Chapter 25

Tristan turned in his blanket for the fourth time in ten seconds.

Eyes stubbornly closed, he turned again and put his feet against the wall. The stargazing tower was all cramped squeezes and windows, which usually the thief thought of as a selling point. Only one way up from the inside, and Tristan had undone the screws on the ladder the first day: he could topple it with a single well-placed kick any time he wanted. Not that he needed to.

But he could.

He turned in his blanket again, feet sliding down to the floor. The door down there was closed and he’d set the easy cousin of a tripwire – a metal goblet atop the latch – so there would be no entering without waking him if he slept. Fortuna would be keeping an eye out for him, too. Only Fortuna could be seen, could be worked and planned around, and that changed things. Made bedrock certainties altogether more porous.

Tristan turned once more, then cursed and pulled himself up. His goddess wasn’t around, though he caught a glimpse of red out on the roof, and his eyes strayed to the open trap door to his side. To the top of the ladder, which he could still make out in the gloom. It was too late, reason whispered into his ear, for Song Ren to still believe killing him would be enough to bury this whole affair. Questions would be asked, obvious inferences made.

Tristan forced himself to get up, to undo the latch one of the windows. Well-greased, it opened without a sound. He was presented with the sight of the Lady of Long Odds leaning back against a thatched roof as if it were some painting: waves of red and gold bathed in the distant light of the Orrery, eerily still until she turned to glance his way.

“Still awake?” she asked, half-surprised.

“Can’t sleep,” Tristan replied.

He leaned past the windowsill, breeze long robbed of the salt of the sea lazily combing through his air.

“Still feverish from the scrap downstairs, I imagine,” the Lady of Long Odds mused. “It takes a while to wind down.”

It would. But it had been hours and the fighting tense had long left him. Tristan knew why he couldn’t sleep, and it was the same reason part of him squirmed uncomfortable at showing his back to the ladder even though the door downstairs was locked and trapped.

Without noticing it he had gotten comfortable, and now that’d he noticed it he could not unsee it.

His fingers clenched and he smoothed away the discomfort of that understanding from his face. Not that it served anything when faced with the goddess that had known him since he was barely more than a child.

“It got ugly,” Fortuna acknowledged. “Song-”

“She is not going to creep in the night and slit my throat,” Tristan sad, and he believed the words as he said them.

“But if she wanted, she could,” the Lady of Long Odds said.

Yes. But she could.

If it came to a straight fight, he would lose. She wore that blade like someone used to wielding it and he had never seen her miss a shot. He was barely taller than her and though unsure who would be physically stronger she – he grit his teeth.

“She can see you,” Tristan muttered. “If she wanted to take me by surprise…”

She could work around Fortuna. He’d never even considered that might be something people could do, before Song. Before Hage’s casual reminder that the world was always larger than you thought.

“Tredegar would not brook silencing you that way,” Fortuna said. “And Maryam-”

“Maryam left me here,” he hissed. “With a better killer whose life would be made easier if I-”

He forced himself to stop there. It had been an ugly scene, and he blamed no one for wanting to leave it. Tredegar had, if anything done so with dignity. But part of him had assumed that when it came to flight he and Maryam would be headed the same way.

Another false comfort.

“I won’t fall asleep here,” Tristan said. “Not more than the hour and change I’ve already stolen.”

Fortuna half-rose, long curls swept back by the wind.

“Where to?” she asked, smiling.

“To do the work I should have begun the moment I walked off those docks,” Tristan grimly replied.

He was already dressed, save for the coat, so it was only a matter of grabbing. his affairs. He slid down the side of the stargazing tower onto the roof, closing the window behind him, then shimmied down. The thief was gone with barely a whisper, through the garden and down the stairs.

It was simple due diligence to have another place to sleep, to have a stash ready in case it all went south, and he would rest when the proper precautions were taken. It was a dangerous failing on his part not to have handled this already. Tristan had let himself be distracted by the threats and mysteries, taken in by the illusion of safety. In a sense, the earlier… dispute was a welcome reminder: nothing could ever be taken for granted.

Your things were yours only until someone larger cared to take them. The cottage was a fine hiding place and he now regretted sharing it, but there was no putting that pot back together. He would have to find another, perhaps something closer to the docks. The port was thick with opportunities for a thief, and it would be unwise to stash stolen goods in a house to which Angharad Tredegar had access.

Making his way under the dark blue light he’d heard some soldiers called the Indigo Moon – it swept through Allazei only between one and three in the morning – he kept to main streets despite disliking the open grounds. At this time of the night there were sure to be lemures skulking around the cottage’s vicinity, so haste won over discretion.

His instincts were not wrong: a pair of shades watched him from rooftops as he hurried, slender silhouettes standing unnaturally still. Yet though Tristan was alone and not particularly large, he was carrying steel and did not look wounded. Not so easy a target. They followed him for a few blocks but ultimately chose not to try their luck. A relief. Shades were scavengers and bottom feeders – in Sacromonte, they were best known for snatching infants – but they had long, sharp nails and feverish strength.

The thief doubted they would have killed him, but they would have likely bled him and the smell might have drawn in something nastier. It was still a long way to dockside.

Haste proved enough to get him there without incident, at least this once. It might be time to look into obtaining some scent that would put off lemures – Hage was sure to have something, although in even the most favorable outcome to asking the question the devil was sure to wildly overcharge him for it. The thief knew shades disliked the false fruits of yew, but he was reluctant to put on necklace of them without knowing if the smell might draw the curiosity of something more dangerous.

It was slightly before two in the morning he reached Regnant Avenue, the hour of a city’s exhale: when the last drunks stumbled out, the last lights dimmed, when dark and silence swallowed street after street. On another night Tristan might have tried his hand at snatching a few things off drunks near the docks, but tonight he had other priorities. Instead he prowled the small streets, keeping to alleys and shadows, and took the measure of the town as he ghosted through it.

It felt a little like coming home.

Port Allazei, mused as the Indigo Moon began to wane, really was a town camped in a city’s corpse. The ruined city was mostly empty, with the parts that were safe and largely rebuilt – the Triangle, the streets closest to the docks and barracks – packed to the gills with students, teachers and townsfolk. Yet though the inhabited portions of Allazei was small, even in that small space Tristan found room to disappear.

In a place like Sacromonte it was best to disappear by becoming a drop in the sea, but Allazei was a warren of nooks and crannies. You just had to find one large enough to fit you.

Leaving the overflowing streets of the Triangle, the thief skirted just past the edges of Regnant Avenue and Templeward Street where the numbers began to thin. That was the sweet spot lay, as far as Tristan was concerned: far enough no one ventured there without a reason, close enough he was well within the regular patrol routes of the garrison. Easy meat for neither lemures nor men. Now he just needed to find a building that met the right standards.

On the Templeward side, about ten minutes away from where Wen and Mandisa had settled, he sniffed out a derelict two-story house with broken stairs and a mostly intact attic. Perfect. Tristan stashed away a blanket, two silvers and a pilfered knife in the attic before hiding rope top climb under the kitchen rubble. He checked the surrounding houses for risks, particularly rooftop access to his hidden perch, but the sole roof that had not collapsed was angled the wrong way and playing host to a bird nest besides.

He sat on that rooftop for a moment, the tiles digging into his legs as he snacked on a few sesame seeds, and let his gaze wander the city’s skyline as the last drops of the Indigo Moon bled out of the sky. Soon the Orrery’s next ring would spin along, bringing in pale and gold, and-

“Huh.”

“Finally in a talking mood again, I see,” Fortuna said.

He glanced to the side, finding her perched near the edge of the roof with her dress’s folds cascading over it. She was leaning away from him, peering down at what he suspected was the bird’s nest tucked away between two broken tiles.

“Something like that,” Tristan said. “There’s a light on the horizon.”

“You know pretending it didn’t happen won’t make it true,” the Lady of Long Odds said. “You should reach out to Maryam, at le-”

His jaw clenched.

“There is,” he flatly repeated, “a light on the horizon.”

A long silence. A sigh.

“Some sort of tower, you think?” Fortuna asked.

He hummed. It had to be, the thief thought. Out in the east of Port Allazei, short of the empty canal that delineated Scholomance grounds but well past the inhabited slice of shore, a silver light was shining. Higher than a three-story house, at a guess, and for the burn to be that stable and visible he would almost think it some sort of lighthouse. Only what would a lighthouse be doing so far inland, and in an abandoned part of the city to boot?

“It’s too far out to be the workshop the Umuthi Society set up for their students,” he said. “There shouldn’t be anything out there, as far as I know.”

“Could be a trap,” Fortuna said, enthusiasm noticeably rising at the prospect.

“Could be,” he agreed. “Only I’d never heard rumors of there being some kind of cursed tower out east, and the soldiers would gossip about a ghostly light. Which means they know what it is and they’re not worried.”

“That or they’ve been told to keep their mouths shut,” Fortuna added.

Tristan nodded, chewing at the inside of his cheek. Either way, it meant that tower its silver light were related to the Watch.

“Something that’s only out there if you find it?” he finally said. “Sounds to me like Mask business.”

Even if he was wrong and it turned out the Watch simply had some sort of hidden fort out there, that was valuable information as well. His instincts weren’t leaning that way, though. This felt like another test in this island overrun with them, and his covenant fit the bill better than the rest.

“Yesss,” Fortuna grinned. “We’re going to the trap cursed tower, aren’t we?”

Tristan decided not to confirm it, lest her further enthusiasm talk him out of the idea. If he didn’t spend his seventhday chasing down a mystery, he might just have to look back instead – and he dared not.

“Come on,” he said instead. “Let’s find out if that attic lets the wind in.”

—

After a pleasant and surprisingly windless nap, he was back on the streets come the sixth hour.

One of the fancy bakeries on Templeward made the mistake of leaving out fresh baskets, so at the cost of one pebble tossed strategically against a kitchen pan to distract the attendant Tristan acquired a breakfast of two freshly baked sweet buns. He scarfed them in a nearby alley, wishing he’d grabbed more. Potato flour, like they used in Old Saraya, but those little bits on sugar on top were delicious.

He dipped seaside to wash his hands free of incriminating stickiness and draw from one of the garrison wells for water, then began heading east as Port Allazei woke up around him. The thief would have likely kept to side streets even were enemies not out to collect the bounty on his head, but that turn gave particular reason to a general practice of caution. Not that even the ‘main’ streets were anything to be impressed about, once you were five minutes east of Templeward.

The wide road the garrison used for patrols was cleaned of debris, but it was missing quite a few paving stones and those holes would be turning into puddles when it began raining in a few hours. Seventhday was the rain day, after all, from nine to nine.

Tristan missed his tricorn.

Past the ruins of what had once been a market – and a large one, too, not just a shopping street – Tristan found that a park had swallowed an entire chunk of the city. Trees and thorny bushes had taken over streets and houses alike, casting shadows in the silver morning light, and overgrown roots slid across streets so full of dead leaves and dirt they might as well have been forest ground. If he’d not misremembered the tower’s direction, going through this was the quickest way to get there.

Tristan took one look at those winding paths and eerily rustling leaves, then took the long way around.

“Coward,” Fortuna complained.

“A long-lived one, I hope,” he agreed.

He went further east, skirting the edge of the forest while keeping a wary eye out for anything that might be inclined to crawl out. It felt a safe assumption the woods were a nest of lemures, at the very least. Yet when he caught sight of movement it was not out in the trees. A pair of blackcloaks, muskets in hand, were strolling across a small street while chatting. A patrol? They seemed too few for this far out in the city. Slipping into the alleys, Tristan followed them.

He wrinkled his nose at how easy they proved to tail, barely paying attention to their surroundings.

The pair walked along the edge of the woods westwards, much like a patrol would, but the thief never got close enough to eavesdrop on the conversation. Their carelessness was interesting – people only acted like that when they felt safe, or at least like others would bail them out should there be danger. Were there other watchmen out here? Their ‘patrol’ came to an end after another five minutes and they headed back the same way they’d come.

Tristan followed behind, keeping a safe distance until his steps went past where he’d come across them and the continuing east. Five minutes later, he came to a halt while sucking in a surprised breath.

“That’s a fort,” Fortuna helpfully pointed out, biting into an apple.

She made the crunch of it obnoxiously loud, no doubt on purpose.

“I can see that,” Tristan replied, rolling his eyes.

Across an open plaza from the edge of the woods, the Watch had built what looked like a fortified village. The walls were made from stones visibly from half a different sources but they stacked a solid fifteen feet high, armed guards waited by open gates. Inside he could see a well near the entrance, then barracks and a cluster of buildings spread out along three cramped streets.

The two watchmen out on patrol stopped to chat with the pair in front before entering, leaving Tristan to weigh his chances. Those walls were to keep lemures, not men – not with so many jutting handholds – so it would not be impossible for him to climb over. He’d have to remain hidden the whole time, though. He was in fighting fit, not the rank-and-file uniform. A risky enterprise, if the Watch was hiding something here. It was tempting to simply go up and ask if students were allowed entry, but they’d be on guard for him trying to sneak in if they refused.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

While debating whether he should avoid the fort entirely, swing around and continue northeast towards the tower, Tristan frowned as he saw someone come up to the well and work the crank. That was not a regular’s uniform, and the dark-skinned woman wearing it was young. Student age. Two more people approached her, another in a coat and the last in a formal uni- Oh, Tristan knew that one. He was looking at Captain Tristan Ballester, of the Forty-Fourth Brigade. He of the impressively well-groomed mustache and mediocre ability to read the room.

That settled it. The guards at the gate looked him over when he emerged onto the street, but not with any particular intent. When he approached, the taller of the two cleared her throat.

“Plaque,” she instructed.

He produced it. The Someshwari watchwoman took a look, then handed it back.

“Welcome to Scraptown,” she told him.

The other guard snorted.

“Stop calling it that to students, the captain’ll put you on night watch again,” she said.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” the Someshwari beamed her way, then her eyes slid back to him. “The student dormitory’s at the end of the street to the left, one copper a night. If you’re headed for the hunting grounds, I’d recommend you swing by the board first – it’s got all the last reports nailed on.”

She looked him up and down.

“Not that you look like much of a hunter.”

“My skills are legend, tia,” Tristan protested. “Have you never heard of the many brave deeds of Ferrando Villazar?”

The shorter guardswoman squinted at him.

“Aren’t you a woman?” she asked. “And blonde. I thought you came for that lemure bounty a few days back.”

“Any resemblance in names is coincidental,” Tristan lied.

Hopefully this wouldn’t make it back to Ferranda, who was well-armed and touchy. If so, he always could try to exploit another coincidence in names and frame the captain of the Forty-Fourth for the whole matter. He made sure to give the students at the well a wide berth, though at least one noticed him passing through, and tread the length ‘Scraptown’ street by street.

It was more an outpost than a village, a strange contrast of buildings made in fine stone and bricks – salvaged from nearby houses, at a guess – and muddy streets. There must be at least fifty watchmen posted here by the size of the barracks, but Scraptown seemed built in part to cater to students: Tristan could not think of a reason for there to be a pair of shops selling arms, equipment and foodstuffs on the main street.

The student dormitory was a run-down in with a badly patched roof consisting of a large common room and a communal kitchen, but the ‘board’ proved more interesting. It was large wooden board under an awning, with a map of the environs nailed on – including a large portion of the forest, which was named the ‘Nettlewood’. Different parts of the map were attributed numbers, and reports put up around the large parchment outlined lemure sightings in those numbered zones. At a glance, most of the lemures around here appeared to be lycosi and shuttle-spiders, though there was apparently a seiren nesting deep in the Nettlewood.

Tristan sent a discreet prayer of thanks to the Rat King for the plentiful boons of habitual cowardice.

Less pleasing was that the northeast of the outpost was apparently thick with lemures come evening time, including a pair of headless men. Nasty beasts, those, and reported to wander about where Tristan believed himself headed to. It would be best if he could be back from seeking the tower well before the Tolomontera night settled.

It was only when he reached the back gate of Scraptown that he saw why the locals had given it such a sobriquet, however. The back of the town did not have a stone wall like the rest instead but two large pieces of metal between which a makeshift gate had been squeezed in. That open gate led out into a graveyard of scrap metal, wind blowing dust through rusted iron ribs.

There were four guards at this gate instead of two, and they seemed much more alert. Tristan was asked to present his plaque on the way out, then cautioned to avoid cutting himself on the metal.

“Blood will wake up the blems,” he was told. “Last night they came close enough to get shot, they must be getting hungry.”

Blems was an old Trebian name for headless men, meaning those words were very much worth heeding. Tristan was not sure he’d win a tussle with a lycosi, much less the kind of creature that would kill them for sport. He thanked the watchmen for the warning and only ventured out with cautious steps and leather gloves on.

The grounds here were worn stone and rust-red sand, with spikes of metal jutting out like teeth and worn, twisted iron forming into crescent shapes. It felt like walking through a maze of open maws, his surroundings ready to snap up and swallow him at any time. Between making sure he didn’t step on anything capable of piercing his boots and keeping an eye out for lemures, a simple walk proved genuinely exhausting.

It was a relief when the worst of the scraps began to thin, giving ground to stairs leading up to what must be shrines – and, excitingly, a shape towering over them that might just be what he came for. There was still metal around but now it was a brass alloy instead of iron, most of it massive pipes. And the word was no exaggeration, for they were large enough he could walk through one standing upright.

Chunks of that pipework had fallen from the frames that’d once held them u, but in his mind’s eye the thief could see what it must have looked like when still hale. Some sort of web-like metal aqueduct leading towards the shrines, though what it would have carried was anybody’s guess. But after walking in the shadows of ancient wonders on a mercifully stony ground, Tristan finally found what he’d come looking for.

Part of it, anyway: at the heart of the shrines a tower of smooth stone did rise, but about two-thirds of the way up the structure abruptly ended. There was no trace of the pale light he had seen on the horizon last night, and given how brightly it’d shone it should be impossible to miss.

“Part of it is missing,” Tristan muttered. “Aether machinery?”

“The air here is thin,” Fortuna told him. “It is most unpleasant.”

Definitely some kind of aether machinery, then. Wary as he was of such things, the only way he would find answers was by having a look. He crept in the shadow of the ancient edifices, reaching the bottom of the shrines accompanied only by eerie silence. The seven machine-shrines had likely been built the same but time had cut them differently enough only traces of that remained: the brush of time had graced them all with their own shade of decay.

They still looked like sisters, mind you. The structures were all squat, almost pear-like in shape, and their roofs were rounded domes in metal long covered by green patina. They were a mixture of machinery and stone, and the great brass pipes from earlier fed into their sides at a rate of two a shrine. The gates that were the only visible way in were tall and narrow, made of carved iron splashed with patterns of gold.

Together, the seven shrines formed a rough circle surrounding what must be the bottom of the half-hidden tower. The style of it reminded him of the structure at the heart of Old Fort back on the Dominion, especially the seamless stone, but he was no expert on Antediluvian works.

Though two of the roofs had been damaged – one dome outright collapsed – Tristan first took a look at the gates. There were no locks and no rings to pull. Tossing a pebble at one did not see it turned into smoke or ash, which was promising, but trying to push them open was like, well, trying to move hundreds of pounds of metal with his arms. Not a winning cause, that.

“The true key is self-improvement,” the Lady of Long Odds sagely told him. “You must first become a musclebound fellow, capable of-”

“One of the pipes broke down just a bit back,” Tristan noted. “If I climb up, it’ll bring me straight inside the shrine.”

“-listening to the wisdom of your goddess, who ever shows you the way,” Fortuna hastily adjusted. “Good eye, though you were slow to pick up on my hints.”

“No doubt,” the thief drily replied.

The pipe on the ground proved a fine perch to climb on so he might shimmy up onto the one still connected to the shrine. It was, however, pitch black in there. Tristan hesitated – should he press on? Fool thought, he decided after a moment. The shrines weren’t going anywhere, but he had only the one life. If some shuttle-spider was nesting in there, eyeing him hungrily, he’d never know until it was too late.