Chapter 6

She could barely make out her father’s corpse through the curtain. Only the outline of his silhouette, laid on the bed as if to let him rest. His arms were crossed over his belly, still in a way they had never been in life. Father had moved them ceaselessly, talked with his hands as much as his voice. The priests had placed the bier flowers around him already, Maryam could smell the heavy scent of the carnations. Like cinnamon and nutmeg.

Father would not pass entirely into the Nav before his kin burned him, but she hoped he was already most of the way there. He deserved better than to hear politics instead of mourning around his last bed. She tugged at her mother’s sleeve, to try and say as much, but Mother gestured sharply at her without even turning.

“Go on, then,” Mother said.

“They are calling in debts,” Queen Adrijana said, pitching her voice low.

Father’s first wife was old, over a decade older than him even though he had passed first. She was wrinkled and bent, with watery blue eyes. The queen did not like Mother, or Mother the queen, but they had never been enemies. Neither of them were a threat to the inheritance of Queen Adrijana’s eldest child.

“There are no debts,” Mother said. “Goran was too clever to give them that toehold.”

“The governor claims that we never had right to impose levies on Malani trade, so their merchants must be reimbursed,” the old queen said. “It is decades of trade, Izolda. The sum they ask for is…”

“They know Volcesta cannot afford it,” Mother said. “What did they demand in private?”

“The land,” Queen Adrijana said, troubled. “They claim that, given Goran’s great debt, Volcesta is their property by right. They will rent it back to us, but they intend to build forts on both ends of the pass and garrison them. It will be war otherwise.”

“It is already war, Adrijana,” Izolda Cernik harshly replied. “It has been war since they took Zarla’s Drift and brought down the walls of Dubrik. We just fled from it into the hills, and now it has finally caught up to us.”

“The Staresine does not agree,” the queen said.

“And will the Staresine fight, when in a few years the Malani demand freedom of the city at cannon-point?” Mother challenged. “Or will they saddle their horses and run? They tremble in their boots, the mewling cowards. You wanted my advice? Here it is: act now, Adrijana, while you still can.”

“My son-”

“Will promise to make terms with the Malani, else they will proclaim Matea’s boy to rule over Volcesta instead,” Mother hissed. “You know this. The only chance is to call a great council in Volcesta while you are still regent, to force their hand by dragging in the other kings.”

Maryam tugged at her mother’s sleeve again, earning an irritated look.

“Go stand in the hallway, darling,” Mother said. “This is too-”

It felt like a finger pressed against the inside of her skull.

Her eyes fluttered open, expecting the smoky glow of lamps in Father’s death room but instead finding distant light in white and gold. Maryam swallowed, still tasting the carnations against the roof of her mouth, and let out a ragged breath. One of her hands found the stone of the wall she was leaning against, the rough grate against her fingers helping her ground herself. She was a long way from home, across the night-black waters. Port Allazei, the Rainsparrow Hostel.

So far away it felt like another world entirely.

Glancing either way from the corner of her eye she could see there was no one close, but Maryam still pulled her hood further down and pitched her voice down to a bare whisper.

“I cannot tell when I fell into it,” she said. “Was I asleep?”

Hooks slipped out of her, whispering against her ear. They could not risk tracing against the veil, not for some time yet. They were still too… muddled.

“It was a daydream, I think,” her sister said. “The transition was almost instant.”

She gritted her teeth. So any drift in her attention was a potential trance, then. But no, it couldn’t be that. She was not that leaky a ship, else Captain Yue would have noticed during the observation period. There must be another factor that made a difference, one that was not a concern within the bounds of the Abbey.

“At least you can snap me out of it now,” Maryam muttered.

“I’ll keep an eye out for them,” Hooks promised.

She sounded like she felt guilty, and Maryam had to push down the reflex to trace comfort on their veil. It was not likely that such a light touch would rip the boundary between their souls, but neither was it impossible.

“We did not know,” she whispered instead. “Now we do. That is not nothing.”

Hooks pulled back into her, saying nothing, and Maryam sighed. They had been told there would be risks to doing as her sister wanted. To take a plunge inside the Cauldron, reaching for answers and secrets, had been so obviously dangerous that she’d been able to dissuade Hooks from attempting it for the rest of their year after Asphodel. But as months passed her sister had grown increasingly discontent, boiling over into constant arguments as break approached and Maryam’s objections accordingly lost strength. When, Hooks had demanded, if not then?

Much as part of Maryam would have liked to dump her sister’s favorite hairpins in a pond instead, she had conceded. Further obscuration was not urgently needed, and Yue had been willing to supervise the entire affair. Eager, even, which had been somewhat distressing. And for all that Maryam disliked the risks, it was true that the potential prize was nothing to scoff at.

Hooks had turned out entirely right that what they’d learned from the Cauldron would let them pull ahead of their rivals among the Akelarre. The stringwork alone, with how it could be used along with wind carding, would have made the uncomfortable experience worth it. But the aftermath was proving… difficult.

Reasserting the boundaries of her own mind after plunging herself into the Cauldron had been necessary if Maryam did not want her consciousness to dissolve like salt in water, but it had also dragged back to the fore a great many memories she had once suppressed or fed to Hooks. For the first week merely looking at some objects had sent her into hour-long fugues that her sister fell into alongside her. Not even Yue had been able to ease them out.

It had been even worse when they slept. Their dreams were bright in the aether and entirely consuming. A mara could have slurped up all their insides in a single night, Captain Yue said, without either sister noticing. In the end they had stayed two months inside the Abbey and then some, to fretting by the others. Even now they had to be careful, though Yue had cleared them to leave anyway. Hooks was taking the persisting vulnerability worse than her, in some ways. Attempts to ease her guilt only seemed to make it worse.

Sighing again, Maryam pushed off the wall. She looked up at the Orrery lights. While she did not own a watch, pale-and-gold ought to mean they were slightly past noon. The others should be arriving soon. The front door of the Rainsparrow Hostel opened a heartbeat later and she straightened, but it was only some young man in black. One of the new first years, by the lost look on his face. The first ones had begun arriving a few days ago, though today would be the first by cutoff – when most Watch ships returned and many of the new princelings as well.

Maryam returned to her post and it was another two minutes of silence, which she spent forcing herself not to daydream, before company arrived. Izel was first out of the door, dark eyes scanning the street and finding her almost immediately. She waved at him in acknowledgement and he walked towards her, Tristan following him out a heartbeat later. Maryam leaned forward, twisting to peek at the door, but no third cabalist followed.

“No Tredegar?” she asked.

“She sent word to the room she would be running late,” Tristan said. “The Watch keeps track of some goods in port, you see, and when someone buys multiple barrels of the strongest blackpowder up for sale that warrants a conversation with the garrison.”

Maryam choked.

“She what?”

Then a frown followed as she fully grasped what she had just heard.

“Wait, why is she buying up blackpowder? Our stocks are fine for at least another three months.”

Izel cleared his throat.

“I can only offer a guess, but she did begin asking me about powder strength shortly after reading a monograph on basilisks.”

“Is she planning to blow up the Acallar?” Maryam asked, amused. “The way I hear it, more than a few garrison men would buy her a drink afterwards.”

Talk was that the local blackcloaks considered being assigned to the Skiritai training grounds an even worse punishment duty than Arsay Avenue night patrols, at least one in three of which turned into a lemure attack.

“I’m sure we can get it out of her later,” Tristan shrugged. “Anyhow, she wrote she would join us directly at the docks. We can head out without her.”

Having no reason to object, she pushed off the wall of the Rainsparrow and fell in with the other two. It was mere minutes from Hostel Street to the gatehouse, then through the Allazei gates – that worn but elegant stretch of stone bearing the pillars marked with the words and symbols of the seven covenants.

After passing through that quiet, contemplative stretch of shade what lay beyond smashed into her like a wave of sound. Never before had any of them seen the Port Allazei docks like this, she fancied. No wonder the garrison had asked to beach her skimmer away from the port and even paid her for it.

The docks were packed tight, a roiling mass of walking and laughing and chatter. Shouts in half a dozen languages sounded from ships and jetties while hired men brought down luggage onto solid land. A pair of black-sailed Watch cogs unloading munition crates were dwarfed by the ship to their side, a heavy-bellied galleon flying a flag Maryam did not recognize. A brightly painted Izcalli galley shared a pier with a tall three-masted carrack whose main sail proudly displayed the name of its trading house in Cathayan characters.

In the distance a slender, knifelike caravel of Malani make was sailing into the harbor, its brass railings shining in the Orrery light, but Maryam’s gaze skipped over that and three more ships to fall on what could only be a skimmer.

Much larger than her own, it looked like flat barge with a rising aft deck and three slender silver masts rising to support some sort of oval metallic structure. There were great whirring blades inside the clockwork and the device was even larger than the ship beneath it – though it must be mostly empty, for the skimmer did not sit heavy in the water. Maryam could not get a good look at the mechanisms, for much of the device was covered by colored stones of green and yellow that formed the silhouette of a crocodile in the Izcalli style.

They had all stopped, stunned by the noise and sight, and Maryam let out a whistle.

“There were nowhere near so many ships last year,” she said. “Or as nice.”

“That skimmer is a genuine Izcalli flatship, Maryam,” Izel said, sounding disbelieving. “I cannot recall the last time one was used for anything but war or carrying royal envoys.”

Tristan snorted.

“Why are you lot so surprised?” he said. “Enough of our year survived that powerful sorts would be willing to send in the students whose life they don’t care to gamble on unknown odds.”

She cocked her head to the side.

“You think we’ll get worse princelings than our current batch?”

The thought of the likes of Sebastian Camaron being on the wrong end of the do-you-know-who-my-father-is conversation did have a certain charm to it.

“No, of course not,” Tristan said.

A beat passed.

“I know we will.”

Her lips twitched while Izel sighed.

“Or perhaps we will find the first years are sensible, professional sorts come to make the most of this opportunity,” he reproached them.

Maryam caught Tristan’s eye, her thief stroking his chin thoughtfully.

“Second year Medicine covers some diseases of the mind,” he said. “I can probably lean to treat that optimism, though it does seem like a severe case.”

Izel let out an offended noise, crossing his arms.

“A regular dose of Scholomance ought to cure him,” Maryam solemnly said. “A drastic treatment, I know, but…”

“If left to linger, the disease could turn chronic,” Tristan agreed. “Any day now he’ll begin speculating that our yearly test will not be wildly murderous and potentially impossible.”

“It might not be,” Izel protested. “It isn’t like they’re trying to get us killed.”

“It’s too late,” Maryam whispered to Tristan. “You’ll have to operate.”

“I got souvenirs for everyone on Kalkhea,” Izel mildly said. “I have been keeping them until everyone is back, but see if I don’t give yours to Song and Angharad.”

“These first years will be the finest of us, I never doubted it,” Tristan instantly pivoted.

“Every last one will be as a brother and sister to me,” Maryam tacked on without missing a beat.

Izel stared them down for a long moment, then sighed.

“Song is right,” he said. “You are bad influences on each other.”

Tristan offering a charming grin, clapped the tall man’s shoulder.

“Come now, dear friend, no need for such dolor,” he said. “Song’s ship has yet to arrive, so why don’t we go and have a look at that skimmer?”

Maryam perked up. She rather wanted that herself.

“I can tell you are bribing me,” Izel said.

“Are you saying you don’t want to have a look?” Tristan replied.

“No one said that,” Izel groused. “I only mean that it’d be polite to make it less obvious, Abrascal.”

“Ah, but then I’d lose out on the pouting,” Tristan told him.

They bickered all the way to the skimmer, this ‘flatship’, and it had Maryam smiling under her hood. Let it stay up. Much of her year at Scholomance had ceased staring whenever she entered a room, but a port full of sailors and new students would not be so domesticated.

The crowd was thick enough they had to elbow their way through, though the hired hands usually gave way at the sight of their black uniforms – the sailors knew themselves to be guests here, and that it was best to tread lightly. Other students come to either welcome back some of their cabalists or some fresh arrivals they had been forewarned about were not so meek, elbowing right back, and between that and piled crates there was quite a bit of navigation required.

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Still, they made their way to the flatship eventually. They stayed at a respectful distance, in sight of the skimmer’s captain and his animated argument with the black-clad harbor officer eyeing him stonily. The flatship’s upper structure was fascinating: through the stone ornamentation protecting the machinery from the elements one could glimpse the oval metal frame supporting the aether engine itself. She could feel the quiet ripple of the machine in the aether, its timing identical that of the spinning blades she could make out in the ‘belly’ of the crocodile.

It was a handsome machine, Maryam thought. She was not the only one so impressed.

“See those two pipes, in the crocodile’s mouth?” Izel said, leaning towards her.

“I see them,” Maryam replied. “What are they for?”

Unlike the rest of the machinery inside the oval frame their metallurgy was clearly modern. These were steel pipes the likes of which could be made in any foundry on Vesper, not something the Ancients had crafted.

“They dissipate heat,” he said. “Flatships all use the same kind of engine, a two-step aether ratchet. It’s a simple mechanism: the ratchet is made of paired materials that exist in both aether and the physical, so when a current makes it spin in the aether it also spins in the Material.”

He leaned in further, eyes gleaming.

“Half the machinery in there is meant to create an aether current that will move the ratchet, the other half is meant to turn the ratchet’s spinning into something that will move the ship,” he said.

“Only there is no material in existence that can perfectly exist in aether and the Material simultaneously,” Maryam said. “That difference will create heat.”

“It used to be that any flatship sailing for more than a day would begin breaking down from the gears dilating,” Izel confirmed. “Many elaborate fixes were suggested, but in truth the solution was as simple as inserting a compartment full of water near the source of heat and sticking pipes through the machine that will feed that water cool air.”

Aaaah. Since the translation imprecision causing the heat was minor, its real danger to the machinery came from accumulation over time. The cooled water would greatly extend capacity, if not necessarily fix the problem outright. And all for the cheap price of two pipes and basin. Tristan cleared his throat, startling them both out of their musings.

“What happens if the air around the ship is warm?” he asked.

Izel coughed into his fist.

“The sole time a Grasshopper King tried to sail a flatship down the Upratha River to invade the Someshwar it blew up, taking six princes and a fleet of river barges with it,” he admitted. “They have been restricted to seafaring journeys ever since.”

Tristan’s brow rose.

“Let us all be grateful for the winter, then,” he drawled. “All these ships around our Izcalli friends will be carrying blackpowder.”

Maryam winced at the prospect of what an exploding aether engine would do to blackpowder even as Izel began assuring Tristan of the improbability of such an accident. From the corner of her eye she saw that the flatship’s captain had finished arguing with the garrison officer, papers and coin trading hands though neither seemed all that happy about it. The colorfully dressed Izcalli whistled sharply, which had a sailor knocking on the door of the structure filling the aft deck.

Moments later a woman emerged in tailored black, Maryam’s eyes widening at the sight of her. She was a tall, striking Izcalli beauty but that was not what caught the signifier’s attention. The Izcalli had painted her face: her forehead was red, split by an unpainted line in the middle, while two thick black stripes went laterally across her face at the height of her nose and chin. Maryam frowned, for she had seen such a pattern before. On one of the small statues that Captain Totec burned fat for, she recalled.

“Izel,” she quietly said, catching his eye before discreetly gesturing at the woman now making her way out of the ship. “That face paint, what does it mean?”

The tinker followed her movement, catching sight of the woman, and in the heartbeat that followed he froze.

“Oh fuck,” he gasped out.

Immediately he tried to duck behind her and Tristan, but that was not unlike a bear trying to hide behind a pair of scarecrows. While Maryam enjoyed being treated to the rare sight of Tristan Abrascal utterly taken aback, Izel’s sudden movement actually caught the eye of the woman from the flatship and she frowned in their direction. Tristan ‘coincidentally’ stretched out, his cloak spreading to hide Izel’s face, and Maryam decided that the tinker’s generosity with her skimmer entitled him to a trick or two.

Tracing a Sign was not exactly discreet, but then Maryam was not merely a signifier. Or alone.

“Hooks,” she murmured. “Distraction, please.”

Hooks hummed in agreement against her ear, and while Maryam Khaimov made sure to keep both her pale hands visible so there could be no accusation of foul play a darker hand slipped out of her side under the cloak. Hooks pulled on a mere wisp of Gloam as Maryam’s mind rode along her sister’s to feel the Craft, watching as Hooks shaped the wisp and blew it away like a dandelion seed on the breeze. The stranger had a bag slung over her shoulder, and when that mote of Gloam landed on the leather cord it would eat through just enough of the cord the bag would come loose and distract her.

That’d been the plan, anyway.

Instead the wisp of Gloam flared and ate through a chunk of the cord and the cloth surrounding it as if someone had splashed acid on them, the Izcalli dropping her bag with a startled shout as both Maryam and Hooks froze in surprise. That should not have been possible. From a simple wisp?

“Density,” Hooks muttered.

The obvious answer, yet Maryam had watched her as she shaped the Craft and she had barely condensed the Gloam at all. How had this happened?

“Well,” Tristan evenly said, “that’s one way to do it. Now let’s get out of here before they start looking for signifiers, yeah?”

Maryam let herself be dragged along by the arm as shouting began, Izel accompanying them bent over like he was trying to roll himself up like a scroll. While fear and confusion emerged in the wake of her accidental attack, the four of them slipped into the crowd and let a procession of loudly chattering Tianxi sailors cut them off from sight. Tristan led them towards a pile of crates, which he guided a still-mute Izel to stand behind. The large man stood slightly bent over, still looking as if he just seen a ghost and said ghost had then promptly socked him in the stomach.