Chapter 37

Treachery was afoot: the carrot seeds were gone.

Maryam might have been complicit in the crime, for when informed of this she offered no aid. Only profuse mockery, including some very unkind moralizing about how he who lived by petty larceny was doomed to be defeated by it. Petty. Petty! For once he was in full agreement with Fortuna, this was unacceptable talk. No, Tristan would have to thoroughly investigate this matter and prove her treason, rightfully relegating her to taking Theology notes for the both of them next class.

Now, if only his only ally in this grand work were not utterly incompetent.

“Maybe she used her eldritch Navigator powers to disappear them,” Fortuna suggested.

She was sitting atop a tree branch, the red trail of her dress trailing as she swung her legs.

“You are a goddess,” Tristan reproached. “How is anything eldritch to you?”

“I was only phrasing it this way for your sake,” she ineptly lied. “I think your field was cursed to be barren by a witch, it is the only reasonable explanation.”

Tristan wondered if she was being blatantly wrong on purpose. Even odds, he figured: it might simply be that she had not been paying attention to the entire affair beyond the amusement of outrage. The thief knelt in the dirt, carefully feeling out the soil. He had sown seeds rather liberally yesterday, but there was not so much as a single stray one left. Whoever had done this had acted methodically, and with malicious intent.

“Could be a devil ate them,” Fortuna suggested.

He rubbed the bridge of his nose.

“I resent that this last guess is the closest we have come to a working theory,” Tristan admitted.

“You need to listen to me more,” the Lady of Long Odds happily said. “I have all sorts of ideas.”

Not unlike a mangy dog had fleas, and about as respectably.

“It could have been foreigners,” he finally said.

It was a long and honored Sacromonte tradition to blame foreigners for troubles ranging from the rising price of bread to why your daughter had been caught half-naked with the neighbor’s son in the back of the shop. It would have irresponsible not to consider foreign involvement, one might argue. If they were an infanzon.

“I am no longer sure I want to be involved in this,” Song Ren drily said.

He flicked a glance back, finding the Tianxi standing at the edge of the garden with steaming mugs of tea in her hand. Tristan squinted her way, not having caught the approach. Had Maryam sent her accomplice to sabotage the investigation?

“I don’t know what it is you’re thinking, but I am almost certain I should feel insulted by it,” Song noted.

“Your help would be most welcome,” Tristan said, not openly adding as soon as I am certain you are not part of this conspiracy.

Fortuna, lending her ‘help’, immediately leaped down from her branch began crowding the captain. She stepped in too close, peering into Song’s eyes like some nosy tia trying to find out their color, and gestured at one of the mugs as if asking to take it. To Song Ren’s honor, she had never once fallen for this cheapest of ghost trickeries.

Unfortunately for Song, Fortuna had taken it as a challenge.

Purely for spite of his goddess, Tristan rose to his feet and ambled over to take the tea. No, he realized, not tea. At least not the proper kind: this was brewed… peppermint? Surprised but not displeased, Tristan actually took a sip for reasons beyond politeness. Peppermint was good for digestion and stomach pains, as well as tasting fine enough.

“I have run the numbers for the brigade funds,” Song said. “I believe we could go as far as ten ramas.”

Tristan chewed at his lip thoughtfully.

“Hage will bleed us if he realizes I’ve gold to slap on the counter,” he said. “The easiest way to avoid that would be asking for something in particular, not merely going fishing.”

She hesitated for a moment, brushing back her long braid.

“Ask about the local criminals,” Song finally said. “The rest we can get from the official reports on Asphodel, but that kind of knowledge will not make it onto them.”

Tristan gave an absent-minded nod. It had been an unpleasant surprise to learn that they were headed to Asphodel in three weeks, leaving them to scramble for preparations. Song had borrowed books from that fancy hidden Stripe library, but books would only get them so far. Hage was almost certain to have access to Mask reports on the Asphodel Rectorate, or Krypteia gossip just as good, and Tristan approved of asking about the local coteries.

“We’ll need to know our way around the underground no matter which of the contracts we end up getting,” he mused. “Getting the lay of the coteries in advance is a good investment. I would not be surprised if the Masks had a contact on the ground, either.”

Song’s impressively well-connected uncle had leaked to her in the letter how assignments would work: there were four contracts outstanding, and it would not be decided until they reached Asphodel which brigade received which. The man had not gone into details about the contracts – could not or would not – but had mentioned that two were investigations, one an exorcism and the last a hunt.

Only the exorcism was likely to take them out of the capital, and not far. Even then finding the remnants of an old god was sure to be easier when you had a way to reach out to the people who could tell you which of the latest disappearances had been paid for.

“I expect that might be beyond our means to buy,” Song said, “but if the opportunity knocks…”

“Barely a day rich and already a spendthrift,” he teased.

She rolled her eyes.

“Maryam’s ties to Captain Yue could end up fruitful as well,” Song noted. “As the senior signifier on the island, she might be in the know for Asphodel affairs.”

“We lose little by asking,” Tristan shrugged.

The two stood there in silence for a long moment, sipping at their mugs. Song was the one to break it.

“Not a single seed left, I see,” she said.

Those last two words were not a figure of speech when coming out of Song Ren’s mouth. Tristan was not yet sure to what extent she could discern details, but she could read book script from across a room without any trouble. Part of him itched to ask how that would pair to, say, a telescope but theirs was not so comfortable a relationship that he could.

“Such meticulous extermination can only be the result of an enemy attack,” Tristan said.

“There are probably at least two birds, yes,” Song agreeably replied.

He paused.

“A what now?”

Song considered him for a moment, then her lips twitched.

“Maryam didn’t tell you.”

“Her treacheries are endless,” Tristan coldly said.

“She told me she saw a bird up on the roof yesterday,” Song informed him. “A magpie, by the description, though an unusually large one.”

“And she failed to tell me this because…”

A rusty groan, one of the drawing-room windows being cracked further open from the inside. They had been getting eavesdropped on.

“Because I thought it would be funny,” Maryam called out.

“See,” Fortuna mused, leaning against his shoulder. “I told you a witch was behind this.”

“Bruja,” Song slowly said. “Did she just call Maryam a witch?”

“Nothing less than she deserves,” Tristan sniffed.

He turned a squinting look up at the roof, but there was no trace of the alleged magpie. How had it made it up here, anyway? Sakkas had said that this place could only be found by those who already knew where it was, but no lock was perfect. If the Gloam working laid into this place was as a surrounding curtain, birds might have simply flown over it. Or perhaps the magpies had nested there for generations? An impressive lineage, if true, though Tristan could not recall ever seeing or hearing a bird here before.

“A recent arrival, do you think?” he said.

“I am uncertain,” Song admitted, sounding fascinated. “It could be that an animal is not enough of a ‘mind’ to be turned away by the defense and our presence drew interest. More might come if that is the case.”

“A siege, then,” he muttered, then cleared his throat. “I will have to draw from brigade funds.”

A wary look.

“What for?” she asked.

“To make a scarecrow,” Tristan fiercely replied. “I yet have carrot seeds: I might have lost a battle, Song, but the war has just begun.”

“I was right,” Maryam called out through the window.

—

It was a mark of Captain Yue’s rank that she had a solar inside the walls of the chapterhouse.

Though not a small building by any means, much of the insides of the Akelarre headquarters was taken up by the Meadow so private rooms were virtually unheard of. There were dorms for Navigators to sleep in, libraries for restricted works and a few small study halls, but all these were shared. The captain’s large solar on the upper level was not, though Yue had crammed so many devices and books inside that a room as large as the cottage’s drawing room somehow felt cramped.

Maryam had learned, over the last few weeks, to tell when she was in for a pleasant afternoon by gauging the enthusiasm on the scarred captain’s face when she was ushered into the solar. Briskness meant it was drudgework ahead of them, checking options off a list not out of belief they were possible but to be through, while on the opposite end of the scale a broad grin meant things were going to get… exciting.

Like being rowed out into a shallow part of the bay and dropped into the sea with stones tied around her feet exciting.

“Ah, Maryam, just in time,” Yue grinned, and the Izvorica almost cursed.

It was going to be one of those, then. The older woman hurried her in, closing the door behind and guiding Maryam past a fresh pile of books – nearly all of which had iron girding and a lock, meaning they were from the deepest part of the restricted library – and the same half-eaten plate of fried rice that had been balancing precariously on the end of a table for three days.

The sheer number of precious instruments in here, from astrolabes to orreries to a set of beautifully engraved ring dials, had been intimidating at first. There was a fortune’s worth of devices surrounding her, many of them of intimidatingly fine make. Nowadays, though, they mostly felt like the clutter that they were. Yue eased Maryam into the usual cushy armchair, then headed across the room to a large, broad silhouette under a pale sheet.

“That is new,” Maryam noted.

“So it is,” Yue happily said. “Had it brought up this morning.”

She theatrically tore off the sheet, which she had obviously put there herself for this very purpose. What lay under looked halfway between a water maze and an Izcalli calendar: an upright stone disk, almost man-sized with layered circles within. Each circle was connected to another by some shallow notch and at the heart, instead of a large motif of an Izcalli calendar, was a gaping hole the size of the Izvorica’s head.

Captain Yue presented it with a flourish, visibly pleased with herself.

“Well done,” Maryam hazarded. “I am… impressed?”

The older Navigator wrinkled her nose.

“At least some put effort into the lie,” she complained, then sighed. “Think, Khaimov. Does this remind you of anything?”

To Maryam’s mild shame, it took another few seconds before catching on. It was the size that had distracted her: the other disk had been barely the size of two fists, and the patterns on the surface significantly more complicated than these.

“The Kuru Maze that Professor Baltazar showed us on our first day,” she said. “The device that lets one gauge their Grasp and Command.”

“You could consider this beauty the bastard cousin of a Kuru Maze,” Yue said, patting the disk.

“I don’t feel any conceptual symmetry from it at all,” she frowned. “The draw of a Kuru Maze is that it restricts manipulation of Gloam. This looks, well, like…”

“A big chunk of rock,” Captain Yue cheerfully said. “Because it is. Not a drop of anything conceptual here. It’s an Izcalli invention called a stele stone.”

“Ominous,” Maryam noted.

The Kingdom of Izcalli – and all the other Aztlan states, to be fair – had a fondness for carving skulls onto everything and their naming sense tended to the funerary. Even Captain Totec had a saltshaker sculpted to look like a dancing skeleton he was inordinately fond of.

“You know how it is with Izcalli,” Yue said. “No matter how sound the scholarship, their scholars don’t take anything seriously until there’s a body count supporting it.”

“The Kingdom of Izcalli is the leading light in metaphysical anatomy,” Maryam loyally said. “No one else understands souls half as well.”

“Yeah, they sure burned a lot of candles studying those,” Captain Yue drily said. “But I seem to recall the man who initiated you into the Akelarre is from Izcalli, so I’ll let you off this once.”

She slapped the stone again, like a farmer at market endorsing their prize pig.

“Stele stones,” Yue said, “are made when a significant number of people die on top of them.”

Maryam blinked, having not expected it to be so literal.

“They used to make these from physician’s floors,” the Tianxi said, “but these days I understand some lords have a racket of ordering their dying serfs to go and lay on top of them so they can sell off the stones.”

The Navigator shrugged.

“It does assure steadier supply.”

Captain Yue’s notion of good and evil tended to run along ‘things that make my work easier’ and ‘things that make my work harder’, which meant she had all the sympathy of an iron rod but also that she was remarkably lacking in bigotries.

“And the advantage to lugging around corpse rocks is…”

Maryam trailed off leadingly.

“Think it out,” Captain Yue said. “The stone used here is basalt, which on the Ban scale of aether sensitivity is lower-middle.”

Maryam hummed. To qualify as middle sensitivity on the Ban scale, a material must be affected by aether phenomenon not directed at it. The study of the effect of metaphysical forces on physical objects was usually considered a part of alchemy, but inevitably it was a matter of interest to both the Peiling Society and the Akelarre Guild and as a result the terms for it were drawn from a dozen different disciplines.

It was a real mess of everyone borrowing from each other and contradicting each other’s works.

The Ban scale had been used by Cathayan architects for over a century before the Akelarre adopted it, justifying this by noting the imprisoned scholar-concubine who’d first created it had been a signifier and thus the scale had always been part of their scholarly wheelhouse. While not the most exact out there, the Ban scale had the benefit of being made into a series of rhymes that translated well to most the major languages of Aurager – and thus was remarkably easy to memorize.

Lower-middle meant the material in question was affected by nearby aether phenomenon, but not unduly sensitive. For example a cutter, with its aether engine, could dock at a basalt dock and there would be no trace left on the stone. A death on top of the stone slab, though? That strong, instant release would leave some kind of mark.

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

Yue had mentioned physicians as the original source, which likely meant painful ends at the hands of cutters. Many deaths, though, and evidently the Izcalli lords out there seemed to think that sending the sick to die on the stone would work just as well. It’s not about the nature of the death, then, it’s about the numbers.

“Saturation,” Maryam said. “Stele stones are basalt saturated with aether.”

Yue cocked an eyebrow.

“And what would be the use of such a thing?” she asked.

“You called it the bastard cousin of a Kuru Maze because those constrict the use of Gloam,” she slowly said. “This would do the same for… aether?”

“Are you asking me or telling me?” Yue said.

She chewed at the inside of her cheek.

“Nav,” she said. “Logos, I mean. It goes through the aether, so a stele stone is meant to constrict the use of one’s logos.”

“Good,” the Tianxi smiled. “That is essentially correct.”

She waved a hand.

“The reality is slightly more complex – the maze carved on the surface is because of metaphysical continuance, a concept you won’t be learning about for some time yet. Suffice it to say that moving your logos through the channels in the stone is more difficult than, say, simply wrapping it around the disk.”

“Why are we testing my logos at all?” Maryam asked.

It was one of the few parts of signifying she’d never had any trouble with. She was, she fancied, a much defter hand with hers than most of her peers.

“Because I told you to,” Yue easily replied. “Come, I will show you how it functions.”

Maryam was always careful sending out her nav with Captain Yue around, knowing herself a candle besides a bonfire. It would have been easy for the other woman to snuff her out without even meaning to. Yue had asked her this time, though, and would be careful. It was an odd feeling, how the other woman coaxed her soul-effigy – like being a raft being pulled along in a galleon’s wake.

Yue guided her all the way to the opening of the stele stone, then goosed her nav as warning. Maryam withdrew, did not follow her in. Instead she tried to feel out what tracing the pattern did to Captain Yue’s nav, what coiled and what tensed. When the captain withdrew, after what could not have been longer than thirty heartbeats, she was faintly panting. Yue brushed back her braid on her shoulder, smoothing it back into place to hide the burns on her cheek and ear.

“It is a good control exercise,” Captain Yue said. “We will not teach logos manipulation until third year, as it’s much too easy for a beginner to rip out their own soul, but if my theory is correct you will have little choice in learning the basics early.”

By now Maryam knew better than to ask her to elaborate. If she intended to, she would have. Instead she gathered herself and felt out the entrance of the stele stone pattern. All she had to do was trace it, not fill those wide furrows, but to make one’s nav was fragile had its dangers: Maryam slid in a rope, not a string. Immediately she felt the saturation’s effect. Most objects were inert when felt out with nav, like dull contours in a world of colors.

The stele stone instead buzzed like flies’ wings, and she had to keep a firm grip on her nav lest it be swept astray.

She was surprised to find it rather easy, at least at first. She just had to thread in her nav, which took concentration but not much difficulty. Halfway through the first loop she began to grasp what Yue had been hinting at by ‘metaphysical continuance’. Maintaining the thread she had woven while continuing to push forward was significantly more difficult than she had thought. She had assumed the trouble would rise like the slope of a hill, but two thirds of the way through the first circle she felt like she had to climb a wall instead.

“Fuck,” she muttered.

“Further,” Yue quietly said. “You need to finish the first ring.”

Gritting her teeth, Maryam pushed on. She might not have made it had she not realized she could cannibalize her own earlier work. She could thin the rope and make it into string. It eased the pressure, though she still only barely made it to the notch leading to the second circle. She threaded past it by a hair, breathing out, and – the pull took her by such surprise she tumbled all the way back to halfway through the first circle.

“What in the-” she snarled, firming her grip.

The pull gave when she pushed back, but as she tried to reclaim the grounds lost she felt as if something was pushing against her. A hand on her shoulder, a pulse of Gloam.

“That’s enough,” Captain Yue said. “I have what I need, withdraw.”

Maryam was tempted to rip herself out, but forced herself into a controlled retreat instead. One should never treat their soul-effigy lightly. When she came back into herself she was panting, covered in sweat, and Yue eased her back into the seat. She spent some time gathering her bearings while Yue puttered about pouring something into cups, pressing a metal goblet into her hand. Maryam took a sniff.

“Brandy?” she asked.

“It will take the edge off that brutal migraine you’re about to have,” Yue said. “Drink.”

Maryam grimaced but did. It burned going down, but there was a faint aftertaste of apricot that took the edge off the lingering in the mouth.

“What was that?” she asked. “Something fought me, it felt like. Was it the stele stone?”

“The stone had aether presence but not consciousness,” Yue replied. “It cannot fight you.”

She leaned back against one of her tables, though she had to push back a strange overlarge bronze compass.

“What has puzzled me about your condition from the start,” Yue said, “is its seemingly contradictory nature.”

“I don’t follow,” Maryam frowned.

It seemed rather plain to her: her Command was lacking because it was sabotaged by an aether entity.