Chapter 48

Song had not worn formal clothes this regularly since leaving Tianxia and was not sure she cared for it.

While formality was a demonstration of respect for the interlocutor, the facts of the matter remained that Song Ren had a lot to do and only so many hours in her day to do it. Consequently, the time spent getting in and out of her layered chang’ao felt like she was being stolen from – and while in need. If she could at least be read reports during it would be something, but frustratingly the process required too much of her attention.

That and it would be indiscreet to discuss the investigation when she was being helped into her clothes by a Black House maid. Servants gossiped, and Tristan was convinced that Imani Langa had bribed some of the staff to keep an ear out for her.

Still, getting in and out of formal clothes was not the worst waste of time her time today. Song watched with a blank face as Lord Rector Evander Palliades stepped to the edge of the balustrade and raised a hand, cheers and applause exploding at the sight of him. She herself stayed half-hidden among the curtains, eyes scanning the crowd and finding only a spread of magnates and nobles with a few contracts peppered in.

None that, at first glance, could be used to get to the Lord Rector up her in his heavily guarded private suite. That an officer of the Watch was being used as a bodyguard for Evander Palliades while the man attended the theatre made that rabid Yellow Earth contractor’s words ring unpleasantly of truth: she was undeniably being loaned to the local yiwu kingpin by her superiors.

That her rental came with fine seats overlooking the stage and luxurious refreshments somehow made it worse.

Lord Rector Evander kept his speech to the assembled influential below short, telling them that the cowardly attack on his life had missed and that the Asphodel Rectorate would not be waylaid from its triumphant rise into a new age of prosperity by such petty distractions. It was somewhat on the nose, Song thought, but hit the right notes for the listening audience. Some of them shouted approval at his words.

Her eyes flicked to his hands on the brass railing, noting how the man’s index and middle finger were tapping out a rhythm. He practiced that speech, Song thought. Enough that he’d decided on a specific cadence for delivering it. Reluctantly, she must approve of the assiduity on display. A lesser man would have read off a sheet.

Soon he was finished, his last words followed by another wave of cheers and applause. Though this was Evander Palliades’ first public appearance down in Tratheke since the assassination attempt the speech was, she thought, almost too well received. Either the botched assassination had made snubbing the Lord Rector unpopular – if not dangerous – or… The brown-haired man stepped away from the balustrade with a sigh, then snorted when he saw the look on her face.

“We will pay the clappers an additional fee, I think,” he said. “They certainly put their back into it.”

“You arranged for cheers,” Song half-accused.

“Men will clap at most anything if there are enough of their fellows already doing it,” Evander Palliades said. “If only to avoid being the only ones not clapping.”

“It will not truly make you more popular,” she pointed out.

He cocked an eyebrow.

“Will it not?” the Lord Rector replied. “Even if they noticed, what will they remember most – the suspicion, or the room full of cheers following my speech? It will not change the minds of those who have made it, but the weathervanes will go where they believe the wind blows.”

Song’s lips thinned, but she did not contradict him. Unpleasant as it was to admit, that sort of trick did work on crowds. Elections in Mazu were replete with their like, and it was said that in Wendi powerful trade cartels sent their ship crews to disrupt the speeches of candidates they opposed. It was a false equivalence to compare a sword in the hand of a tyrant and a sword in the hand of free man, but the hand wielding it did not make the sword itself more virtuous.

Tricks were tricks, and truth was the first victim of hypocrisy ennobled.

The Lord Rector invited her to sit, but before she could answer there was a knock at the door. Song put a hand on her pistol, for she would be dutiful regardless of her opinion of the assignment, but it was only the refreshments that had been sent for. Watered wine for Evander Palliades, and water for her – though by suspicious happenstance a pot of Sanxing green tea and two cups were also brought in.

She hid a grimace, aware that over the span of the next two hours it was likely her nose would win over her pride and she’d have a cup. Evander’s subtle smirk at the sight was set aside, as a debate over whether it was attractive or irritating would see her lose whatever the answer. She sat down on the lushly cushioned black seat, sipping at her water.

“You don’t very much want to be here, do you?”

Song kept her face calm, carefully setting down her cup on the low table between her seats. Only then did she turn her gaze on the bespectacled Lord Rector, who expression was one of faint amusement.

“I have personally been assigned this duty by Brigadier Chilaca,” she replied.

A thoroughly frustrating conversation, that. While he did not outright dismiss the findings she and Tristan had dug up in the northwestern ward, the heavyset Aztlan had been largely indifferent to the notion of a brewing noble coup. In his eyes, Song suspected, weakness in the reign of House Palliades merely strengthened the Watch’s bargaining position.

In the end he’d told her that he would be passing the report along to the senior Krypteia officer on the island, appending a personal note that time might be a factor, and that she was to cease being involved in the matter.

And while Song knew objectively that the brigadier had acted correctly, that he was following the proper protocols and had arguably treated her thin-on-proof report more seriously than many in his position might have, it was all a thorn in her throat. It was not the place of the Watch to intervene in Asphodelian affairs beyond what was required to maintain its own interests, so refraining from warning House Palliades about the coup was the proper course of action.

Yet she could not help but feel that this inaction was a mistake, that they were missing something, and in the end that Brigadier Chilaca had merely humored her awhile before sending her out here as a pawn in a greater game. It was hard not to resent that at least a little, though Song tried.

“And here I thought it a Malani affectation, to lie while speaking truths,” Lord Rector Evander drawled. “I take no offense, Captain Song. I am not unaware that seeing to my protection is not why you came to Asphodel, or that you were victim to a diplomat pulling rank.”

She cocked an eyebrow at that.

“A diplomat who pulled rank,” Song mildly said, “at your personal request.”

He smiled wanly.

“If I am to be robbed by the Watch, I might as well get them to contribute to my survival while the robbery is ongoing,” Evander Palliades said. “I’ll confess to some puzzlement you took the black in the first place: your contract, Captain Song, would make you a wildly wealthy and influential woman at the court of any great ruler.”

“You do not know the details of my contract,” she replied.

Nor would he ever.

“No,” he easily conceded, “but I know what my friends in Tianxia were able to gather about the Ren, which is not nothing.”

Her jaw clenched.

“I am a woman of the Watch,” Song Ren flatly said. “My past is of no import.”

Evander Palliades brushed back his curls, staring at her, then shook his head and took a sip of his watered wine.

“Neither of us believe that,” he said. “And you will find I can understand better than most what it feels like, the crushing weight of the legacy one must live up to.”

“You are a hereditary ruler,” she bit out. “I am from the single most despised bloodline in the Ten Republics. It is not the same.”

The last words came out a hiss, and she shut her mouth so quickly when she realized what she had said that her teeth clacked together painfully. Only Evander did not look bothered by her disrespect in the slightest – he seemed almost pleased.

“No,” he agreed. “Unlike you, I do not get to leave. I will sit a throne atop a house of glass until I die or a stone is thrown strongly enough to bring it down under me.”

She scoffed.

“You can leave,” Song flatly said. “Abdicate, take what wealth you can carry and live a life without a crown. To remain is a choice, not some divine punishment.”

“You could change your name,” Evander Palliades retorted smilingly. “Find a patron in Izcalli or Sacromonte, spend the rest of your life rich and respected.”

There is nowhere the curse will not reach me, Song thought. And I will not simply leave my sisters to rot from the inside like curdled milk. Only she owed this man none of these words and it would have felt almost obscene to share them with him. Already the strange joy in his mien at their talk was leaving her feeling naked, as if it were all too intimate. Gods but how lonely he must be, to be so candid with a woman he barely knew. She needed to pull back, not encourage him.

No matter how satisfying it would be to put him in his place, to let him realize the sheer extent of his misguided arrogance.

“This conversation can lead nowhere, Your Excellency,” she said. “It is best ended, with my apologies for speaking out of turn.”

He hummed, leaning back into his seat and reaching for his cup again. Watered down as it looked, he’d be able to drink the entire goblet and have his wits entirely unaffected. It was an admirable habit, which she resented. She did not feel much like approving of him, at the moment.

Silence had spread below them as they spoke, leaving Song to hope their talk had not been too loud, and it shamed her some to realize she had missed the beginning of the play. Painted panels of a magnificent golden city were being covered by streaks of blue cloth carried by children, which after a beat she grasped represented rising water. In front of the city being lost to the sea, a young man was addressing the gods in a lamenting monologue.

“With how expensive the seats are, you’d think they would change the city panels from year to year,” Lord Rector Evander noted. “They barely touch them up.”

Song shot him a disapproving look. It should be beneath even a despot to speak at the theater. The man had the gall to grin back.

“It is the Oduromaia,” Evander said. “I have seen it so many times I am in danger of falling asleep. Kindly protect me from peril, Captain Song.”

She glared at him, then sighed. It was not as if her duties would have allowed her to watch the play anyhow. She was meant to keep an eye out for dangerous contracts in the crowd.

“I take it that the ‘Oduromaia’ is the tale of Oduromai King’s journey to Asphodel?” she said.

“One such tale, certainly,” Evander Palliades said. “Though it claims the same title as what was once a spoken epic, I believe the text turned into play dates back to… late Century of Accord or early Dominion. During the early reigns of House Lissenos.”

The much-loved predecessors of the Palliades, who had ruled over Asphodel for over a hundred years.

“So shortly after the Ataxia,” she said.

His eyes lit up.

“Exactly,” he said, growing enthusiastic. “There was need to knit back Asphodel after those years of war, and the Lissenos went about it cleverly: they paid for tales and songs and plays, all harkening back to a common founding from which all Asphodelians drew common root.”

He paused.

“Though, of course, said works all implied Lissenos descent from King Oduromai so their part of the root must be recognized to be a little better than the others.”

“You are skeptical of the claim, I take it,” Song said, reluctantly amused.

He was impugning his own descent, practically speaking, as the Palliades claim to the throne came from their relation to the Lissenos.

“They were originally a minor noble house from Ikarios that took refuge in Asphodel during the Century of Steel,” he said, rolling his eyes. “They are as related to Oduromai as I am to Viterico the Great.”

Tempted as Song was to agree and add that kings must constantly change the past to justify the present, Evander was well read enough he might notice she was quoting the Feichu Tian. Which, given its contents, might be taken as impolitic of her.

Strong arguments in favor of royal decapitation were advanced within those pages.

“At least they were not Raseni,” she teased.

He cleared his throat.

“Actually, given that Rasen occupied Ikarios during the century preceding their exile, the odds are that they had a little…”

“No,” she said, almost grinning.

“All aristoi try to avoid talking about that,” Lord Rector Evander noted. “Everyone measures the strength of their claim by relation to House Lissenos, these days, so it would be a losing game for all involved.”

Far below Prince Oduromai bemoaned the treachery of the hollows and devils that laid low the hall of his father, announcing his intent to find the most beautiful island in Vesper to replace it, and Song reached for the pot to pour herself a cup of Sanxing green as Evander Palliades idly told her that in older version of the play some of the devils responsible for the destruction had been named – and sounded suspiciously like the houses of the Six, which the Sacromontans had taken offense to.

It was a waste of time still, she thought, but it need not be unpleasant. There was worse company to keep.

—

Though it was now his second time visiting, Tristan still found it genuinely impressive that Hage had gotten his hands on even a hole-in-the-wall shop inside the Collegium. He’d heard those went for literal bags of gold.

The new Chimerical still sold coffee, but as it was effectively a large and deep broom closet squeezed in between two eateries it only had one table and Hage had to stay upright inside his glorified stand to make room for his brewing apparatuses – even though most had stayed behind in Allazei, by the looks of it. So had many of the bags of bean varieties, which made it all the more amusing that an entire shelf of that limited space had been turned into a cushioned bed for a lazing Mephistofeline.

The cat’s monumental girth squished a little past the edge of said shelf, predictably. He also hissed at anyone who lingered too long to chat with Hage, but inexplicably this had charmed the locals. Someone had woven him a little crown of flowers, which he sat on, and there was a plate with bits of roasted chicken on it he occasionally deigned to nibble at.

“One serving of your cheapest bean water, good sir,” Tristan ordered, sliding a single copper across the counter.

The devil stared down at him through those owlish eyebrows.

“I will have you dragged away by the lictors,” Hage threatened.

Though not, the thief noted, without first pocketing the copper. Tristan theatrically sighed.

“Fine,” he said. “I will have to settle for all the information you have on the basileia called the ‘Brass Chariot’, then.”

He’d made that request when first finding the Chimerical yesterday, surprised to learn that as it was part of the test he would not even have to pay for the information. There was no one else in line, or even out in the street – he’d come during early morning work hours – but Hage still swept the environs with a look. Purely for show, given that the old devil’s hearing was sharp enough no one should be able to approach without him being aware.

“Second-raters,” Hage told him. “Their main business is smuggling, but they have a few protection rackets and front businesses.”

The thief frowned.

“What do they smuggle?”

“Mostly legal merchandise, in truth,” Hage said. “Only they get it into Tratheke without paying the rector’s tariffs and sell it marginally cheaper than it would be otherwise for a thin slice of profit. If they went for the real moneymakers, larger players would step on them. It is unconfirmed, but rumor has it other basileias sometimes hire them to transport goods through their routes.”

Tristan hummed thoughtfully.

“Trade Assembly connections?” he asked.

“Not the way you mean it,” Hage replied. “They make most of their coin at the expense of Assembly revenue so the merchants want them dead, but they’ve friends in the workshops and warehouses.”

So they had ties to the employees of the Trade Assembly, not the wealthy magnates themselves. As far as Tristan was concerned that was for the better. Coteries followed power and money, neither of which Tristan Abrascal could outbid even a single merchant magnate over.

“Much obliged,” he said. “I’ve another inquiry for you, though it is nothing urgent.”

“Oh?” Hage replied, grabbing a cloth to clean an already perfectly clean cup.

“Does the Watch have anything on a Lord Locke and Lady Keys?” Tristan asked. “Guests of the Lord Rector, supposedly. They were snooping around the assassination attempt, though I do not believe it was the assassin they were after.”

Hage stilled, and not as a man would. In that way only devils could, for devils need neither breathe nor soothe aching muscles: when their kind stilled, it was stone or the cast of night. Immediate, absolute.

“Repeat the names,” Hage ordered.

“Lord Locke,” he said. “Lady Keys.”

“Describe them to me.”

He did, the rotund and mustachioed little man and the tall and thin bespectacled woman. He even added how Lady Keys had grabbed him by the neck and tossed him down a window with strength unusual for a woman a skinny – though not, it must be said, impossible. Hage set down the cloth, then the cup.

“The Krypteia had no word of them being on Asphodel,” he finally said.

“They are a known quantity, then?” Tristan asked.

“I will look into the matter personally,” Hage said. “You, and the Thirteenth at large, are to avoid them as much as physically possible.”

He let out a low whistle.

“That bad?”

“Tristan,” Hage said, and his tone was grave enough the thief straightened. “You are not, under any circumstances, to make those two angry. Keep them smiling, keep them laughing. Always.”

Slowly he nodded.

“Above my pay grade, I understand.”

The devil stared at him, then jerked his chin to the side.

“Get going, I have paying customers on their way.”

Tristan snorted, and waved a goodbye a Mephistofeline – who summarily ignored him, as Tristan had lost any influence over the distribution of foodstuffs and thus become a stranger not worth remembering. There was nothing more fickle than a cat, save perhaps Fortuna.

Tristan took his time on the way back, still getting his bearings around the city. He’d gotten clothes in Asphodelian linens – even paid for them, at Song’s insistence – so he did not draw much attention anymore, at least until he talked. There was not all that much difference in appearance between Trebian islanders and Lierganen from the continent, at least not those from Sacromonte, but he had yet to unlearn his City accent. Hage had given him exercises, though, so he had hopes.

The Collegium was too rich for his blood, and too much of a tribe. Even though most who worked within the gargantuan cube of glass could not have afforded a Collegium house even if they save up for it their entire life, there was a cachet to spending your day there that set them apart from the rest of Tratheke. Not the kind of company one could slide into without first learning their little terms and customs, so Tristan instead let his feet take him to the southwest ward.

The southeastern ward had a large swath of noble mansions and properties, but its southwestern neighbor was the living heart of the city. It was where the workshops and the merchant warehouses were, and those well-paying jobs had sprouted shops and eateries and a dozen industries to cater to those earning the wages. There were a few of what Sacromonte would call guildhouses, the seats of trade consortiums, but they were surprisingly few and discreet.

Asphodel did not like to sell land to merchants, and it showed.

The hum on the street was about Lord Rector Evander’s surprise appearance at a playhouse in the northwestern ward the previous afternoon, proving rumors he had been disfigured to be a lie. There were also rumors the man now had a mistress, for a woman had been glimpsed up in his private lodge. Considering Song must have been the woman in question, Tristan had to swallow a shit-eating grin when he heard the rumor.

She was going to lose her mind at the implication she was some king’s mistress, and it was going to be beautiful. He couldn’t wait to tell her.

Overall, sentiment towards the Lord Rector was rather favorable. Even the mistress rumor got the wink-wink treatment about him being a young man with a young man’s needs, and everyone scorned the attempt to kill what they considered a fine enough ruler. Speculation was rife about who had done it, though in the southwestern ward when foreigners weren’t blamed the suspicion leaned more to the Council of Ministers than the Trade Assembly.

The ministers, being largely high nobles from the eastern and western regions of Asphodel, were unpopular with the people of Tratheke – who saw themselves as the heart of the Rectorate and believed the rest of the island to resent this obvious truth.

It was halfway through the afternoon, while debating grabbing a bite, that he first caught sight of them.

None of them were wearing back, which was how he almost missed them. He was saved by Captain Tozi Poloko’s absurd haircut, which stood out enough he gave her a second look and caught sight of the entire Nineteenth moving down the street in local clothes. Blades out in the open, but pistols hidden from sight so as not to out themselves as blackcloaks under the local laws.

He was tucked in behind a curtain of beads by a trinket stand, so he wasn’t in their angle of sight. The odds were good that for one he would be the one with the drop on Cressida. Too pleased at that notion to let the opportunity go, Tristan began to trail behind them. Though the four of them moved briskly the streets of the ward were thick with people so he was able to stay in sight of them without drawing attention.

Where were they going? It must be part of the investigation into the contracted killer, as they were moving the opposite direction from the way back to Black House.

It was when they dipped into side streets that Tristan’s curiosity was truly stoked. Cressida alone would have been too risky to follow into there, but the others were louder and not as wary. Taking pains to never be in their line of sight, tracking them by footsteps and the sounds of voices, he followed in their wake. A few minutes later, near a dead end, chatter rose sharply before ending entirely.

Tristan pressed himself against a wall, pricking his ear and catching what he was certain was the sound of a door opening. He waited it out, several minutes in case Cressida was keeping a lookout, and only then risked a glance. The alley past the corner was a run-down hole, with most of the edifices there stripped for parts, but there was a small cluster of standing buildings at the end. One of them had a lantern lit inside, by the glow behind the shutter.

Tristan slid back out of sight before anyone could see him. Well now, would you look at that. It looked like the Nineteenth Brigade had decided to obtain a safehouse out in the city, and he now knew exactly where it was.

You never knew when that sort of thing might end up useful.

—

Obtaining access to the private palace archives had been as simple as asking the Lord Rector, or rather as simple as Song asking the Lord Rector.

Maryam would admit she was not the most experienced in matters of romance, but when a boy invited you to the theater before plying you with drinks and talk about books you liked one did not usually call that a ‘bodyguard assignment’. Though, maybe if the drinks and talk went very well. Much as she believed that Song could use a little unwinding, the man involved meant the whole thing smelled like trouble and thus Maryam refrained from teasing her friend over it. Once you made a joke of something, it became easier to consider.

Yet for now they reaped the benefits of the association, as not only had Maryam been allowed access to the archives but she had effectively been given the run of the place – with for only restriction the inability to take books out. Captain Wen came along, as much to supervise as because the only thing the corpulent man enjoyed as much as good meal was a rare book.

They found out, together, that the private archives of the rector’s palace were a prison.

Maryam was not being dramatic, they were quite literally a repurposed gaol. Six large pentagonal chambers connected to a larger central enclosure, each of the pentagons having once carried three cells and a guard post. The central enclosure, at the heart of which stood a squat and heavy tower containing the only way in and out of the archives – a lift leading to a room below – was surrounded by small alcoves that could be used for work.

A few of the dozen archivists were glaring at her from their cover, perhaps under the impression they were being subtle. They’d not enjoyed Maryam being granted rights over their little kingdom even before seeing the color of her skin. After? Some of them refused to so much as look in her direction, and she had heard hollow muttered more than once.

The senior archivist, a frigidly polite older woman whose tendency to turn her up her nose really should be paired with better care to pluck the hair inside her nostrils, offered the most cursory of welcomes before saddling Maryam with the youngest of the archivists as a gofer and attendant. While she was going to need the help navigating these stacks, many of which were filled with books in Cycladic, there was the slight trouble that in this case ‘youngest’ meant a nine-year-old girl in brown robes too large for her. Maryam could not recall being around a girl of nine since she herself had been one of those.

“If you’re a blackcloak,” Roxane gravely asked, “then why aren’t you wearing a black cloak?”

Maryam might have been irritated by the question, if not by the painful earnestness on her face. The messy auburn bob and slightly too long sleeves only added to the effect.

“I am secret blackcloak,” Maryam replied. “On a secret mission.”

“Then why’s your captain drinking booze in the common room?” Roxane wondered.

The Izvorica considered that a moment.

“Because he’s an asshole,” she finally said.

“Oh, so like Master Alexios,” Roxane mused.

Maryam cocked an eyebrow.

“He spilled wax on our only translation of the Medead and told Lady Eumelia it was me,” Roxane informed her with a scowl. “It wasn’t, I wasn’t even there.”

“I believe you,” Maryam assured her.

What would she have wanted as a bribe, when she was nine years old? Desserts, spending money, or maybe – ah!

“Would you like me to curse him?” she offered.

Roxane’s eyes turned large as teacups.

“You can do that?”

“I’m a Navigator,” Maryam said, which was mostly true.

Roxane pondered the offer.

“Can you make it so he farts loudly in front of Mistress Laodike?” she asked. “He’s trying to court her. She’s the short woman with the braid and the tight robes.”

Roxane raised hands to show the strategic location of said tightness, along with a possible motive for Alexios’ interest. One should never underestimate the inherent viciousness of children.

“I have no fart curses,” she replied, “but I could make hot wax spill onto his lap if you’d like.”

“Wait until Laodike’s around,” Roxane instructed.

“I will,” Maryam said, suppressing a smile, “but in exchange you have to help me find everything I need and not tell the senior archivist what books I asked for.”

The former part was what the girl had been ordered to do, so the latter was what Maryam was really after. Even the way the Lord Rector sorted his private papers had been made political, there was simply no chance at all that the senior archivist’s appointment had been spared intrigue. Since Maryam had no intention of allowing a list of the books she cracked open to be passed to the woman’s patrons the moment she left the archives, measures must be taken.

Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

Roxane hesitated, but a promise that Maryam wouldn’t let her be punished for refusing to answer questions about the books tipped the scales in favor of agreement. They shook on it. An older archivist could have been threatened into silence with the weight of the Watch, but Maryam preferred it this way. She would ask Wen on their way out to make it clear that if the girl was punished for keeping silent then the senior archivist was to receive the same punishment tenfold.

That was not within their authority to do, strictly speaking, but if the Thirteenth made a formal complaint about this Lady Eumelia obstructing the investigation the senior archivist would be in for much worse than merely being switched ten times. Maryam was not all that familiar with Asphodelian laws, but meddling in an investigation that involved the Lord Rector’s life seemed like it might fetch the noose – or at least immediate dismissal from one’s position as senior archivist.

With Roxane freshly invigorated by the promises, Maryam got to work. A letter had been sent to Stheno’s Peak to see if the Watch had any record of major construction in Asphodel using brackstone, or of an entity that might have warranted such effort to contain, but there was no telling if they would answer – much less in time to be of use.

The Lord Rector’s own ignorance of such an undertaking was not a good omen, but the archives were much older than House Palliades’ grasp on the throne. There might be answers buried here that’d been forgotten when the old royal houses passed. Usurpation was no friend to the uninterrupted passing of royal secrets.

“I need the oldest works you have on Tratheke that describes the city,” she told Roxane. “And anything you might have about gods that became forbidden.”

For the first they ended up combing through the stacks not of histories but of epic poetry – the oldest records of Tratheke were spoken epics that had been set down to ink later on. That alone would not be enough, though, so Roxane then led her to the pentagon containing legal records of Rectorate. Specifically those of land ownership in Tratheke. An archivist began hovering close when they entered that section, which was not entirely unwarranted given how precious such documents were.

Maryam still curtly dismissed him. They’d already assigned her an attendant and she had no intention of tolerating another archivist looking over her shoulder as she worked. She only had so many bribes in her.

They set those first volumes aside in the nook she’d claimed for her use, finding as they did that Captain Wen had emerged from the tower. He was now leafing through a worn volume titled ‘The Esteemed Noble Lines of Great Cathay’, chuckling as he did. He was not so busy that he did not share a look with Maryam, however, dipping his head slightly. Good, he would be keeping an eye for anyone intending to snoop at her picked volumes.

Roxane was visibly excited when they went to fetch the second set of books, revealing she was not usually allowed into the ‘Closed Sixth’. That pentagon chamber was closed by a lock and iron grid, which they had to send for an archivist to unlock for them. The fair-haired man who did offered a friendly smile and passed no comment, but Roxane held up her nose at him.

“Alexios?” Maryam asked in a murmur after they went in.

The girl scowled and nodded. Well, Maryam had a face to the name now. She just needed to wait for an opportunity. The stacks inside the Closed Sixth were all covered with glass and small numbered locks, for which Alexios left them a set of keys. Brass plates with Cycladic words on them named the contents of particular shelves, but that language was beyond her knowledge.

“Can you translate any of it for me?” Maryam asked.

Roxane looked surprised.

“Of course,” she said. “I learned along my other letters.”

That begged elaboration, so she asked. The girl, it turned out, was the orphan of palace servants. As she had no relatives, she had been placed here to become an archivist as a kindness from the majordomo running the palace. Roxane was taught Cycladic by other archivists as well as her numbers and letters because so many of the older documents here used the dead tongue. Pleased at the turn, Maryam consulted the girl for guidance and found what she suspected to be the right shelf.

Prohibited could only have so many meanings in this context.

The entire left side of the shelf was piled scrolls with wax symbols stamped on the wooden rod the vellums were wrapped around, but the right half was books. Mostly leatherbound manuscripts, but one was instead bound by a gold frame and another contained by what looked like an iron puzzle box.

“The golden one is titled the ‘Graveyard Book’,” Roxane murmured.

She looked uneasy, as if the stillness of the room was overcoming her enthusiasm.

“Then we take that one,” Maryam said.

She was careful to feel the book out with her nav before touching it, finding it harmless. But with her soul-effigy out, she noticed a detail she had previously missed – one of the leather-bound volumes was rippling in the aether. And in a way she had seen before: she had walked through enough fields of Asphodel crowns, those purple flowers in the rector’s garden, to recognize the slight ripple they caused in the aether.

Sliding the small book out from between two larger volumes, she found simple brown leather without a title. A symbol had been pressed into its front, though: the stylized silhouette of a blooming Asphodel crown.

“I don’t know what that one is,” Roxane said, the small voice breaking her out of a trance.

“That’s all right,” Maryam muttered, stashing it with the other book. “I think I might.”

They locked the shelf behind them and returned to the nook they’d picked out to work, finding an irritated Lady Eumelia staring down at an unimpressed Wen Duan.

“It is simple precaution to-”

“You seem like a well-read woman, Eumelia,” Captain Wen mused, turning a page. “In your opinion, should you insist on spying on a Watch investigation are you more likely to be tried under the Iscariot Accords or Asphodel’s own treason laws?”

“I could have you expelled from these grounds for threatening me,” the senior archivist threatened.

“Is it a threat to tell a child they’ll be burned if they shove their hand in a fire?” he asked, bespectacled eyes flicking up to look at her. “I should hope not.”

Lady Eumelia sneered at him, then at Maryam and for good measure she glared at Roxane for being in the general vicinity of her humiliation. Her face was ice-cold as she stalked off, but the fury was obvious in the steps. The Izvorica frowned. Perhaps a sterner warning than ‘returned tenfold’ was in order, because she did not like that look on her face. She led the nervous girl into their nook, giving Wen a thankful nod.

He ignored her, flipping his page.

Much as Maryam would have liked to dig into the books, those she most wanted to read – the golden book and the epic – were written in Cycladic. She set Roxane to translating the appropriate passages of the epic inside a journal she’d brought for the purpose, instead busying herself with the documents in Antigua. Beginning with the legal records, which she figured might help her narrow down when the brackstone structures had been built.

The land records went as far back as the beginning of the Century of Steel, over three hundred years ago and three Asphodelian dynasties back. A pirate admiral turned lord and war hero by the name of Archelaus had seized power in the last decade of the Century of Crowns and proved an energetic Lord Rector, his efforts to improve tax revenue leading what was to become the Archelean dynasty keeping thorough records of noble properties in Tratheke.

Clever. Those would have been easier to tax than the noble holdings out in the mountains, where a former pirate’s tax collectors would likely have been greeted by arrows. Mind you, records was somewhat underserved a word: they were just family names and vaguely described boundaries.

Already the noble properties had been concentrated in the two southern wards of the city, though apparently the nobility had owned a lot more of the land inside Tratheke back in those days. The northeast ward, where Tristan and Angharad had found the brackstone wall, had been a royal holding back in those early days.

Property ledgers remained orderly for several Lord Rectors, the succession laid out by the ruler names changing on the documents, then turned chaotic during the two Pelagid reigns when the Archeleans were overthrown. They stabilized when the Archeleans resumed rule after winning back their throne only to become… spotty when the house began producing increasingly indolent and corrupt rulers. Short-lived, too.

Maryam was no treasurer, but Lady Rector Artemisia Archelean had sold the same piece of land in southwestern Tratheke to three different lords the same year and that seemed just a mite suspicious. Either it was cover for bribes or it was a scam of some sort, she figured. Either way, those records could not really be relied on. Which was frustrating, because late in the Archelean dynasty was when the house began pawning off pieces of Tratheke for coin, crucially including some of the northeastern ward.

It got even messier after that, nearly sixty years partial or outright missing. Not surprising, as the end of the Archeleans during the Century of Accord resulted in the ‘Ataxia’, that great Asphodelian civil war. From that chaos House Lissenos eventually emerged as rulers, and when they did, Maryam finally saw useful work again.

Twice now she’d had to double back to the chamber to get fresh books, replacing the old ones, but as her pen scratched down fresh notes she figured she was getting somewhere. The first Lissenos to become Lord Rector had ridden noble support to the throne, but his successor had then promptly turned on those supporters. That betrayal included confiscating some of their property in Tratheke, the gains from which were written down in copious detail.

From the confiscations Maryam learned that apparently House Drakos had once owned about a quarter of the capital, mostly in the northwest, and been stripped of most everything. The northeast, though, had been sold for parts to half a dozen houses. And though Lord Rector Hector Lissenos promptly redistributed some of this confiscated property to allies in an obvious move to buy their support – including, amusingly enough, the original grant of Black House to the Watch – he held on to confiscated the properties in the northeast.

Interesting, as they should have been worthless back then. After the Ataxia the population of Tratheke had almost halved according to the records so even the precious southern wards would have been partly empty. The north would have been a ghost town, decaying space no one cared to inhabit.

A good place to secretly build a prison for a god.

Hector Lissenos, Maryam jotted down. A simple genealogy book revealed his reign to have lasted from 9 to 26 Dominion, which narrowed down the period of time to look into. By the time she returned all the ledgers to the appropriate stacks, Roxane had finished translating for her. Maryam looked down at the girl’s elegant cursive, filling seventeen pages with nary an error in ink, and rubbed the bridge of her nose. This was going to take a while.

“All poets should be hanged,” she muttered.

She reassured Roxane the displeasure was no reflection on her. The epic was, well, a poem. Which meant that while several parts did describe Tratheke as it was made by the Antediluvians and then found by Oduromai King, the description were so dramatic as to be nearly useless. At least the Oduromai parts mentioned the general layout of the city, as a prelude to his distributing parts of it to his loyal crew as reward.

Yet all that told her was that the general shape of the city, four wards and the Collegium, had been this way as far back as was known. The problem was that the information she was most curious about was in the most poetic part: namely, what the Antediluvians had built their city on.

The epic contended the Ancients had carved deep into the ground and set down a city fully made, which sounded unlikely if not outright impossible – one must be careful using that word, when it came to the First Empire. The implication there was that below the city was rock, but was there only that? The entity that needed containment in brackstone, had it been put there by the Antediluvians in the first place? That horrifying god on the Dominion had.

Was it even a god down there, a monster or something else entirely?