Pale Lights

Chapter 156 29

In the moment after the loud snap of broken bone, all Tristan could think of was the name.

Benito Giran. That'd been it. A first year from the Two Hundred Sixty-Ninth, the Stripe of a holding brigade who had been looking for seasoning. He'd joined the fighting with an eye to bringing some of the other first-year independents into his brigade when his temporary cabalists left. He'd laughed a lot, Tristan recalled, and loudly.

The hippogriff had snuffed him out in an instant, easy as blowing a candle.

Death was always abrupt, even when you saw it coming, but no one had this time. Fear spread like a poison through the ranks as the sense of invincibility that nearly forty minutes of fighting without a scratch had seeded was brutally disproved, but the bones of their force stayed in place. Ferranda and Guadalupe de Tovar stayed calm, and so long as the two in charge did not start running there was still a muzzle on the rising panic.

Orders were shouted but he barely heard them. Only when Izel was no longer kneeling at his side did he remember to get up, snatching his too-warm musket and swallowing the taste of sulfur in his mouth. Hell's own rock, a match for the Hell he had drawn here to this benighted field.

Tristan stumbled behind the others, following Zenzele's tall silhouette, and kept a twitching eye on the harpies above. He could not seem to stop running his tongue against the hollow of his missing tooth. One of the creatures shrieked and his pistol snapped up, clicked and blew and went so wide it could barely be called a shot. If felt absurd, worrying about the harpies when there were belltower bird and a patarico around, but those things were all too clever.

Those spindly legs and talons might not look like much but when they had the strength of a swoop behind them they could break a neck. Would it take longer than a single blown breath, to snuff him out?

He hurried after Izel and Zenzele, feeling all too exposed, and was halfway to the gates when he saw Angharad and the rest of the second-year Skiritai moving to bail out the Nineteenth when the belltower bird fell upon them like a spot of bad news. He could not even muster anger at her working against his plan to get some of them killed. The count, it felt like the notion of another man entirely right now. At some point he'd lost track of lemure deaths in the whirlwind, knowing only that his own shots had wounded much more often than killed.

The last he saw before entering the forge was Angharad's crew maneuvering the giant lemure into a killing stroke within the span of ten breaths, like it was the easiest thing in the world. This is why the Marshal accepted, he thought. Gods, but this is no place for a Mask. It is Militant's garden. There was some comfort, at least, in the dazed looks that feat put on the face of Yaotl and her minions. They had expected a corpse and a retreat, he thought, but not the ones they got.

That was the cruel truth of the Acallar: it might swallow the weak, the slow and the luckless but it sharpened all the others to their keenest edge. Angharad and the others had spent a year wading into death, how could they still be the same as those who had but dipped a toe into that pool?

He turned away, tugged along by Izel's broad hand, and within a moment found their first wounded of the day when he almost tripped over a shouting, wriggling man. Tristan moved on instinct, only now thinking to put away his emptied pistol.

"Up," Tristan said, sliding an arm under Frederique Long's armpit.

Guadalupe de Tovar did the same on the other side, helping up her Navigator - who was not the victim of a lemure but of their own defenses. In the jostling to enter, the small and slight Frederique had been elbowed into stumbling onto a caltrop by another student. The two of them kept pressing forward, lest they be pushed into the traps by the pressure of those behind as Frederique had been.

Keeping within the painted lines they reached the barricade, where their effort to help Frederique over the wall of gaviones was helped along by Fanyana Khosa leaning in to lightly tap the man's back as he was eased over the edge – for a heartbeat Tristan found the Navigator not... lightened, exactly, but easier to move. He waited until we'd already got Frederique moving, the thief thought dimly, almost reflexively. An amplification contract?

Half his mind seemed to have been turned into flinching and powder smoke, and still he could not stop digging into the secrets of others. Had that always been in him, or had Abuela taught it? He could not remember. Right now he felt like a man on a boat sailing down a dark river, the world extending no further than the lantern's glow ahead and behind.

Whatever the truth, the Navigator was past the wall in a moment and his captain eased him down on the other side.

"Thanks, Abrascal," Frederique rasped out, voice pained.

"It's all in the Circle," Tristan hoarsely replied, waving him off.

They were all in this together until the swords returned to the sheath, except for the Nineteenth. It bit at his guts, the thought that even in the middle of this he would be working against others and others against him. It felt... petty. Ugly. For the first time in his life, he thought of the Watch's talk of closing ranks against the dark and found a grain of truth in it.

Tristan nimbly climbed over the wall, seeing from the corner of his eye how Angharad's crew was calmly retreating into the safe path with a lethal fluidity that was almost hypnotic to behold – it was a rotation of death, the last of the three firing into the handful of lycosi dogging their footsteps before moving forward, beginning to reload, and by the time they had finished the other had fired and it was their turn to fire again.

With a simple, straightforward ease that obscured the hundreds of hours of practice it must have taken to get it right they shredded the wolf-things following and had left six corpses by the door by the time they hopped over the barricades to join the gunline. Angharad and Shalini had killed two each. Four more for his tally, whatever the Manes might will that to be. Or a god closer by, Marshal de la Tavarin.

A deity just as brutal and capricious as the patrons of Sacromonte.

Gray eyes sought said Marshal and found him already inside, near the ladders. The old man was leaning on his cane and eyeing the gunline like it was a mildly entertaining garden party, entirely unruffled. What does the sea care for rain? Besides him stood Captain Yue, to his surprise. Tristan had thought her long gone. He shook his head, drew back his gaze to the front.

Rong Ma quickly stepped into the gap left by Angharad's crew, throwing a bucket of caltrops through the safe path before setting down two of their pressure traps and withdrawing to the barricades just in time for the first shadow to be cast across the threshold. Tristan put down his musket and set to cleaning and loading Yong's pistol. He'd barely gotten the ramrod out of the barrel when the first uninvited guests began showing up at the door, but he didn't stop.

"Hold your fire," Ferranda called out. "Let the traps do their work first."

Tristan had thought it a matter of coin, when he'd learned that free companies usually used but a quarter of the barrel they'd tipped down outside when baiting lemures. That often the alchemical brew was cut with other substances. He knew better, now.

There had to be more than four dozen dead lemures outside, but more came.

Ignoring the corpses of their fellows they could have feasted on, ignoring every instinct and cleverness that should have warded them away from attacking a line of guns past a chokepoint, the ravenous things ripped their way in. Elbowing each other as the students had, but not in fear – in mindless, furious hunger. The gates first spat out a hogman, ambling forward on that falsely unsteady gait, and Ferranda's echoing order held as the lemure took its first few steps through the caltrops without catching any.

Until finally it stepped on one, the spike pinching straight thought its totters. It squealed in pain, falling over, which only had it rolling through more caltrops. It should have given the other monsters pause, if they had any sense at all.

But behind it, as if summoned by the pain, the horde erupted like a torrent of screeches and howls.

Trenti and shades first, the imps squeezing through the doorway as a skittering pack while the tall spindly shades strode over them. The imps were small and clever enough to avoid most of the caltrops – though the still-rolling hogman dragged a few into its throes – but not so clever as to avoid walking into the cloth-covered trap Rong had laid. The jaws closed on the imp, ripping through in a squelch of black ichor and staying there a full ten seconds before there was a clicking sound and it opened anew with a wet spray.

Tristan watched and felt nothing, putting away his pistol and clutching his musket close. Not pity, not fear, not joy. It was as if every shot he emptied into the enemy had turned gray a part of him, leaving only an automaton who only remembered how to clean, reload, shoot.

The horde poured into the traps, spreading out into Rong Ma's special party favors. Foothold traps that opened up again on ten second delays, false stones covering spikes, patches of a thick jelly-like acid that ate through skin and muscle, pedestal triggers with rotating hatchet blades and near the middle of the room there was even one wire-triggered tube that spat out a gout of wet, sticky flames until the reservoir ran out.

"Umbral sagrado," Alizia Salas softly cursed his right, sounding like she could not decide whether she was nauseous or fascinated. "What in the gods is in that pump-tube?"

"Tamarian fire," Fanyana Khosa told her. "Rarely used. Barrels of it tend to blow up from temperature differentials."

Rong, Tristan noted, had mentioned no such thing. But they had been very excited about that trap, which with tinkers tended to be a hint that something wildly dangerous and unstable was being plotted. It was impressive, how the field of traps shut down the horde's advance, but ultimately Tristan saw that few of the lemures actually died from it. Maybe ten, twelve? The real value of it had been to bring in and pin down the enemy, which made the front half of the forge into a shooting gallery. He felt the orders coming in his bone before they ever sounded.

"Fire," Guadalupe de Tovar called out.

"Fire," Ferranda agreed.

Tristan brought up his musket, anchored it the way Song had taught him and picked his target – an angry, screeching shade with part of its foot melted off – before cocking back the hammer and squeezing the trigger. A heartbeat later the wood smacked against his body, the gun jolting as it spat out a cloud of smoke and a lead ball that tore through the shade's stomach. Up and down the line muskets erupted, scything through the lemures stuck there like fish in a barrel.

Clean, reload, shoot.

Gods, part of him thought. They had spent a fortune and a half on blackpowder and still they were going to run out before an hour passed. It was like killing men with arrows made of gold. A scattered volley tore into the enemy, then a second, and as billowing smoke and the smell of burnt powder filled the forge Tristan saw that if it continued like this they could hold until the powder ran out. But these were just the chaff, the small and quick.

Heralding the true beginning of the siege, a massive shadow cast across the doorway. The hulking shape of the patarico filled the space whole, the one-eyed giant missing entire chunks of its torso where the blem had ripped them out. It bled black, dyeing its beard, but its hands were just as black and not from its own ichor. The patarico bellowed, the sound raging like a storm in the room, and it rushed forward heedless of what it stepped on – trap, lemure, anything at all.

"Izel," Tristan tried to shout, fingers clenching on his musket, but his voice was nothing but a dry croak.

It didn't matter. Izel was at the ready, he and Zenzele aiming the falconet at the entrance, and with a wild look on his eyes the tinker lit the fuse. It felt like an eternity before it burned through, the patarico charging their line like a runaway carriage, but soon enough-

"Fire," Izel shouted, and thunder erupted.

Before this all began, Tristan had worried that the falconets would only be able to fire a handful of times before turning useless. The great cannons that defended the Sanguine Port back home could only fire at most twice a day lest they shatter. But those were more than a hundred years old, and Izel had explained to him that nowadays a small field piece like a falconet could keep firing so long as the barrel was kept cool enough and the cannon did not crack. A crew of trained artillerymen would manage a shot every few minutes, but the less-trained pairs manning the falconets today should take about twice as long.

Rounding up, the small cannons would shoot every ten minutes.

Meaning their force would only get at most twelve shots out of the falconets before this was over. Tristan had thus asked Izel, when they were dealing with the Garrison, if it might not be better to ask for bigger guns like the culverins that Watch ships used. If they were only to have a few shots, why not aim large? Only if you want to assign ten trained men a cannon, Izel had replied. And even then, unless you buy your cannons from Ingalapur if you push them to keep firing like falconets there's a decent chance they'll blow up in your face.

Still, part of Tristan had thought it a missed opportunity that they could not bring the big guns to bear. Knowing the size of the Watch's preferred field cannons, in the back of his mind he had half-dismissed the falconet. It was the smallest cannon used by the rooks, after all, and looked like nothing more than an overlarge musket on wheels.

He'd been a fool.

The stone ball hit the giant in its belly, and there was an explosion of black gore. It had, Tristan realized with awe, gone straight through the tightly sealed layers of fat and even the patarico's spine. The giant toppled back through the doorway, like a fallen pillar, and around it was a thick splatter of ichor. Gods, it'd not even had time to scream before it died.

"Reloading," Izel shouted. "Rong, the door is yours."

Tristan swallowed and brought up his gun. He had to keep shooting, for even with the finale he had in mind he could not risk allowing the Nineteenth to pull ahead by too much. They were in the gunline, for now, but that wouldn't last. Their assigned role was to drive back whatever beasts reached the barricade.

It was like being in a trance. The heat and noise, the thickening smoke and the screeches and screams. His shoulder ached from the kickback and the barrel of his musket was burning to the touch, the flashes of light had him half-blind and his mouth was chokingly dry. He coughed, his spit tasting like iron, and fired another shot into the mass still squeezing through the door. A parade of nightmares, howling and shrieking.

He could barely tell what was happening. The harpies came down through the hole in the ceiling, at some point, only for Izel to aim that tube full of arrows he carried around and pull a string – there was a loud pop and the arrows went flying, exploding in shards of wood and steel and shredding the wings of the lemures. Another pack of lycosi squeezed in, climbing the carpet of corpses covering the tracks, only for Rong Ma to empty a load of grapeshot into their teeming mass, and leave behind nothing but fuming, bloodied flesh.

On streak of madness after another. The beasts began reaching the barricades. Tristan hacked at a shade's arm with the sword he barely knew how to use, black spraying across his face, and shouted as he pushed down the thing – long enough for Izel to pulp its neck with a hard swing. Blades were swung from behind, ichor flying, and the Nineteenth again and again reinforced the breaches – they went in swinging, a pack of grinning ghosts that ripped and cleaved and screamed just as loud as the beasts. How many were they getting? Too many.

Gods, how long had this been happening? Only sheer, icy terror of what inattention might cost him kept his eyes open, his hands from shaking too much. Corpses were everywhere, the stink was cloying, but still the creatures were coming. He fired blindly, blearily. Someone called for the next part of the plan when he did not remember to. Angharad fired at one charge and Ferranda the other, the barrels of reliable Watch blackpowder the Pereduri had spent her own coin on tearing through the walls at just the place and strength Izel had decided. With a roar the front wall of the forge began collapsing forward onto the lemures and-and there was spray of stone and mortar as something slammed its way through a chunk of falling wall a gray giant's arm ripping through as an old foe came for a visit.

A briarid. The briarid, by the great scarring still sweating blood. That fearful realization woke him from his numbness. A glance on the cannons – both reloading – and he snarled, rising even as the Nineteenth moved towards the briarid only to scattered when the thing charged through them.

Towards him, a small part of him realized with a deranged laugh. Hadn't Zenzele warned him it was keeping a grudge? And even as the furious mass of death barreled towards him, Tristan realized something. Oh, he thought. I am dead. I am in a grave. And as the bone-deep knowledge of that sunk into him, filled him up, he let out a long breath and laughed because the fear was gone. This was old hand, this was home in the worst and most familiar of ways.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

So Tristan let his mind spin and moved.

His foot hit the ground and he weaved hard right, past screaming lead, and counted means. Pistol, musket, sword, knife. Blackjack in his boot. Two packs of matches. Not much of an arsenal, to counter thousands of pounds of hatred turning and slipping across the killing floor as it tried to keep charging after him – the briarid took shots into its flank almost indifferently, driven so wild by the pariah's blood it did not even notice being peppered with salt munitions.

Tristan crossed half a dozen traps, most full of corpses, boots squelching black. He curved the opposite way the briarid had come, to the right and towards the outside, and the beast spared only a moment to slap away Rong Ma's falconet before pursuing. What to do, what to do? The moment it finished lining up a charge with him he was dead, nowhere quick enough to avoid it. He had nothing that could kill it, either, he thought as he idly cut away at a creeping trenti. How very useless of him, good only to waste a little time before – huh.

How close was that to done? Better than he'd thought, ironically, since Rong had moved over to help.

"If I die doing this," Tristan told the still-creeping imp, "it is going to look very stupid."

His ingrate confidant only hissed, leaping at his leg, but Tristan was not one to end a friendship over trifles so he ran instead of swinging a sword at it. Ran hard to the left, across the length of the forge, like a fucking idiot. The briarid screamed, pivoting to keep facing him and idly slapping its great limbs around, and when Tristan kept running across a field of dead and grasping lemures, spared the traps only by the carpet of dead flesh, it kept turning with him.

Even as he ducked below a shrieking harpy's swoop – lead flew – or tripped forward over the bloated, bloody belly of a hogman or hurt his ankle against the now-empty tube of Tamarian fire the briarid kept lining up its front for a charge. Its front moved, anyway. The back stayed in place, the great limbs there the anchor to the movement.

So when Izel and Zenzele finished loading up the shot, labor much quickened by the addition of Rong Ma and Fanyana Khosa to their loading crew, they had a stationary target.

A good falconet shot had killed the patarico like swatting a fly, earlier, but the briarid was made of sterner stuff. Still, that madman Izel actually wheeled the cannon closer to the lemure so it was almost point-blank and in a thunderous explosion an entire chunk of briarid was gone – including one of its back limbs. The thing screeched, finally hurt enough to see through the red, but by then combined labor of five people had been lining it up for a lot worse than a cannon.

Angharad Tredegar leaped from the balcony on its back without even the courtesy of war shout, landing near its largest head and plunging her blade deep into the body. The briarid tried to shake her off, but the Skiritai fell on it like wolves – the Nineteenth carved away at its limbs, Shalini blew a grenade under the belly and finally Alizia Salas, standing on thin air, caught a flung Angharad by the coat and tossed her back onto the briarid so she could rip out her saber and drive it even deeper.

Twitching like a headless ant, the beast topped forward. Silently, like the dead thing it was even though the extremities of its body had not yet caught up to Angharad severing its deeply buried spine.

Angharad let out a startled shout of triumph as she rode the beast on its way down, and for the barest heartbeat Tristan thought he saw her shape ripple. His attention was soon grabbed, though, by Alizia Salas pointing her musket at him. He blinked.

"What are-"

He flinched at the plume of smoke, throwing himself into the spilled guts of a shade, only to realize a heartbeat later she'd shot an imp sneaking up on him. Her contract running out, the Skiritai began walking down the sky like it was a set of stairs.

"Would have been real embarrassing to die to a trenti after that impressively mad run acro-" Alizia Salas began, only to be interrupted by a shot.

It wasn't enough. Feathers went flying, but Shalini only managed a shoulder shot – the hippogriff wasn't able to snatch Alizia out of the air, but it still casually ripped her throat out before flapping off. She dropped down the last invisible stair like a stringless puppet, shouts of dismay erupting across the line. Tristan was one of the first to rush to her, helping her sit as she clutched her red, gurgling neck. He was roughly elbowed aside by Guadalupe de Tovar, who was white-faced and trembling as she pressed her red scarf to the wound.

"Fred," she snarled. "I need-"

The Navigator was only a beat behind, limping and face twisted with pain but his hand already trailing Gloam. Tristan's eyes, though, rested beyond the makeshift hills made of the fallen walls. Silhouettes could be made out past the crest, dipping a toe. The briarid's fury had bought them a moment, lesser lemures scattering, but now that'd passed and the horde was gathering again.

"We need to go," he urgently said.

Captain de Tovar looked about to strike him, but she held back at the last moment. Frederique Long pressed a wriggling Sign to Alizia's neck and there was a smell of burned flesh as she began weeping. The flesh was warped and black, but it had stopped bleeding. The other two from the Second helped Alizia up, carrying her to the barricade as he covered their retreat with a shot. Soon, though the continued labor of four formed a much more fitting rearguard.

Gods, but they were so much quicker when four instead of two.

"Grapeshot loaded," Izel shouted. "Everyone back."

"Retreat," Tristan called out, climbing past the barricade. "Get down the ladders."

"The tunnel is too narrow to concentrate musket fire," Captain de Tovar harshly said. "If we go down there the lemures will swarm us before we can make it out."

"It doesn't matter," Tristan said, "because we will be leaving nothing alive behind us."

"I tracked how much powder you bought, Abrascal," Captain de Tovar snarled. "Half of what you got was used as munitions, there's not even enough left to blow up the forge!"

"That would be true," Tristan said, "if we were using only blackpowder."

But they weren't. He'd always known there wouldn't be enough, not with how many rounds they would not need to kill the lemures. So he'd looked for... alternatives. Barrels of black tar from Soriada, the kind that burned like oil and put out poisonous smoke. And then entire crates of powdered coal, that volatile mixture. It was not sold in Allazei, but it did not need to be: the forge had been full of coal, so the Thirteenth and Thirty-First had taken turns powdering it with hammer blows one hour of backbreaking labor at a time.

And there had been crates upon crates upon crates of coal down in the basement, now stocked upstairs on the balcony.

"It will blow," Angharad bluntly said, cutting through the tension. "We move down or we die. Tristan, light the fuse. Izel, cover our retreat then bring down the cannon."

"Firing now," Izel agreed, his departure ending the conversation.

Tristan glanced back that way and swallowed, for the press of lemures was thick. Surely grapeshot would fail to- a heartbeat before the cannon belched out lead, Fanyana put his bare hand against the bronze and swallowed a scream as his skin burned. The shrapnel that went flying tore through the lemures like hot, searing-white knives – trailing smoke and carving through lemures as if they were butter. Gods, what had the Malani done?

Whatever it was, he wouldn't be doing it again. Fanyana drew back his burned hand with gritted teeth, the skin already seared. It had bought them long enough, though.

Tristan was on the ladder in the next heartbeat. He climbed up as fast as he could, overhearing the second falconet get dropped down for lack of time to lower it properly. They were in full retreat now, the last of the rearguard holding out with blades as the others went down the ladder. Tristan hurried to the edge of the balcony, past the crates and barrel, to where the wick set against the wall led straight into the furnace. The explosions were in two beat – first the furnace, then the balcony.

It'd not been a sure thing the entire structure would be leveled otherwise.

Grabbing his matches, he leant over the balcony's edge and struck one. It blew out. A second, carefully shielded, let him set the wick aflame. The trail of fire towards the furnace began creeping forward. In a few strides he was at the ladder. Only three left of the rearguard and-

"Down," Angahrad shouted.

He obeyed without hesitation, and swallowed a scream when talons ripped through the back of his cloak and coat, shallowly into his skin, as a shape smoothly glided past him and back up. That fucking hippogriff. Blowing the walls had opened them all to its attentions. Only Angharad was left on the forge floor by the time he got back up, and there was no time to do it properly: he leaped down the balcony, hitting the floor in a burst of agony. Angharad did not miss a beat, killing a shade with a clean stroke before grabbing him by the waist.

"Um," Tristan began.

"No time," she said, sheathing her saber and then in the following heartbeat she was dragging up the pulley's rope and leaping down.

He was not ashamed to admit he screamed on the way down. And, typically, he ended up toppling into an empty crate and faceful of splinters when released while she landed in a crisp, textbook-perfect roll. They were the last out, the rearguard shared with the Second helping along their increasingly-pale Skiritai, and they'd only barely made it into the tunnel when the wick ran out.

Behind them, they left only fire.

--

They didn't go all the way back to camp before taking a break.

Haggard and bloodied and slightly singed, they went up the gangwalk and stopped right by the wormway entrance of the tunnel. Students sagged, dropping to the floor. Some laughed, others wept. Incredulity held court over them all, as if the last hours were not truly real. As if, standing here on that avenue under the serene light of the Orrery, it simply was not possible that they were in the same world that they had been in that other place – the one of blood and fire and death, of screaming and terror.

But they were in the same world, none could deny it. Because looking north, you could still see it: the burning hellscape the forge had been turned into lit up the horizon. Red flames roared beneath a thick column of black smoke that seemed to tether the dying grounds to the sky, spreading every higher and larger. Even Tristan stared, unsettled by what he had wrought. This was not some Antediluvian disaster, or an eldritch machinery. It had been man-made, every piece known and understood, and yet he could not help but look at the scale of it and feel terrifying estranged.

"Well," Marshal de la Tavarin mused, "that was a bracing little morning exercise."

The old man alone, of all assembled here, seemed to have been invigorated by the slaughter. There was smile on his face, a spring to his step. Even Captain Yue, who was standing behind him with a calm look, had a tightness around her eyes that spoke to fatigue. The Marshal twirled his cane, the motion just slow and flashy enough to draw the eye of everyone around, and rolled his shoulder.

"Shall we get to the tally, then?" he said. "There was a bet to settle."

Gods, Tristan had almost forgotten about that. Not that it mattered: the last blast had killed so many he could not possibly imagine losing in the final count.

"Tristan Abrascal, Yaotl Acatl," the Marshal said. "Step forward."

Tristan did, Izel following close behind until he shook his head at the other man. The crowd gathered, exhausted but never too exhausted for bloodsport – so long as it was happening to another. Tristan trundled to the front, watching from the corner of his eyes as Yaotl did the same. There was a tension to her frame, he saw, that she did not even bother to hide. The anger was painted as plainly on her skin as the colors of her house.

Marshal de la Tavarin had never been shy in favoring his own over others, so Tristan had half-expected the old man to be patting her back with words of comfort. Instead the Marshal hardly even looked at her, despite her seeking out his gaze. He barely seemed to want to be standing on the same stage. That man will forgive anything save for defeat, Tristan thought. In that regard, at least the Militant was impartial.

"I kept count of your kills as the fighting unfolded," the Marshal said, "through my own eyes and the offered Signs of the lovely Captain Yue."

The lovely Captain Yue grinned like a shark that'd been born with an extra helping of malice.

"The things we stoop down to for entertainment, in our old age," she said.

I know why Maryam likes you, Tristan thought. Yue was someone so utterly sure of her own power that it freed her. That would be like honey to Maryam, who for so much of her life had felt like a prisoner to her own impotence. Tristan was less impressed. It might be more earned than the kind of untouchability an infanzon was born to, but why should he admire someone who won power and then mostly used it to be an asshole?

"I await your verdict, then," he said.

"As do I," Yaotl spoke through gritted teeth.

The Marshal put down his cane, drummed his fingers on the lionhead.

"Your crew was in the lead by sixteen until the retreat to the second line, Warrant Officer Acatl," Marshal de la Tavarin said.

Tristan winced. He'd known holding the gap had let them wet their blades, but he'd not thought them behind by that much. Seven to four, and still they'd been left in the dust.

"Advantage went back and forth at the barricades," the Marshal continued, "but never by more than two and the final blast took at least fifty. There can be no doubt that Abrascal's crew won the contest by a tall margin."

The old man stroked his mustache.

"It was a well-executed trap," he said. "Going by the numbers, I expect you cleared up most of western Allazei in a few hours' work. And the smell of the burning tar will chase off any would-be scavengers, so once the fires die out there will be a clean path to the Old Canals."

The Marshal snorted.

"For a time, anyway," he said. "There are always more. Still, today fine work was done. Your scores will reflect as much, despite the lack of scalps brought back."

Seemingly losing interest in them, he offered Yue his arm and the two strolled away. They left behind them a silence that was like an hourglass being emptied, Tristan staying there looking up at the princess as she tried to strip his hide off him with her glare. He said nothing, not even a taunt. He didn't need to.

"You cheated," Yaotl finally snarled. "How can it be counted a scalp that you blew up powder barrels?"

"How convenient," Tristan idly said, "that the terms of the contest would change right at the end in a way that makes you win. The Marshal, our chosen adjudicator, did not consider it cheating. On what grounds do you?"

"Common sense," the princess bit out. "You never intended to win properly! It is no measure of skill to strike a match."

"We agreed to a contest of corpses, not skill," he said.

And Manes, but he could see the strings to pull. How easy it would be to make her draw a blade, to nudge her just past the line of what would be forgiven by the Watch, but he had promised. It ran against his every instinct to withdraw, but it was not worth the break with Izel. Either Tristan was wrong and the princess could be salvaged, or he was right and this was just delaying the inevitable. He raised his hands in appeasement.

"But I see you're not convinced," he said. "Fine, if you want to measure skill it can be done. Three matches, duels at first blood. I'll wager a finger on every outcome, but whatever the score it will be the end of conflict between us."

He was, of course, going to rig the damnation out of this if she accepted. He had not promised to keep the champions to the members of the Thirteenth present, even though the three members and three duels might lead her to assume it. Neither had he promised not to use the same champion more than once, or even to limit himself to using members of the Thirteenth as duelists. And would you look at that, Angharad was on friendly terms with some of the finest duelists among the second year Skiritai! Tristan was more than willing to cough out appropriate fees to keep his fingers on.

Did she see it on his face, how he was already considering how to swindle her? Or perhaps it was just instinct, the way cats hissed at ghosts. Either way, Yaotl Acatl sneered at him with contempt.

"Do you think I will fall for your tricks twice, Krypteia?" she said scornfully. "You only ever wager when you think you will be able to wriggle out of your comeuppance."

"That is the rather the point of a wager," Tristan mildly replied. "Taking a chance."

"Taking me for a ride, more like," Yaotl snorted. "I think not. Blood calls for blood."

"I offer you blood," Tristan said. "First blood, specifically, if you've the skill to claim it."

"That is not enough," she said. "Not for what you've done."

And here it was, he thought. The plain admission of what they had all known, deep down: the princess wasn't interested in a contest, really. In anything that she had a chance of losing. This had only ever been about punishing him without getting punished in turn. And now that she thought the chances of that were slim, she was no longer bothering to humor the pretense of a game.

"Twice now I've offered you a way out," he said. "I am running out of lifelines to throw you."

"You should keep those for yourself, boy," the princess said. "You'll soon need them."

And now it was done. With that line spoken in front of so many witnesses, if Tristan so much as skinned his need tripping on cobblestone she'd get the blame for it. Deniability was dead and buried. But that was not the final consequence of this, of course. No, that was only coming forward as silence followed in the wake of that casual, almost childish threat.

Izel Coyac pushed past Zenzele – strange, hadn't Angharad been next to him? - and the back of the thief's neck prickled when he saw the Izcalli stood straight. Gods, but it was easy to forget how big Izel was. Taller than Angharad and with thicker arms, broader shoulders, with a plumpness that no longer looked like softness but like weight. His eyes were no longer straying this way and that, fleeing gazes and chasing omens, but staring straight into Yaotl's own as the tinker came to stand in front of her.

"Enough," Izel said. "You were tricked, Yaotl. So be it. You were greedy for blood and fell for a ruse: learn the lesson and move on."

"My accounts with Tristan Abrascal are not yet settled," she said.

And Izel snarled, a rictus of sudden and twisting anger that had Tristan taking half a step back as Izel snatched his knife from his belt and threw it at the princess's feet.

"Pick it up, then, you bloodmad fool," he spat. "I'll pay up on his behalf. How many of my fingers will it take before you put away your fangs, Nightdaughter?"

Her face blanked.

"It is not you who owes-"

"Pick up," Izel Coyac slowly said, "the fucking knife."

"Do not think to order me, Coyac," she bit out. "Remember your place."

"My place?" he softly said.

And the Mask could see, even through the face paint, that she immediately regretted saying it. That it had been spite lashing out, thoughtless. But Izel shook his head, and though he laughed Tristan found not a grain of anything like joy in the sound. It was like a tomb sliding shut.

"My place," he repeated. "I should remember it. Fine, then."

He loosened the strap on his hip, took up his roundhead mace with a casual spin.

"Draw your blade," Izel said. "We'll let the Dialectic of Night decide it all."

She looked surprised.

"You will agree to come home after?" the princess asked.

Not realizing, Tristan thought, what she had just admitted in front of an audience of blackcloaks. Izel, though, Izel had known. And he wasn't even finished: he answered her hopeful question by laughing in her face. Looking at her expression, the Mask thought it would have been kinder to slap her.

"Come home?" he said. "You fool. There is only one thing that poison you've swallowed knows how to make, and that's corpses. So come on, let's make a fucking corpse. Yours, mine, what difference does it make? It's all a dream until made otherwise."

He raised his arm, his mace.

"So come on, Yaotl," he said. "Draw that sword, before I crack your skull the way they taught me. Let's make a truth."

"I did not come here to kill you," she said, frowning in irritation.

"I don't care," Izel tiredly said, taking a step forward.

She took half a step back before scowling, and her hand went for the sawblade at her hip. He half expected to have to hold back Angharad, but she was nowhere in sight. Ferranda caught his eye questioningly, but he shook his head at her. No, he thought. We let him finish. Let him lance the wound. Izel took another step forward and the princess half drew her blade.

"If I draw, you will lose," she coldly warned him.

"If you draw you have lost," Izel said. "Because you'll kill me, and where does that leave you? But if you don't, you've lost as well. Because you'll be admitting that all your snarling is just that. Funny, isn't it? That you were so obsessed with victory you've left yourself with only defeats to pick from."

He took another step forward and she drew, but the blade stayed down. As if to show she would not use it.

"Tell me Yao," he said. "Does this feel good? Does it feel like a victory, finally getting the fight you came here for?"

"I did not come here for this," the princess bit back. "Whatever it might be."

"Exactly what you asked for," Izel said, and swung.

Tristan saw the sheer, utter disbelief in her face. How it turned to genuine fear when she realized he wasn't pulling the blow, that it would kill her if it landed – she only barely brought up the sawblade in time, the sword dipping down from the impact and cutting into her hair.

"Are you mad?" she said.

"Furious," Izel snarled back. "That it had to come to this, that I had to use violence. That I couldn't find a better way, that it's the only thing you respect enough to listen to. But here we are."

He stepped back. Yaotl Acatl swallowed, a bead of sweat running down the side of her face.

"Kill me or leave," Izel Coyac said. "I've no longer anything else to say to you."

A moment passed, then he snorted and spat to the side and walked away to the sound of utter silence. Tristan closed his eyes, smiling, and thought that if he pricked his ear he could ever so faintly hear a crack. The first break in the glass under Yaotl Acatl's feet.

But also another crack, a subtler one. For when he saw past the crowd to the inside of a broken house a handful were kneeling down. The Second Brigade, Angharad, Shalini. All of them around the still, pale form of Alizia Salas. She must have been too close to death to keep moving. And when Guadalupe de Tovar's eyes rose from the corpse of her friend to meet his own, Tristan saw in there a poisonous flame. The death, he thought, she would have hated them for. But that there would be all this... theater happening two dozen feet away while Alizia was dying?

For that, she would be an enemy for life.