Chapter 74

“It doesn’t matter,” Maryam snarled. “It doesn’t matter.”

Hooks spoke not a word, only staring at her seemingly stuck halfway between terror and astonishment. That made it worse, in a way. Maryam’s nav still held her and she could feel every fluttering thought, like bird wings against her fingers. She looked at the pale girl in the pale dress, and though she tried not to see it there was no denying the obvious: the cheekbones and the eyes, the lips and even the shade of hair.

How could she ignore she was staring at her sister when Hooks’ looks were so close to her own? She had been able to resist the resemblance before, deem it just another thing her enemy had stolen from her, but now that she knew it was rightly hers? Now she could not help but find Mother in the harsher cast of Hooks’ chin, in the way the thinner lips found a sneer easier than Maryam’s own.

“I – I didn’t know,” Hooks said. “I didn’t remember. I thought I was…”

The aether around them rang out like a bell, a titan’s knock on a box. The currents blew through them both unkindly, but neither broke the stare binding them. Blue on blue, neither daring to blink. Maryam’s hand tightened around her nav, all ten rake-rings biting into the aether.

“It’s too late,” Maryam said. “I called on the Threefold Crowns to bless these grounds for the purpose of contest between us. It’s begun, Hooks. Even if one of us stops-”

She swallowed. Whoever gave in would be at the other’s mercy, fully and utterly. Victor takes all, that was what she had carved into this moment.

“And if we both stop,” Hooks quietly said,” it burns us both.”

It wouldn’t be a draw, if they both gave up. That wasn’t the taint that would be released into the aether, that would be fed to the gods of the Threefold Crowns through the chalk marks that had consecrated these grounds. It would be taken as two defeats, running against the very purpose of the ritual, and that made backlash certain. Maryam licked her lips.

“It might not be lethal,” she slowly said.

“But the blowback will strike at what we wagered,” Hooks replied. “Your nav. The Cauldron.”

Maryam did not answer, for while she did not have all the knowledge that her… sister could call on, she had enough to know she must be right. The destruction of her nav would end her ability to signify, even if it didn’t kill her – which it well might, if her soul was scoured by the wrath of gods instead of something more delicate. And for Hooks, losing the Cauldron would be like getting most of her brain cut out.

And it’d destroy centuries of Izvoric learning in the same stroke.

She licked her lips again, looking for a cheat, but no matter how she twisted and shook the situation in her hands the conclusion stayed the same: it was too late. Surrender would be letting Hooks devour her, opening all the fortress gates and throwing down her arms. Giving up would destroy them both, or close enough. She looked into her sister’s eyes and found there the same ending she had reached.

“You can preserve everything, if you devour me,” Hooks bitterly said. “Everything except me.”

Maryam felt sick. This should have been a triumph. The thief destroyed, the Cauldron reclaimed and her signifying brought to a peak that would eclipse all her peers. She’d known the price she would have to pay too, even though she couched it in maybes when speaking with others: absorbing so many memories would change her in some ways, dilute the boundaries of what was ‘Maryam Khaimov’. She could have made her peace with that, made herself see it as the process that turned a caterpillar into a butterfly.

Instead, to get it all, she had to murder her sister on the altar of the Threefold Crowns and drip her blood into Mother Winter’s empty bowl. And who under firmament was more rightly reviled than a kinslayer? Not that she had not already crossed that line once, today taught her.

“Again,” Maryam managed, nauseous. “I just need to murder you a second time.”

Once in the womb, a second time outside it. A never-born soul made into power for her to wield.

“You get everything you want,” Hooks said. “Again. I see a way out, a chance to live, and again-”

She bit down on whatever else she had been about to say.

“Don’t stretch it out,” her sister bleakly said. “You’ve already won. Cruelty now is a choice.”

I’m what’s left, Maryam had claimed but moments ago. That everyone else was dead had been meant to be an epitaph, not a prophecy, but oh when was a ritual under the auspices of the Crowns ever anything but a bitter brew? She could be all what was left, all of it down to the last drop of the Cauldron, but only if she murdered the only other soul to make it out of the wintersworn. The only other survivor, her own sister.

And the reasons came to her legion, orderly and ironclad. Hooks was already dead, or close enough. The soul had been made malformed and incomplete, atrophied by years of being starved of anything but the scraps Maryam accidentally fed her. And had Hooks not ruined years of her life, however unknowing? Had she not, in a way, killed Mother by sliding in the knife of a final disappointment she would never overcome?

Besides, was it not the right decision to sacrifice a single soul to preserve the Cauldron? And for Maryam to be armed with all the power she could wield, was it not wiser than casting two mutilated souls out in the wild where both might perish? There were rows and rows of reasons, each more sensible than the last.

Blue eyes looked into a mirror. Be a coward, Tristan would tell her. Do the right thing, Song would expect. And Angharad… There was no need to wonder, for the Pereduri had already told her. No one else can balance those scales for us, can they? And that last thing, it had her fingers balling into fists because she was letting someone else balance the scales. No, not someone – something.

“It’s not really a choice, is it?” Maryam rasped out. “To be on either side of the knife. You tell yourself it is, because once you’ve been on the sharp end you never want to be again. So you reach for the handle, and no matter how ugly it gets you can silence the voice of conscience with the reminder of much worse it was when you were the one getting cut.”

Her fingers trailed against the wood grain of the roof on which they both knelt. Hooks watched her in silence. Already beaten, and harshly enough the fight had left her.

“But it’s not really a choice,” she said. “It’s just moving around the parts. The real choice you made is the knife. It’s cramming the entire world into that vicious little equation – murderer, knife, victim. You play the game and you think you’re winning because you’re not the one getting cut, but you’re still part of the same… scheme.”

Her nails were too short so scratch at the panels, but she clawed at them anyway.

“And you chose to be part, this time.”

Hooks said nothing. Wan, silent. Utterly at her mercy. Her fear fluttered against Maryam’s nav like a dove in a wolf’s maw.

“I should kill you anyway,” Maryam quietly said, rubbing at her eyes. “You get to take me otherwise, that’s what this ritual is. But the only reason we’re down here with that knife between us is because I dragged us into this, Hooks. Because I made that choice. And I’m just… tired.”

She swallowed. That confession had come unbidden.

“Of the hate,” Maryam said. “Not because they don’t deserve it, but because I have been carrying that hate with me for so long I can’t remember who I am without it. Because I won’t get to know who I might have been without it, and gods but I hate them for that too.”

She weakly laughed.

“There’s no forgiveness in me,” Maryam said. “The Kingdom of Malan will have a foe in me until the day I die, and I will never be anything be proud of that. But you… “

She shook her head.

“You’re dried blood on the altar of empire, same as me. And I was going to do the same thing to you because an empire’s not a crown or a line on a map, it’s fucking disease.”

Her eyes closed.

“It slips into you when you touch it,” Maryam whispered. “Even if that touch is a hand strangling you. It whispers that the tools of the enemy are the tools of victory, that only by embracing their methods can you match them, surpass them.”

Her jaw clenched.

“But that’s just another defeat,” she whispered. “That’s telling them they were right, that they were allowed to do what they did and no one has a right to face them and look them in the eye and tell them: this was evil. This was evil and you knew and you did it anyway.”

There was war, and Maryam knew how ugly war could get. What fighting for your freedom looked like when it wasn’t in the folk songs. But she wasn’t at war with her sister. And what she had come here to do here tonight, it was evil and she knew it. She had known it all along.

“The world,” Maryam Khaimov whispered, “is more than the two ends of a knife. And my enemies do not get to make me less than what I am.”

And with the last whisper, she let it go.

Everything. Grasp and Command, her will and her anger and her fear. The nav went slack between them and she felt disbelief slither down the chord. Hooks tugged at it once, as if calling a bluff, but Maryam wrestled down the urge to tug back. Narrowly.

“Do it,” she croaked. “Gods, do it now before I can change my mind.”

And her sister did. Her soul-effigy, years in the making, the brush through which she painted the Gloam, was pulled in like a child haphazardly collecting a rope. Hooks was yet incredulous, mistrusting even as she pulled to the very end of the nav and hastily bit down.

Maryam screamed. Screamed in pain as white-hot knives of pain tore at the inside of her head.

“Do it,” she snarled, fists hammering against the roof. “End it, gods damn you.”

And her sister tore at the nav, teeth tearing into flesh fearfully as she severed the soul-effigy by consuming what tied it to the rest of Maryam. Bite by bite, the pale girl writhing in suffering and screaming against the roof as a third of her very soul was torn out. Pain flensed her body, limbs and innards and gods her left eye felt like it had been boiled out. Hooks could have taken more, even through the torment Maryam knew that. Ripped more of the soul out, winner takes all. But a third had been offered, and a third was taken as Maryam Khaimov screamed her lungs out.

Only when the teeth finally bit through the chord tying the both of them together, when the suffering cut out, was there finally a moment of stillness.

Maryam tried to reach out, face on the ground, but she was… contained. Her sixth sense was gone, the eye that saw through the bounds of the Material punctured. There was no longer a nav for her to move, to feel through. There was only a wound now, bleeding into the aether, and the prison that was her feverish, sweat-drenched body. She moaned and opened her physical eyes, but her vision remained dim. Was the room gone dark? Only then she blinked, and terrified nausea reared up as she realized that the room was the same as before.

She had gone blind in her left eye. She reached for it, trembling, and found the flesh stiff. Unnatural. Dead. A sound ripped free from her throat that straddled the line between weeping and laughter.

“And why should you get anything for air?” she asked the silence.

Oh, the arrogance of her. She had told Angharad that a sacrifice had to cost you something. She had made her sister whole, restored some of what she had taken from Hooks unknowingly and then almost taken again on purpose, but it couldn’t be enough. Not, why would it be enough that Maryam should lose the ability to signify, to use the Gloam? No, her body must be wracked as well. Made sickly and an eye gone blind.

Maryam had made a life, made a woman whole. How could it cost her anything less than a life ruined?

Of Hooks there was not a sign. To her own surprise, Maryam was darkly pleased by that. Good. Let her leave this place, let her make it out. Let at least one daughter of Volcesta escape the shadow of that city’s ruin, of that world’s end. May Hooks reach the far end of Vesper and never once look back. She tried to rise to her feet but the world spun and she dropped back down on her hands and knees, noisily emptying her stomach on the roof.

Wiping her mouth against her sleeve, she heard footsteps. Glancing up, she saw in the glow of the last remaining lantern that someone was walking out of the alcove facing her. Hooks? Had she returned? Only the silhouette stopped at the edge of the traced chalk, erasing shapes with the sole of their boot, and Maryam saw it was not her sister at all.

It seemed a man, until she took a closer look.

The clothes were worn and old-fashioned, striped green cloth fraying at the edges and tall thick boots coming apart at the seams. Long hair like ragged seaweed fell all over the face, on angular features yet veiled by shadow. Then he crossed into lantern light and what she had thought skin pulled taut was revealed not to be skin at all but bare bone. On the right side of his face, from the brow to the lip, dead flesh had sloughed off the face. Like a mask peeled off.

And the eye, the eye was not empty. Some glinting ruby was in it, but it looked… wet. As if alive, while the matching flesh eye on the other side seemed strangely dead. She knew what she was looking at. Who.

“Hated One,” Maryam greeted, still bent over her own vomit.

She could not have run away even if it would have made a difference, and it wouldn’t have. The corpse-god paused in his steps, looking up at the ceiling, and breathed in deep of dead lungs. Something rattled inside them, not quite a snake’s tail nor a man’s last breath.

“No,” the god said. “Not anymore.”

She flinched at the words. The voice, it sounded like any man’s but that undertone… Even bereft of her nav she could hear the whispers in it, the faint scream of someone buried alive and desperately trying to claw their way out. Had her stomach not already been empty she would have emptied it now.

Trembling, she pushed herself up and though her vision swam she managed not to fall again. The god resumed his advance, slowly. Unhurried. There was nothing natural to that gait, for all that its steps were not clumsy – they were brusque, like a jolting puppet that the puppeteer only pulled at half-heartedly. He stopped when he reached the bottom of the tower on whose roof she still stood.

“You aren’t her either,” the god said, sibilant whispers trailing in the wake of his words. “The woman who made a shrine of these grounds. Not anymore.”

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

She swallowed. He could tell, then, that she no longer had a nav.

“I’m-”

“Bleeding,” the Odyssean said. “Dying. Soon you will be one of mine.”

That last word rippled like a blow. The whispers grew louder, a thousand thousand secrets stolen from graves and there for the reaching, but she gritted her teeth. She was already dying, dead. There was nothing left to fear and she would not pass from this world cowed.

“Oh,” Maryam softly said, “I think not. The shores of my birth are far, but not so far I will not return to them in death. It is the Nav for me, Odyssean.”

The god laughed, a sound like crumbling rust.

“My gut is closer, child,” he said. “And my grasp stronger. But you are not offal for my plate.”

“What am I, then?” Maryam challenged, too exhausted to care for consequence.

“Worthy,” the Odyssean said. “An apostle of ambition, fooled into putting down her blade. But I will show you, child.”

Maryam blinked, for that last word had echoed like a clap in an empty cavern, and in the fraction of a moment she closed her only living eye the god moved. Gone from the bottom it was now on the roof, facing her. He was so close now, mere feet away. His visage burned to behold: an eye of flesh and an eye of red, set in pale bone. Was it truly human bone? Something whispered in her ear it was not. That it belonged to something older, hungrier.

“What was taken from you can be forged anew,” the Odyssean said. “A life is currency, Maryam. It is meant to be spent.”

She blinked in surprise. Intent dripped from every word he spoke, like ink seeping into the water of her mind. She glimpsed truth, sifted through the influence for implications.

“You offer,” Maryam slowly said, “to help me forge a new nav. Out of…”

A sacrifice, she did not quite dare say.

“We will find you a soul deserving,” the Odyssean said, sounding almost fatherly.

A warmth in her limbs, chasing away the hollow ache, but it felt… wet, she realized. Not like a hearth but instead like warm water. Or blood.

“The lictor whose stare slighted you, perhaps. Or that meddling majordomo, so insolent.”

Fatherly, he sounded, and that was what broke the spell. Maryam remembered her father and Goran Khaimov would have never spoken like this. He’d hated fighting, hated death. Not so much as to be weak, but he had always preferred trade and peace to the clash of arms. Gold is sweeter than iron, daughter, he liked to say. It does not rust.

“Why?” she croaked out.

Why was it bothering to offer her a bargain, however poisoned?

“There is death in your footsteps,” the corpse-god said. “It whispers, it schemes. You will make a fine witch for the court of my Ecclesiast.”

It came as twitch in the shoulder, first, but the convulsion spread. Maryam held her ribs and laughed, laughed in the old dead thing’s face, for how great a fool did it think her?

“You lie,” she said. “You are a thing of death, and death is all you peddle.”

It was trying to undo something, she thought. It did not fear her, not exactly, but there was some… detail she was missing. How absurd, she thought, that when she was at her most powerless such a great thing would be wary of her. She might as well be an ant, faced with the might of the Hated One’s new face.

“I am a god,” the Odyssean said, and he loomed over her now. “Truth is mine to ordain.”

I am a daughter of the Craft, she thought. I deal not in truths but in the lies we call miracles. The corpse raised a commanding hand.

“Kneel,” he ordered. “Kneel and rise remade in my service.”

“I am the least of the Akelarre, Odyssean, but a witch still,” Maryam told him, and grinned a death’s grin back at Death. “My knees do not bend to the inevitable, much less the likes of you.”

“Then you will fall,” the Odyssean said, “and rise a servant still.”

“No, I think not,” she said. “I think, corpse-god, that I will be a poison in your veins so long as anything at all remains of me.”