Chapter 37

The thing about weakness was that there was absolutely nothing redeeming about it.

Everyone loved a good picaresca story, in Sacromonte. Tales of a roguish man of scandalously common breeding getting the better of his betters. Swindling greedy merchants out of their wealth, tricking vain ladies and pompous lords into humiliating themselves. And it was not a taste that ended at the borders of the Murk or even the Old Town. Infanzones, they liked the songs and poems about rats same as the rest of the city. Their smile, though, it had a bit of smirk to it around the corners.

Because they understood that the stories were just that, that when a witty wastrel won in the stories because life in the streets taught them to be clever it was just what people wanted to be true. In the world they lived in the clever rogues got caught, shot in the head and dumped in the canals. There was nothing meaningful about being poor and hungry and afraid no higher meaning to it. Weakness was not a trial with a reward at the end, it was just being weak.

And Tristan was weak.

He wouldn’t hide from that truth, that would just get him killed. He’d always need the edge: the poison and the dagger, the lie and the quiet feet in the dark. He’d always be the rat, scurrying around the boots of men. He’d almost forgot that, in these trials. He’d won too many petty victories, found too much respect in the eyes of others. He’d been awakened from that dream, though, and though it had been a rough awakening he was almost thankful Lieutenant Vasanti for it.

There was nothing like bargaining your treatment down to torture to remind you of your place in the order of things.

Yet Tristan had lived, bought his way out of the grave again, and now he must ensure that he would not be thrown back in it once his enemies had what they wanted from him. Once he was no longer useful and their reason for taking the finger off the trigger passed.

So in the dark before the other rose, after what little sleep he had stolen from his bruised and aching body, the rat scratched up a plan against the walls of his mind. What did he want? To live. To keep his crew alive if he could. Maryam first, then the others.

Under pale light he might have been ashamed of that brutal truth, but alone in the dark with the pain he felt not a flicker of guilt. It would wait until he no longer tasted blood in his mouth.

Second, Vasanti must die or be forced off the board. The old lieutenant must be put in a position where she could no longer come for him, not even if she burned all her last bridges to get one last swing at him. She had already tried to get him killed twice and her hatred of Abuela would have driven her to try again even if Tristan had not indirectly helped her slip a noose around her own neck.

Two wants was enough. More would be greedy, scattering his focus. So what was in the way?

The god in the pillar. Lieutenant Wen, who would not suffer violence against blackcloaks until it was dealt by the hand of the law. Vasanti herself, who was sure to sabotage him if she could – until she could do worse. Yong, who would turn on him if selling Tristan’s hide guaranteed getting to the third trial and keeping his husband alive.

Maryam? No, her own wants came after the Trial of Weeds. She was a help. Francho would murder to survive, and perhaps even for convenience, but so would most everyone Tristan had ever known. The old man’s contract would be even more important than Yong’s musket and Maryam’s Signs anyhow.

There were greater dooms looming in the distance, the Red Maw and his oath to Wen and whatever awaited beyond the Trial of Weeds, but these did not matter. One grave at a time.

Tristan turned in his cot, grey eyes open as he looked at the stone above him. He was not alone. Fortuna, sitting against the wall to his side with her dress like a pool of silk at her feet, kept him company in silence. Golden eyes under a golden crown he thought, taking in the sight of her for the span of a breath. Like a painting come to life. His eye returned to the stone, the claws inside his mind scratching at the walls.

He stayed like that a long time, his body a dull ache, until finally he saw how the pieces fit together. Only then did the rat close his eyes.

“To join the court of cats,” Tristan Abrascal softly sang, smiling.

Sleep snuck up on him.

—

In the small hours before morning, before the others woke, Tristan was handed a small cup of milky white poison.

It didn’t look that way when they sold on the streets. The black tea that the coteries served in their dens was as dark as the name implied and socorro tincture, that purported miracle drug that claimed to heal anything from the cough to impotence, was red-brown. Both of those were cut with other substances, especially socorro – which every charlatan and street witch from the Murk to the Orchard claimed to have a potent family recipe for. It all came back to the same plant, though: the poppy.

Tristan had seen the fruits of that bud hollow out too many men to ever trust it, but he made himself drink the extract anyway.

The thugs had left few visible marks during his talks with Lieutenant Vasanti, but he had been savagely beaten and his body still felt like it. If he was to be able to move the way he needed to, he would the pain taken care of. Hence, poppy extract. It would not make up for the sleeplessness lurking behind his eyes, yanking his thoughts one way and the other, but he would handle that himself. The few bruised, intermittent hours of sleep he had grabbed after making his plans would have to tide him over until he could collapse.

“I recommend against marrying the poppy to substances from your box,” the Watch physician said, stroking his sparse beard. “Though I expect you know better than that.”

“I do,” Tristan said.

There was nothing left in there but the bearded cat tincture and the medical turpentine anyhow, not after Vanesa’s last farewell. He had already moved the last vials to his bag along with the few medical supplies he’d wheedled out of the Watch, abandoning the box itself as dead weight. And to think mere days ago he had killed a man for that pile of broken wood. How quickly such worth was spent, though that should not have come as a surprise.

In Sacromonte, lives could always be had on the cheap.

The Watch doctor nodded a farewell at him, then packed up his kit and left. The thief rolled his shoulders a little, wincing at the sensation, then finally turned to meet the gaze of the other man present. The one he needed to bargain with so he might begin setting the board, and fortunately the one who had wanted to speak with him. Best to begin with that, if only to fish for leverage.

“You wanted a word?” Tristan said.

“Something like that,” Lieutenant Wen replied.

The Tianxi with the golden frames was, for once, not eating. He might have called that an ill-omen, were Wen not already inherently such.

“I am all ears, then.”

Wen studied him for some time, then sighed. He went fishing around the pocket of his vest, pulling out a bronze grandfather pocket watch tied to a chain. It was a simple but lovely piece, still ticking away dutifully. The thief stilled, for he had seen it before – most often during the Trial of Lines.

“That is Vanesa’s watch.”

“It is,” Lieutenant Wen said, and threw it.

Tristan panicked, but even dulled his reflexes were better than most. He caught the chain, then the rest, and sent a dark look the fat Tianxi’s way. Not that the watchman seemed to care.

“It’s yours,” Lieutenant Wen said.

He frowned, looking for the trap.

“Why?”

The watchman snorted.

“Because the old girl must have emptied your stocks killing that Aztlan tough,” Wen said. “He died quick and ugly.”

Tristan smoothed away his worry, painting confusion on his face instead.

“My stocks?”

The lieutenant sighed, taking off his spectacles to clean them with a ragged silk kerchief he dragged out of his sleeve.

“Alvareno’s Dosages is a required reading for Cryptics, you shifty little prick,” Wen amiably said. “I know a poison box when I see one.”

Tristan swallowed. There were only so many reasons for the lieutenant to know that.

“Are you…”

Wen had spoken contemptuously of Masks before, but that might have been to hide his tracks.

“Do you think I’d tell you if I were Krypteia?” Wen replied, amused.

A fair point, the thief mentally conceded. The Tianxi dismissed the notion with a wave a heartbeat later.

“I never cared for the cloak and dagger games,” Wen said. “I’m a good Arthasastra boy, we don’t partake.”

Tristan slowly blinked. As in the Arthasastra Society, the Circle of the Watch that trained diplomats?

“You’re a Laurel,” he said, not hiding his skepticism.

“Historian track, to be exact,” Lieutenant Wen amusedly replied. “Our society’s got the broadest remit of the entire College, Tristan, we’re not all translators and negotiators.”

Wen had seemed unusually well-versed in the history of the Watch. Besides, even if the man was lying it hardly mattered. Fingers closing around the watch, feeling the faint ticking beneath, Tristan bowed his head.

“Thank you,” he said.

The older man stared him down.

“She died well,” Wen said. “Sometimes that’s the best you can hope for.”

There’s no such thing as a good death, Tristan thought. We all shit ourselves and get thrown in a canal when the rot starts to stink. There’s nothing noble about rot, Wen. It’s just the meat that used to be a person going bad. But the thought of leaving Vanesa’s watch in the hands of strangers seemed disrespectful, somehow, so he put it away inside his own pocket. There would be time to fasten it properly later.

“You’ve buttered me up properly,” Tristan acknowledged. “Shall we now tuck into the meal?”

“A poor choice of words, on an island with a history of cannibalism,” Wen noted, sounding amused. “But if you insist.”

Manes, was there anything on this island that didn’t eat people? It was bad enough Tristan was going to have to rely on the fact for his plans. The lieutenant, at last satisfied with spectacles that had been largely spotless when he began cleaning them, slid them back on. It made his eyes colder, somehow, for them to be framed in gold.

“Do you still intend to try for the lift?” the lieutenant asked.

It was phrased as a question, a choice, but Tristan knew better. Wen had extended him help and protection only in exchange for his sabotaging the aetheric machine above. If he went back on his word now there would be consequences. The maze is suicide for us anyhow, he thought. Yong, Maryam, Francho and himself was not fine enough a crew to make it all the way across even if they had some idea of a usable path.

“I do,” Tristan said, “but we both know that Vasanti’s new plans mean mine need to be adjusted. I have a concern.”

Bait.

“You’re afraid that she’ll find the lift,” Wen stated.

Bait taken. I’m not, Tristan thought. She thinks she has the solution to the front gates and the last thing she needs is more dead blackcloaks. She’ll be religious about sticking to the tiles room and walking right back out.

“It would be the end of my plans,” Tristan said. “I need to take some precautions, Wen. And to do that I need access to the pillar.”

Wen frowned at him.

“There are only two stone keys to that door,” he said. “Vasanti keeps both on her.”

And she was unlikely to share them even if politely asked. Fortunately for them there was no need to go begging.

“There are only two known keys to the door,” Tristan corrected.

They’d not found the stone button in his boot. The fat Tianxi blinked, then let out a startled laugh.

“You have a third,” he deduced. “So what is it that you need from me, then?”

“To get up there unseen,” Tristan said. “Vasanti means to hit the pillar come morning, so it’s certain to be under guard right now.”

“I could arrange that,” the lieutenant agreed. “Get my people in place, tell them to look elsewhere.”

He then narrowed his eyes from behind that thin lens of glass.

“And I will, if you tell me what you’ll be up to in there,” Lieutenant Wen said. “I won’t be party to attacks on watchmen, boy.”

Wen’s line in the sand. Wen’s lever. Learn what people love and you will know how to move them, Abuela’s voice whispered into his ear.

“I don’t have anything I can hurt the Watch with,” Tristan lied. “I only intend to jam the door with the broken lock.”

The lieutenant studied him, looking for the lie, but he wouldn’t find it. Tristan’s mind felt like a door without a hinge – every passing thing winding through, without regard to need or sense. The Tianxi might as well have tried to read a whirlpool.

“Sensible,” Wen said. “And the god inside?”

“Another concern,” the thief smiled winningly. “Which leads me to my final request.”

Lieutenant Wen cocked an eyebrow over his spectacles.

“This ought to be good.”

“I need,” Tristan said, “a human leg.”

And given how many watchmen had died fighting the god earlier, at least he could count on supply beating demand.

—

“You should have asked for an arm,” Fortuna opined. “It would have been easier to carry.”

Tristan duly ignored her. He’d glimpsed the leg he now carried wrapped in cloth earlier and noted it was half-charred, likely hacked off a corpse on the great funeral pyre the Watch had made outside the Old Fort – in the same place Inyoni had been burned. They must not have had enough wood to keep it blazing long enough for all the corpses to be turned to ash.

As the nearest woods were full of bloodthirsty cultists, this was understandable.

With Wen giving a few orders the thief’s path up the rope ladder was cleared and there was no one keeping watch on the stairs. Good. He could afford no witnesses for this. The last stone button unlocked the door, and once it popped open he hastily claimed the key back before shoving it into a pocket. No teeth sought to chomp down on him, so Tristan went ahead with the first part of his plan: tossed the leg out into the room.

“Dinner’s served,” he called out.

“Wow,” Fortuna muttered. “That got dark.”

He’d told Wen he needed the dead flesh to hide his scent, keep the god off him. The truth was that he needed it for the very opposite reason: he needed the god to come, and the smell of meat was his best chance at ensuring that.

“I need you to keep watch out in the tile room,” Tristan told Fortuna. “The moment it gets close, tell me.”

He would need to be able to close the door in a heartbeat when the god approached, as he doubted that offering of a leg would keep the deity from trying to eat him.

“I don’t want to be alone in a room with a dead leg,” Fortuna whined.

“You won’t be,” Tristan assured her with a winning smile. “There will also be a terrifying ancient god trying to eat us.”

“Ugh,” the Lady of Long Odds sniffed. “It better not get anything on my dress.”

Tristan opened his mouth, about to ask whether her dress could actually be dirtied – or cleaned – but then he caught the gleam in her eye and his mouth snapped shut. She was only trying to get a rise out of him. Not that she stopped afterwards, complaining about everything from the lighting being unflattering to the leg facing the wrong way, but at least she kept watch as he had asked.

The minutes passed, one after another, and his shoulders tensed. If he could not speak with the god, if he could not join that cat’s court…

But after more than half an hour had passed, the leg did what it was meant to.

“Company,” Fortuna warned, then cocked her head to the side. “Oh, that looks nasty.”

She fled into the wall a moment later as darkness slithered into the room on quiet feet.

Tristan pushed the door until it was but a finger’s breadth away from closing. He felt like a child closing the closet door to keep the monster at bay, but the monster here was not of his own making: through the thin length kept open he glimpsed the god moving, all slimy dark scales past a flash of yellow eyes. It was the teeth that had him shuddering in revulsion, though still startlingly human-like for all that each was the size of a hand. The god gobbled up the dead leg with nary a sound.

“It’s lost a leg,” Fortuna whispered in his ear. “Must have been salt munitions, it’s not healing.”

However slight her whisper, it was still heard.

“The vermin has learned unexpected tricks,” the god chuckled.

Its voice was smooth and lovely, almost like a singer’s. It made you want to lean in, to listen closer. Tristan grit his teeth. The Red Maw had not made a meal of him, neither would this lesser thing. The thief put himself together, breathing out and steadying his back.

“God of the land,” he smilingly said, “I greet you.”

The god – that horrid reptilian thing – laughed, laughed like a infanzona who had just seen a little monkey do a clever trick.

“Oh, Tristan,” the god crooned. “Is it a test you’ve come for, like those the shackled beasts below offer to you lost souls?”

It came closer, until its humid and fetid breath came like a whisper through the crack.

“Come closer and I shall give you a game, I promise.”

And the voice, the way it spoke, made it sound tempting even though it was utter madness sure to end in his death.

“I’ve a dislike for playing the games of others, I must confess,” Tristan said. “It is a bargain I came for.”

A mocking rictus that he only glimpsed, rows of white teeth over too-red lips.

“You need only come closer,” the god silkily said, “and you will have everything you need.”

Fortuna popped her head out of the wall.

“He’s lying,” she helpfully said. “He’s going to eat you.”

Tristan sighed.

“Thank you, Fortuna,” he replied.

“Just looking out for you,” she smugly said.

He suspected that if she had enough reach to pat herself on the back in that dress she would have. The god had gotten close, during that short distraction, edged in. He began to close the door and it froze. Ah, so it did want to talk. At least as long as eating him when he slipped up was on the table.

“I do not have a name to call you by,” Tristan said. “Would you care to remedy this, god of the land?”

“How polite,” the god drawled. “You may call me Boria.”

That word, that name, it rippled. Echoed. And when Tristan heard it, all he could thought was that he should step out. The god was tricking him, but it was wounded. Weak. And had he not beaten starker odds than this? It would be easier to bargain from there, and if it turned in him then his wits would be enough to… Nails dug into his palm as the thief breathed out shallowly.

Enough. Enough? Had he ever once in his life held enough in his hand that a victory had come cheap? He turned inwards, sharpened himself.

“You are,” he said, “a god of arrogance.”

Fortuna fanned herself, leaning against the wall to his side. She looked disdainful.

“The kind that dooms you,” she said. “Very specific.”

“Amusing, coming from the likes of you,” Boria laughed.

The goddess huffed up like an offended cat.

“Let us not lose ourselves in the weeds,” Tristan hastily said before she could throw a fit. “I’m not so sure you have the time for it, Boria. You have troubles.”

“Not even the touch of the Glare can still me forever,” the god scoffed. “I will return in full splendor and take my revenge upon those who dared to wound me.”

“Ah, but it may well be that the Watch comes for you first,” Tristan said. “They have discovered some of the secrets of this place.”

“And what is that to me?” Boria dismissed.

The thief did not answer that immediately. He would first, he thought, need to crack the shell. Just like eating crab.

“I thought you might the Red Maw for a time, did you now?” Tristan said. “Because of the tongue and that fearsome throat of yours. I only knew for sure it was untrue when I returned yesterday and heard the Watch had chased you off.”

Nothing so fearsome as the Maw could have been chased off my muskets, no matter how much salt was loaded into it. It had been confirmed later when he saw the projection of the machine on the other side of the pillar and how massive that entity had become.

“You spend my patience,” Boria warned.

“So I’ve since had to wonder about,” Tristan continued, unruffled, “why it is you’re here at all.”

The god did not answer.

“You’re not bound by the golden light and its rules while in the pillar, that’s true,” Tristan said. “But you’re not here by choice either, are you? You’re starving, Boria. I must have been the first piece of fresh meat you saw in centuries.”

Silence. The god watched him patiently, waiting for an opening. A way to gobble him up.

“The devils put you in here,” the thief said. “After they fiddled with the rules of the golden machine they stranded you inside the pillar and sealed the doors, knowing you’d be so fucking starved of fresh meat that you would attack anyone coming in like a good guard dog.”

This entire mountain, Tristan thought, had been turned into a sandpit for the Red Maw. The devils had created a makeshift seal by piling up gods atop the Maw and forcing them to feed on it through the rules imposed by the golden light, and when the Watch had evicted them from the island they’d sealed the doors behind them so the blackcloaks would not be able to accidentally undo their seal by tinkering with the aetheric machine.

And then, just to be sure no wily vermin would burrow their way to trouble, they’d tossed a starving god inside so it would eat whatever made it in.

Tristan went still as darkness billowed out, filling the entire room on the other side of the door until there was nothing at all left but dark and a great, unblinking poisonously yellow eye. It was close, so close he almost closed the door in a fit of fear. He mastered himself at the last moment.

“And it occurs to me,” Tristan said, “that these devils, they were meticulous. Paranoid almost.”

He met that unblinking eldritch gaze.

“That maybe they would have made it so there would a punishment for the guardian should the treasures within be stolen,” he said.

A collar for the guard dog, so to speak. The thief made himself smile bright and wide.

“But worry not, my friend,” he said. “For I have come to bargain out of the goodness of my heart to help you avoid such a grisly fate.”

Darkness thinned.

“And why,” Boria asked, “would that be?”

It was breathing in, as if tasting the air.

“The leader of those would breach the pillar is a woman who wants me dead,” Tristan said. “I would return the favor.”

Darkness thinned further and further, until once more the thief saw the terrible creature before him.

“Speak,” the god ordered.

—

The door closed, not even the barest of cracks open between he and Boria. Tristan allowed himself to sag against the wall, shivering as if out in the cold, and closed his eyes as he forced his breathing to settle.

“Now what?” Fortuna asked, sounding curious.

In and out, until calm returned. Ten more breaths passed before the worst of the fear had left him, before he felt ready to speak.

“Now we walk to Wen again,” he replied, “so that the last piece is put into place.”

—

The trick to making someone give you something for nothing was to make it so that every other decision was worse.

It was not a surefire trick, of course, though what was? Sometimes the mark would refuse out of spite or make a worse decision because fear or anger. People were not the automatons of story, making every call with clockwork precision and choosing to mitigate damage rather than stick a knife in their enemy on the way down. Tristan, however, had rubbed elbows with Lieutenant Wen enough to get a decent read on the man. The fat man was a practical soul, more interested in results than means, and his moral compass was clannish as any coterie man’s: there was the Watch, then everyone else.

Tristan had crossed that line in the sand, so he made sure to lie to the man.

“I ought to have you shot,” Wen snarled.

Having a lie almost as offensive as the truth helped, in his experience. When you told a man you’d killed his wife he did not usually think to question whether you’d actually killed his children instead.

“It wouldn’t help,” the thief shrugged. “And it’s an opportunity, isn’t it? To do it on your own terms.”

The bespectacled Tianxi was furious but they both knew that nothing could be done. Or rather that many things could be done, but all of them were worthless. And Tristan, though eminently executable, was still more useful alive than dead. It was enough.

“An opportunity to clean up your mess,” Wen scoffed. “Now I need to speak with Mandisa.”

“Don’t let me keep you,” Tristan said, idly fishing out Vanesa’s watch.

Half past six, he saw after popping the lid. He carefully closed it.

“If you are gone long, this may well be our last conversation,” the thief added/

The lieutenant sneered.

“Are you giving me your sweet farewells, rat?” he asked. “I’m touched.”

Tristan nodded, to the man’s visible surprise.

“I cannot say meeting you was a pleasure,” the thief said, “but it has not been a misfortune. May you fare well in the years to come.”

He even meant it. Lieutenant Wen was a bastard and something of a bully, but his cruelty was shallower than his sense of duty. Had Tristan been part of his tribe, the lives that mattered to the man, then he might even have grown fond of him. A guard hound was loved by the house, not the street.

“You have been nothing but a heap of trouble,” Wen bluntly replied. “Rats always are, it takes us years to beat the Murk out of their bones.”

Then he sighed.

“You’re not unfit for the cloak, though, I will grant,” the lieutenant said. “And your work today will force a good, so prick your ears up.”

Tristan cocked an eyebrow, openly curious.

“When you find your path through,” Wen continued, “be careful if you emerge on the mountainside.”

“Trouble?”

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

“The hollows on the islands are divided up in tribes,” Wen said. “Those who dwell in the mountains are worst of the Red Eye zealots: they kill on sight and they’ve even scavenged some muskets with the powder to match.”

Which they must have taken from the Watch. By force, as the blackcloaks did not trade guns to the hollows. He let out a low whistle.

“Bold,” Tristan said.

“You don’t know the half of it,” the Tianxi grunted. “They know they can melt back into the mountain paths after, so they’ve even attacked the fort that serves as sanctuary on the other side. It got overrun about a decade ago, all hands lost. The higher-ups ordered a vault built underneath so there’d be somewhere to retreat to if it happened again.”

“I will be sure to keep an eye out, then,” the thief seriously replied. “My thanks for the warning.”

“I don’t need thanks,” Lieutenant Wen said. “I need that machine broken. Get to it, rat.”

—

It was darkly amusing that Lieutenant Vasanti’s stalwarts – numbering a mere eleven watchmen – ate breakfast early and had orders to ensure he was not allowed anywhere near the communal cauldron of porridge. Vanesa’s legacy, he mused. The Someshwari lieutenant ought to have known there was near nothing left in his poison cabinet, since she’d ordered it searched, so in a way it was flattering that she still would not allow Tristan near anywhere food she was to eat.

How resourceful she must think him, to be wary of his making poisons out of thin air.

By the time Vasanti’s crew was finished his own was up and ready. The four of them claimed a table on the other side of the kitchen, busying themselves with stilted talk and cups of grass tea until the blackcloaks were gone and they were finally allowed to fill their own bowls with slop. Tristan forced himself to eat two, knowing he would need the vigor. For all that the blackcloaks would be the ones taking the vanguard he did not expect an easy way of it.

It was only when he set down his spoon after the second bowl that Yong broke the silence.

“All right, I’ll be the one since no one else is stepping up,” the Tianxi said. “What in the fucking Heavens happened last night, Tristan?”

“Vasanti tried to scapegoat me for her blunder in the pillar,” he casually summed up. “She failed to talk the watchmen into having me hanged, so she had to settle for an interrogation.”

Interrogation sounded better than torture. Usually meant the same thing, in his experience, but sounded better. Maryam cocked an eyebrow.

“Which yielded?”

Tristan cleared his throat.

“Remund Cerdan, that villain, stole the brand and hid it before attempting to frame me for this hideous crime,” the rat said. “Once this became obvious, Lieutenant Vasanti and I divined the hiding place together and cleared my name.”

Francho toothlessly grinned, shaking his head as he chuckled.

“A terrible villain, that lad,” the old professor said. “And should this reprehensible character proclaim his innocence?”

“That’d be quite the trick,” Tristan said, “as I saw a rusty piece of steel two inches wide go right through his throat last night.”

It was highly unlikely that anyone had seem him dispose of the Cerdan but not impossible, so he had a second lie prepared just in case. Remund had survived his wounding on the way down but been unable to walk, so he had demanded that Tristan carry him. When refused, the infanzon tried to force him at the point of a pistol. When poor Tristan had tried to wrestle it away from him a shot was fired in the melee, putting Remund to rest.

Remund Cerdan had been a noble, so it was only natural for Tristan to be terrified of the consequences even if it had been an accidental death while defending himself. It was the only reason he had lied.

On the other side of the table, Maryam’s blue eyes were knowing.

“The tunnels past the wheel room, was it?” she said. “I heard Tredegar almost got cut as well, they sound almost as dangerous as a test.”

In the lantern light Maryam’s hard face and long tresses looked as if they had been carved by hatchet, like as not to cut any hand daring to strike those cheekbones. She was pleasing to the eye, Tristan thought, in the way that a good knife was: entirely itself even when at rest, a knife even before it cut. There was something curiously reassuring about that, about having that calm sharpness on your side.

On his side.

It was a small thing, he thought, what she had just done. Helping him sell a lie the others would only barely care about. But it had been unasked for, nothing bargained or offered, and she had done it without batting an eye. It was a small thing but she gained nothing from doing it – it implicated her needlessly, if anything – and that meant it was not a small thing at all. Tristan looked away, clearing his throat.

“My differences with the good lieutenant have been settled,” he said. “Moreover, she now delivers an opportunity: as Vasanti believes she can open the front gate, we can make our own move while she sets out through it with her crew.”

“He expedition might draw the god’s attention and clear our path,” Francho approved.

It would. Tristan had seen to that. It surprised the thief some that it had been the old professor and not Yong who talked of distraction, however. When he turned he found the Tianxi’s dark eyes narrowed and resting on him.

“Put your hand between your shoulder blades, Tristan,” Yong said.

The thief’s face went blank. Lies came his tongue, rich and plentiful, but not a single one they would believe. Three seconds passed, then the Tianxi sighed.

“You can’t, can you?” he said.

“I could,” Tristan said, which was true. “But would rather not.”

Even truer. The poppy milk had taken off the edge, but he has still been thoroughly worked over.

“They beat you halfway to useless,” Yong said. “We should wait until tomorrow to do this.”

His jaw clenched. The others noticed. Gods but this fucking exhaustion was going to be the death of him, it was like someone was painting his every thought on his sleeve.

“I have made arrangements that require precise timing,” Tristan said. “I’ve been given something for the pain, Yong, I will not slow us down.”

“Arrangements,” the Tianxi flatly repeated.

I cannot tell you, Tristan thought. You will betray me. Yong had told him as much when he had drawn his own lines in the sand. Another obstacle to dance around. It was tempting to say he would soon reveal the truth, but that was sentiment talking. Even that much might let Yong deduce that Vasanti was involved, decide that there was something worth selling there. And you’ll want to turn on me if you figure it out, like you did the infanzones.

So he gave nothing.

“Arrangements,” he simply said.

The older man’s face tightened with displeasure turning to the rest of the table for support. Tristan’s belly clenched, at least until Maryam shook her head.

“I would be more worried if he-” Francho broke into a cough, rasping out a breath before resuming. “If he wasn’t scheming something, Yong.”

The Tianxi’s lips thinned with displeasure, but he was alone in wanting to push the matter. And he did not have the leverage to force it, not when his only option should he walk away was trying the maze alone. It gave no pleasure to Tristan to watch the older man realize he was in a corner and there was little he could to about it.

“Sending soldiers out without telling them the marching orders is bound to get someone killed,” Yong bit out. “You’ll have to learn that lesson sooner or later, Tristan.”

Everyone was trying to teach him lessons, these days, the thief thought. It was getting rather tiring.