way.”

The dark-skinned man passed a hand through his hair.

“Bracing,” he said. “The old girl isn’t going to take it easy on us today, it seems.”

“That or Scholomance considers poison needles to be taking it easy,” Song replied.

He shot her an amused look but did not answer.

“Let’s have a look around,” Captain Emeni said. “There must be something we can use.”

Song made a point of nudging away the broken needles so no one would step on them as the rest of their company spread around the room, lanterns in hand and poking around carefully. No one wanted to find out firsthand what those needles had been coated with. It was Maryam that picked up on the trail, having stood motionless in the middle of the room for the better part of a minute with her eyes closed.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

“The plinths all have some sort of machinery beneath them,” she said.

While the pedestals could not be inclined forward or back when pushed, Captain Emeni discovered that they could be pivoted.

“There was some sort of puzzle with the busts here,” Ishanvi said. “They must have been removed so we would have no hint to go on.”

Ah, but while the busts themselves were gone Song found that after wiping clean the dust around the plinths there were faint marks of wear that gave away some of the angles – some of the busts had been looking at each other, either diagonally or across. It took them about ten minutes of fiddling about and elimination to match the four pedestals that the marks on the stone had not outed, after which the lock on the door at the end of the chamber popped open. It came slightly ajar.

“Solved,” Lieutenant Felicity said, popping his head back and whistling. “Bring out a spike, lads. Nail it down.”

The garrison men walked in, one carrying the metal spike while the others brought large hammers, and as the first man knelt to hold the spike in place the exploration crew assembled to move to the next room. There was no need to worry about their way back being lost so long as someone stood in the room – Scholomance could not change or move a chamber someone was standing in.

Beyond the chamber stood a long hall of pristine white marble, a perfect rectangle about a hundred feet long interrupted only by the small oil lamps that hung from the ceiling on chains. It ended in an open threshold, without even a door. Lieutenant Felicity popped in long enough to confirm the yatrameter marked the room as heading closer to the Glass Repository, then doubled back.

“Long hallway, well lit,” Silumko muttered. “Ten ramas there’ll be pendulum traps.”

“Only a fool would take that,” Song snorted.

She took a pebble from her pouch and tossed it down the hall. The clatter echoed lightly, but nothing else happened. Not a simple trigger, then. Weight, perhaps? Silumko had knelt by her, a stubby longview in hand, and he suddenly chuckled.

“Left side, ten feet,” he said.

Song’s silver gaze flicked there, and after a beat she found what he had: a shallow depression in the stone, which started about a third of the wall’s height then went all the way up to the ceiling then all the way across it. It was just wide enough, she saw, for a swinging blade.

“Pendulum trap,” she agreed.

“Already?” Maryam whined.

Song heard her sigh, then the clinking of coin and Yaq letting out a pleased grunt. Goddamnit, Maryam. Knowing what to look for now, Song found another pendulum blade at twenty feet on the right, thirty on the left again, and this way again and again at ten feet intervals – until the last two, which were both to the right. Scholomance’s idea of getting tricky, perhaps. Yaq went in first this time, a long wooden pole in hand.

He waved it around about ten feet in, and after a beat a large half-moon shaped blade cut swung down from the ceiling to disappear in the wall. The Skiritai had pulled back his pole in time, and instead of proceeding forward they tested three more times to find out the interval at which the trap reset. Once it swung, one would have just shy of three seconds before the blade swung back. If you kept to the opposite side and relatively low then the blade should miss you outright, but they agreed it was best not to take the risk.

Yaq crossed. He strode a few feet further then picked up the pebble Song had thrown, but the sight of it had her frowning. For a moment, looking at the stone, she could have sworn it… moved?

“Wait,” she called out. “There is something.”

Yaq paused, cocking an eyebrow at her. Song put out her musket, prompting the pendulum to fall, and crossed in the same breath it passed her. She knelt down afterwards, trying to get a better angle of where the pebble had been – and she saw it again. A slight movement in what should be solid stone. Stiffening, she glanced back and studied the floor there before she slowly resumed advancing through the hall.

The marble near the door was pure white, but the closer the floor got to the middle of the hall the more translucent it became. The movement she had seen? Bubbles, inside water. That’s why the god put lamps in the room, so the reflection of light on polished marble hides the effect.

“It’s an ice trap,” Song flatly said. “The floor thins the closer we get to the middle, we’d fall right through.”

And whatever was waiting for them in the water would not let them leave it so easily. Gods, if not for the peculiarities of her eyes she would not have been able to see through the reflection. Curses all around, and now the danger of the room became clearer: they were going to have to crawl while pushing forward their supplies, never putting too much weight on the floor at once even as blades swung above them.

Maryam was the lightest among them, even though she was taller than Ishanvi, so she went first. The marble on the other side of the hallway grew thick again, so once her friend was past the middle of the hall they were able to make a rough daisy chain by tossing her bags and her tossing them on the other side. It took a quarter-hour, then Maryam herself crossed all the way through and a knot loosened in Song’s shoulders. They went in presumed weight order after that: Ishanvi, Cemelli, Song, Silumko.