Chapter 39

Maryam woke up halfway through the hall, which helped a lot.

Even groggy as she was she could stumble forward while leaning on his side, which was a distinct improvement from carrying her on his back. Tristan had been worried about her, as being knocked unconscious was rarely the end of one’s troubles, but though she had a hard time focusing her eyes her mind seemed all there. Enough to insult him, anyway, which he took as a good sign.

“You carried me,” Maryam doubtfully repeated. “Did you happen have a cart at hand?”

Tristan glared. He was not that skinny.

“I can still leave you behind,” he threatened.

“But then who will catch you when you leap off a cliff for the third time?” she shot back.

“It was really more of a fall this time,” he argued. “And not, by the strictest definition, a-”

“If you have breath enough to talk,” Yong bit out from ahead, “then run faster.”

The older man was not doing well. He was barely ahead of them even though Tristan was helping someone. There was a hole in the back of his coat where Vasanti had shot him, perhaps an inch to the side of the spine – it was a ragged, red thing. The thief could not easily tell with the coat on, but he thought it might be high enough a lung would be a at risk.

Gods, let it not have pierced a lung. That was an ugly way to die.

The ground shook beneath their feet again, a reminder that Yong’s anger was not senseless. A glance behind told him that the cavernous room at the top of the pillar was still there, but for how long? Sooner or later the weight would drag the whole thing down like a spear into the Red Maw’s heart. Cutting out the chatter, the pair followed after Yong as best they could.

It was a close thing, but when the hall behind them snapped like a twig they did not fall with it. They’d pulled ahead enough, though Tristan knew better than to stop. He’d glimpsed the parting gift of the devils and it was not going to stop at the pillar spearing down: without that structure serving as support, the entire mountaintop was going to crumble inwards.

It would be best if they were not there to crumble with it.

It was a strange thing, their race to the end of the hall. On the one hand fear – and the cloud of dust behind them – kept them wide awake and attentive, death looming ever close. On the other, the length of the hallway was aggressively monotonous. It was all bare stone in a dim light of no clear source, perfectly symmetrical and utterly empty. The kind of sight that made you fall asleep.

Thrice the thief found his gaze drifting, seeking corners and angles, and he thought he might have been tiring until he realized what he truly was doing: looking for Fortuna. There was no trace of her, not leaning against a wall and smirking or even effortlessly keeping pace with him in her red dress. She was just gone. Tristan felt his breath shortening, a dim fear seizing him by the throat.

“Tristan.”

What if she never came back? What if the way he’d pulled on the contract had killed her? She was a small god, near forgotten, and if he’d taken too much from her she might have…

“Tristan,” Maryam hissed. “Focus, we’re nearly there. We’re going to be fine.”

The thief came back to himself, his back covered in cold sweat, and bit his lip hard enough to draw blood. The pain centered him, kept him in there and now. He could not think about this, about how he might have lost the only person who’d never left, who could not die – he could not think about this.

Maryam was right, they were nearly at the end of the hall. All around them stone shuddered, the distant hallway falling apart as dust and dirt clouded sight but not the cacophonous noise. Ahead of them waited a smooth iron gate, and Tristan could but pray that it was not locked for if it was then they might well be dead. Yong was the one to reach it, and though there was no handle for him to push when he touched it the gate began opening on its own, sliding into the wall.

It was an unsettling sight, though not unsettling enough to stop him from taking refuge in the room past the gate.

The room was, he found when following after Maryam, little more than a glorified antechamber. There were racks on the wall from which nothing hung and two doorways on the sides leading into other halls. More importantly, though, was the broad gate – twice as long as it was tall – covering the entire back wall of the room. There were broad stripes of cryptoglyphs on the ground before it, beyond their understanding now that Francho was dead. Tristan’s teeth clenched.

It had been a quick death, he told himself.

“It must lead outside,” Yong said, eyeing the wall-gate as his breath came in pants. “There was nothing at the end of the hall in the projection we saw.”

The ceiling above them rumbled, softly lapping away at the silence.

“We cannot go through so long as there is a landslide,” Tristan said. “We’ll have to wait.”

The Tianxi grimaced.

“And if the landslide blocked the door?”

“Then we will try one of the other halls,” Maryam said. “We are not yet out of options, Yong.”

The veteran looked away.

“I suppose not,” he said.

Tristan cleared his throat.

“If we are to wait, then I would have a look at your wound,” he said.

The Tianxi turned, eyes cool.

“I can move just fine,” he said. “That is not necessary.”

Yong had never declined that offer before. The thief knew why he now had – though much had happened since, their conversation at the summit of the pillar was still fresh in his mind. Irritation rose.

“Disdain won’t stop your bleeding,” he coldly replied. “But if sanctimony is the hill you want to die on, by all means spare me the waste of bandages.”

He almost winced after saying it, seeing the way the other man’s face tightened, but he did not look away. It had not been the right way to handle that, and were he less tired he might have finessed his way into something better, but Tristan had been brutalized enough by his day he wasn’t sure he cared. Worse, he was pretty sure that the poppy was beginning to fade.

The dull ache in his everything was something of a hint.

“Would you have preferred picking out the hill for me?” Yong replied just as coldly. “That does seem to be your favorite racket.”

“All right, that’s enough of that,” Maryam said, stepping in between them with a tired look on her face. “Tristan, you left everyone in the dark as to your actual plan until the last moment. He’s got a right to be angry.”

A pause, then her eyes met his.

“I am too,” she frankly said. “This just isn’t the time or place for us to have that talk.”

His lips thinned. If Francho hadn’t been killed, would either of them even… Maryam turned to Yong with a smidgeon more sympathy, but only that.

“You know he’s never turned it on any of us,” she flatly said. “It’s childish to pretend he’s trying to do anything but keeping you from bleeding out. You can still be angry after he’s helped you – I am.”

“You don’t understand,” Yong said.

“Neither will the bullet in your back,” she brutally replied. “You need to get that seen to, and there’s only one of us who knows how.”

It was hard to argue with that, even though Yong looked like he wanted to. It was in a slightly sullen silence that they set about the examination. Yong laid out his coat and clothes on the ground, stripped down to the waist, and laid down with his belly on the coat. Kneeling by the older man, Tristan rinsed his hands in booze and leaned close. The Tianxi shivered when a droplet of drink fell onto his back.

“Cold,” Yong muttered.

Tristan did not answer, his face pulling into a frown. He wasn’t as familiar with gun wounds as those from knives or cudgels – he’d worked as a cutter’s assistant, not under a military surgeon – but he knew he wasn’t looking at the good kind of wound. If it had been a musket instead of a pistol he was shot with, Yong would have died. Reaching for a rag from his bag, he soaked it in alcohol and after cleaning the wound set about checking how deep the ball had penetrated. Yong’s shivering moan of pain went ignored.

The thief stopped almost immediately, letting out a noise of surprise.

“Tristan?” Yong croaked out. “What is it?”

The grey-eyed man grimaced.

“I’m going to have to feel out your ribs,” he said. “It’s going to hurt.”

The Tianxi cursed.

“Give me the bottle,” he said. “I-”

“You’re already drunk,” Tristan sharply said. “I’m not letting you thin your blood any further, you’ll kill yourself.”

“Fuck,” Yong quietly muttered, then breathed in. “Do it.”

He forced himself not to hear the man’s groans as he felt out the ribs, pressing the flesh enough to feel the lack of give beneath and – Yong let out a scream. Tristan’s fingers pulled away. He’d learned what he needed to anyway.

“You have been,” Tristan said, “extremely lucky. It may yet kill you.”

Maryam cocked an eyebrow at him.

“Well,” she said, “I guess there’s a reason you’re not in charge of morale around here.”

“I’m not convinced he should be in charge of medicine either,” Yong groaned from the ground, laying his forehead against his coat.

He stayed like that for a few breaths, mastering himself, then raised his head again.

“All right,” the Tianxi said. “Tell me.”

“When Vasanti shot you from behind, she hit your rib,” Tristan said. “It’s the reason why there’s currently not a hole in your lung.”

“We may need to work on your definition of lucky,” Maryam noted.

“No,” Yong quietly disagreed. “He’s right. I’ve seen men get shot in the lung, this was fine luck. Now give me the bad news.”

“The impact shattered your rib and broke off at least one large piece,” the thief said. “I’d need to open you up to be sure – and that might well kill you even if I was a real physician – but I think that right now the bullet is what’s keeping that piece from stabbing into your lung.”

Maryam had nothing pithy to add to that. Yong swallowed.

“What can I do?”

“Nothing,” Tristan honestly said. “If we get you to a Watch surgeon in Three Pines they can remove the bullet and the broken off piece, but trying the same here with a knife would be like…”

The only words that came to him were too light, too teasing.

“It would be kinder to use the knife to slit your throat, let’s leave it at that.”

The veteran slowly nodded.

“How long do I have?”

The calm, Tristan thought, was the worst part of it. Yong had an almost serene look on his face, like the thought of dying didn’t move him at all. Like all he was wondering about was the schedule, the details of the marching orders to his grave. Maybe it was about knowing death, Tristan thought. That old friend walked with all the children of the Murk, but none of them knew it the way a soldier would. Someone who’d seen a hundred lives be snuffed out in a heartbeat, washed away by a wave of smoke and lead. Maybe it wasn’t so scary when you’d seen so much of it.

Somehow, he couldn’t quite bring himself to believe that.

“I can’t tell,” Tristan admitted. “Depending on how the rib broke that piece could be wedged tight in place or it could be on the edge of coming loose. Could be hours, could be days, could be a year.”

The thief licked his lips.

“Avoid moving too fast and getting hit in the torso, that’s the best advice I can give you.”

His gaze broke away from the Tianxi’s as he reached for his bag.

“I’ll bandage it,” he added. “It might help some, and we need to keep that wound from getting infected as long as possible.”

The wound going bad might kill the other man before the rib piece did. Yong’s forehead went back down and he did not say anything after that.

None of them did, waiting in silence until the last of the rumbling above passed.

—

The last iron gate parted open at a touch, both sides fleeing into the wall – though one got stuck halfway through, some unseen metal gear letting out a strident cry as it tried to force the matter and ended up breaking for it.

Wary as that sound had made them, they still hurried out into the small natural cave past the gate. The iron wall closed behind them, save for the part that’d got stuck. Yong’s lantern showed there was a worn fire pit in here and some coal drawing on the walls along with words in a language Tristan did not know. At least one of them was a name, he figured, written above a pretty obscene drawing of a man thrusting his phallus at an airavatan’s buttocks.

“Charming,” Maryam drily said.

“It hasn’t been used recently,” Yong said, eyes on the pit. “Still, it looks like hollows know of this place.”

Tristan drew back to lay his hand on the iron gate, who confirmed his suspicions by not moving an inch. It only opened from the inside, then. The hollows had never gotten into the pillar. By the time he returned the other two had moved on, leaving the cave and stopping on a ledge right outside of it. Tristan joined them, inhaling the faint breeze with a smile as he pressed down his tricorn. Above them the veiled lights of firmament shone, cold and unmoving stars. They had made it out.

For a long moment they stayed there, savoring the simple truth of that.

Tristan was the first to stir. His gaze turned below, where a great dark forest spread out – through there was a ring of light nestled in its heart, to the northeast. The glow was pale enough it must have Glare to it. Some kind of Watch outpost? He was not the only one who had begun looking around, as Yong made clear when he let out a soft curse in Cathayan.

“It looks like we won’t be getting to sanctuary,” the Tianxi said.

Their gate out of the mountain was facing the Watch fort on the other side, but it did not need to when even from where they stood they could see the aftermath of a massive landslide gone down that slope. The blackcloak fort had been on that same side, they all knew, which was less than promising. Feeling Yong’s gaze grown colder when it moved back to him, Tristan held his hands up in protest.

“We don’t know that the place got buried,” he said. “And even if it did, Wen told me they have a vault below. Odds are it has a hidden passage they can use to get out of the mess.”

“You had best hope they do,” Yong said. “Else they might shoot you for this at Three Pines.”

Tristan was not the one who had caused the collapse, but he was disinclined to pass the blame onto Maryam.

“Vasanti caused all this,” he said instead. “She forced us at gunpoint to trigger the trap the devils left behind because of her obsession with controlling the Antediluvian device.”

Yong looked unconvinced and he felt Maryam’s blue eyes on him. She said nothing, tacitly agreeing to his take on events. Since the Tianxi had been down during most of the confrontation with Vasanti, potentially unconscious, he was in no position to argue the tale.

“It doesn’t matter,” Yong said. “Even if they get out we won’t be finding them out in the dark. They’ll be headed to Three Pines, at a guess.”

The port at the northern end of the island, Tristan thought, and likely where the Trial of Weeds ended.

“Or that place,” he said, pointing at the distant ring of lights in the woods. “Sarai, what did the map say about it?”

“Sarai?” Yong mildly said. “And here I thought her name was Maryam.”

Tristan grimaced. Shit, he’d let that slip during the mess inside hadn’t he? He sent his friend an apologetic look, which she dismissed with a hand.

“You can call me Maryam too,” she told the Tianxi. “Though I would ask you both to use Sarai in front of others.”

She got the nods she was seeking, then sighed.

“And the map did not say anything about what that place is,” she said. “It was marked, however, and a road through the woods that ultimately leads to the port goes through it. We have nothing to lose by taking a look.”

“If it’s a Watch outpost they might have surgeon,” Tristan told Yong. “Given how far the port is, it seems our best chance at keeping your ribs out of your lung.”

A little explicit for his tastes, but that ought to remind the man of how much danger he was in with every step he took.

“It does seem the wisest course,” Yong said. “If there are blackcloaks there, we may also learn what the Trial of Weeds is meant to be.”

“It’s settled, then,” Maryam said. “Let us get moving before the rest of this mountain comes down on our heads.”

“Or worse,” Tristan fervently agreed. “Lieutenant Wen warned me about cultists out here, they’re the worst of the lot.”

It’d be a stroke of luck if the landslide had taken care of that for them, so he felt safe betting on the opposite.

—

There were remains of what the Antediluvians must have used to get up and down mountain once upon a time, some kind of half-buried machine whose sharp glittering spikes rose out of the dirt. None of them would have any idea how to get such a thing working – if it still worked at all – so instead they went down the old-fashioned way. Hollows clearly camped in the cave on occasion, so it was just a matter of finding the path they used to come here.

It turned out to be a glorified goat trail snaking down the mountainside, narrow and made even steeper when the earlier collapse had shaken off loose rocks. Tristan was no stranger to heights but he still stepped warily, for a single slip here would likely be enough to kill him. For the better part of an hour they descended, the path widening as they got closer to the bottom, until finally they were able to leave the narrow trail for a bit.

They’d heard the waterfall long before they saw it. Tucked away in the mountainside, it spat out the end of some river from the maze onto the rest of the island. There was a crossing through the water, a loose path of jutting stones that the wet had turned dangerously slippery. They took their time moving across, which was the reason Tristan even noticed something was amiss. Frowning, he clutched the side of the stone he was standing on and went fishing in the foamy water.

What he got for his trouble was a ripped doublet.

“Tristan?”

“Found something,” he told Maryam.

He held up the dripping doublet into the lantern light, catching blood on the edge of the rips. The thief let out a low whistle when he realized it wasn’t a simple case of the doublet having been torn: it was the same hole on both sides, more or less, so it was the remains of an impalement he was looking at.

“Old clothes?” Maryam said, taking a closer look. “Didn’t think you were that hard up.”

“I’ve seen that doublet before,” he said. “So have you.”

She blinked.

“The colors,” she slowly said.

“House Cerdan,” he confirmed. “It belonged to the elder brother, I believe.”

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

“So there’s a half-naked infanzon corpse somewhere in the maze,” Maryam said. “This has not been a good year for the Cerdan.”

Tristan smoothed away his smile. Yong had not disapproved of his taking revenge earlier, for all that the man had not known the details, but that had been before their disagreements. It was best kept under wraps now. Besides, he thought, what was Yong actually-

“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” the Tianxi called out.

Yong had crossed all the way to the other side of the waterfall, at the edge of the lantern light, and was standing by a dead tree. The thief couldn’t make it out well, so he tossed the doublet back into the water and set about catching up. A waste – it was good fabric, might have fetched silver in the right shop – but he did not want carry any more weight than he had to. Maryam let out a startled noise within moments of reaching the other shore and Tristan soon saw why: there were footprints in the mud.

Someone had crawled out of the water onto the shore. The real surprise, though, was by the tree Yong was still closely studying. It was not dead the way Tristan had first thought. While he was no woodsman, he knew what a dead tree looked like. Dry wood, bark gone grey and dry if there was still any at all. The tree instead looked like it’d been scourged: there were slight furrows, as if a thin cutting whip had been wielded at it, and only around these marks was the tree dead. The rest of it looked fine, untouched.

“Contract,” Yong said.

“Contract,” Maryam agreed.

“Contract,” Tristan concluded.

And it did not look like the pleasant kind.

“Augusto Cerdan got impaled by something large, if his doublet is any indication,” the thief said. “It seems to me he might have struck a pact – any pact at all – to live through that.”

“If it truly was a bargain with the Red Maw, the Watch will kill him for it,” Maryam noted.

Tristan had been hoping the champion of the downtrodden would take care of this for him – really, Tredegar, how hard could it possibly be to off someone you’d publicly sworn to kill in a duel? – but he’d settle for the Watch instead if that was on the table.

“They might have,” Yong said, “if they were not under several tons of rock.”

Tristan grimaced. A fair point, even if its tone was slightly accusing.

“The only way off this island is the port at Three Pines,” he said. “They would check before letting him onto the boat, surely.”

“Our ship should stay until all the trial-takers are arrived or believed dead, anyway,” Maryam said. “We’ll have time to tell the blackcloaks of our suspicions”

“If we live to inform them,” Yong said.

“That is the plan,” Tristan reminded him.

“You always do have one of those, don’t you?” the Tianxi said.

Though the man was smiling, it was not a compliment. Irritation could wait until they were in a safer place, Tristan reminded himself.

“The path to the outpost won’t walk itself,” Maryam said. “Still, let’s keep an eye out for the Cerdan as we go. I doubt anything capable of that-”

She pointed at the mangled tree.

“- is going to be all that friendly,” she finished.

Yong hesitated.

“We cannot know for sure it is a Red Maw contract,” he said.

I would want to kill him even if it isn’t, Tristan thought. The more diplomatic ‘that contract seems dangerous regardless’ was on the tip of his tongue, but he was not so blind as to be unaware that if it came out of his mouth Yong was unlikely to agree. Best let Maryam take care of it instead.

“Yong, it’s a maze full of starved and half-mad gods,” the blue-eyed woman said. “The Maw was the worst, sure, but there were plenty of things in there almost as bad.”

Tristan saw in the muscles of the neck that the veteran was about to glance his way, so he looked away first. A moment passed, then Yong sighed.

“Fair enough,” he conceded. “I won’t shoot on sight, Maryam, but neither will I approach him if we find him.”

An awkward silence stretched on after that, until Tristan cleared his throat.

“We should fill our waterskins before moving on,” he said. “We might not get another occasion any time soon.”

A few minutes for that and then they were back on the trail.

—

They found no further traces of Augusto Cerdan on the way down, not for lack of looking.

There was no telling if he had made it off the mountain, though Tristan’s instincts whispered that he had. The man would not have made it this far if he was the kind to lay down and die. The thief could respect that kind of mettle, in truth, so as a gesture of goodwill he would try to kill Augusto standing instead. So long as it was not particularly inconvenient, anyway.

The woods below were no easier to navigate than those in the Trial of Lines had been, though at least the thief had gotten used to such journeys. Their pace remained slow. Tristan had not noticed on the mountain, where the prospect of taking a tumble down the cliff had kept all their movements sedate, but Yong was at the edge of his rope. His breath was labored and his hair drenched with sweat. By unspoken agreement he and Maryam let the man take the lead so he could set the pace. She held the lantern, though, to relieve him of the weight.

The thief fiddled with his hat, adjusting it unnecessarily as he debated calling for a halt so the Tianxi might rest. It might be better to wait a little longer, he thought, perhaps until they reached the road. Maryam had guided them in what was the right direction according to the map stored in her head, but a direction was the most she had been able to provide: until they hit the supposed road through the forest, they would have no real notion of where they actually were.

“Lights,” Yong suddenly rasped out. “Maryam, kill the lantern.”