Chapter 50

When Scholomance offered them an already-cleared room as their first step into the Trench, Maryam’s hackles immediately went up.

The god wasn’t one to do delvers a favor without some awful reason for it waiting around the corner. When the room’s sprawl of windmill blades did not suddenly start spinning again while the vanguard was halfway through, her guard went even further up. No trap, no kobaloi ambush? Scholomance must be guiding them towards something truly nasty.

But when they reached the next chamber, instead of a machine running on endless children’s screams that personally went around cutting a limb off each of them, it was also cleared. Not even the amusement of learning from the red paint on the wall that it’d been the work of the Forty-Ninth some weeks past was able to distract Maryam from warily eyeing the collapsed pit traps dotting the floor.

She spit to the side at the sight, and might have thrown something over her shoulder as well were there anything suitable around. There was not, so the old trick would have to do instead.

“I am a child of Dolotac,” she lied out loud in Recnigvor.

An old superstition, but it was like scratching an itch to indulge it. That indulgence soon proved half a mistake, though, because it had someone immediately honing on her like an arrow cursed to strike true.

“What did that mean?” Angharad asked, leaning in. “It sounded like Recnigvor.”

Maryam wasn’t sure what she thought of this new… trend. In a way it was pleasant to be asked about her home, to uproot at least some of the lies Malan had planted in her friend, but sometimes it could be tiring. Angharad approached asking her questions with almost meticulous respect but answering them was still work. And work dredging up memories that still ached – how could she talk of orchards without thinking of the valley of Volcesta, of the hills and woods she had played in as a child?

Of how it was now called Ifanje, under the rule of a Malani official.

Still, Maryam made a point of answering when she felt up to it. It was- it was good, that Angharad asked. Maryam had not given much thought to it, but if she kept silent the only tale about the lowlands being told was House Morcant’s. Or, more accurately, she’d not cared much about that fact because she had never truly believed Malani might be willing to hear her out without assuming her a liar. Some, evidently, were. That deserved a measure of her patience.

“I invoked the god that is the father of the fates,” Maryam replied after a moment. “It is said he sires a child on the waters of the Nav every time someone falls pregnant. Should that child be born the sired this spirit, called a dola, will lay out the fate of their life and accompany them throughout.”

Angharad looked startled.

“The Izvoric believe fate to be predetermined?” she asked.

Right, that would stick in the craw of Malani monotheists. Both flavors of their odd religion thought the world to be some test by the Sleeping God, she recalled, mostly differing on details. Maryam hedged, wiggling her palm.

“One can fight against their fate,” she said. “It is not an ironclad thing, more like a current pulling you in. Sometimes going against your fate means great glory and riches, sometimes it means a terrible doom. But that is for hero’s stories. Most people just go off their path for a step or two to snatch some good fortune when their dola’s not looking.”

“And you were praying to this father-entity?” Angharad politely asked, cocked to the side.

Count on the Pereduri to notice how Maryam had not used the god’s name since the first time, not even in her own mind.

“No,” Maryam snorted, the lowered her voice. “I was fooling my own dola, by telling her I am also a child of the same father so my road need not be paved.”

She again avoided saying the god’s name, as by custom that would draw her fate’s attention back to her instantly.

“And this… works?” her friend delicately asked.

“That depends on who you ask,” Maryam said. “My father swore by it, but my mother was rather more skeptical. I suppose it’s not all that different from blessing someone who sneezes.”

And easier than throwing salt or sand over your shoulder to blind the dola and grab more good fortune than was your allotted share while she struggled to get it out. Angharad slowly nodded.

“And in this case,” the Pereduri tried, “the ‘sneeze’ being blessed would be our apparently unusual streak of cleared rooms. You are… fending off bad luck in advance, so to speak?”

“That’s actually fairly accurate,” Maryam mused.

It was a little endearing how Angharad lit up, like she’d been handed a second helping of honeycake or a respectable reason to stab someone. Mostly Maryam believed that Scholomance must be about to fuck them, so she’d been trying to ward off the worst of what fate must have planned for her by sending the dola away. Not that it would actually work.

Maryam had seen Mother Winter herself die at Malani hands. What could a mere spirit of fate do all the way across the ink-black sea, when one of the greatest gods of the Triglau had been put down like an unruly dog in her own temple?

No, she did not keep to the custom because she thought her fate was standing behind her. It was to keep a little bit of light shining, to pour a thimble of oil into the guttering lantern that was the ways she’d been taught as a child. Maybe it was childish of her, to go through the movements without truly believing, but the truth was that Maryam would rather there be a fate than not. If there was a prayer here, it was that there might still be a dola around to trick and fight.

That she’d brought another piece of home with her, instead of leaving it behind to burn with the rest.

“Advance!”

While they’d been distracted – her, at least, since Angharad did not seem surprised in the slightest by Song’s call – they had crossed the rest of the pit trap room just in time for the vanguard to be sent forward again. There was a long, shallow hallway between the rooms she had yet to cross but this time Maryam could already see the room ahead was not going to be a third handout in a row. It looked like a crisscross of narrow, sloped halls that intersected under a ceiling, one of the few in the Trench. The ceiling was a long and thick rectangle of solid rock covering the entire room like a coffin lid, at least thirty feet high. It was also full of angled holes, though there were some in the ground as well, strewn about haphazardly.

Angharad patted her arm before heading to the front, readying to join the second wave, and Maryam waved her off. She headed near the end of the hallway, joining a frowning Alejandra Torrero who stood there looking at the vanguard carefully stepping into the next room. Her arms were crossed under a slightly deeper than usual scowl, which was a bad sign considering Alejandra had been the designated spotter for this room.

Maryam flicked a look behind her, duly finding the last two signifiers of this war party – Shumise was walking up, riding herd on a sullen Bingwen. They were the assigned support for the vanguard in the rotation Song had arranged, though not to intervene unless needed. The signifiers were all being rotated so none would burn out too early in the delve.

“What has you so grim?” Maryam asked, joining her colleague.

Alejandra pointed up at the ceiling of the room ahead. The vanguard, five student association fucks under their ‘leader’ Captain Susana adding up to a rounded crew of six, were keeping an eye on it even as they walked up the central corridor of the room.

“See those holes?”

“Hard not to,” Maryam replied.

“Those are tunnels,” Alejandra said. “I couldn’t reach the end of them.”

Maryam’s brow rose. While she did not know the precise limits of the other woman’s nav, she ought to be able to stretch it at least a hundred feet from her body. Either those tunnels were much longer than the size of the ceiling should allow for or something was getting in the way.

“Scholomance interfered?” she guessed.

“She’s worrying those tunnels like a bone,” Alejandra grunted out. “The old girl’s out for a helping of student chow, this time.”

Student chow, gods. And to think some called her a rough with her tongue. Mind you, the addition of Izel to their ranks had solidly improved the average niceness of the Unluckies while continued acquaintance of Tupoc Xical was probably the moral equivalent of getting the clap.

“Something’s going to drop from the ceiling,” Maryam predicted. “Kobaloi? That seems a little too obvio-”

She was interrupted by a sudden whoosh followed by a sharp clang, metal on stone.

The door at the end of the hallway, the one separating them from the hole room, had just been shut off by an iron portcullis slamming down. That immediately caused a ruckus with the second wave, which was meant to serve as reinforcements should the vanguard be overwhelmed. Tupoc, who served as the wave’s captain, immediately called for the two supporting signifiers to get the portcullis out of the way. Shumise and Bingwen immediately got to it, the latter putting his back into it for once – he looked genuinely worried. It spoke well of him, considering that on this particular vanguard rotation none of his brigade were out there.

Now that Scholomance had taken the gloves off, things went to shit almost immediately inside the room. There was a sound like rolling thunder and one of the ceiling holes spat out a massive rounded boulder, in an instant making it clear why the corridors had inclines and there were holes everywhere. Maryam let out a low whistle as Bingwen and Shumise rusted a swath of the portcullis, her eye on the two additional boulders that fell while the vanguard fled back down the central corridor and scattered every which way.

The thunderous noise did not stop even as one of the boulders fell into a hole, disappearing only to be spat out of a ceiling tunnel moments later. If anything, it looked to be going even faster now. The vanguard didn’t even try to clear the room: they all retreated into the hallway the moment the portcullis was kicked down, unharmed but visibly shaken. If there’d not been signifiers at hand, they would all be dead right now: one of the boulders rolled all the way to the door before bouncing off the frame and disappearing into a hole.

Orders were shouted out, Song taking the situation in hand, and Maryam was called upon to lend a hand to the clearing. She moved to the front with Alejandra, weaving strands of Gloam to slow a boulder in the central corridor long enough for her fellow signifier to slap it with ten Burdens in a row, quick-tracing in a way she could only envy. Once the moving stone had stopped to a crawl, four delvers accompanied Angharad into rushing forward with wooden poles and blocks to stick it in place. The boulder was only a threat if it was moving, after all.

It wasn’t going to be this easy: Scholomance answered the effort by spitting the other two boulders down the central lane, straight at the one immobilized.

A cleverly thrown grenade by Salvador sent one spinning down a right-leading corridor while the second was hastily slowed down by Maryam and Alejandra before it hit the stuck stone – two of the poles shattered, but as the front boulder wobbled near the top of the blocks Angharad and the Skiritai from the Forty-Ninth threw themselves against it and knocked it back just enough it held.

The latter, a lean Someshwari with colored streaks in his hair who went by Dasa Gaurav, shot Angharad a disbelieving look afterwards. She’d thrown herself at the boulder without hesitation while half the crew had been inching back.

They got through without casualties, in the end, and all the signifiers felt Scholomance take offense to that. There was shuffling ahead of them for a full ten minutes, the god discarding rooms like a toddler tossing unsuitable toys out of her pen until she had the ‘right’ one, and to absolutely no one’s surprise the next chamber turned out to be a vicious piece of work.

Maryam held back for this one, as Shumise was now the spotter while Alejandra sat on Bingwen. Metaphorically speaking, anyway. Maryam had secured that arrangement from Song the same evening her captain laid out the plan for this expedition, pointing out that press-ganging a Navigator and sending them into a gauntlet of death traps at gunpoint was a good way to get blacklisted by the Akelarre. Not that Bingwen had been particularly grateful.

Mind you, since his stint as a ‘volunteer’ had begun by Maryam sucker-punching his nav she figured that was fair enough.

She hung back, catching her breath and calming her mind. They had four signifiers, which had allowed for there to be no casualties so far, but even though the rotation was keeping continuous signifying from happening she was already beginning to feel the effects and they were barely at the fourth room. From the corner of her eye she caught sight of Hooks talking with Tristan further down the hall, feeling a pang of envy she carefully kept off the veil, and closed her eyes.

When an approaching visitor forced her to open them mere moments later, it did not put her in a great mood. Neither did the identity of those visiting: Imani Langa, all smiles and pleasantries, and a pest. Xiadani Jobe was a Savant physician with a classic Izcalli name and equally classic Malani surname, a common practice among the large community of Malani settled in the Kingdom of Tariac. She had the mixed looks, too. Skin darker than the usual Trebian hue but paler than most islanders, with kinky hair and large brown-green doe eyes.

Xiadani Jobe was also a member of the Forty-Ninth, so Maryam spared her only enough attention to express disdain at the general concept of her existence before turning to Imani with a disgruntled look.

“What do you want?” she asked.

“Only to serve as an intermediary,” Imani smoothly replied. “Xiadani has questions, and your captain is quite busy while Angharad is on… freshly poor terms with the Forty-Ninth.”

Funny how she wasn’t mentioning how Angharad had acquired the opportunity to refresh those terms with Morcant’s nose by bribing Thando Fenya with the ten hours of logos fencing tutelage Maryam now owed the Eleventh’s signifier. Maryam barely knew Shumise, who did not particularly stand out among Akelarre second years, but even if the other Navigator had been the most insufferable woman alive Maryam would have promised twice as many hours to buy Nathi Morcant a beating.

“So you’re reaching out to one of the people this idiot’s brigade arranged an ambush for?” Maryam disbelievingly asked. “A mere month after Morcant tried to re-enslave my freshly freed countrymen and rob me of a skimmer? Black fucking Goat, you could have tried for Tristan at least.”

“Bingwen believes you a reasonable woman,” Xiadani told her directly. “I thought this conversation less likely to end up with snail poison being poured into my mouth.”

“That’s only true because I don’t know where to get any,” Maryam scornfully replied, then began ignoring her again. “Imani, I’m not sure where you got the impression you’d earned enough goodwill from me to do you the favor of playing along for the sake of a slaver’s minions, but I’d check my ledgers again if I were you.”

If the captain was budgeting accurately, besides Maryam Khaimov’s name the word NO should be written in bright red ink.

“I can ask the questions for her, if you’d like,” Imani said. “But it seems unnecessarily childish of us to go through the pretense.”

Maryam stared her down, for a moment, and considered being pleasant.

“Exercise is good for the soul, Imani,” she said instead. “Now, what does the cannon fodder want exactly?”

“Assurances,” Xiadani bit out. “Captain Ren has proved she will not simply throw us at rooms until either corpses or clears ensue, but how long are we to serve as your vanguard? We have eyes, Khaimov, we can see you have supply packs. We do not, and if we are to be starved and spent I would rather take my chances with a blade in hand than go meekly to that end.”

Maryam made a point of not acknowledging the words until an exasperated Imani paraphrased them. Unfortunately this was actually a bone she could throw them, and should: uncertainty wouldn’t serve the Thirteenth’s purpose. Song had carefully calibrated how far she was willing to push the student association and the Forty-Ninth, lest their retaliation become a degree of escalation the Thirteenth could not afford.

“Tell the meat shield they’ll be shaken loose when they take either a bad enough wound or at the end of a day’s delve,” she told Imani.

Xiadani sighed, and was evidently about to press for details or some arrangements but Mayam gauged that her actual concern had been allayed. Now it’d be dickering, which she saw no reason to allow.

“I’m done with this conversation,” she announced. “Anyone who keeps pestering me is going to serve as a tests subject for my attempts to reproduce Professor Artigas tongue-locking Sign.”

One of the Emains had actually managed to get the part that made the tongue stick to the roof of the mouth down, but without also removing the inherent corrosive property of the Gloam. There’d been, uh, less of that tongue left by the end of the test. Fewer volunteers as well, one assumed. Xiadani walked away with a groan of frustration and Maryam’s lips thinned as she watched the retreating back.

There needed to be a balance: fear was necessary to keep their conscripts obedient, but too much of it and the student association would take their chances fighting their way out just as the Savant had threatened. Not enough fear, though, and the volunteered would try to call a bluff that wasn’t entirely one. The Unluckies had come entirely willing to shoot kneecaps, after all, if mostly as a spectacle of fear to make the rest fall in line.

But they couldn’t start shooting their conscripts out here. Unless they then sent them back to the camp under escort afterwards, it would be an execution in everything but name.

“I am impressed with Song,” Imani Langa, inexplicably still there, equally inexplicably decided to share. “She walks the tightrope well: in principle she inflicts nothing on them they did not willingly sign up for, only now the wounds are taken for her advantage while she can still plausibly deny being responsible for them. All that while using the conscripts for a Watch cause of some urgency that serves the common good. It would be a very difficult position to assault in front of the Obscure Committee.”

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

“Did you know Angharad still smiles a little when she talks about hanging you off that ledge in Tratheke?” Maryam casually asked. “I think she sometimes fantasizes about dropping you.”

“I am not surprised,” Imani replied without batting an eye. “As a Malani who lies, in her eyes I am only marginally better than catching the pox.”

“Don’t feel too bad,” Maryam consoled. “I also think that of you.”

“This grieves me,” Imani replied, challengingly unbothered. “It is clever work, mixing conscripts and our own cabalists in the second wave under Tupoc to share some risks while simultaneously setting him up to take the lion’s share of blame for casualties. But you need to have guns ready for when wounds begin to mount up, or even casualties. This only works so long as the vanguard is more afraid of us than the maze.”

Casualties were the line they had to heed, Maryam agreed. Song was taking pains to avoid deaths by using the Akelarre as workhorses, but that was only a delaying measure if they kept pushing at this pace. When the inevitable happened, the plan was to order a drawing a straws to send three conscripts back with the corpse but there was no denying it would be the make-or-break moment. If there was a death and they did not rebel, Maryam figured they would not at all. But if they did?

Things could get ugly.

“We have eyes on the situation,” she vaguely said.

“Abrascal,” Imani listed. “That Gloam spirit you call your sister. Barboza and that insufferable ‘Emergency Rations’ fellow.”

“He’s a lovely man,” Maryam lied out of reflexive spite. “I don’t understand your problem with him, you must have thin skin.”

“You didn’t bring in any of my cabalists,” Imani noted, almost a reproach.

“That’s because you’re an untrustworthy snake and Tupoc says you’re just using him for his bodies, by which I assume he means delve crew,” Maryam helpfully informed her.

More hoped than assumed, really. Surely no one had taste quite that terrible.

“I’ll lend you Salvador,” Imani said. “He’s not unfamiliar with that sort of work.”

Another strike for Tristan’s guess that his fellow Sacromontan had been an enforcer for the brutal criminal gangs that the city apparently bred like lice. Not that it really mattered.

“Imani,” Maryam sighed. “Do we really need to go over the part about your ledgers again? It won’t sound anywhere as cutting the second time.”

“We can, if you’d like,” the other woman shrugged. “The result will be the same: you’ll give in, because you know full well that I can kill Song’s entire plan with a single order to my brigade.”

Maryam kept her alarm tucked in behind bared teeth. If the Eleventh bailed on them, their numbers would get dangerously low compared to that of the conscripts. It might not be the killing stroke that Imani implied, but it’d be at least a proper crippling.

“You won’t,” she said.

The Eleventh had not been forced into this, they’d bought in. Without even needing to be bribed, by Song’s recounting. There was no good reason for them to back out now, it’d trash their reputation.

“I will not,” Imani agreed, “so long as I am buying something by renouncing cordiality with Colonel Cao. I lend a hand, my dear, to obtain a rectification of my relationship with the Thirteenth Brigade.”

She smiled prettily in the face of Maryam’s teeth.

“If my coin buys nothing, it goes back into the purse,” Imani Langa lightly said. “So go on and tell Song to put Salvador to work, Maryam. I look forward to our continuing friendship.”

Maryam Khaimov looked at Imani, then, and finally saw Krypteia.

Not Tristan’s sort of Mask, the rooftops and lockpicks and thefts, but a subtler kind. The spider in the corner, quietly weaving its web while no one paid attention. Langa had waited to leverage them until they were three rooms deep into the delve, Maryam thought, and thus twice as dependent on her. Then she had demanded nothing they could not afford, afford easily even.

Just something none of them had really wanted to give her.

And unless crossed Imani keep on sitting in her web, spinning favors and contacts and doing not a thing but listening. Until she had to, and then she’d tug at a string and suddenly the full size of the web bore down on you. Tristan was training to become a spy, Maryam thought, but Imani Langa was training to become a spymistress. In that pretty smile she caught a glimpse of the difference.

“You’re more dangerous than you look,” Maryam finally said, not entirely disapproving.

“Never to my friends,” Imani said. “So aren’t you glad we are?”

It was a solid line to walk away on, Maryam conceded. You had to respect that, so she put down the urge to shout something at Imani’s retreating back. Well, that and she couldn’t think of anything clever.

In the end the room didn’t manage to kill anyone, despite Scholomance pulling out one of its most vicious yet, but it was a close thing. It’d first looked like a simple square steel chamber with a door at the end that had no obvious handle or lock. Shumise discovered with her nav that under some the floor panels there were eight levers, so the vanguard had gone on to pop open the floor with tools and try them out. Nothing happened until all eight were pulled at the same time, at which point shackles shot out from the sides of the under-panel to catch the hands on the levers.

Only six of the eight were caught, Dasa Gaurav and a second year proving quick enough to dodge the trap, but neither were quick enough to get out of the room before a steel door closed shut behind them. Scholomance then began to fill the room with water from holes in the wall, which was something of a problem for those stuck kneeling on the ground. They’d drown in a matter of minutes.

It only got worse when spindly metal contraptions deployed from behind the walls on either side and began pouring out streams of a yellowish gas that lingered like fog.

The final tally was five wounded of various degrees, most of them caustic burns from the gas. Gaurav was one of the worst hit, having ‘solved’ the room in classic Skiritai fashion by tearing off one of the contraptions and using it to block off the holes pouring out water with a little help from signifiers to solder the metal. He’d gotten blasts of gas all over his face and arms, melting away swaths of his cloak and leaving nasty red welts on the skin it did not burn off.

The wounded were assessed by Song and Tristan, who assigned two to the ‘rearguard’. It was a fancy way to say that those whose wounds made risky to push further would get to stand in the back until enough of them stacked up they were relatively safe to send back to camp as a group. The rest remained with the vanguard, and when some of the batch that’d just survived drowning and gas were put back in the rotation she saw the thought take hold. What if we ran for it? But then she also saw Tristan casually cleaning his pistol just to the side and back of a boy gritting his teeth as his hand gripped his blade, saw how the boy knowing there was a loaded gun just beyond his line of sight ate away at his anger. Without a plan, a crowd, too few of them were willing to pull the trigger and try to run or fight.

For now. The clever ones would talk now, try to band together. The next test would be the one that mattered.

Wounds were cleaned and bandages wrapped, then they pressed on to the next room.

Maryam rotated in as spotter, laying out the nature of the trap inside with a grimace – a narrow hallway where wooden stakes would come out of the wall, though the mechanisms inside the stone looked too complex to be merely about that, and withdrew as the two supporting signifiers came up and the vanguard entered.

She’d slipped Song a word earlier about Imani’s demand, which saw a mild change of pace when Salvador was pulled off the second wave to keep an eye on the volunteered and Imani was assigned captaincy instead of Tupoc. A move to bind her to the enterprise, Maryam gauged. If she got her hands dirty, she couldn’t denounce them afterwards with any real credibility. It really was quite a different thing, going back into the Trench with such numbers.

Even when they’d banded together with the Twenty-Ninth they had been nowhere this many – not even a match for Tupoc’s own crew, much less the addition of their fresh vanguard volunteered. It made the simple things like pauses and marching through hallways long, but having the numbers to throw at rooms more than compensated for it. Even without Scholomance handing them to pass-throughs, they would have kept an impressive pace.

She was joined in watching the latest vanguard rotation go through the room by the same man Song’s decision had temporarily freed. They watched the traps activate with a shared wince.

“Well,” Tupoc said, cocking his head to the side. “That’s going to leave a scar.”

Impalement did tend to do that, yes.

“She should have ducked,” Maryam unsympathetically said. “You could tell just by her face she was going to be a screamer.”

The short Tianxi – whom she vaguely recalled having been part of those that prevented Song and Ishanvi from withdrawing when the ambush was sprung – had a wooden stake through the shoulder, which probably wouldn’t kill her. Maryam’s earlier warning about the mechanism had proved prescient, the stakes having first come out of the walls like spikes, then the wall moved forward in moving panels and then finally without warning the stakes were shot out like darts instead.