Chapter 28

The nerve, really. Like putting on his face would be all it took to trick her.

“You are the most inventive so far, I’ll grant,” Maryam coldly said, “but it is still a miss.”

The signifier’s fingers cut across the air, Gloam dragging behind as the primordial dark leaped eagerly to her command. Or so it felt like. Objectively she knew she was likely barely middle tier when it came to control at the moment, but the sheer difference it made was…

“That does not look pleasant,” the mara wearing Tristan’s face said. “Please don’t do whatever this is?”

He backed away with his hands raised instead of outright fleeing, the way most mara would when threatened with something that could hurt them. They were scavengers, not hunters. Maryam frowned, keeping a tight grip on the roiling Gloam as she refrained from tracing the Sign’s last stroke. Mara could talk, they were intelligent, but this was unusual behavior for one.

“Leave,” she said.

Tristan pinched the bridge of his nose.

“I would,” he said, “but you are standing on top of the gate I would use. Are you really Maryam? You should be in class right now.”

“That’s rich, coming from you,” she replied, then cursed herself.

You should not talk to mara, it only gave them more to work with.

“Class has been over for at least an hour,” she challenged.

“Did Kang kick you out early?” the mara frowned. “It shouldn’t be past nine in the morning.”

If this was a trick, Maryam thought, it was a good trick. The Gloam was bucking wilder and wilder, so she let it disperse with a snap of the wrist. As long as he came no closer she would still have time to trace.

“What was the name of the mayor of Cantica?” she asked.

Maybe-Tristan cocked an eyebrow at her.

“First, put it down that we will be having a conversation about why that question would mark me as not an impostor instead of the hundred others I can think of,” he said.

This was, Maryam conceded amusedly, most probably Tristan.

“Second, his name was Crespin,” the gray-eyed man replied. “I might have forgiven him the man-eating tendencies, if he’d kept them turned on Tupoc.”

“I sometimes daydream about him having been eaten on the island,” Maryam admitted.

“Don’t we all?” Tristan replied, then his eyes narrowed. “Now, what’s this about classes being over?”

“It should be past noon,” Maryam told him. “I returned to the chapterhouse after Teratology ended.”

Leaving Song behind, but it was only a walk back to the front gates. There were only so many tricks Scholomance could attempt while on the spiked paths and the Tianxi was not the kind of fool to fall for them. Tristan’s jaw clenched.

“That should not be possible,” he said. “It was eight when I first entered this layer and I only left it for moments before returning. Is there such a thing as…”

He gestured vaguely, conveying a sense of general magical tomfoolery.

“Time travels one direction only,” Maryam firmly said.

The most Gloam could do was remove you from that journey for a while before spitting you out. If it ever spat you out.

“How did you get in here, anyway?”

Maryam refused to believe he was so profoundly unlucky as to trip into a layer twice in two weeks.

“I crawled through a hole,” Tristan noted. “Then I was pushed into a pit.”

Mask classes sounded like any other cabal’s punishment. One detail caught her interest, however.

“Those passages,” she said. “Were there Glare lights in them?”

“The first, yes,” he frowned. “More or less. The second was a dark pit whose bottom ended up being one of the streets near here.”

He was not slow to catch on.

“You think the dark was Gloam?” he asked.

“Almost certainly,” Maryam said. “Layer entrances do not grow on trees and most of them have Gloam near them. The pit must have eaten a few hours off you before letting you fall into here.”

The thief grimaced.

“Ah, a fresh addition to the list of why I will never have a sound night’s sleep ever again,” Tristan said. “It’d been a day, I suppose I was overdue.”

She would have passed that as humor if not for the exhausted undertone.

“Ancestors, what have you been up to?” she asked. “First you disappear for days, then-”

“Covenant business,” he replied.

“That’s not an answer,” Maryam said.

“It’s the one on offer,” he said. “What are you doing in here, anyway? I thought layers were particularly dangerous for signifiers.”

“I’m fine,” she sniffed. “Unlike you, I’m tethered to the material by a Navigator keeping watch over me. She would pull me back if I were in danger.”

Unless it was danger unlikely to kill her and likely to yield interesting results. There was a reason Maryam had said that Captain Yue was ‘watching over’ her and not ‘protecting’.

“That’s not an answer,” he smugly echoed, like a jackass.

It could not be a mara, they simply would not be able to manage such quantities of smug.

“It’s the one on offer,” she replied in her smarmiest voice, pulling a face.

“Fair,” Tristan conceded, lips twitching. “I expect this is not the place to have that conversation, anyway.”

“It isn’t,” Maryam said, casting a wary gaze around. “Will you be at the cottage tonight?”

He hesitated.

“Will you?”

After this, she was inclined to cut her day early. Captain Yue should keep the grumbling to a minimum, given the hours Maryam had already volunteered this week and the glad news she would be bringing back from this jaunt. She had not run the whole spectrum of tests yet, but the first results had been more than promising.

She had cautiously high hopes for the rest.

“Yes,” she decided. “And I’ll be expecting you for supper.”

“I suppose I’ve nothing better to do,” he conceded.

They stood there for a moment, looking at each other awkwardly, until Maryam remembered and cleared her throat.

“Right, the bridge is your way out,” she said.

Which was the reason she had manifested here in the first place. Captain Yue was alarmingly powerful, but breaching anything but the shallowest part of a layer through brute strength was still beyond the older signifier. This was almost certainly the real Tristan, but Maryam took no risks: she backed away and kept her hand at the ready. He seemed, if anything, to approve of her wariness.

“Right,” Tristan said, stepping onto the bridge. “I suppose I should look for-”

Between two footsteps she blinked and just like that he was gone, vanished into nothing.

“I am going to make fun of you for that,” Maryam announced.

There should still be a few minutes until the layer’s coherence pressure grew strong enough to try and push her out, forcing Yue to shift her location again, so she should get to reason she was out here in the first place. Breathing in, Maryam straightened her back and raised her hand.

The Sphere first.

Her nav a brush, she painted the Gloam into the shape she’d been taught. Gods, the difference it made. Like using an actual paintbrush, even if her fingers were numb, instead of trying to… splash paint at the wall in the right shape. The sphere of pure Gloam formed with a dull pop, which Captain Totec had once described as the consequence of it coming together quickly enough to be hermetic, and Maryam just knew that her creation would be able to bear a man’s weight without wobbling.

It still fought her to collapse, as Gloam always did, but that could be wrestled back into line by tightening the grip of her will. An Ancipital Sign traced just like that, solid and smooth and without a full minute of preparation first. She couldn’t quite believe it. Ancipitals were supposed to be the easiest Signs, simple manipulation of raw Gloam on a small scale, yet Maryam had always found them an uphill struggle.

Excitement rising, she dismissed the sphere and set down a small metal cube on the floor of the bridge. Two downwards stroke and a slash, anchoring at the cube and tethering: the Pinching Ward.

It was delicate work, bordering on conceptual, so like most Acumenal Signs it did not require a heavy hand. The difference, this time, came in depth. Maryam nudged the cube with her foot, breaching the condition of ‘movement’, and immediately felt like the inside of her arm was being harshly pinched. It was a false pain but it felt real, and not a mere twinge of discomfort either.

If her Ward had been that strong, in Cantica, she would not have slept through Tredegar being attacked.

Maryam picked up the cube, stashing it away with trembling fingers. Yue had given her an order to follow, she should now be attempting the basic Didactic Sign known as the Heat Thief, but Maryam had to know. The Izvorica had never once, in all her time as a practitioner, been able to use a Thalassic Sign. Large-scale manipulation of raw Gloam, the branch of the arts that had made the Navigators the power that they were.

She breathed out, calmed herself, and raised her hand toward the wan sky of ancient Tolomontera. She raked her fingers like claws, ripping into the nothing, and felt her hand plunge into the Gloam. Gods, she’d never even made it this far before, she could – focus. Carefully and slowly, she dragged her clawing fingers down before her in a smooth, rounded zigzag. Thick trails of Gloam were left behind, like smudges of oil, and Maryam’s heart leaped in her throat.

She pulled out her hand and released the Gloam, a shit-eating grin on her face.

“Wind Carding,” Maryam exhaled. “Ancestors. Wind Carding.”

A child’s achievement, the Thalassic Sign that built into all the Wind sequences, but never before had she been able to use it. She’d always stumbled at seizing the Gloam currents, finding them hard as stone and sensing nothing like the fibers her instructors were telling her to pull and lay out into another shape. If she could Card then she might eventually be able to create her own winds of Gloam, to quell storms and hide the drag of ships from the leviathans of the deeps.

She could be a real Navigator, not a glorified hedge-witch that could properly use neither her mother’s arts nor her teacher’s. It took a while for the sheer glee to die down, until she could stop smiling long enough to focus. Yet she must, she still had a list to go through.

“Didactic,” she reminded herself.

And then an Autarchic, so Captain Yue could establish if baseline capacity regarding those changed when she was inside the layer. Only the moment she raised her hand, the world blurred.

Maryam hastily drew back her nav into herself, keeping a tight rein on self-perception as the layer tried to ‘heal’ the wound that Yue had made to get her inside. The Tianxi captain would not be able to withstand that strength head on, so instead would slash a fresh wound through the make of the layer and slide Maryam down it.

It felt a little like falling and a lot like being thrown.

When the world grew solid again, Maryam was standing on a rooftop. Looking around, she found herself near what must be the edge of Port Allazei – not far before her stood walls, and far behind her she could see smoke and fires where the army attacking the city fought for the docks. Movement caught her attention and with some dread she realized she was not alone.

Maryam was not far from city gates, which strangely enough were open. She shuffled to the edge of the rooftop for a better line of sight and froze. No, not open: ripped off their hinges.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

A pack of devils – half wearing human shells, the others bare long-legged horrors – stood in torchlight, two of them bringing forward a large machine on a painted wooden litter. It was set down gently, facing the smashed gates, and after some chatter two shell-wearing devils approached it. Maryam stared at it all in the torchlight, spellbound.

The device looked like a printing press, though overlarge and made entirely of gray iron. The devils treated it with reverence, and the two who manned it only did so with great care. The corkscrew turned as the devils pushed the handles and the block fell, slamming into the press bed like a lightning strike. Forgelight burned bright at the edges, as if the insides were filled with molten iron, but this was no metalwork.

Maryam could hear the aether screaming, a chunk ripped out from the Empty Sea and compressed into a shape by the implacable tyranny of the machine.

And when the devils turned the handles the other way, untwisting the corkscrew and releasing the block, there was something where there had once been nothing. A many-limbed creature, its carapace almost shining as its mandibles twitched and came to… life, or close enough. A devil. They had made a devil, cast it from nothing by wounding the aether. Gods, was that how their entire kind came to be?

The creature twitched up, jerkily, and the other devils hooted in joy.

Maryam felt a shiver of dread run up her spine and did not think twice: she pulled at the tether, signaling Captain Yue to pull her out before she could see the rest of this nightmare.

—

She woke up strapped on the table, her body aching all over.

Captain Yue was still seated in her armchair, a small leather-bound journal in hand as she scribbled notes. The Tianxi bit at her lip as she leaned forward, the movement drawing her braid forward and revealing some of the burns around her ears before she let out a noise of satisfaction and drew back. Maryam focused on breathing, her heart still beating wildly.

“I could have kept you in there longer,” Yue said. “What happened?”

“I shifted to a dangerous place,” Maryam forced out. “I saw…”

She swallowed, feeling nauseous.

“Devils. One being made.”

The older woman looked, horribly enough, envious. Yue busied herself undoing the straps as she talked.

“Lucky!” the Tianxi said. “There’s hardly anyone alive who has seen an Infernal Forge in action, you know. The Watch destroyed most, the ones left are either sealed in Pandemonium or buried in the deep vaults under the Rookery.”

Maryam licked her lips, gingerly rubbing her wrist where the leather straps had left a red pressure mark.

“It’s really how they are…”

“Made?” Captain Yue finished. “Yes. Devils are not a natural race. The first were made by the Antediluvians, though I doubt any of that era are left. The oldest you’re likely to see out there were cast back during the Old Night.”

“What are they?” Maryam asked. “I thought they were aether intellects, maybe failed gods.”

“Arguably, they are the very opposite of gods,” Yue said. “A god is an aether intellect that seeks to manifest a physical body by feeding on tainted aether. Meanwhile, well – did you see the new devil long?”

“No,” she admitted. “I pulled at the tether soon after it was made.”

“Fresh castings are all but mindless, barely cleverer than dogs,” the Navigator said. “They gain mindfulness by feeding on tainted aether, and through that process eventually form, well – a makeshift soul, you could say, though not one like ours.”

“Annealing,” Maryam said. “That’s what annealing is, how they become immortal.”

Meaning that older devils feeding on something like slaughter were quite literally forging a soul out of the concept. She was most glad Pandemonium remained sealed by the Watch.

“A devil that annealed will continue to exist in the aether even when its physical body is destroyed,” Captain Yue confirmed. “It can be cast anew out of any Infernal Forge as soon as it has finished ‘swimming’ the aether towards it.”

She paused.

“It’s one of the reasons the Iscariot Accords ban signatories having any, not that it stops them trying,” the Tianxi said. “When we kill Hell’s nobility, the only place we want them coming back is behind the walls of Pandemonium where they’re more trouble to each other than us.”

Maryam made a noise of disgust.

“Why would anyone want to make devils?” she said.