Chapter 49

Something had changed, down in that layer.

Tristan had been told otherwise. When the Krypteia was done squeezing him, they’d passed him around like a wine flask and everyone who got their hands on him agreed he was fine. The physicians had said his body was only exhausted, the Navigators had said his soul was untouched and no parasite had latched on to him. Even Song’s silver eyes had pronounced him unaffected. He’d spent two days in bed, dreaming strange dreams when he was not ravenously tearing through meals, but that was only his body catching up to his stay in the layer.

But Tristan, he could tell: there was something out there with him now. It hid just beyond the edge of his gaze, crept in through the silences and the waning lights. It was eager but patient and so very, very hungry. He’d not felt it fully when in the cottage, while Sakkas and his crows kept watch over his sleep – over those vivid dreams of being bit by a dog, of the seeping blood turning into the hem of a deathly still Fortuna’s gown – but from the moment he had stepped onto the grounds of Scholomance it had been an incessant buzzing.

He’d not even needed to pass those great gates: merely walking onto the worn stone of the plaza had been enough.

No one else was hearing it. Was he going mad? No, he reassured himself. Perhaps it was just some aftershock of his time in the layer, like an irritation of the skin that left you more sensitive to the touch of wind until it passed. He tried to run his fingers down the seam of the odds, as he’d learned to before Fortuna was taken, but while he could feel… something, it was not chances. The odds had felt like strings, thick or thin, but now his fingers were running down a shifting pattern. Like one of those ball-in-a-maze puzzles, if the paths had kept changing.

He should have reached out only the once, but there was something oddly soothing about the touch – it helped dim the buzzing. It was only after he caught himself doing it the third time that he bit at his lip just short of it bleeding, forcing himself to stay in the now. There were things to see, to put together as they went through the halls of Scholomance. The aftermath of the last sennight was still falling down like plumes of ash.

Whispers in the ranks, students gazing at Song with admiration tainted by what-a-shame shakes of the head. A fine captain, Tristan put together, stitching together half a dozen whispers. But her days are numbered. Cao will drive her out. The thought itched at his hands, at his fingernails. The changing situation – Asher’s hand at work – had turned Chunhua Cao’s exploration scheme into the lynchpin of the year, and if the colonel brought that accolade home everyone knew she’d be purging the Stripes of the unruly. Making some examples to cement her reign.

It would have to be handled. First the work out on the ship, then a renewed search for the rest.

Izel, on the other hand, drew the good kind of talk. Mostly about his work and the mysterious end of the Nineteenth Brigade. That’s the tinker that made the blastcap, the refrain came with pointed fingers. It melted that monster like snow. Izel liked the attention, Tristan could tell, but it was a like touched by relief. And that tinker girl from the Twelfth was looking at him like the first thing he did every morning after getting up was slap her in the face. There was anger there, building up like silt at the bottom of a well. A parting of ways that’d soured her, or something more dangerous? Tristan struggled to tell, and misliked it.

Angharad? Thug, some accused. Ill-bred. The words came from noble mouths, Malani-dark faces with wide noses and rounded chins. It wasn’t the violence that’d shocked them but how it had been dealt against the implied law of custom – she should have done it out in the street, claimed another reason for it. But there were cracks, Tristan saw. That disapproval did not ripple out like they thought it should. Beyond the dinner party, the tide rode out as snickers and rolled eyes. What did Morcant expect, after that ambush?

Even at the edges of the nobles’ own party, the stone grew brittle. Awonke Bokang, indifferent. The Emain twins were openly mocking. The bottom rungs of the ladder were looking shaky, a little tired of all that getting stepped on. They were all a long way from Malan, and while the aristocrats might have brought it here with them that way of thinking was just like any other merchandise: it ran out, if you didn’t keep bringing more in.

The Ninth Brigade? Silent, despite the eye on them. Sebastian Camaron was assessing, mobilizing his forces but sitting on them like a king that had not yet decided if it would be worth crossing the river. The next few days would decide where he fell. The student association, already split between those who had been hired hands and those who had not, now walked around looking over their shoulders. If the paymaster could be gotten to, how could the thugs be spared? The boy with the broken nose no longer felt quite so untouchable, and now bought’s regret was kicking in.

Nkosinathi Morcant would be the key, Tristan thought. If he went, so many of the troubles besieging the Thirteenth fell with him – the Ninth would back off, the nobles bite their tongue, the student association disband with a whimper. It would have to be soon. He was running out of time. They would give Song’s way a try, but if it didn’t work…

“Thinking deep thoughts?”

Hooks leaned in close, hands behind her back in a feint of maidenly demureness that surely not even a fool would buy. She wore Watch black, as was her habit out in school, but adorned with lace and jewelry. Tristan liked the former better; he could look at it without thinking of how easily it’d be stolen.

“Considering our obstacles,” he told her.

She snorted.

“I wish Morcant was given a day of grace instead of a week, but regardless he’s on borrowed time,” Hooks said. “He’s pretty much finished.”

He would be, Tristan agreed, if he took a beating at Angharad’s hand a second time. His brigade would desert him. Though if Song gets her way, that collapse will come even earlier. His own plans for the student association had been shelved, given that Song’s schemes were arguably harsher than what he’d planned while still entirely within the unspoken rules of Tolomontera.

“Giving a week is better,” Tristan disagreed. “It lets him muster his defenses and call in favors. If he still loses after that, there will be no doubt in his mind that we can get to him at will.”

And it’d be easier to find out if there were loose ends to clean up after he went away. The stakes were high enough that anyone who genuinely backed Morcant would have to step in.

“He’ll be like a cornered rat, though,” Hooks pointed out. “He could try something foolish out of panic.”

He conceded as much with a nod.

“That is more feature than flaw,” Tristan said. “If he crosses lines on his own…”

“He could get himself expelled without our lifting a finger,” Hooks finished with a frown. “Risky, though. It could blow up in our faces instead of his.”

“It isn’t as if we are under some sort of truce with the man,” Tristan noted. “Nothing prevents us from moving to check him before the week has passed.”

Hooks hummed, skipping along.

“You think if I ask nicely, Song will let me break his nose a second time?”

“I can promise to advocate strongly for it, princess,” he solemnly promised, lips twitching.

“Your loyalty will not go unrewarded,” Hooks said, sounding pleased. “I’ve figured out how to get into the egg cupboard to move them around.”

Which would drive Song absolutely mad, Tristan happily thought. She kept them in a round ceramic pot with holes at the bottom to keep the eggs in place, taking them out only in an order that kept the pattern symmetrical. They discreetly shook on it. The amusement carried him the rest of the way to class, though after he slid into a seat it soon faded.

Theology began at a brisk pace after the professor entered, but his mind was not on it. It was, mind you, no reflection of Professor Artigas’ skills as a lecturer that Tristan barely listened to her lecture. Theology remained one of the more interesting classes and today’s subject matter – the relationship between Gloam and gods – was even something he’d been wondering about for some time. He simply couldn’t seem to focus.

“-gods that existed during the period known as the Old Night,” Professor Artigas was saying. “It is theorized that the general collapse of lucent civilizations caused gods to turn to the rising tide of dun souls, which cannot create gods but can contract with them through the medium of Gloam. Rituals can even allow hollows to achieve the equivalent of aether mirroring, thus allowing them to become a manner of priests and-”

It was like the moment he wasn’t actively forcing himself to parse every word, his mind collapsed into a sort of stupor filled only by that hateful buzzing sound. Gods, he had slept through most of two days so how could he possibly still be this tired? Only it wasn’t exhaustion, he was almost sure of it. He’d had sleepless nights before, felt that certain faintness and lightness behind too-warm eyes, and today’s blankness was not the same. It felt more like a… trance, one he had to keep dragging himself out of.

“- will sustain the entity, but cannot grow it,” Professor Artigas continued. “This is why gods served by hollow cults will often incite them to violence against lucents. The resulting emanations are a form of prayer that they can feed on to expand, as all aether intellects fundamentally-”

There was a smudge of ink on the side of his palm. He blinked, looking down at the mostly empty page in the bundle resting before him. The few squares he’d unthinkingly scrawled on the paper were senseless. Or – no, were these notations? Coracha neumes laid out on four invisible lines, without any meter indication accompanying the musical notes. A tune?

“A fine observation,” Professor Artigas praised, answering some question. “Gloam-wielders cannot safely contract with gods because they remain lucent. Since a contract is essentially a divine organ appended to a lucent soul and the soul of a signifier is a conduit for the manipulation of Gloam, to contract with one would risk the injection of Gloam specks into the intellect of the god. The results of that are unsurprisingly disastr-”

Tristan looked down at the notations, fingers tapping the page as he tried out the notes in his mind. It’d never come easy to him, not like it had to Father, but he still remembered how. It had been… a long time, since he’d read Coracha neumes, and somehow still not long enough. It felt scratching at an open wound, nails ripping up flesh in search of scratch. Despite the lack of meter the rhythm came easy to him, as if he had heard the song before, but Tristan was sure he had not.

“-popular theory in olden times, but gods do not react to Glare as lemures and lares do. Glare is not any more inherently harmful to them as any other form of energy, save that its presence subjects entities to the property of being ‘fixed’. In other words, they are forced to be continuous and cannot simply undo the wounds done unto them. That said, even when not actively being wounded by Glare most gods find its constraint highly unpleasant and those that deal heavily in Gloam or have entered rampancy may be damaged by mere expos-”

Under the table, his foot was tapping. If he closed his eyes Tristan knew he would be able to see it – the strokes of the bow on the string, the fingers pressing and plucking. His hand moved again, put the music to ink across the four lines only his eye could see. Low, low, low but rising. Rising with every stroke, like a ripping scream, like a tightened rope. What was he listening to? He could make it out faintly, through the fading buzz.

“Tristan?”

He turned and found Izel looking at him from his left. Brown eyes flicked to his ink-strewn page, but they skidded past it as if following something crawling off the paper. Izel’s face tightened. And Tristan cocked his head to the side, because it was almost – oh, it was gone. That last note, the scream, the laugh, it shivered down his spine.

The violin had stopped.

“Something’s here,” he said.

Angharad drew in the following heartbeat, just before the door to the back of the class was kicked open.

Tristan rose and turned, half-there, as chaos erupted across the hall. The revenant – a boy in a black cloak, dark-skinned and with his face blank of all features – aimed a matchlock pistol at the closest student, but before he could pull the trigger a burst of Gloam like a river swallowed him whole, filling the entire doorway for three heartbeats as Professor Artigas clicked her tongue.

“Flip the tables, take cover,” the professor ordered. “Our pests grow bold.”

He never truly felt in danger, not with so many blackcloaks here and ready for the fight.

The raid was repulsed in quick order: there were only a dozen revenants, the mangled corpses of blackcloaks that once died within these walls armed with vestiges of another time. They charged in to be reaped by the firing lanes the brigades had swiftly organized. Without Cai Wei leading them, the revenants were not a threat to a prepared position unless they significantly outnumbered the blackcloaks.

Tristan never fired a shot, or even paid the fighting much attention.

He crouched the entire time, thinking. Eyes closed as he listened, sunk into the trance on purpose. And when the last revenant died anew, collapsed in flakes of corpse ash and paste, he heard it again.

A breath of sound, the song of the string.

“Ah,” he breathed out.

He laid his palm against the floor.

“It’s you, isn’t it?” he asked Scolomancia in a murmur. “You’re talking to me. That’s what it was from the start.”

Plucked strings, every sound like a cat’s arched tread.

“Good,” Tristan said, eyes opening. “We’re going to play a game, you and I.”

Bow on string, lilting up. A question. He smiled.

“Why, the wicked kind,” Tristan told her. “What else is worth our time, tia?”

The bow slashed at the strings like a butcher’s knife chopping down, like great teeth clacking together, like the monstrous laughter of the god in the walls. The sound, it ought to have scared him.

It didn’t.

—

It was not an auspicious beginning to sixthday.

Song was no priest, to read the will of gods and speak their will to the flock, but she had eyes and those eyes saw it plain: Scholomance was pleased with their return. The god in the walls was all but skipping along with the Thirteenth as they walked the halls, moving with weapons drawn. It swirled around Angharad’s boots, matching her stride like a trotting hound, and playfully hid behind Maryam’s head to ‘peek’ out either side. It nipped at Izel’s roundhead mace, at the hand near it, and wriggled in arrow-like strands ahead of Song like it was inviting her to hurry up.

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Worst of all, it was sticking to Tristan like a crooning lover – tendrils all but embracing him, curls of smoke writhing across him like it was licking up his presence in the aether.

She sought to keep her unease off her face, to offer up only calm to her brigade, but by the way Angharad fell in beside her and matched their paces it seemed she had failed. She slowed a tad, letting Tristan and Maryam peel ahead so she might have some semblance of privacy.

“Your mood looks even grimmer now,” Angharad said. “Is it Scolomancia?”

Song’s lips thinned.

“It acts glad of our return,” she said. “That does not strike me as a good omen.”

“Perhaps she hopes we will harm our common enemy,” Angharad suggested. “This so-called Machinist.”

Silver eyes flicked ahead, to Tristan’s deliberately unhurried steps. The kind you put on when you knew that if the leash slipped you would run. He had the look of a man with his hand on the chisel.

Tristan had been forthright with her that he was under orders to keep silent about much of what he had learned inside the layer, but Song did not think it coincidence that within days of her friend’s return word had come through every brigade patron that the source of all the year’s troubles was a god of the Old Night called the Machinist, who had crafted the false dantesvara and was now the source of the revenants plaguing the school.

An official Krypteia report had been distributed suggesting that the Machinist was using the peculiarities of Scholomance to hide within an aether fold – either a layer or a lesser fold like the trial rooms – and that the most secure path to that hiding place passed through the Glass Repository. That’d been as much a blow as a boon to Colonel Cao’s position, sending much-needed wind into the sail of her ailing enterprise but simultaneously flipping an hourglass on it.

While there’d been a rush of support and esteem for the delve, if it did not soon begin showing results the entire effort might well be wrested from Chunhua Cao’s hands. The situation was growing dire enough a general muster of the soldiers and students of Tolomontera was very much on the table. Asher’s work, Tristan had whispered in her ear. I would bet anything on it. He never does anything without three reasons.

And Cao was feeling the pressure, as made plain by the obligatory all-hands meeting of delving crews she had called this morning.

“Maybe,” Song said. “But that won’t be enough for it to willingly let us anywhere near the Repository. The Trench would be wide open otherwise.”

Which it was very much not. The sole difference was that now the Machinist’s minions were sometimes funneled into the maze.

“Her aid in coming to grips with the revenants is all I would ask,” Angharad serenely said.

“Do not be so eager to take the front rank there,” Song warned. “It will not be like the hunt, long preparations leading to a short burst of violence. The delve is a match of endurance as much as skill.”

She snuck a sideways look.

“Besides, you’ve already come to grips with an enemy this week,” Song mildly added. “Leave some for the others.”

Angharad laughed, the sound soft and entirely unashamed. Not that Song intended to shame her for breaking a slaver’s nose, but however upright the beating delivered it had not come without costs. An otherwise pleasant visit by Thando Fenya had seen him inform Angharad that given the incident some within their company were ‘no longer comfortable’ with her attendance, a polite notice of exile she had taken with a degree of indifference that was startling to Song.

There would be no more drawing on those connections going forward. Ties might be maintained with some members on a personal basis, but the fellowship the Thirteenth had drawn on through Angharad had now decisively cast her out.

Still, while that bridge was burned Angharad had still achieved what she set out to: she was disinvited, but so was Nathi Morcant. In the wake of his humiliating hour and a half nailed to the door of the Dregs before his cabalists came to pick him up, a public repudiation from his fellow Malani nobleborn had been the end of his reputation. Especially combined with the oath hanging over his head, the week of grace before brutality resumed.

Anyone offering him a hand now risked being drawn into the line of fire, and gold could do many things but it could not buy back the things Lady Knit took as payment.

“I make no promises when it comes to Cai Wei,” Angharad said, “but I shall endeavor moderation for the rest.”

“It’s a start,” Song drily replied, eyes on the curls of divinity

Scholomance only pulled away when they came in sight of the Trench camp, withdrawing into the floor, but even then it remained close. As if waiting for something. Song, unfortunately, had no time to spare for this.

She had timed their arrival so she would arrive minutes before the meeting called by Cao, but they were cutting it close. Even from here she could see that the camp was filled fit to burst with hardly a soul outside. The camp itself had little changed since she last saw it: someone had gotten around to putting in proper gates and the walls had been raised higher, but otherwise it remained the same organized bare bones. More a waystation than a post that could be properly garrisoned, unlike the Lamb Hill camp. Colonel Cao had no expectations that anyone would want to spend the night inside Scholomance.

It would make the packs the Thirteenth had shown up with all the more noticeable.

Song put a spring to her step to leave her cabalists behind, as she saw waiting ahead a necessary conversation. Leaning back against the open gates was her man on the inside, wretched as he was.

“A good morning to you, Song,” Tupoc Xical waved, pushing off afterwards. “I see Abrascal is still around, but know I am here for you if you need help looking for an even deeper pit to throw him in.”

“Tupoc,” she greeted him back, ignoring the rest. “Is everyone inside?”

“Lined up like little ducks in a row,” he agreed. “Did you get your permission?”

Wordlessly, she pulled out the papers from inside of her cloak and flashed him the seal and letter without letting him read more than a few sentences. He grinned, all perfect pearly white teeth.

“Well, that ought to make a stir,” he said. “Did I misread, or did see you were not contracted but mandated?”

It was thoroughly irritating that one of the worst men she knew would be so reliably sharp on the draw.

“We asked for no remuneration, so operating under a Garrison mandate seemed most fitting,” Song blandly replied.

He looked at her for a moment, then burst out laughing.