Chapter 31

Maryam crept along the floor, fingers trailing Gloam as she pricked her ear.

She risked a glance past the corner of the metal panel, immediately drawing back. Just ahead a kobalos was panting as it gazed below, clutching a barbed javelin. It had a ragged mail coat on and a helmet with holes for its horns, but mail could be worked around. The Akelarre Guild had entire suites of Signs meant for that very purpose.

With the hand not holding her pistol she traced the barred triangle anchor-symbol, then tracing strokes wide and sharp around it to twist the basic Arrow pattern into Gulati’s Arrow. As she finished the last curve on the derivative she withdrew her fingers and Gloam branded itself into the air, shaped into a Sign. She held it back until she popped back around the corner and aimed it the kobalos’ way.

The movement caught its attention and it chittered in surprise as it turned her way, javelin pulling back, but Gulati’s Arrow came tearing out of nothingness half an inch in front of her palm. In the blink of an eye a spike of oily darkness had caught the beast in the chest, hardly even staggering it but melting through the ringmail in a thick patch.

The burns spread from there, devouring it from the inside as Maryam’s nav kept a tight hold on the Sign.

Aad Gulati’s variation on the Arrow would keep burning away at what it touched so long as one maintained their grip on the Sign. The downside was that the more it ate the harder the Sign became to control. Maryam, whose Grasp was usually one of the finest in her year, could make much better use of it than most. She could feel Hook’s glee the sight of the brutal effect and almost rolled her eyes. Her sister liked combat Signs a little too much.

She waited until a chunk of the torso was gone before dismissing the Arrow, the kobalos dropping to the ground as she rose to her feet and tugged her cloak back into place. On the other side of the half-circle balcony Yaq was on his feet as well, flicking ichor off a long knife. He nodded at her. They’d secured the second level, then. Below them the main body of the crew moved from cover to cover across the pocked metal ground, only smoke and silence answering them from the rest of this wretched iron wasp hive.

“The second level is clear,” Maryam called out.

Yaq was not the screaming type.

“The top level is clear,” Silumko called back from above.

After a long moment of them fanning out, the remainder of the crew on the bottom level finally relaxed their guns.

“Clear,” Song announced in turn. “We gather downstairs.”

Resting her pistol against her shoulder muzzle up, Maryam allowed herself a satisfied glance at the last half-hour’s work: a handful of corpses up here, most killed by Yaq without a sound as the large man moved with a panther’s silent lethality, and many more downstairs where their main body had drawn the attention of the kobaloi while the flanking forces hit the upper levels. She waited for Silumko to come down one of the odd sloped halls that served as stairs in this place, watching as he struggled to make his way down between the sharp angles and slopes.

Maryam called the room a wasp hive in her head because it was broadly shaped as one, four levels of a structure that was akin to a fat pear. The inside was a forest-like mess of iron panels and fallen metal beams, with the ground level a broad warren of holes and walls. The kobaloi tribe had gathered mostly around the central part of the structure, which boasted two stacked half-circle balconies overlooking the middle of the ground floor.

The last level, the basement, was so thickly filled with broken metal and collapsed ceiling that it was impossible for humans to wade in through past a few feet beyond the door. Silumko leaped down the last of the angled slopes, landing next to Maryam with his musket held steady.

“That was easier than expected,” he said. “Considering their numbers, I mean.”

She snorted. There might have been thirty-odd kobaloi in the room, but there was a reason those lemures were not considered a threat to anything other lone travelers or farmsteads deep in the hills. Unless they were led by a larger lemure, anyway.

“We caught them by surprise in their own lair,” she said. “Some of them weren’t even armed. It makes musketry almost unsporting, not that I intend to stop.”

Their crew’s ranged weapons punching through the enemy’s armor without trouble meant they might as well have been wearing silk robes instead. A decided advantage in a fight, though that did not make dealing with them a stroll in the park. The rudimentary crossbows they sometimes wielded packed quite a punch, and at a comparable range. The quarrels were often nothing but sharpened wood, but the kobaloi smeared shit and ichor on the tip. Cemelli had cleaned Maryam’s shoulder wound to be sure she got all of it out, when she was clipped earlier.

“I’m not one to turn down a fight stacked my way,” Silumko cheerfully agreed. “Still, you’d think Scholomance would have worse to throw at us this far into the Trench.”

Maryam traced the evil eye against her palm at that tempting of misfortune. This was their sixth room of the day, the furthest anyone had pushed into the grand maze.

“There was something odd about the last shuffle,” she said. “It was unusual of it to give us an empty room, and at the last moment to boot.”

The first two rooms this morning had been in the usual mold. One a hall of spinning blades whose timing changed every two and a half minutes, the other a field of checkered black-and-white ceramics that blew up first on a three-one pattern but then abruptly all turned into traps for the last section of the field. Yaq had, for some reason, found this deeply hilarious. Izcalli humor could be passing strange.

Still, though the rooms had been dangerous and required both care and thought their delving crew crossed them without much issue.

The room after that was one that had already been cleared – the Fourth and Eleventh, by the painted marks – but that’d been a different sort of trap. The disarmed traps had hidden a kobalos ambush, the tribe peppering them with crossbow bolts and javelins before legging it. Song had caught them out early, thankfully, and a few kills were enough to have them on the run. It’d still cost Maryam a bolt to the shoulder, which could have torn muscle if not for the layers and padding of the combat fit.

That was not the last they saw of the little bastards, either. They harassed their crew through the next room as well. It would have been tricky to navigate on its own, for it consisted of two sets of shuttles going back and forth across a deep spiked pit and since each shuttle only covered half the length of the pit you had to leap from one to the other when they were closest – a timing that changed on a cycle. The kobaloi had made it much worse by sneaking onto the further shuttles to shoot at them all the while, though at least they proved poor shots when on the move.

Still, between some fine shooting and Maryam’s personal contribution of throwing a Gloam-hound construct in their shuttle to tear them up their crew made it through the fourth room as well. They’d expected the fifth room to be even worse, but Scholomance then inexplicably shuffled off what it had lined up for them just before they entered to put another empty room on their path. The god was visibly angry about it, according to Song, and for good reason: they’d walked right through the solved room into this iron hive, the lair of the same kobalos tribe that’d haunted them all the way.

They had cleared it of the lemures with relish.

“There must be some kind of mechanical limitation on what it can do when shuffling rooms around the Trench,” Silumko mused. “This whole place was built.”

“Built by Lucifer, his court of devils and an empire’s worth of slaves,” Maryam shot back.

Hell was said to be the mother of many mechanical horrors, and depending on the chronicle the Lightbringer was either one of the greatest minds to ever exist or a god in the flesh.

“Even aether engines are engines,” the Mask insisted. “They are capable of astounding things, but there are still rules they must obey.”

Maryam was disinclined to argue mechanics with a man who was half a tinker, so she simply grunted in acknowledgement and let the conversation lapse until they’d reached the ground floor. Yaq was already there with the others, having gone down the path on the other side of the balcony.

“We will be taking a rest here,” Captain Emeni announced, patting at one of her hair knots.

She’d not taken a wound today, a relief after the javelin she ate in the stomach last time. Still, the pretty face was tired even if her gaze was undimmed. Silumko groaned in relief at the announcement, and he was hardly the only one. Given their crew’s progress they had continued the delve uninterrupted since morning, pushing on uninterrupted save for a rest to eat earlier. Some of them were getting tired, though not Maryam.

Part of that would be the poppy pills Cemelli had fed her earlier and made her body rather… floaty, but there was more. They were just on the edge of finally getting somewhere in this fucking delve, Maryam could feel it, and that lent her a feverish sort of energy. There was a victory around the corner, proof they weren’t just wasting their time in a pointless game of dice with death. A hand caught her shoulder and she almost twitched.

“Are you all right?” Song quietly asked.

Her friend’s uniform was barely scuffed even after all the day’s travails, she ruefully noted.

“I was only thinking of how far we made it today,” she said.

Song slowly nodded.

“There has been some discussion of turning back,” she said. “Some among us are getting exhausted.”

“We’re close to something, Song,” Maryam said. “I can almost feel it. At least a little further.”

“I happen to agree,” her captain murmured back. “It was too agitated earlier for it to have been entirely about the kobaloi, there is something else near it doesn’t want to see.”

She sighed.

“But there is more to this than the two of us,” she said. “Emeni is ambivalent, so as compromise after resting we will push one room further – but no more. We still do not know what our path back will look like.”

Maryam grimaced but did not argue. That was one of the first lessons the Trench had taught them: anyone who blew all their powder on the way in would be in the pits for the way back. There was no guarantee Scholomance would take it easy on them while they retreated. And Ishanvi did look tired to the bone, now that remembered to check. Slumped on the ground with half-closed eyes, breathing shallowly. The little scholar was fit, but there was a still a softness around her edges that Maryam recognized from their first year Warfare class.

Ishanvi Kapadia had begun training not so long before Scholomance, that was her guess, and while she had been assiduous she was not used to long days of physical work. Many College students had been the same back in Warfare class.

“I still think we could push further,” Maryam said, “but it sounds like that decision’s been made.”

Song hummed.

“You’ve never been so eager to throw yourself into the delve before.”

Blue eyes narrowed. That was much too innocent a tone.

“Is there question in there, or are we going to be throwing statements around?” Maryam said, then paused. “Rice sometimes tastes good. Clothes can be red.”

She’d thrown the rice one in there just to piss off Song, but tellingly the other woman did not even bat an eye.

“I am not accusing you of anything, Maryam,” Song said.

“Really?” she tightly replied. “Because it sounds like you are.”

“Or maybe,” Song said, “I happen to be acquainted with throwing myself into the work to avoid other matters.”

Her fingers clenched. What was it with everyone and trying to tell her how to live her life, lately? She was doing her fucking job, the one they’d signed up for. Just because Yue would soon have the supplies for obscuration didn’t mean that Maryam needed to use them immediately. It was under control.

“Winning your race to the library is what we’re here for, aren’t we?” Maryam harshly replied. “It’s become the point of our year, we won’t even be doing a test. Never thought I’d heard you complain about me taking it seriously.”

She walked away from her captain before Song could answer, knowing it was ill done but her teeth clenched too tightly around a bit of spite to care. She went to stand with Ishanvi, who had woken up enough to break bread with Silumko. Quite literally, the two of them sharing a nut loaf and some dried sausage in between pulling at their waterskins.

“-like a rather low wage,” Ishanvi frowned. “Coffee-making is a rare and prized skill. And you are all paid this much, not only you?”

“I asked Tristan and he says he’s got the same wage,” Silumko told her. “He started taking shifts before I did, too, so he shouldn’t be paid less.”

Maryam, not quite able to make herself sit down with them, instead folded her hands behind her back.

“Talking about the Chimerical?” she asked.

“Well, Hage underpaying us for working there anyway,” Silumko said. “I don’t suppose you could get it out of Abrascal whether we actually have the same wage or he was lying through his teeth?”

Considering Tristan regularly called Officer Hage ‘the worst sort of cheapskate’ and an ‘extortionate old spider’ Maryam very much doubted anyone taking shifts at the Chimerical was getting paid a copper more than the devil could get away with offering.

“Silumko,” Ishanvi chided. “Not all cabalists talk freely about money.”

Maryam frowned at her.

“He’d tell me,” she said.

The other woman’s brow rose in what looked like genuine surprise.

“Oh, are you two close?” Ishanvi asked. “Apologies, I’ve never seen you together.”

And Maryam’s mouth opened to say something scathing, but then she tried to bring up an example from after Ishanvi’s arrival on the island and she could hardly think of one. They… Gods, had they spent any time at all together beyond the brigade hours since Misery Square? Maryam could not even think of a time only the two of them had gone to buy food together. Because either I did it with the Orels to show them the good shops or I passed the duty to Angharad.

It occurred to Maryam, like a bolt out of the black, that for all that part of her resented Tristan holding her at a distance his contribution was merely the holding – she had walked out there on her own. She swallowed, mumbled an excuse about keeping a lookout and fled the pair. The closest thing she could think of to disappearing into a hole was heading down to the basement, but adding insult to injury there was already someone down there. Cemelli Popo, kneeling down by some painted iron panel with a lantern, spared her a curious look.

“I’ve found one of the places the kobaloi use to make their ringmail,” the Savant informed her. “A little deeper in. There’s piles of alloy shavings by a makeshift anvil and hammer.”

A change of topic. That would do.

“I would have thought their armor to be salvage from the invasions of Tolomontera,” Maryam said.

“It could be for repairs,” Cemelli mused. “I’ve noticed there are patches in their mail shoddier than the others. It would fit with them being imitators of lucent creations rather than creators. In most regards, anyway.”

She inclined her head at the painted iron panel. Maryam was not exactly impressed: thick spirals of rust red and brown covered most of it, surrounding what she thought might be meant to represent Lucifer’s ancient throne. There was a large red eye on it that’d thrown her off.

“A great admirer of spirals, are you?” she drily asked.

“It seems confirmation that the kobaloi tribes in the Trench are under the dominance of Scholomance,” Cemelli told her. “Or something taking that guise, anyhow.”

She then turned a more critical eye on the painting.

“Artistically speaking, this is rather well done for something painted using one’s fingers,” she said. “Almost certainly not the maker’s first work, which is interesting to me.”

“So you’re a fingerpaint expert?” Maryam teased. “Peiling classes teach broadly indeed.”

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Cemelli looked almost embarrassed.

“I thought to become a painter, once,” she admitted. “I even studied at the workshop of Master Madiaraga in Ixta for a year.”

“That doesn’t sound like an Izcalli name,” Maryam said.

“It isn’t, but I’m from the Totochtin League,” Cemelli shrugged. “We’re barely even Aztlan.”

The League was one of the oddities of that part of the world, Maryam had always thought. It had been the seat of Izcalli royalty once, and one of its wealthiest regions. But it had also been invaded and annexed by other powers half a dozen times, and those tides coming and going had left them rather different from every nation surrounding them.

“Evidently you changed careers,” Maryam said. “Was the workshop a disappointment?”

Cemelli shook her head.

“Gods, no, it was the best time of my life,” she replied. “But I couldn’t afford to keep paying the fees. My family lost almost everything in a flower war. None of my kin were grabbed, thankfully, but the Izcalli ransacked the dye shop and enslaved most of our workers.”

The Izvorica grimaced. That was all too familiar a tale, though the slavers were from a different banner.

“My condolences,” she said.

Cemelli shrugged.

“I still paint,” she said. “There is no reason I should stop. This is a job, not my life – I trained as a physician to help pay my family’s bills, joining the Watch doesn’t change that. It just means I don’t have to worry about getting stiffed when I send my bill.”

A practical woman, this one, Maryam thought amusedly. And with a certain approval. Cemelli Popo rose to her feet with a groan.

“One more, then,” she said. “I could have done without, but I suppose the Stripes need their pats on the back.”

The signifier was not in agreement for the first part, but the second was a breath of fresh air.

“Not impressed by Colonel Cao’s magical points?” Maryam laughed. “For shame, Cemelli.”

“The most magical thing about them is how they make generally sensible people lose their sense,” Cemelli said. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about, considering you’re the steady one in your brigade.”

Maryam’s brow rose.

“I thought Song had grown on you,” she said.

“She’s brilliant,” Cemelli bluntly replied, “and very gifted. That skews her opinion on what can and should be done.”

Maryam crossed her arms.