Chapter 45

Tristan did not like Marshal de la Tavarin.

It was not a judgment born of any particular moral objection to his callousness or even of distaste for the ostentatiousness of his clothes but because of a simpler, more personal reason: the old man was hard to get a read on. Not in the way that a schooled face or a skilled liar would be, hiding or feigning. No, if anything de la Tavarin’s emotions were quite openly worn. It was more that Tristan struggled to grasp the mindset, the code.

Getting the Marshal to come along to the Battle of the Barrels had been child’s play, a single conversation’s worth of effort, but this time it took several days of study on the man’s part for him to even consider acquiescing. Tristan was absent for most of the meetings – it was above his pay grade, to stand up there with Song, Camaron and Chapul – but for the final briefing his captain had seen fit to drag him along to stand as part of the scenery. Every ‘captain’ in their forcefully welded alliance had brought two spares, so at least he had Angharad for company.

He was amused to see the others had also brought along their Skiritai – Jeronimo de Aznarez for Chapul, their old friend Musa for Camaron – as if the Militants were some kind of mandatory fashion accessory, standing there very lethal and very bored. Chapul had also brought along Awonke Bokang, sensibly enough given the importance of his work to the planned strategy, while interestingly Camaron had brought Ruo Xuan.

Tristan was at least two-thirds certain the captain of the Ninth had not done it because he knew the Mask grated Song something fierce, but no doubt it was an ancillary benefit. Sebastian was still quite miffed not to be the undisputed king of their arrangement and kept taking small digs at his fellow captains through deniable means like this.

On the other side of the cramped table, sharing pots of cheap tea and several plates of pastries, were the Marshal and three more officers of the Watch. To Tristan’s surprise, Commander Salimata Bouare was one of them. The odds were low a commander was going to be boots on the ground, so more likely she was here on behalf of Colonel Azocar to decide how much Garrison support this offensive should get.

For once, Tristan believed Watch politics would be leaning their way: Azocar should be interested in getting the hunt over the line while the Cao’s own delve was still spinning its wheels. Getting visible Garrison involvement in the win would be a boon for him, too, enough that he might be moved to cough up more than the mandatory minimum of resources.

The two officers to the left of the table required introduction. The first was Lieutenant Navpreet, a heavily pierced woman wearing a silver pin on her collar that marked her as an artillery officer, and the second was a scarecrow tall-and-thin man by the name Captain Hernando Shange with obvious mixed looks. He got an utterly startled look from Musa when he mentioned his surname, but did not spare the Skiritai so much as a second glance.

They’d gathered in a small Regnant Street bakery called Acallar Pastries, which had a delightfully appalling sign outside displaying a painted spice cookie in the shape of a man getting eaten by a dark wolf monster. The baker sold actual cookies in this shape, and the Marshal was already on his fifth when finally he cut through the chatter and got to business. No doubt Song was slowly going mad trying to ignore the crumbs in the old man’s admittedly splendid mustache.

“Choose one of you to speak,” Marshal de la Tavarin ordered. “Then kindly convince these fine fellows from the Garrison that your fancy plan isn’t going to piss away the lives of their soldiers.”

Tristan barely paid attention to the byplay between the brigade captains, already knowing how it would end. Camaron would speak, since when Awonke Bokang was called up to speak it would propel the Third to the front. Song would diplomatically cede the opportunity to speak as a favor, carving out a role as the head of the scouts that would let her shine when discussing the state of the terrain they were to march through.

But that was not Tristan’s business beyond allowing himself a sliver of admiration at how his captain had seen that decision coming from miles away – last night he’d overheard her practicing the scouting presentation in front of a mirror. He had not been brought here to talk tactics but to serve as Song’s eyes while she had to maintain appearances.

So, how was their roster of Garrison officers looking?

Lieutenant Navpreet kept fidgeting. Crossing her arms, leaning back into her seat, toying with her half-full cup of tea. Nervous, he assessed. But not just that. Every time there was a mention of fighting from Sebastian Camaron as he sold the officers the same plan Song had sold him, she tensed and clenched her fingers against the arms she’d crossed. She doesn’t want to be part of this, but she was ordered to be.

Which was fair, Tristan conceded, considering the artillerymen would be quite vulnerable to being overrun by the beast. The cannons were their best shot at killing the Lord of Teeth, but they were also massively heavy pieces of metal manned by lightly armed specialists.

Captain Hernando Shange was visibly interested, and contrary to the lieutenant tended to lean in when there was talk of fighting. It was when Camaron spoke of the planned disposition of Garrison troops that his expression darkened. Tristan cocked his head to the side. Reluctance at his troops being split, or was it from their role in general? Given his visible eagerness for the fight, the Mask would bet that his greater concern was that the Garrison troops would not be playing a decisive role. He wants a notch on his belt.

But not so much, Tristan saw, that he forgot his place in the pecking order. The captain kept sneaking looks at Commander Bouare, as if to gauge her opinion of what was being said. That told Tristan everything he needed to know about who must be sold: if Navpreet believed herself of too low a rank to influence the decision and Captain Hernando would defer to his superior officer, then the only one they really needed to get to buy in was Salimata Bouare.

He pretended to adjust his collar, learning close enough to pitch a whisper at Song’s ear.

“Marshal lied, only Bouare matters,” he murmured, then straightened.

From the corner of his eye he saw Song slowly nod in acknowledgement even as Angharad shot him a curious look. He shook his head – he’d explain later. Besides, his job wasn’t quite over yet: there was still one person at the table he was supposed to get a read on.

The Marshal had already heard it all, most of it twice, but did not behave like a man bored out of his mind the way Tristan might have expected. Even the earlier meetings had been taken seriously, with little of the nonchalance he’d displayed before the Battle of the Barrels – men or creatures, like the difference hardly mattered. De la Tavarin had asked about the roads, about supplies, about retreat paths and second-string plans. It had seemed quite at odds with his usual Militant swagger, the maverick boast that one did not need planning when you could kill anything in every room you were ever in. Was it because there were Garrison lives on the line?

It shouldn’t be, considering that the permanent presence in the Lamb Hill camp was also soldiers from the Allazei garrison and the Marshal took no real interest in running the place beyond the occasional public ruling over student squabbles. Despite the alleged rank he had retired at, the Marshal ran Lamb Hill more like a captain of the farfanes, the Old Liergan mercenaries whose taste for garish colors he still kept.

Tristan watched the old man, who was listening to Camaron’s words attentively and did not distract or posture beyond his outlandish clothes, and wondered if it was that simple. That this part of the hunt was, to him, like a mercenary contract and so finally worth taking seriously. It seemed absurd at first glance, considering the deadliness that lay under every other paving stone of Port Allazei. But then what does deadly mean to a man who was a Skiritai for decades?

It made a twisted sort of sense for the habits of a lifetime to lead Marshal de la Tavarin to treat a beast-hunting contract with attentive respect but refuse to spare death anything more than a smirk. It was, Tristan thought, a feasible read of the man. One that’d even give him a keystone when bargaining with the Marshal in the future. So why was it that he kept feeling like he’d missed something?

Tristan really did not like Marshal de la Tavarin.

The meeting did not wrap up quickly, but neither did it spin up into an endless platitude of empty questions and clarifications. Captain Chapul and her powderman were made to answer technical questions as to what they were using by the artillery lieutenant, who seemed satisfied by the answers if slightly appalled by the expense. That makes two of us, lieutenant. War was expensive business, Tristan had learned, he could understand why the Six avoided it so much.

No doubt it was even more costly when you lost, which they had a careless habit of.

When Song was called to the front to answer as to the state of the route to the dantesvara, he noted with approval that she focused on Bouare and gave hard numbers like the severe woman preferred. How much weight the wooden passageways could support, estimated time to pass through the brushlands path and then get the forces into position, the minimum necessary number of powder barrels and she even produced the few scouting reports from their crews on the state of the Nests and the western canal bed.

The papers seemed to impress Commander Bouare, so Tristan retroactively retracted the slightly scathing comments he’d made inside his mind when Song insisted that his and Angharad’s reports must be inked instead of purely verbal. If it worked, it worked.

Then came the verdict.

“It is a risky operation you propose,” Commander Salimata Bouare sternly said, leaning back.

To her left Captain Hernando’s face creased while Lieutenant Navpreet looked hopeful.

“But there is no way to beard a Lord of Teeth in its lair without risk, and you have been laudably thorough in your planning,” she said, triggering a reversal of the faces to her left. “The estimated costs are high, but the Marshal’s involvement means we can recoup funding from the Obscure Committee.”

Her lips thinned.

“And I would rather pay in coin than blood to be rid of the beast,” she added, then turned to her right. “Marshal, you’ve faced dantesvara before. You believe the plan will work?”

The old man stroked his mustache, flicking off some stubborn crumbs on the floor in a gesture that had Song suppressing a twitch.

“If this were a regular specimen of the breed, I would give it two in three chances of success,” Marshal de la Tavarin said. “This one, though, is different. It ate shrines to heal and nearly collapsed Misery Square into the aether. Moreover, since lairing in the Old Canals it has kept an unusually low profile.”

The Marshal drummed his fingers against the table, then twisted his wrist to reveal a thick golden coin, its visible face stamped with a round lake. Rajasarasi, Tristan thought. The Someshwari’s most valuable minted coin, the most valuable gold coin in all of Vesper when the latest Raja of Mahabhara wasn’t debasing the currency. The old man twirled it across his knuckles and laid it to rest atop his readied thumb, revealing the crown stamped on the other side.

“For this one?” the Marshal continued. “Half-and-half. A flip of the coin, Salimata.”

She sighed.

“Not odds I would usually gamble on,” Commander Bouare admitted. “But our forces are stretched too thin. Between the defensive line facing the Ashgarden, the ever-increasing Scholomance patrols, your Lamb Hill camp and the ships we had to send to Kofoni we’re pushing the limit of our capacity. We need that monster dead.”

Marshal de la Tavarin smiled, flipping the coin with a resonant ting then snatching it out of the air quickly enough Tristan never got a glimpse of how it landed.

“Then we have an agreement,” he said. “You stand by your stated date, captains?”

“The twenty-ninth is most suitable for our purposes, sir,” Sebastian Camaron replied before the others could.

Not that they disagreed, though Nenetl looked irked at having been cut off. It was in five days, on the secondday of next week, and the date had been carefully picked. They wanted to march after the rainy day so that it would wash out the scents for the lemures of the Nests, but some parts of the canals were unusable before they dried – so two days after was best. Setting out during the week also made it harder for other brigades to mobilize and interfere, especially if they managed to keep a lid on their plans this time.

They wouldn’t, not entirely. Tristan had personally seen to that. But thinning down the interference was well worth the inconveniences.

“The Garrison will provide all the requested equipment and soldiers for the hunt on the twenty-ninth,” Commander Bouare stated, officially stamping her seal of approval. “Gods be with you, blackcloaks. And if they aren’t, that’s what the silver is for.”

She was answered by rigid salutes, the sudden formality then almost immediately collapsing into rather informal chatter as the meeting came to an end. Tristan hung back by the door, letting the Stripes and the Skiritai mingle with the officers, and kept an eye on the crowd instead. He was soon joined by another. Ruo Xuan Liu did not lean against the doorsill as the thief had, ramrod straight even when idling as if unbending even an inch would be a decadent indulgence.

Tristan could see why he set off Song, besides the way he spoke. Instead of the topknots ubiquitous in Tianxia, Ruo wore his hair in a plait pulled into flat bun against the back of his head, secured in place by a square jade hairpin. It was an older style, Tristan been told, and much of the man was old-fashioned – it felt slightly off, as if aside from other Tianxi.

Not that it made Ruo Xuan any less sharp on the uptake.

“Master Abrascal,” the other Mask greeted him.

“My lord of Liu,” Tristan drily replied.

A moment passed as they watched the chatter.

“Lieutenant Navpreet might be an issue,” Ruo Xuan quietly said.

Tristan snorted. Bit of a Republican blinder, there. Their armies were mostly militia and mercenaries, so they had a long history of running when things looked bad. Ruo was predisposed to look for that weakness first.

“She’s afraid,” Tristan said. “That’s just good sense, as far as I’m concerned. But she can’t run without killing her career. The good captain, on the other hand? Now he has me worried. That man wants a taste of glory.”

“His relation to Musa is unclear,” Ruo Xuan provided. “Some stray lineage that ended up in the Watch, presumably. The surname does not seem to have helped his career any, to end up here.”

Tolomontera had been a dead-end posting before Scholomance reopened. Not the kind of place a superior officer sent a captain if they intended them for the promotion track.

“House Shange isn’t exactly a heavy hitter anyway, from what I’ve been told,” Tristan noted. “They’re big and well connected for middle nobility, but they’re not in the same league as the Sandile or the Khosa.”

Most of his firsthand knowledge of Malani nobility came from admittedly somewhat biased sources – Zenzele had famously pulled a runner on his own house and arranged marriage, Silumko hated most nobles like poison and Angharad had been in a rather odd position within the Malani pecking order – but by triangulating their opinions he liked to think he’d gotten a decent grasp of the larger players.

“Or the Morcant,” Ruo Xuan slyly added.

“Or the Morcant,” Tristan agreeably replied.

Dark eyes flicked to him, then away. That had been a test, Tristan noted, fishing for a reaction.

“You seem to be doing better,” Ruo Xuan suddenly said.

And why wouldn’t he? They were less than a week away from finally freeing Fortuna, weeks ahead of even the lowest boundary Andreu Claver had calculated for him. He had good reason to believe his goddess would come out largely unharmed and unchanged. Maryam had, well, forced them to speak out loud some things they’d been leaving silent but it might yet be for the best. And well worth it if it’d been the price for her owning up to how she’d been drowning and dragging them all in with her.

And he was feeling more… comfortable with the Thirteenth, these days. Angharad had proved trustworthy in ways he would never even have considered a year ago and while Izel was burying himself into work to avoid choking on the noose of his own bad decisions, the work was very fine. Admittedly Song had publicly set aflame all her bridges with the most influential Stripe on the island before pivoting to the hunt, but when he had heard Tristan had found he only felt a sort of crooked glee. The barrel had not bent, not for power or advantage. Song Ren would remain Song Ren.

And though on other fronts his frustration kept rising – while his captain had skillfully secured him a chance at finding Cao’s correspondence, that was not all he was looking for and the rest wouldn’t be on the ship – there was an ending on the horizon.

Not that his fellow Cryptic had a right or need to know any of this, so Tristan instead put a smile over his face and a hand over his heart.

“I always do my best, friend,” he declared. “Why, I’ve even-”

“I was asked to assess your stability,” Ruo Xuan cut through. “I am pleased I will be able to speak well of it.”

His brow rose. Unusually direct of Ruo, which meant this was half a warning.

“Camaron?” Tristan asked.

“Not only him.”

And there were only so many people who could have given that order. Hage.

“Well, I wasn’t the one to make the mad plan this time,” he drawled, hiding the flash of fear and something almost like resentment.

If Hage gave a shit, he could have shown up and seen for himself.

“Izel was due a go at it, if we don’t take turns it gets a little stale.”

“No doubt,” Ruo dismissively replied, then inclined his head. “Can I trust that the Nineteenth Brigade is in hand?”

Tristan blinked in surprise, an innocent lamb afflicted with strategically distributed confusion.

“We’re doing this on a secondday, what else is needed to throw them off?” he said. “They’re not the most popular sorts these days, Ruo, they’re not in anyone’s loop.”

The Second Brigade had been a concern in that regard, but he’d been assured that hole was plugged.

“One of their members is a Krypteia asset,” Ruo Xuan plainly said. “Which you know, Master Abrascal, as the eyes I paid to follow you around town saw you meet with him in secrecy.”

Tristan would have been more offended by that if he’d not done the same thing to several people over the last few months. At this rate, by graduation the Krypteia was going to have turned the urchins of Port Allazei into merchant princes. That brat Arabella had already upped her rates twice.

“Fine, I see you won’t be fobbed off with the usual distractions and audacious lies,” Tristan said. “I’ll level with you, Master Liu.”

“Must you?” Master Liu asked, deadly serious.

“I went into that bookshop so that I might learn how to read,” Tristan told him. “This entire time, I’ve only been pretending.”

“I have seen you read words in several languages, on multiple occasions,” Ruo Xuan flatly said.

“I’m a very good liar,” Tristan solemnly told him.

“You are,” the other Mask said after a slight pause. “Which somehow makes this even more aggravating. Well played.”

Behind those steady eyes a recalibration took place, adjusting downwards what could be gained from the conversation.

“Will it put my brigade at risk?” Ruo Xuan asked.

His line in the sand, the thief decided. The least he’d accept leaving with. Tristan hummed.

“Have you ever heard,” he asked, “of the tridecan?”

“I have not,” Ruo Xuan frowned.

“They’re lares,” Tristan said. “Frightfully intelligent birds. They’re mimics that can change their feathers and the way they sound to pass as other birds, joining their flocks for food and protection.”

He wiggled his eyebrows dramatically.

“They then slowly take them over by replacing the eggs of their flockmates with their own and killing off isolated birds – eating them, too – until they grow to make up most of the flock. Then they turn on their benefactors, devour them all in a single night and spread out to find new flocks.”

“Clever birds,” Ruo approvingly said.

“Aren’t they just?” Tristan smiled.

They left it at that.

—

The morning of the hunt, Izel Coyac woke up embracing a skeleton.

The bones were ice cold, phalanges digging into his shoulder and back as the open jaw leered at him in a parody of a lover’s kiss. He stayed there for seven long breaths, forcing himself not to scream, and swallowed. After putting a bridle on his panic and horror – the more unsettled he grew, the worst his ken would take – he untangled himself and got dressed while never once glancing at his bed. Afterwards, he had the presence of mind to lift the covers and check the bones.

As he’d thought, several of the leg bones were shattered or missing. This was an omen of the Grave-Given, a herald of death to come. He put the covers back over the skeleton and began bracing himself for what was to come. In a word? Death. To his enemies, his friends, to strangers and brothers: the Lord of Graves did not care who the grave goods were from, only that the dues be paid.

He ate his porridge and egg at the table with the others, smiling at Song’s exacting portioning of oats and berries as he pretended not to see the bats crowding the open windowsill, hanging and standing and looking at him unblinkingly. The Grave-Given’s heralds were not still, always stirring ever so slightly in a way that quietly drew his eye back.

There was a storm of movement and a dull thump as Sakkas suddenly landed among them, trilling triumphantly as they scattered every which way in fright and the massive magpie began running its talons against the wood in a demand for blueberries – nice windowsill, Captain Ren, it’d be a shame if something… happened to it, Tristan voiced for his ever-greedy familiar. Izel did not laugh along with the others, instead letting out a relieved breath and turning back to his meal. He picked out two berries from his porridge to reward the bird for his favor on the sly.

Scholomance was even worse.

It was as if the god in the walls could tell his ken was burning up, crooning and cradling the omens that were scattered everywhere for him to find. On the way to class he kept glimpsing torn and crushed limbs tucked behind every corner, hanging from the chandeliers and crammed into every alcove. Izel barely heard Professor Iyengar’s lecture because of the pulped, shattered head at her feet. It was slowly dripping blood and brains on the floor, a spreading puddle of gore.

These, he eventually realized, were the remains of the Four Hundred Brothers. The gods butchered by the Deathless Bird in a rage after they besieged his second mother – save for the three-hundred-ninety-ninth of them, who instead ran from the god of war and survived to become the god of defeat and cowardice. The Lord of Graves had warned him of death in his own bed and now the Twice-Son promised a great slaughter to come.

A mute dread rose in his stomach and refused to leave, lingering like a sickness.

Scholomance spat them out to seek a grimmer fate and Izel went through the motions as they stopped at the armory on the way to Lamb Hill, every part of him focused on the work save for the sliver that was already flinching away from the last visit he knew was to come. He packed away the three aether spikes he had crafted, and the intricate mechanism of the dispenser. The finished spikes were each in a leather sheath, the percussion caps slid into pouches on his bandolier and the machine securely in his pack.

“Here.”

He startled, finding Angharad handing him his usual pack of grenades. He rasped out thanks.

“Slept poorly?” she casually asked.

Izel took two more grenades from his bag and crammed into the pack. He was already past a reasonable weight, but felt naked heading out without at least five.

“More the waking,” he admitted.

“Your part will not last long,” Angharad encouraged. “And it might be you never see the beast at all.”

“There’ll be deaths today,” he quietly told her. “I can feel it.”

“Then let them be those of our enemies,” she replied, undaunted.

He simply nodded. She was brave, Angharad. He was not. There could be no bridging that. In an hour’s span he found himself standing among the crowd on the slope of Lamb Hill as above them distant gray clouds loomed, a dark canvas for the colors of the Grand Orrery to slide through. A hundred Garrison blackcloaks stood here, along with eighteen students, and Izel’s eyes kept looking for it. For him. Where would it show?

The captains and the Garrison officers went up by the Marshal’s side for speeches and orders, but Izel let the words and cheers wash over him. He’d found the telltale warnings: the way shadows curved and twisted, hinting at fang and claw. The way the light of the fires and lanterns seemed dimmer, as if promising to wink out any moment. These were herald enough that Izel did not startle when the captains began walking down the hill and behind them a great black dog was revealed to have been standing all along.

Large as a man, it was, its teeth bones and its legs twisted. It stood there, watching through those blind-white eyes. Waiting. It had come, the third of the great gods that fed on battlefields. And this one, this one the tinker did not dare ignore.

“O Moon-Eater, god of my father,” Izel murmured in temple dialect, tracing the god’s sign against his arm.

The seven stalks of the maguey, one twisted the opposite way of the others. Wrong, deformed.

“Lord of Raids, Sheperd of Monsters, you who crafts the war-dusk and guides the lost dead across the rivers, I beseech you. I invoke you not, for you spare none, but beg your disdain for my enemies.”

He swallowed.

“I humbly offer ten lights snuffed early, never again lit, and honor to the next beast bearing your mark I lay eyes upon.”

The herald of the Moon-Eater did not move, did not react to the prayer or the offering. Izel nearly jumped out of his skin when someone laid a hand on his shoulder, finding a concerned Tristan standing by him. When he glanced again the omen was gone, not a trace of it or its lesser marks, and he almost cursed. No god of his homeland did he dread more than the Moon-Eater: not the Night King and his love of darkness and discord, not the Deathless Bird and his all-consuming rages or even Lady Coldstone with her heartless, implacable judgments.

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It was not to them that Father kept an altar, not their colors he painted on his face or the mark of their favor that had made his sobriquet – Doghead Coyac, the Lord of Raids’ beloved bannerman.

“Izel,” Tristan repeated. “Are you all right?”

He bit his lip.

“No,” he tiredly replied. “But it will stand. Tonight is to be a moonless night, Tristan, a sarabande of monsters.”

There was a distinct pause.

“Well, consider me appropriately alarmed,” Tristan said. “One of those days, then?”

Izel closed his eyes, forced himself to focus again.

“Yes,” he forced out. “One of those days.”

“Are you still fit to use the device?” Tristan bluntly asked.

Izel opened his eyes, let out a breath and nodded.

“I am,” he said.

“Had to ask,” his friend quietly said, the cleared his throat. “Anything we can do to help?”

He hesitated.

“Do you think we have time to get some candles before we leave? I need to do something.”

Then he grimaced.

“No, forget it,” he said. “It’s just superstition, it wouldn’t-”

“I’ll handle it,” Tristan firmly said.

Within five minutes, even as the expedition began arranging itself past the palisade at the bottom of the hill, he was standing by the tent of the Unluckies with a few matches and the company of Tristan and Maryam. He knelt by the canvas, lighting a candle and letting it burn for a few seconds before pressing it into the dirt to kill the flame and snapping the wax. He did it ten times, and only once he’d thoroughly smashed the remains of the candles and dumped them in the brigade’s chamber pot did he feel a knot loosen in his shoulders.

It was always better to pay upfront with the Moon-Eater.

“Huh,” Maryam said, and for a moment he thought her dead eye was as a bat’s – shining, brown, bulging.

Her sister must be in it, and Hooks must count as close enough to dead for the Grave-Given’s attention to linger on her.

“I always hate it when you huh at something I can’t see,” Tristan complained. “It’s never good news when you huh like that, Maryam.”

“Don’t pigeonhole me, you Lierganen yokel,” she shot back without missing a beat. “I was going to say that whatever ceremony Izel did stirred the aether a bit.”

“The Sheperd of Monsters is always listening,” Izel said, rising to his feet.

The old stories said the Moon-Eater had been a lesser god, before the Fifth Loss. Not minor, but beneath many of the great gods of Izcalli. Now, though… How could a god of monsters and the dying of the light not stand more powerful than any other, in Vesper? He had not been surprised to hear that while some debate raged over the strength of several of his people’s gods, none across the land thought the Moon-Eater to be anything other than a second-order entity.

He rolled his shoulder, feeling a little better. Like his ken was not reined in, but perhaps had reached a peak and was now headed down the opposite slope.

“I’m out of the reverie, I think,” Izel told them, coughing. “Thank you.”

“We’ve all got to pay our dues sometimes,” Tristan reassured him. “Candles are better than what some of the Manes hold out for.”

Maryam simply nodded. She was not a woman of strong faith, Maryam. Navigators often were not, as they dealt in forces some considered match to that of the gods, but Izel suspected there was more to it than that. He had read how many of the deities of the Izvoric took the field, when the Malani began their campaign to conquer the lowlands. Those gods had fought, and those gods had died. She was a pragmatic woman, Maryam Khaimov. Not the sort to keep praying to a boat already sunk.

Song saw to them before they split up, the Unluckies gathered one last time before the plunge.

“We have trained and planned for today,” their captain said, silver eyes flicking from one to another. “It could still go wrong, but we have prepared for that as well.”

She straightened.

“Trust your instincts,” Song Ren said. “I trusted them as well, and it got me this far.”

A half-smile.

“See you on the other side,” she ordered.

Smiles all around and Izel was not quite sure whether he should reach out or salute. Nor was he the only one.

“She’s been preparing a fancy dinner,” Maryam tattled. “If any of you die, I claim your share.”

“I will mine to Sakkas,” Izel said.

“Oh, if we can will it away then send mine to Professor Kang,” Tristan mused. “He’ll be convinced it’s poisoned so he’ll-”

“You cannot will my cooking to people, not even if you die,” Song sighed.

“Come, Song, willing only the ingredients would be quite… half-baked,” Angharad said, sounding very proud of herself.

“Pun?” Tristan asked her in a whisper.

“Pun,” she confirmed.

“Nice.”

Song rubbed the bridge of her nose, though Izel saw her lips had twitched.

“I hope the wind doesn’t carry and no one heard you,” she complained, “else the first casualty of the day will be when I shoot myself out of embarrassment. I order you all to pretend you are reasonable people for a few hours, and that will be all.”

They split up smiling after that, though Tristan hung back just a moment. Izel leaned in.

“You remember the word?” Tristan asked, pitching his voice low.

“Instrumentality,” Izel replied. “You’ve drilled me a hundred times, I shall not forget.”

“You had better not, it is a magic spell I made just for you,” Tristan drawled. “Use it well.”

Izel nodded, mustering up most of a smile.

“Thank you,” he said.

The thief’s brow rose.

“What for?”

“For letting me do it my way,” Izel said. “Instead of the way you would have.”

Tristan grimaced.

“Not my pack to carry,” the Mask finally said. “Fortune smile on you, Izel.”

“Soon enough she will,” he replied, and that startled a smile out of the other man.

Gods, but he moved so much more lightly these last few days – both on his feet and as a man. Izel had not quite grasped how much Fortuna’s fate ate him up from the inside until he saw that wound begin to mend. The ease he was regaining with Maryam was like a second balm, too, taking the thorns out of his humor and making it about laughing again. One more reason to see today through in full.

They clasped wrists and parted ways.

The expedition split up in three companies, though for the initial stretch all three would be walking the same paths. Izel joined the student crew under the command of Captain Nenetl Chapul, along with Zenzele, Andreu Claver and Ritwick Banerjee. They’d be accompanied by twenty Garrison regulars under Lieutenant Acachimal, a tall Izcalli with a shaved head and golden ring through his nose.

The two from the Third took the front while Zenzele stayed back to speak with the Garrison lieutenant, leaving him walking alongside Andreu Claver as the column began marching through the beaten paths and passageways of the brushlands. It was satisfying to actually use the fruit of their labors, and Izel caught himself glancing back at the company behind them to see how the cannons took to the routes. Quite well, he noted with satisfaction. The channels had properly drained the ground, if they were lucky they wouldn’t have to change more than a pair of axles.

“Ah, the famous tinker pride,” Andreu amusedly said. “All praise the Wednesday Council, every Laurel should be retaught mathematics and become Umuthi.”

“You’re a Savant with a theoretical specialty,” Izel shot back. “There has never been a College budget in the history of the societies where you weren’t the first on the block for cuts.”

“The trick is being born wealthy,” Andreu happily told him. “Well, that and applied theology. The Skiritai may mock, but they still use us to run the numbers on the gods they want to plunge those pretty silver swords into.”

The Lierganen’s eyes dipped to his bandolier, where the spikes hung in their sheaths.

“Though I hear you went with field measures instead,” he added.

“I based the strength of the discharge on the aether density threshold I encountered when in the dantesvara’s presence,” Izel agreed. “It felt less risky than going off the formulas, given the strangeness of the creature.”