Chapter 23

One more joined their number.

Yaretzi was the last, approaching her on the evening when Tupoc and Lord Ishaan’s crews went scouting ahead. The Aztlan did not look any worse for the labors of the first trial, her tanned face without mark and her practical clothes – a sleeveless stripe blouse above a long patchwork skirt, all of it under a thick sailor’s coat – barely scuffed. The earrings dangling from her ears were of the same copper-gold as Tupoc’s, but they were set with blue stones. They drew attention to her sultry dark eyes.

“Turquoise?” Angharad asked, touching her ear as the other woman sat.

Yaretzi looked surprised, even pleased.

“Indeed,” she said. “I was part of the Turquoise Society before leaving Izcalli.”

Angharad cocked an eyebrow.

“I thought Izcalli societies were named after animals,” she said. “Jaguars, eagles and the like.”

“Warrior societies are,” Yaretzi corrected. “Izcalli cosmology separates the world into three spheres, one of which is war. As a diplomat I was part of the second sphere, culture, whose societies are named after precious stones.”

“And the third?” she curiously asked.

“Trade,” Yaretzi said. “In the sense of occupation, not the mercantile, though that is also covered. It is the third sphere and the least, though still above okse – the other, that which is not in the spheres.”

“I will hazard a guess that this is where foreigners are counted,” Angharad said.

“It is hardly our fault that they did not have the good sense to be born Izcalli,” she said, lips twitching.

“I can only apologize for the slight,” the noblewoman gravely replied.

“I will forgive you this once,” Yaretzi allowed. “It is a difference in philosophy, the way the societies are named. A warrior seeks to embody the strengths of their emblem, but that is a personal distinction. A cultural society is named after precious stone because we seek for our service to Izcalli to be just as precious.”

“That is admirable,” Angharad said. “One’s honor is often found in service to that of others.”

It was the fundamental tenet of honor in the Isles, whose root was the High Queen. She was keeper of the honor of all Malan, its beginning and end, and could not die so long as the people of the Isles remained honorable.

“Mostly it teaches us to think differently than warrior society thugs,” Yaretzi said. “There are only so many flower wars you can start before you’re drowning in enemies instead of war prizes. I think our… friend Master Xical never quite learned that lesson.”

Angharad eyed her speculatively.

“But you did?”

“I have spent much of my life learning to read people,” the Aztlan smiled. “Which is why I can tell you with a degree of certainty that Shalini is one of the loveliest people you will ever meet, and also that if she suspects someone might be slight trouble for her Ishaan she will fire a shot into the back of their head without batting an eye.”

Yaretzi’s smile never wavered, though it pulled tight around the yes.

“A strong crew, those two have assembled, but until they have decided whether they are siblings or lovers I would much rather be part of yours,” she said. “It will do wonders for my nerves, if nothing else.”

Angharad choked, both at the glimpse into the private affairs of the Someshwari and the suddenness of the request.

“You can fight?” she coughed out.

Yaretzi stared flatly at her.

“My dear,” she said, “I was an Izcalli diplomat.”

That was fair enough, and so their company added another. They spent the rest of the afternoon preparing supplies and drilling basic formations at Angharad’s insistence, for a crew that did not know their place would only trip each over each other in a storm. Or so Mother had always said. Come evening she was satisfied everyone had elementary understanding of each other’s skill and would know where to stand when violence inevitably came knocking.

Now all that was left was to venture out.

—

Come morning the divisions had become clearly visible.

Three delving crews sat together for breakfast, and then the handful of spares who did not intend to venture out that day – Tristan, Sarai, Francho and Vanesa. Some off-color jests were made by Remund about why Tristan and Sarai might want to stay behind with only dotards as witnesses, but they petered out in the face of her obvious disapproval. Save for that misstep, the mood was pleasant. Yaretzi got along well with the pair she had shared the Trial of Lines with, though she tread carefully around Zenzele, and while the air between Song and Isabel was yet frosty the Tianxi found much to speak about with Inyoni.

That friendly air was shattered by Sergeant Mandisa, who made a round at every table with a wooden crate full of what Angharad finally saw to be small iron lanterns. None larger than a fist, charming but quite identical. Some Tianxi workshop must make them in bulk. The sergeant showed them the small engraved circle inside where they must put at least a drop of their blood, about where a candle would be were this a real lantern. Angharad pricked her forearm with a knife and smudged a drop inside as instructed.

“Why a lantern?” she asked Sergeant Mandisa.

“Same reason the Twenty Crowns used them,” Lady Inyoni idly cut in.

Angharad stared at her blankly, to the other woman’s confusion.

“Have you never read ‘The Empty Sea’?” she slowly asked.

Ah, the noblewoman thought. That would explain it. It was the third of the Great Works and from what she recalled only marginally more interesting that ‘The Vainglory’ and its incomprehensible mythologies or the endless litany of deaths and disasters that was ‘The Dead Shore’. Angharad had stopped trying to read it after Father admitted that though it purported to recount how the nations of her ancestors had sailed away from the dying Old World and journeyed to Vesper it was a largely philosophical book about the nature of mankind and its reflections on the eponymous Empty Sea.

Lots of finding islands where the lesson was that men were the real monsters all along, she’d heard.

“I began the Works with ‘The Ships of Morn’,” she admitted.

And ended them with the following work, The Madness of King Issay, she refrained from adding. That she had only read two of the nine Great Works was occasionally a slight embarrassment.

“Can’t blame her, I never read as anything half as depressing as The Dead Shore,” Sergeant Mandisa shared. “I’ve written up casualty lists that were more cheerful.”

“But you did read it, that’s the point,” Inyoni grumbled. “It is our common heritage, there’s a reason it’s mandatory.”

The grizzled older woman squinted at her.

“The Twenty Crowns, Lady Tredegar, our very own ancestors,” she said with an accusatory pointed finger, “found that our perceptions influence the aether. We associate lanterns with sight, with finding things, and so-”

“Gods will be able to use them to get at you,” Sergeant Mandisa completed. “You know, for the eating.”

Both of her gave her odd looks at the choice of word.

“I was raised Orthodox, they’re not spirits to me,” the sergeant informed them.

“It is your prerogative to be wrong,” Inyoni conceded.

“Hey now.”

“It is not her fault, she was never taught any better,” Angharad ‘excused’.

“And I was going to give you hints about the maze,” Mandisa said.

Inyoni raised an eyebrow.

“Were you really?”

A moment passed.

“No,” Mandisa confessed. “Gods, it’s like getting stared down by my own grandfather. Any moment now you’ll be asking why I haven’t found a husband yet.”

“And why is that, young lady?” Inyoni asked.

Sergeant Mandisa shivered, called the whole affair eerie and fled to another table. Angharad lost the war to keep her grin from showing, though she would admit she had not put up much of a fight. As breakfast slowly came to an end and it became clear that once more Beatris would not be joining them, Angharad’s lips thinned. Isabel had last evening admitted that she had not seen her maid in over a day, not even for meals, and that the Watch had refused to answer her questions. Since she no longer slept in the old stables like the rest of them and her personal affairs appeared to have been removed, it was suspected that she slept in the barracks with the blackcloaks.

Angharad sought and found Isabel’s eye. As they were all at the same table, a common company, it was not breaking the oath she had given Remund and must still heed.

“She may have retired from the trials,” Angharad said.

“And not even asked me for leave?” Isabel said, openly dubious. “The barracks are also where that charming old woman was operated, so there must be a physician’s office within. I expect she is simply sicker than anticipated.”

How much of that was genuine belief and how much was saving face at possibly having been abandoned by her handmaid Angharad could not tell, and now was not the time to plumb the depths of the question.

“Regardless, she is not to be counted among our company,” she said.

To that Isabel could only agree. They would be eight, then, and not nine.

After everyone finished breaking the last of their fast, when her crew went to get their packs, Angharad found herself approached by a pair she had so far had little to do with: Lord Ishaan Nair and Shalini Goel. Save their occasional cordial conversations on the Bluebell they had hardly spent a minute together, so this was unlikely to be a social call. Movement drew her eye and she found Song, ready and armed, already on her way. Isabel was behind her, talking to Remund with a faint air of irritation on her face. Pleased with the prompt reinforcements Angharad turned to meet the Someshwari pair with a polite smile just as Song came to stand at her side, mirroring Shalini.

“Lady Angharad,” Ishaan greeted her.

“Lord Ishaan,” she replied. “Good morning to you.”

“And you,” he easily said.

He looked better now, not at all wan or feverous as he had the days before. The unpleasantness brought on by his contract must have passed.

“Shalini.”

“Song.”

Their tones were strangely amused, given the banality of the situation. Were this another situation Angharad would have engaged the others in small talk, as her station demanded, but they had more pressing duties to attend to.

“May I be of assistance to you, Lord Ishaan?” she asked.

“It occurred to me that while we will part ways later,” the chubby-cheeked man said, “we could journey to the shrines together.”

The tone was casual, the implied offer was not. Angharad decided to set it out plainly.

“Mutual defense against Tupoc’s group on the way seems agreeable,” she said. “And it would be diplomatic to keep some distance in order to… avoid arguments.”

Zenzele Duma was a lord of Malan, he would no more break a truce than he would shoot a child out of the black, but temper were best left untested if possible.

“Brisk business,” Shalini commented.

“We left our tea and silks at home,” Song replied.

They both ignored their seconds.

“Against Tupoc’s group or other third parties that are not the Watch,” Lord Ishaan counteroffered. “And I would extend the same terms to a common return, should we leave the maze around the same time.”

Angharad could see the attraction in a common return, as they would be the most weak then – tired, wounded, possibly carrying corpses. The first part she hesitated about, for it was unpleasantly open-ended. Third parties could mean a great many things, even if their cooperation was limited to mutual defence.

“Third parties that were not intentionally provoked,” Angharad finally specified.

She would not let her crew be dragged into disputes like a reeve tricked into siding with some Uthukile clan. She had heard the stories, the reeve always ended up shot and then the clans promptly made a peace-marriage so they could begin raiding their other neighbors for cattle instead.

Being appointed a royal reeve on the Low Isle was not what a wise woman called a reward.

“Cautious,” Shalini said.

“Last time my people weren’t, it took four Cathayan Wars to get you out.”

“Savage,” she praised.

Angharad traded a look with Ishaan, sharing in the kinship of being faintly embarrassed of the person they had brought along. They shook on it, as much to avoid more of that than because there was nothing left to quibble over. As they parted ways the Pereduri tried to look for what Yaretzi had mentioned, but mostly she saw that Shalini was protective of the man – which was hardly a revelation.

She informed the others of the bargain struck as they assembled to move out, to mostly approval. Zenzele’s face darkened but even he saw the sense in a protection pact. They set out without further dallying, through openings in the ramparts at the back of the Old Fort. The Watch kept an eye on them from above as they moved across the rubble and onto the uneven bare rock of the cavern floor. It was not so smooth here as it had been before they entered the fort.

Without lanterns and the pale golden glow from above it would have been trouble to walk: not only were there crevices and clumps but also stretches of some sort of coppery moss that was highly slippery. Lord Ishaan’s crew was waiting ahead, nearly arrayed, while ahead of them both lanterns made it plain that Tupoc Xical and his five had taken the lead.

The journey was uneventful, though the atmosphere was stilted from nerves and tension. It was about a quarter hour from the fort that the slope of broken shrines began, Lord Ishaan informed her. After they left behind the great pillar the Old Fort was nestled against, it was largely open grounds between them and the ruins. Only a few jutting rocks, usually covered in that copper moss, broke up the barren landscape.

The beginnings of the maze were not clear, for though every piece of this place had been built by men the place itself had not – whatever haphazard spirit had seen fit to cast everything down in a pile cared not for gates and paths. Rubble and loose stones, sometimes entire slices of structures like arches and pillars, rose in a soft slope that inch by inch turned into a mountain within the mountain. So many temples and shrines and pavilions had been thrown atop one another that she could not tell where the ruins of one ended or began, leaving her with the impression that she truly was looking at a mountain.

There were dozens of half-open shrines that might have served as a gate, Angharad saw, but only three whose entrance was open beyond the first few feet. The three shrines the Watch had told them of: one marked by a lion, another a dove and the last a serpent. Tupoc’s crew was already slipping in a narrow crevice between two walls along which a broken mural of a serpent slithered. It felt a little on the nose for the Aztlan to choose the Serpent Shrine, in all honesty. Her musings were interrupted by Lord Ishaan, who offered her his hand to shake. She did.

“We explored the Lion Shrine yesterday,” the dark-eyed man said. “We will again today.”

“Good luck,” Angharad replied.

“And you.”

Theirs was, then, to be the Dove Shrine. It was in the middle of the three between a painted and sculpted arch to the left, adorned by roaring lionhead, and the narrow winding path that Tupoc was leading his fellows through. The way into their own shrine was broad stairs half-covered in dust and rubble, going up twenty feet into a collapsed arch – which would easily be climbed over, leading into yawning open gates whose sides were covered with intricate bronzes of doves at play. A hall continued into what she thought might be the shrine proper, while above the gate the mountain of ruins continued to rise.

A mere half a foot above a column had toppled backwards, stuck between two laughing monkey statues, and above those heads was a window where a yellow light trembled that – Angharad shook her head. She could spend a lifetime finding new paths here and barely scratch the surface. She would have to trust in the explorations of the Watch. She turned to glance back at her company, finding it grim-faced and ready.

“Forward,” she simply said. “Let us see what the shrine has in store for us.”

The stone here was unsettlingly dry, she noticed, not at all like the natural cavern floor they had walked on. It was as if the spirits of this place had licked up even the dew. Though Angharad went forward with a lantern, after passing the broken arch and entering the hallway she found it was hardly needed: lights burned on the walls at regular intervals, small trembling flames inside eggs of glass. It was surprisingly beautiful, especially when the light shone along the edge of the bronze reliefs adorning the walls: they showed feathers, the Pereduri thought, though some of them bent folded strangely.

They went down the corridor into a larger chamber, whose dusty floor was touched with old footsteps. The Watch, she decided. A flicker of movement at the corner of her eye had Angharad reaching for her new blade, a solid saber that was not at fault for not being the sword she wanted, but when she looked it was only an empty glass egg in a corner. The bare stone of this place was unsettling, so she pressed on without waiting longer.

This was, the Pereduri knew within a heartbeat of entering, the heart of the Dove Shrine. The chamber was the largest yet, at least thirty feet wide and as long, with elaborate decorations. The first few feet of the floor were bare stone, but beyond that a tiled floor in blue and bronze led all the way to another bare stretch and a cramped door at the back – but it was the walls that drew the eye. They were covered in dizzying murals of bronze tiles, painted so that great swirls of dark colors would envelop eyes and feathers, and exquisite perches of bronze extended at irregular intervals.

Angharad moved aside from the entrance but was careful to stay on the bare stone. The spirit of this shrine would reveal themselves soon enough: the only way out of this room seemed to lead into a much smaller chamber, perhaps the way out. Her instincts told true. The moment the last of them, Zenzele, entered there was a small flutter. Eight pairs of eyes turned to the same perch, where the spirit had deigned to reveal itself.

It looked like a dove, but now finally Angharad understood the strange gilding from earlier: every single feather was made of intricately folded paper, patterns within patterns, and she was careful not to look at them too long. If the powerful storm painted on the mural was any hint, there may be danger in staring. The dove spirit flicked its paper-fathers, eerily bird-like.

“Supplicants,” it spoke in a voice like fluttering paper, “you enter the shrine of-”

Angharad winced. That had not been a word, at least not in a way a woman’s ears could hear. Her companions seemed to have fared no better.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“By ancient accord,” the dove spirit continued, “for a wager you may take my trial and win right of passage.”

“And what is to be your trial, spirit?” Lady Inyoni called out.

The dove rustled with anger, paper feathers inflating. Spirits often enjoyed the unearned deference that was being called a god, but Inyoni had done no wrong. The sole god was the Sleeping God, they who would one day wake.

“Cross the tiles of my shrine,” it said, “without standing on water.”

Angharad eyed the tiles, seeing no water. Did it mean the blue tiles instead of the bronze? That would be easy enough since they alternated, which meant there was likely some sort of trap. Given how singularly well suited her contract was to avoid making such a mistake, however – it was nothing glimpses ahead would not see her through – then she ought to begin. It would be a good example, besides. Only before Angharad could so much as say a word she was interrupted.

“Let me,” Isabel said, stepping forward.

Surprise, Angharad’s among them.

“There is no need to-” she began, but the dark-haired beauty shook her head.

“There is,” she replied. “I am not unaware that my skill at arms is lacking compared to most here. I must then be ready to risk my life on tests of cleverness to compensate. It is only fitting.”

There were many approving faces at that, enough that Angharad curbed her instinct to insist that someone else should take the very first trial. It would be disrespect twice over: first of Isabel herself, who was acting with honor, and then of everyone else in this crew for implying that their lives were not of equal worth. She kept her worry off her face.

“Be careful,” she said instead.

“Of course, darling,” Isabel smiled back.

She then stepped forward, gathering her skirts, and approached the edge of the tiles straight-backed.

“God of the land, I ask you for terms,” she called out.

The dove spirit shuffled on its perch, what looked like feathers shivering at first glance in truth an intricate dance of paper folding and unfolding.

“I already gave them,” the spirit replied, its voice like pages being strummed.

“Then there will be no imposition in speaking them anew,” Isabel firmly insisted.