Chapter 55

The thing about being the lowest rung on the ladder was that everyone stepped on you.

It was Tristan’s fourth day as a Kassa traveling man, which meant he was still swallowing an awful lot of boot: there hadn’t been a single trip across the city where he wasn’t the one hanging onto the back of the carriage and he’d thrice been volunteered to clean vomit or horseshit. The pay, to be honest, wasn’t great. Four coppers a day, one of which went to the injury fund, and then an additional twelve if he made it to the end of the month.

Staying with the company for longer raised your salary, but most traveling men only lasted a month or two. It was a rough, exhausting job and its veterans were a tight-knit group that cared little for outsiders. Tristan genuinely could not tell if he was being hazed or they were attempting to push him out. The Kassa family kept about forty traveling men, which was at least ten less than they needed, and of these a quarter were what the veterans called ‘ermanos’.

The sobriquet was a mix of the Cycladic word for ballast and Antigua for sibling and was used as a shorthand for dead weight. If you dropped a crate? Fucking ermano. If you showed up late? Ermano thinks this is a vacation. You didn’t pay for the first round of drinks? Typical ermano. On account of being Sacromontan Tristan got ridden twice as hard as the other newcomers, some of which even joined in to keep the heat off them.

Still, there was a rough sense of fairness to how the Kassa men did things. To his honest surprise, the injury fund truly was that: if anyone crippled themselves or were forced to rest by sickness then the injury fund was spent to support them. When one of the other newcomers, a sly little shit by the name of Eugenios, tried to get Tristan blamed for his having put the wrong crate on the cart the foreman looked into it and slugged the liar into the stomach when the lie was outed.

Eugenios got the worst duties for the rest of the day and got ribbed for being ‘more dishonest than a Sacromontan’. It warmed the cockles of his heart how genuinely despised the Six were around here, even if as usual the shit of the infanzones had ended up splashing his boots.

The fourth day started as all the others had: show up an hour before dawn at the workshop, share a plate of flatbread and olives more for the ritual than for need, then spill out in the alley for assignments. The four foremen called out their traveling men for the day, splitting the lots until early afternoon when the crews reunited and there was a shuffle for the day’s second work order. Tristan still kept an eye on the distribution, it was useful to discern the cliques, but no longer paid attention to his own name.

He always ended up with Nikias, a mustachioed bastard of a man who looked like someone had built a barn door out of horse leather. Nikias took most of the ermanos in his crew, the rest going to whatever foreman had taken a shine to them or wanted to try them out on a job. Nikias, naturally, thus ended up getting assigned the worst jobs – not that he seemed to mind. If anything, he appeared to take a twisted sort of pride in it.

“Oi. You listening, Ferrando?”

Tristan twitched, turning to the old man addressing him. Temenos, the white-haired elder of the Kassa traveling men – thirty years in a job that broke your back in twenty gave one standing in spades. He coughed.

“Of course, sir,” he lied.

“Then get in the line, you idiot,” Temenos bluntly said.

Hiding his surprise, he fell in with the man’s crew. Temenos and his nine always got the Lordsport runs, which were hard work loading and unloading the goods but otherwise a restful ride. It was seen, with good reason, as the plum assignment. It was a job that an ‘ermanos ‘like him shouldn’t be getting anywhere near, and he caught Eugenios glaring at him from the corner of his eye. Had he done something to catch the old man’s eye? They’d hardly traded more than a dozen sentences over the last few days.

After an hour moving the goods into the three carts began rolling south towards Lordsport – the wool cloth wasn’t so bad, but the Kassa also sold shrine idols of some wealth god from southern Tianxia made in Asphodelian marble and those were brutal to move. As a useless newcomer Tristan wasn’t going to be trusted leading the horses so he had expected to spend the trip wedged in between crates, but instead he was sent to sit by one of the drivers: Temenos himself.

Something was off.

The mostly toothless old man took his Izcalli snuff religiously every hour, snorting up the ground tobacco. Tristan personally thought it smelled horrid – it wasn’t the expensive scented snuff nobles used, which was somewhat easier on the nose – but some of the other traveling men had told him that when Temenos got off the stuff the usually pleasant old man turned into a veritable monster.

More worrying than the unpleasant smell was that Temenos took the time to show him the basics of cart driving, how long he could and should run the horses as well as the easiest path out of the capital. Tristan made himself an attentive pupil, the entire time awaiting the drop of the other shoe. It came, in a manner of speaking, shortly after they passed the city gates.

The old man opened his worn wooden box, snorted deep of the snuff and put it away with a roll of his shoulder.

“So,” Temenos said. “We have questions.”

Tristan cleared his throat.

“Questions?”

“Yeah,” Temenos grunted. “It’d be for the best if you answered them, Ferrando.”

Tristan glanced back, finding that the men in the other carts conspicuously all had cudgels near their hands. Ah.

“Well,” he said, “you have my attention, Temenos.”

“The Shoulderbones recommended you,” the old man said, “but I asked around: none of our friends there know who in Sculler’s name you’re supposed to be. Only those up high, and they’re not saying shit.”

Of course they wouldn’t. Tristan had robbed the account books of the most brutal – and richest – moneylender in the northeastern ward without her noticing in exchange for the Brazen Chariot negotiating on his behalf with the Shoulderbones to get that recommendation. I’d taken him a day to case the place and another to rob it unseen, much longer than he’d wanted since now that he’d stopped sleeping at Black House he had to arrange his own accommodations.

“I came in from another basileia,” he said. “They made a deal.”

“It’s what we figured,” Temenos said. “But the thing is, Ferrando, we don’t like the basileia boys. They make trouble, and a lot of them think because they know someone they can get away with laziness.”

His jaw clenched.

“I have not been lazy,” Tristan replied, anger not entirely feigned.

“You haven’t,” the old man agreed. “Which is why we’re having this talk all nice and friendly, instead of in an alley with double black eyes and a knife at your throat.”

Keeping anger on his face, the thief let his mind whirl. This looked bad, at first glance, yet it was the contrary. They would not bother to look into him if they weren’t looking to keep him around. He scoffed.

“Let’s just get this over with,” he said.

Temenos eyed him lazily.

“Young men and their pride,” he said, shaking his head, then let the amusement fade. “What’s a Sacromontan doing in bed with a basileia?”

Fortunately, Tristan had come equipped with a plethora of lies that the Brazen Chariot had been instructed to regurgitate if needed. He sighed, as if put upon.

“You ever hear about the Meng-Xiaofan?” he asked.

Temenos nodded.

“Tianxi criminals,” Temenos said. “They’ve tried to get a foot in the Lordsport, but the Trade Assembly’s got their own mules for drugs and they don’t want foreigners getting a cut.”

“In Sacromonte they have more than a foot,” Tristan said. “And they tried to get more, push into the Murk and deal there, but they lost some toes trying.”

Temenos looked him up and down.

“Tianxi, are you?” he drily asked.

“I’m Murk,” Tristan replied. “But I knew the twins that were running that expansion, and when it went belly up they were hung out to dry – and that splashed on everyone they did business with.”

He’d burn a candle for Lan and Jun tonight, a sacrifice to the Rat King, for the twins were to be a helping hand from beyond the grave. If the Kassa knew people in Sacromonte, which they likely did, then they could check up on the story.

“I wasn’t eager to get my throat cut, so I took a ship out as far as I could,” Tristan continued. “I know some people who knew people, so I emptied the last of my pockets getting that recommendation.”

Temenos grunted.

“Why the Kassa? Why the traveling men?”

“I didn’t want to step in piss all day by joining as a fuller,” Tristan said. “And, well, the Kassa weren’t actually my first choice.”

The old man looked surprised.

“I looked into the Euripis warehouses first, on Charon, but then I heard about that one foreman…”

“Ah,” Temenos said, then eyed him skeptically. “Not sure you’re pretty enough to draw that fucker’s eye, but I can understand not wanting to risk it.”

The old man hummed, then struck out with his whip to quicken the horses again. Tristan looked back at the other carts and found the cudgels were being put away.

“That’s it?” he asked.

“That’s it,” Temenos said. “Pay attention, you’ll be driving the horses on the way back.”

“I thought there would be more questions,” Tristan said.

“We’ll check on your story,” the old man shrugged. “But I’m not your father, Ferrando. If you’re not trouble I don’t care.”

The story would hold up even better when asked about, he’d made sure of that. The Brazen Chariot, after all, was a smuggling basileia. It would be entirely believable that Tristan’s supposed Meng-Xiaofan ties had put him in contact with them.

“Back to Nikias tomorrow, then,” he drily said. “It was good while it lasted.”

Temenos eyed him like he was a fool.

“I didn’t pick your name out of a hat, boy,” he said. “You got twice as much shit as the rest of the ermanos and still put in twice as much work. Make it to the end of the week like this and we’ll see about getting you in properly – you’ve got all your teeth and you speak well, it’ll make you useful with the dockmasters at Lordsport.”

It was an odd thing, but Tristan would admit to feeling somewhat proud about that. For all that it had been for the purposes of deception, he had put in the work.

“Because you liked my answers,” he said.

Temenos snorted, then nodded.

“And if you hadn’t liked them?” Tristan dared to ask.

The old man gave a toothless smile.

“Then you fell off the cart and got run over,” Temenos said. “Tragic accident, it was.”

Well. That motivated him to keep paying attention to the lessons, if nothing else. He was being let in on the veteran crowd, by the looks of it. Good. Once he was in, he could sketch out who the inner circle was.

And when he had that, he had the trail he must follow.

—

While objectively Maryam knew that Lord Rector Evander Palliades was a clever and ruthless king, it was hard to think of him that way when he kept looking like a kicked puppy whenever she showed up to give the reports instead of Song.

While the bespectacled man always forced himself to pay attention to the latest word from the Thirteenth – which was mostly that leads were being run down by Tristan and Tredegar – it was also quite blatant that he wanted to get the reports out of the way as fast as possible so he could get to bribing Maryam with fresh burek and raspberry jam pastries.

They called burek by a different name here, and didn’t put potatoes in it, but the recipe was basically the same. It had significantly raised her esteem of Asphodel, because no people who made decent burek could be entirely without saving graves.

Polishing the last of the layered cheese-and-egg pastry under the Lord Rector’s vigilant eye, she set down her fork as the man rang a small bell to have her empty plate taken away and a dessert plate brought in to replace it. They even topped off her wine while at it. It was a hard job, reporting to the Lord Rector. Sometimes she had to take naps afterwards. Maryam watched the servants discreetly exit, their ruler barely acknowledging their presence, and leaned back into her seat.

Well, she had been bribed good and proper. Now came the price. First her own part of it. The bespectacled man set a leather-bound journal on the table, dipping his steel-tipped pen in a pot of ink before turning a look on her. Maryam bit into her delicious pastry, regally getting powdered sugar all over her chin. It was really good raspberry jam.

“You last mentioned that the Triglau are not a single people but three,” Evander Palliades said. “Might you elaborate on this?”

Maryam swallowed as quietly as she could, which was not very, and wiped the sugar powder off her face with the born grace of a princess of Volcesta.

“I am Izvorica,” Maryam told him. “The Izvoric are – were – the people dwelling in the lowlands of the continent we call Juska. The lowlands were bordered by the sea and a great plateau, the only way through which was the Great Gates.”

“The same now known as the Broken Gates,” the Lord Rector half-asked.

She nodded. Maryam had best not speak of that, else a sea’s worth of venom about the Malani would spill past her lips.

“These were maintained by the People of the Gate, the Skrivenic, while past them dwell the great kingdoms of the highlands whose people are known as the Toranjic.”

“And of these peoples the Izvoric were the greatest?” he asked.

Maryam shook her head.

“The Skrivenic were never many, though of great wealth, but there are ten Toranjic for every Izvoric and some of their fortresses have walls built by the Ancients. The Malani would have broken their teeth trying to take a bite, it is no wonder they preferred to break the Gates than risk it.”

His hand paused before the pen reached the paper.

“The Kingdom of Malan,” he said, “claims it is the Triglau who broke the gates.”

Maryam snorted, dismissive.

“My people were pleading for help from the highlands while Malan sacked our cities and burned our groves,” she said. “Why would we break our own Gates? Besides, my own mother – a practitioner of the Craft of high rank – commonly spoke of it as being Malani work in public. None ever contradicted her.”

Maryam had no doubt the Toranjic kings would have bled the Izvoric dry for their help, and likely made vassals of quite a few cities, but the highlanders were warlike men who relished in the fight. Their fortress-cities clashed with each other almost as much as they did with the hollows that dwelled in the bleak lands beyond their own.

The Lord Rector did not look entirely convinced but put it to ink regardless.

It pleased Maryam somewhat to be correcting Malani lies, though she was not sure that Evander Palliades would live long enough to finish a book – or that it would spread beyond this isle, even if he did. Still, she had only so much tolerance for speaking of the past and had told the man as much. He’d not argued, considering what it was he really wanted to talk about. Or, rather, who.

The Lord Rector pushed up his glasses and cleared his throat, embarrassed but not embarrassed enough not to ask.

“Poetry,” he said. “What does she like?”

She set down her dessert, humming as she sifted through her memories.

“She owns a book by Pingyang Zong,” Maryam noted. “One of her favorites, I think.”

It was certainly worn enough to have been read often.

“Really?” the Lord Rector exhaled, looking pleased.

Maryam cocked an eyebrow at him and he coughed into his fist.

“Lady Zong wrote much of drinking under moonlight and love affairs,” Lord Rector Evander explained. “I am merely surprised.”

‘Surprised’. Sure he was.

“The only other I can recall is titled ‘Ruina’,” she said. “It’s from… Alaria, or something of the sort?”

“Ilaria,” the bespectacled man corrected. “The preeminent poetess out of Sacromonte, the reckoning of most. Ruina is one of her finest works, though not her most popular. It is very maudlin.”

The steel tip tapped around the paper, as if the Lord Rector of Asphodel was debating how to transmute sad Lierganen poetry into smooth seduction.

Now, it might seem like Maryam was selling out her captain for jam pastries. Really good jam pastries, mind you. But the truth was that there was a little more at play. The dais under Evander Palliades’ throne was being gnawed at by rebels, but for now the man was still the greatest authority in the land. And so long as he believed he might have a chance at seducing Song, he was quite amenable to the Thirteenth Brigade.

It was the sort of thing that might come in quite useful if, say, they needed to get the head of the Watch’s diplomatic delegation to Asphodel removed because he was trying to get Tristan abducted on behalf of some sinister conspiracy.

Anyhow, Maryam wouldn’t have entertained the notion if she didn’t suspect that somewhat Song wanted to be seduced in the first place. You didn’t sit down alone on brothel beds with men you weren’t at least a little attracted to. Besides, if she’d wanted to nip the entire thing in the bud she could have simply told Palliades they were headed to a brothel in the first place, which would have seen him withdraw his insistence to tag along.

Insisting on taking a lady you were taken with to a brothel wasn’t a good look.

“How’s your handwriting, Your Excellency?” she asked.

His brow rose.

“Respectable,” he replied.

“Song is a great admirer of calligraphy,” she meaningfully said.

There, she’d given him as much as she intended to. If he couldn’t work something out with so many hints on his side, he was a lost cause anyway. Maryam was of the opinion that a good romp would help mellow out Song, once she was done panicking about it, but their captain would get on just fine if Evander Palliades fumbled the draw.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Clearing her throat, she changed tack to signify she’d delivered as much as his bribe warranted.

“I am charged by Brigadier Chilaca to inquire when the delay to the visit will be ending,” she said.

Lieutenant Apurva had been, it turned out, one of the very covenanters meant to visit the shipyard on the delegation’s behalf. As a tinker with a decade of experience servicing Someshwari skimmers, he’d been meant to assess the quality of the engine-building suites of the Asphodelian shipyards.

By slitting his throat Tristan had kicked a beehive.

Not only had the Watch been forced to bring in a second Umuthi tinker from the Lordsport, one that was less qualified, the visit itself had been put on hold until the death was fully investigated. Song, reading between the lines, had told Maryam that the Lord Rector had grabbed the opportunity to further delay the visit with both hands.

The theory floated by the blackcloak diplomats was that Palliades wanted some signed accommodation with the Republics before letting the Watch in – that way, if the rooks tried to fence him in by leaning on the Iscariot Accords he could drag in the Tianxi to argue for his side. It was clever diplomacy, since the Republics were hungry for his wares.

The Sanxing republics could make aetheric engines, sure, but none capable of powering something as large as a warship. If Tianxia got its hands on a skimmer warfleet, it would no longer need to fear the fleets of Izcalli and the Someshwar should it come to full, bare-knuckle war with either. They could afford to start truly throwing their weight around the Trebian Sea.

“Two days,” the Lord Rector said. “Arrangements are nearly finished and a letter will be sent this afternoon. It is unfortunate that it took so long, but the delay was most necessary given Lieutenant Apurva’s death.”

He smiled pleasantly.

“I am grieved to hear the Watch’s investigation has yielded no results. As always, my offer to lend the help of the lictors stands.”

Maryam, on the other hand, was deeply pleased by the dead end that’d followed the corpse. She was not surprised in the least that Tristan had skill in disposing of bodies – eventually his closet must have run out of room to cram skeletons in – but that he’d been able to stump a Watch investigation was impressive. While the site of death had been found, he’d himself come under no open suspicion. Why would he, when the entire Nineteenth Brigade had been out the same night?

No request had been made that the Thirteenth recall him from his infiltration assignment so he might be interrogated, either, which was a promising sign. Even better Song had mentioned that while there were frustrations among the delegation supposedly they were as much about the delay to the shipyard visit as they were about the death.

The rumor so far was that it was a robbery gone wrong, the killer panicking when realizing they’d attacked a blackcloak and killing the lieutenant to avoid leaving someone that’d know their face alive. Apparently such things were not too uncommon, the Watch’s reputation for heavy-handed reprisal for attacks on its members having some hidden costs.

“That’s a decision for Brigadier Chilaca to make, Your Excellency,” Maryam demurred. “I will be sure pass the offer along.”

They both knew the brigadier had no intention of allowing the lictors anywhere near that case. It would mean tacitly admitting the Watch couldn’t close the investigation it had the legal privilege of conducting without more than symbolic oversight from the Lord Rector. An admission of weakness in the middle of important negotiations with the same throne that’d granted the privilege.

“Please do,” Lord Rector Evander shrugged. “Though now that we are on this subject, it does bring a matter to mind.”

“I am all ears, Your Excellency.”

“Would I be wrong in understanding you’ve an interest in skimmers?” he asked.

Her hand clenched under the table. Of course he would have noticed that. It was hardly as if requesting books on the subject from the archives had been subtle. Maryam had simply not expected him to care, given how sparse the materials were. While no doubt the private archives had better volumes, it would have been an abuse of the given permission to use them for something other than their contract with the throne.

“As a Navigator, I must admit I’ve a certain curiosity about them,” Maryam evenly replied.

A cunning gleam behind those glasses.

“Then it should be no trouble at all to add you to the shipyard visit,” Evander Palliades said. “Our first skimmer is being kept there, at the moment, so you could study it in some depths.”

He paused.

“Besides, you’ve mentioned looking for potential fissures in the aether like the one that allowed the assassin to enter the palace,” the Lord Rector added. “It would be reassuring to establish whether or not such an opening exists in the shipyard as well, given its importance.”

Shit, Maryam thought. He was a clever bastard, wasn’t he? If it was only an excuse for her to get her hands all over the first skimmer she had seen built in her lifetime she would have declined, but it was a legitimate concern whether or not the assassin could get into that shipyard. And since the Antediluvian construction was supposed to be somewhere under the island, going so deep might yield some fresh insight about the brackstone shrines and what they held imprisoned.

In a few sentences he’d gotten her to want to go and given her good reasons to. Which made it all the more frustrating that they both knew the only reason he’d offered was that it would mean she was gone for two days and Song would have to bring the reports during – with Tristan currently gone and Tredegar a known face at court, there wasn’t really another choice for it.

Maryam resisted the urge to grit her teeth.

“I must consult with my captain, you understand,” she said.

“Of course,” he said, nodding. “I will merely require an answer from you before the departure, which is the day after tomorrow.”

At least he wasn’t smug, Maryam thought. If he had been she would have held a grudge, because they both knew that whatever she’d said just now she sure as Nav would be joining the delegation on that trip.