Chapter 27

As far as plans went, it had the virtue of simplicity.

“So we’re going to rob the man,” Tristan amusedly said.

“Politely,” Cressida insisted. “He knows how to open one of the gates, you saw it just as I did. In the morning he always goes without that Someshwari girl he’s made a deal with, so we can grab him and get him to talk.”

“By robbing him,” Tristan reminded her, lips twitching. “Are you sure I’m the rat here?”

“The smell does not lie,” Cressida Barboza replied without batting an eye.

Damn. She just kept nailing those, but he wasn’t going to stop. One of these days she’d miss a step and it would make finally getting one over her all the sweeter. Though both of them agreed that their target was unlikely to return to the tower today, they agreed to meet up at Scraptown by six of the evening.

“I couldn’t find out anything about the Someshwari, but Silumko belongs to the Twenty-Ninth Brigade,” Cressida said. “I’ve never seen one of the other cabalists follow him to Scraptown but best to keep an eye out for them anyway.”

“You followed him around as well, I take it,” Tristan mused.

“We all have things we’re good at,” the noblewoman replied, then looked him up and down. “Presumably.”

“Like pickpocketing,” the thief smiled. “Not a skill I expected from you, Lady Cressida.”

“Met a lot of noble girls, have you?” Cressida smiled back, just as falsely.

More than most rats, he figured, at least since the Dominion. Not that he intended to tell her as much.

“Did House Barboza have a rough few years, perhaps?” Tristan ‘sympathetically’ asked.

She cupped her hand around her ear.

“Do you hear that?” Cressida replied. “The sound of how close I’m getting to pulling a knife, I mean.”

“Just making conversation,” Tristan lied.

If he recalled correctly, Professor Iyengar had marked her as being ‘Lusitanian’ during the first Mandate class. He’d never heard of such a people before, but the word sounded vaguely Lierganen. Something to look into if he could find a source of information. Like, say, an ancient devil from a conspiracy obsessed with secrets he was headed to do underpaid labor for. As if sensing something Lady Cressida Barboza narrowed her dark eyes at him.

“The trouble with digging too deep, Abrascal, is that it makes a grave for people to push you into,” she warned.

Ah, Tristan thought with a pleasant smile, but that was only a problem if you’d never learned how to dig your way out.

—

“So where are Lusitanians from?”

Hage’s brows rose. It was the devil’s favorite facial expression, which he used often and to great effect – they were mighty impressive eyebrows, Tristan had to concede, and well taken care of. He was coming to suspect the devil brushed and waxed them regularly.

“Do I look like an atlas to you, boy?” Hage asked.

“You’re not anywhere that useful,” the thief agreed.

“If you want more than insults, make it worth my while,” the devil said.

Tristan did not even hesitate, knowing exactly the sort of coin his teacher was after.

“I’ve struck a pact with Lady Cressida Barboza to work together to get into the hidden tower,” he said. “Robbery might be involved, in a polite sort of way.”

Satisfied with the information offered, Hage nodded.

“Lusitania,” he said, “was one of the southernmost Sitiadas.”

Tristan let out a whistle. When the Second Empire fell, entire swaths of its heartlands had been swallowed by the Gloam in a matter of days when the Thirteenth Betrayal swept through the cradle of the empire. Yet if only those lands were lost Liergan might have recovered – not as an empire ruling the world, perhaps, but some kingdom match for the great powers of the modern nights.

Only the catastrophe had not stopped, invasions and civil wars ravaging the lands now called Old Liergan until only remnants were left. As the Succession Wars stretched on, the entire southern half of the continent was lost to the dark save for a few fortified holdouts: the Sitiadas. Small pockets of Glare surrounded by hollow kingdoms and mad gods, ever teetering on the edge of annihilation.

“Was. What happened to it?”

“It fell in 71 Sails,” Hage said. “You did not buy much with imprecise gossip, but I will add this: that entire affair was tied to the first muster of the Watch in over a century.”

“I don’t know what that is,” Tristan admitted.

“A call,” Hage said, “for every garrison, free company and Watch ally within a year’s travel of the source to mobilize their full strength and march there as fast as they can.”

So the sort of calamity causing nightmares for the rest of one’s life. Only Cressida Barboza could not have been born in Lusitania before it fell, unless she wore her twenty-nine years of age very discreetly. Most likely she’d been born in exile, her family fallen on hard times after becoming refugees. That was an angle that could be worth-

“Mephistopheline got into the cream again,” Hage idly said. “Best get out the bucket and soap, he threw up particularly sticky.”

Later, sadly. Tristan shot a betrayed look at the guilty party, who flopped belly up in formal denial of having slapped a cream bottle off the shelf so he could lap up too much of it and spew it into a corner. For the third time in two weeks.

“Mrow,” Mephistopheline tried, advancing a case of pure happenstance.

“I don’t even know how you keep getting up there,” Tristan muttered, pulling back his sleeves. “You’re like a fat anvil, there’s no way you can make that jump.”

And to mop up vomit he went. A Mask’s work was never done.

—

Meeting at Scraptown, they prepared thoroughly for tomorrow.

Secondday would be Saga class, which Tristan was sad to miss, but needs must. In truth neither expected subduing the Malani to be all that difficult, it was not missing him before he disappeared into the shrine that was the real obstacle. Silumko, Cressida told him, had arrived at Scraptown around seven for the past two days. He always came from the south, going around the forest by a wide margin. He then bought breakfast at one of the shops in the fortified town, washed his hands in the well and headed out to the tower.

She had written all this down in a small booklet in neat handwriting, which Tristan struggled not to find endearing.

“He has some sort of silver gyroscope he uses to navigate the scrapyard,” Cressida added. “I’m not sure what it does, but I’ve never seen him get anywhere near a lemure.”

“So we follow after him,” Tristan said.

He’d not mind riding the man’s coattails twice in a day, if they had room to fit him.

“It’d be best to only grab him while he’s at the foot tower,” she agreed. “Otherwise we’ll have to carry him. I have restraints to put him in – do you have a weapon that shouldn’t kill him by accident?”

Implying she did not. Something to remember.

“A blackjack,” the thief replied. “He didn’t look like much of a fighter, if we take him by surprise I like our odds.”

“He carries at least two grenades on him,” Cressida warned. “We get only one chance at doing this clean.”

They agreed on three hand signals – attack, wait and retreat – and to set up a watch for the night, one of them always staying awake to keep an eye on the front gate. They simply could not afford to miss Silumko, as if he reached the inside of the shrine he would be beyond their reach until he deigned to leave. Assuming he did not simply find the way into the tower and leave them behind. Having only taken a quick look at the shrine gates, the thief made inquiries.

“They are kept closed by some kind of aether lock,” the noblewoman said. “He’s got some silvery tools that let him work it, but lockpicks don’t do anything.”

“Ever go inside the shrine?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“Tried through the pipes, but there’s grids,” Cressida said.

“On pop seals,” he said. “It’s possible to get through – and our potential teacher certainly did, because the inside of the one I visited had a trap laid.”

She eyed him, reluctantly impressed and entirely unwilling to acknowledge it.

“You couldn’t get further in?”

“I think it’s an aether machine that controls the doors,” Tristan said, “and if the pipes are broken it no longer works. Any shrine I could get into that way would be a dead end from the start.”

“The shrine Silumko’s working has unbroken pipes,” Cressida noted. “That lends some credence to your theory. How sure are you the teacher’s the one who laid the trap?”

“Unless our Malani friend hangs up taunting notes with his traps, it’s not his work,” Tristan said.

Cressida seemed pensive.

“Between that and the flower rods, it seems almost too harsh a test,” she said. “I cannot help but feel we are missing something.”

“I don’t know about that,” Tristan said, “but here’s the thing about those flower rods: the salts in them fade. Which means someone has to be placing them out there regularly. And if neither of us saw anything during day hours…”

“Then odds are it was done during the night,” Cressida finished. “That’s… Doing it once might be possible, with some luck, but regularly? Even a veteran would balk at trying.”

The lemures out there were no joke, as he had personally found out.

“Either our teacher’s not afraid of lemures, or they have a way to avoid them,” Tristan agreed.

Considering they were Krypteia and not Skiritai, the latter seemed far more likely. By the hour’s turn they had the outline of a plan ready and some contingencies for the most likely disasters, but there was one area that Tristan thought unfortunately vague.

“You really don’t know anything about the Someshwari?” he pressed.

“She only came once, last sixthday, but she spent an hour around the tower and ran into Silumko while he was on his way there. They spoke and looked like they came to terms. As far as I know she has not come to Scraptown since.”

“He has a lot of toys, the way you tell it,” Tristan noted. “Could be she’s providing tools or funds in exchange for a seat in the class when he has a way in.”

“That is my guess as well,” Cressida said, “but it is only a guess.”

He let the subject go at that, instead letting the conversation change to the watch shifts for keeping an eye on the front gate. Yet in the back of his mind, wheels were spinning. One meeting, the appearance of alliance and some guesswork. It was a thin foundation to the belief the other Masks were in accord. Besides, Silumko was usually alone by the tower and did not seem like a trained warrior, which Cressida definitely was: she had a sword and the right calluses for someone knowing how to use it.

She could do this alone. It would be riskier, certainly, and that was reason enough to bring Tristan in. But that was a safety, a surplus. Not a necessity, and so not a match for the eagerness to make common cause with him she had displayed back in that paella shop.

So what was she not telling him?

—

Silumko of the Twenty-Ninth Brigade strolled through the front gates of Scraptown at precisely seven hours and four minutes, wearing a wide-brimmed hat and that sown-up fighting coat.

They went ahead while the Malani bought his usual apple bread at the street stand, leaving through the back gate and hiding out in the scrapyard where they had a good line of sight on the exit. Moments later he was heading out, a large bag hoisted on his back and a musket as well. He’d not had that yesterday. The Malani moved surefooted, but not quite as warily as he should have: following him was child’s play.

Every minute or so he pulled out that silvery gyroscope Cressida had mentioned, staring at it for a few seconds and sometimes sharply changing direction. Then, about halfway to the tower, he headed straight left without even eyeing his device first.

The pair were puzzled but knew better than to speak out here, instead following as closely as they could. Tristan had not been sure what to expect, but it was not what they found: a trapped shade. A beartrap buried under the rusty sand had caught it by the leg, and though it did not seem in a great deal of pain neither had it been able to flee.

The tall lemure looked thin in the morning’s silver light, like a rattling scarecrow, and lashed out angrily when Silumko approached it. The Malani put down his pack and went rifling through it. He took out a ball of rags, removing from them three glass vials. Two were full of translucent liquids, the third empty and larger. With deft fingers the man mixed some of the liquid from the two vials in the third, corking them all afterwards and putting them all away save for the mix – which he shook, then uncorked before throwing at the shade vial and all.

What a waste of good glass.

“Poison?” Cressida murmured.

It was more silent than the musket, the thief thought, if Silumko wanted a quiet kill. But Tristan was unconvinced and turned out correct in his suspicions. It seemed as if Cressida might have been right when the shade, at first shrieking in displeasure, settled down and after five minutes ceased moving entirely. Only Silumko undid the bear trap and took shackles and a muzzle out of his bag. He fitted them on the shade and tied a makeshift harness of rope before putting it on.

The Malani let out a loud sigh, then set out with the lemure dragged behind him.

“Well,” Tristan drily said when he was out of sight, “that’ll certainly make him easier to follow.”

Not only had Silumko slowed down significantly he was leaving a literal trail behind.

“What does he need the shade for?” Cressida wondered/

Tristan did not know, but if he had to guess? It must be related to why the Malani could get into the shrine but evidently not yet the tower. The flower rods, are they there as more than a way to make the journey dangerous? If a lemure was necessary to beat some sort of puzzle, it only made sense to make trapping them easier. Too early to tell if it was a coincidence.

Following the Malani the rest of the way proved almost triflingly easy. And it had other benefits besides: Silumko now consulted his gyroscope so often he did not even bother to put the silvery tool back into the back afterwards, and though the path was winding they did not so much as glimpse another lemure. Once they’d reached the stone grounds around the shrine they had to let the man pull ahead a bit, given the sparser options to hide.

Thankfully, he had to drag a shade up a set of stairs so he was a tad distracted.

The pair circled to the left, moving from pillar to pillar in the shade of the pipes. It took longer than Tristan would have liked and was unfortunately tricky besides: the caltrops the Malani had laid yesterday kept forcing them to make detours. Tristan was starting to wonder if the point of them might have been to flush out anyone creeping up rather than catching the unaware.

Either way, within a few minutes they were in position. There was a collapsed section of pipe on the ground angled so that you could not see the inside entirely from near the shrine gate, he and Cressida stood in wait inside. About a dozen seconds later Silumko dropped the harness and leaned forward, hands on his knees. Panting and red-faced. The Malani was not as tall as Tristan had first thought – not even a full foot taller, the thief assessed now that he was closer.

The gray-eyed man cocked an eyebrow at Cressida, reaching for his blackjack, and she nodded. Bet get it over with now. A load moan stopped them cold.

Silumko started cursing, hastily fleeing from the awoken shade struggling to get out of its bindings. It was flailing ineffectively but the Mask still panicked, tripping on his own bag and groaning as his musket dug into his side. The two of them waited for a full minute while the Malani struggled to open his pack and mix his brew again before tossing the vial at the wriggling lemure. Tristan would admit, in the privacy if his mind, that he was starting to feel better about their odds rolling the man without trouble.

“Now,” Cressida murmured.

Only yet again they stopped, as Silumko – back on his feet, managing to look disheveled even with that haircut – had turned towards the stairs and was peering at something attentively. The pair shared a frustrated look and settled to wait. The Malani waved whoever he was looking at closer, and there the complications began. A tall middle-aged blackcloak in regular’s uniform, a Lierganen man with sword and musket, stepped into view. He bore a heavy pack and lieutenant’s stripes on his shoulders.

“Regulars aren’t to intervene in student scuffles,” Cressida murmured.

Tristan scoffed.

“If you believe that, I have a nice manse in Pandemonium to sell you.”

The officer stood there talking with Silumko for a few moments, their voices pitched too quiet to carry, then a decision was reached. The Malani pulled the unconscious lemure closer to the shrine gates even as the watchman put down his own pack and took out a large tin receptacle. He unscrewed it, then produced a broad paintbrush.

With further ado he dipped the paintbrush inside and began tracing a red line of paint. After three strokes, it became clear it was to circle the entirety of the shrines. As if to mark it off limits, one of the few rules enforced on the island. Tristan squinted.

“You ever seen that lieutenant back at Scraptown?” he whispered.

“No,” Cressida whispered back. “But I’m not familiar with all the officers there. That is a real uniform, though.”

“There’s no way the tower’s really off limits,” the thief said. “So I guess the question is…”

“Bribe or fake?” she finished, tone pensive. “While I’m uncertain whether there would be consequences to tracing a false red line for a student, there likely would be for a watchman.”

Tristan hummed.

“If our friend down there had the coin for a bribe large enough to make a lieutenant gamble his rank, I expect he would have no need of making common cause with the Someshwari girl,” he said. “My bet is on fake.”

The cosmetics must be very skillfully applied to fool him even at a distance, but Tristan was not so arrogant as to thinking his eyes were above being tricked.

“Sound about right,” Cressida muttered, then risked a peek. “I should be able to shoot him from here.”

Tristan blinked.

“Pardon?”

“It’s not that hard a shot and he’s moving predictably,” Cressida said.

She sounded like she was wondering whether or not to be insulted.

“That is not the nature of my surprise,” the thief flatly replied. “Even if it’s not a watchman, they are still a student.”

“It’s not like I’ll aim for the head,” she peevishly said. “A leg shot would-”

“Be a death sentence, out here,” Tristan said. “We both know that. Blood and the inability to run? They would never make it back to Scraptown.”

“I thought Sacromontan street rats were cold-blooded killers with butcher’s knives,” Cressida frowned.

He rolled his eyes. Provincials.

“That’s the confederales,” he replied. “Though I understand the butcher knives are mostly symbolic.”

“Your lot chop people’s hands off and hang them upside down to bleed out,” Cressida flatly said. “And now you’re balking at a leg shot?”

“That’s the coteries,” Tristan said. “You’re aiming Murk-wise, at least, but do I look like a legbreaker to you?”

“More like a legbroken,” she sneered. “What even are you, if not those?”

“Unwilling to use murder as a conversation opener,” he replied. “It’s one thing to rough up the Malani for information, another to drop a student without warning. We should try to bargain first.”

“We’d lose the advantage of surprise,” Cressida said.

“The false watchman’s irrelevant, it’s Silumko we need,” he replied. “We can still grab him and take him hostage. I’m guessing whoever that is in lieutenant’s stripes can no more enter the shrine without our Malani friend than we can.”

The noblewoman scoffed.

“I wouldn’t have put out a hand if I’d known you were going to be such a flower about it,” Cressida said.

That had the ring of truth to it, which stung a little but that was a passing thing. He’d come out here for results, not more false comforts. The thief said nothing, simply raising an eyebrow. They both knew she was in too deep to turn back. Even if she fired that shot anyway, nothing forced him to help. He might even prefer to help Silumko subdue her in exchange for the way in.

“Fine,” she groused. “I’ll grab him. Can you run me a distraction, at least?”

“Done,” Tristan replied. “I’ll wait thirty seconds before going in.”

“Make it a full minute,” Cressida grunted.

Tristan crouched down, glancing back long enough to see her disappear into a pillar’s shadow without a sound. His gaze swept the ground as he counted the sixty seconds, finding what he needed and closing his fingers around it. Silumko was unwrapping a leather roll holding silvery tools, eyes on it, while the watchman energetically went about painting red. Fifty-eight, fifty-nine, sixty. Tristan slowly rose, eyed the distance and snapped his wrist.

The loose stone he’d picked up hit the officer right in the back of the head, a real beauty of a peg.

The watchman shouted in pain even as Silumko turned towards him in alarm, but Tristan ended up the most surprised of them all – even as the officer clasped the back of his head, his skin rippled and then burst into smoke. It wafted off in streams, revealing a furious Someshwari girl of the same height and in the same clothes. Contract.

“What the-”

Tristan stepped out of the pipe, drawing their eyes.

“Sorry,” he smiled, making his tone obnoxiously false. “I was cleaning my rock and my hand just sli-”

The Someshwari lowered her musket at him. She was just a few inches shorter than him, he noted, but broader at the shoulders and more muscled. Hair pulled back by beads to bare her forehead and going down the back of her head in curls, gray eyes – darker than his – and thick lips pulled back into an angry snarl.

“Who in the Wheels are you?” she demanded.

“My name,” he gravely said, “is Lord Ferrando Villazar, of House Villazar. You stand in the presence of-”

“Fuck.”

Both their eyes went to the speaker, Silumko, who raised his hands as Cressida stood behind him with a pistol pressed against his throat.

“-a distraction,” Tristan smoothly finished. “And how might I refer to you, my fair lady?”

“Ira,” the Someshwari replied, batting her eyelashes at him. “You’ve fine courtesies, Lord Ferrando, but this seems to me a most unprovoked assault.”

“Nice red paint you brought,” Cressida drily replied. “Musket on the ground, now, or I pop your friend.”

“Please don’t,” Silumko croaked.

That accent was thick as board but mostly intelligible. Definitely from Uthukile, though, good to confirm the beads were no mere pretension.

“You will not shoot him, Barboza,” Ira snorted. “If you could get into the shrine you already would have. He is your way in as well.”

“I brought a lockpicker and the tools are out,” Cressida said. “Try me.”

The Someshwari glanced his way.

“You are a lockpicker?”

“My talents are myriad,” Tristan solemnly replied.

She tittered but those eyes were cold as ice. She flicked a considering glance between them.

“Then if you switch sides, I will pay you double,” Ira said. “It does not matter who gets me in.”

“Ira, you bitch,” Silumko choked out.

He tried to struggle, but Cressida pressed the gun into his neck and that settled him down. Tristan raised an eyebrow.

“You have ten ramas on you?” he asked.

“There is no way she paid you five gold,” Ira haggled.

“Three,” Tristan ‘admitted’. “But I’ll do it for eight.”

“I can do eight,” the Someshwari smiled.

Tristan shrugged at Cressida, as if to say sorry, and turned to face her while sidling closer to Ira. Always keeping an eye on that musket, which had moved a little closer to his accomplice but could still be turned on him in a heartbeat.

“Villazar, you treacherous whore,” Cressida bit out ‘angrily’. “I should have known you’d turn.”

“None of you can get into the tower without me,” Silumko called out, openly panicking. “The aether device inside the shrine is broken and I’m the only one who knows how to jury-rig it.”

“I’m going to take a guess and say it involves strapping that shade into some sinister-looking machine,” Tristan said.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

The other man cleared his throat.

“That’s not all it takes,” the Malani defensively replied.

“Go on then, Barboza,” Ira challenged. “Kill him. I imagine breaking one of the few enforced rules on Tolomontera will see you hanged and I can take my time getting that seat afterwards.”

Tristan sought Cressida’s eyes to get an idea of their move here. He was not sure if he could handle Ira in a fight, though odds were he could divest her of her musket at least. He was already clasping his blackjack inside his sleeve, but the thief was not sure the Someshwari would let him get close enough to use it. If he could get a pistol pointed at her back that would make a difference, let them dictate terms to the other two, but it would take- Cressida’s eyes widened, which was the only warning he got.

Ira brandished the musket at him, taking aim, and with a curse Tristan dropped. Only she didn’t pull the trigger, instead swiveling back the way of the other two and then shooting – both Silumko and Cressida ducked low, neither able to see Ira had shot above the standing heights of their head. A fakeout, he realized even as Silumko wriggled out of Cressida’s and broke into a run. Shit, he thought, even as he rose back to his feet and Cressida took a potshot that had Ira ducking behind a pillar.

“I’ll take her,” Cressida shouted, “take the-”

He didn’t listen to the end of the sentence, instead moving to intercept the Malani before he could make it into the scrapyard. The tall man snarled when he realized there was no way out, then reached for his belt as the thief closed the distance. Silumko was quick on the draw, but Tristan was just a second quicker: his blackjack hit the man’s elbow just as he drew his pistol, sending the ornate pearl-incrusted piece clattering to the floor.

The Malani yelped in pain and the thief drew back, angling a blow to the side of the head, but then Ira was on him.

She had turned into an ox of a man, at least seven feet tall and so muscled the sleeve of her uniform burst. Tristan half-ducked out of the blow but her fist still caught the side of his chin and it was like he’d gotten kicked by a horse: his head snapped back and when he next blinked he was on the floor, on his back. Ira, back into her true shape and wafting smoke, was struggling to fend off Cressida’s sword with a dagger and shouting all the while.

Vision swimming, Tristan pushed himself up onto his knees – dimply realizing his hair was free, his cap gone – and saw Silumko was facing him the same way. By the looks of that nasty bruise on his cheek Cressida had sucker punched the Malani with the shell of her guard. Silumko was reaching forward, towards the pistol he had dropped. Which now lay halfway between them.

“Truce,” Tristan offered, discreetly reaching inside his other sleeve. “We can let them fight it out.”

“Indeed,” Silumko said. “Let us not be uncivilized.”

A heartbeat later he tossed his knife as the other Mask threw himself at the pistol, the blade losing itself in the cloth of the coat. Silumko triumphantly raised the pistol but Tristan kicked it out of his hand, the other man shouting angrily before charging him bare-handed. The thief reached for his blackjack, but the Malani punched him before he could aim a blow and the two of them ended up rolling on the floor. Back hitting a pillar, Tristan choked out a curse and elbowed the man in the nose.

“Not the face,” Silumko complained, kneeing him the belly.

“Not the belly then, you prick,” the thief gasped.

He caught the Malani’s wrist as the man tried to punch him in the face again, gouging at the man’s eyes only to miss and claw at his cheek instead. Panicking, Silumko smashed their foreheads – and the angle was horrid. They both rolled away, groaning in pain, and Tristan wrinkled his nose. Was he bleeding? No, the blood on his fingers wasn’t his. The Malani had a nosebleed from that elbow earlier. They both got onto their knees again, legs wobbly, only for Silumko’s eyes to widen as they stared behind him.

“Stop,” the Malani shouted. “STOP. There’s-”

Tristan started running without bothering to look back. Something brushed against the back of his heels, reinforcing the wisdom of that decision, and he almost tripped into Silumko as the man stumbled trying to wheel around.

“BLEMS,” Silumko shouted. “WE DREW BLEMS!”

Tristan risked a glance back and saw a thing of horror. They moved on two feet and they had a man’s shape, roughly, but that too-broad torso bore no neck or head. The headless men had small beady eyes scattered all over their abdomen and a mouth like a crevasse – going down into a jagged stripe, full of sharp teeth and tendrils that looked like stretched-out black tongues.

Gods, Tristan thought as he saw the taller of the blems – almost eight feet tall – suck back in a tendril that’d extended at least a dozen feet out. Gods, that thing was what’d almost grabbed his foot. Silumko had slipped when he stumbled, dropping his hat, and from the whine of pain he’d hurt his leg. Tristan gritted his teeth, dragging him upright and snatching the fallen wide-brimmed hat without thinking about it.

“Move you fool,” he snarled.

“It’s sprained,” Silumko moaned, but move he did.

Tristan hurried, half at a run, but the headless men were so tall and he could feel the ground shake behind them as they caught up, a wet slurp as a tendril extended and, and shrieks as the blems drew back. They’d run into the caltrops, the thief realized with dumb relief.

“How long to open the shrine?” Tristan asked, lengthening his stride. “We can’t lose them by running.”

“Seconds,” Silumko breathed. “I rigged the aether lock, I just need to pop it open.”

Seconds was what they’d earned from the caltrops, as the sting did not distract their pursuers for long. Headless men did not seem like much, compared to some of the lemures out there, but there was a reason they were so feared: the things were basically unkillable. Unless you cut them in half or fired a cannon into them there wasn’t much of anything that would keep them down for long.

“Get him to the door,” Ira shouted, and there was a burst of thunder.

The Someshwari had fired her musket at the lemures, though it would be but a fly’s bite to them. Cressida, the thief saw, was aiming her pistol and gauging the shot. Once they were mere feet away from the tools, Silumko pushed off and pressed something into the thief’s hand.

“Slow them down,” the Malani gasped, reaching for the tools.

Tristan’s fingers closed against a ball of cast iron with a fuse. A grenade. Well, better odds than him landing a shot. He absent-mindedly put on the hat to free his hands and went fumbling for a match, finding and cracking one even as two more shots sounded. Not that the bullets did much more than anger the blems, one haring off after Cressida while the other tried to snatch Ira before she ducked behind a pillar.

That one was closest to the gates, so it was the one Tristan tossed the grenade at.

“GRENADE,” he shouted.

Not quite loudly enough he did not hear a click behind him, Silumko sobbing with relief as the gates began to jerk open. A heartbeat later there was a burst of powder and pale light, both lemures shrieking in pain – when Tristan opened his eyes, colors swimming across his vision, he saw the skin of the monsters looked burned in patches. On the bright side, it made the blems draw back for a moment.

On the less bright side, it woke up the shade and the thing was very angry.

Ira was running to the gate, he saw, and so was Cressida. So it fell to him, damn it, if they wanted to get anywhere inside. Tristan grabbed the rope harness and grunted with effort as he began to drag the furiously struggling shade into the shrine, the other Masks hurrying past him as the blems screeched in fury and one’s mouth opened – only for the gates to jerk closed past the shade’s foot, a dull thump hitting the metal form the other side.

Furious hammering against the door ensued, but the sound was muted and the metal did not even tremble.

The four Masks stood there in the dark for a heartbeat, alone with a terribly angry monster, until Ira lit a lantern and their faces were cast into light. They traded looks, a little at a loss, until the thief cleared his throat.

“I’m not giving back the hat,” Tristan firmly stated.

—

With two headless men pounding at the gate and a barely contained shade in there with them, none of them thought resuming the fight to be a sound notion.

After they dragged the shade in a corner away from them, the four spread out and saw to their own health. He’d not come with a physician’s kit, but he had cloth and sweat enough wiping himself clean of Silumko’s blood was easily done. He offered to check on the man’s leg, suspecting it sprained, but got only a frosty look.

“Fair,” Tristan admitted.

It was Cressida that put it forward they should formally make a truce until they left the shrine, which the continued pounding at the gate made a sound argument for. The motion passed unanimously and the tension thawed a bit, if only a bit. Silumko had been coming here for days and he had water stashed as well as six cheap wicker lanterns, both of which were shared.

Tristan had wondered what the inside of the shrine would look like – the proper rooms, not the glorified closet he’d made it into – and he was duly impressed once enough lamps were lit they were able to see around.

The heart of the room was a massive bronze altar sculpted like a procession of foxes chasing after falling stars, never quite sinking their fangs into them. Pale marble benches faced the center of the room, radiating out in circles, and the ceiling was covered with twisting rivers of bronze. There were two doors out, save for the front gates, in the corners of the room near the back.

Both were closed, and according to Silumko likely to remain so unless he was allowed to ‘proceed with the work’.

“This doesn’t look like Antediluvian work, aside from the choice of metal,” Cressida noted.

“It is not,” Ira replied. “The kings of ancient Sologuer built these shrines over the works of the Ancients. They believed themselves capable of drawing power from such places.”

“They mutilated the aether machinery is what they did,” Silumko grumbled. “There are channels all over these walls that got redirected, it’s no wonder this entire setup is good as scrapped.”

The man had been quiet and almost harried, but now that they’d been in here for fifteen minutes and no one bared a knife he was getting rather chattier.

“Redirected towards where?” Tristan asked.

“That gaudy altar,” the Malani said. “It is hollow. Meant for some sort of ritual, I think.”