Chapter 4 |
It was a fool’s notion, so of course Fortuna heartily endorsed it.
A grim portent if Tristan had ever seen one, but he was running thin on options. There was no telling how long Lord Asher would remain on Tolomontera, which meant that if he wanted to cut through the bureaucracy tonight might just be his only chance. He set out early, taking to the streets, and swallowed his doubts. However risky this might be, it was riskier to leave things as they were. So far the… episodes had not happened during anything too dangerous, but how long could that last?
Sooner or later he’d freeze in the middle of a fight and it would get him killed. Tristan needed that shrine, and the man to give it to him was Lord Asher Modai.
Who, as he learned from some discreet inquiries, was not staying in the fort overlooking the harbor. A shame. Fort Seneca was well guarded and bristling with cannons, but the modern fortifications had been built from the bones of an older fortress so there were weaknesses to exploit. Tristan had once been tasked with getting inside as part of his lesser tradecraft class, which he achieved by crawling up a condemned latrine chute facing seaside.
That opening had been closed with fresh masonry within the week, making it clear why Hage was giving out these assignments in the first place. Naturally, Tristan had kept another idea or two tucked away for a rainy day.
It would have been simpler to use one instead of spending his evening casing the dockside warehouses, but needs must. Finding where in the neighborhood Lord Asher had made his lair was no trouble, as there were rumors in town and one of the furthest corners of the neighborhood was ringed with watchmen, but that was the end of the easy part.
Sneaking into a warehouse sounded like it would be much easier than the fortress, but most definitely was not: that little slice of Port Allazei was swarming with watchmen. Out-of-towners, since those were not garrison officers. Likely Asher’s own handpicked men and it showed, as these visitors had been taught to look out for basic Krypteia tactics.
There were lanterns on the roofs, all guards stood at least in pairs and the watch rotations were staggered so there was never more than one blind spot at a time. It wasn’t a flawless arraignment by any means, but there were further watchmen past that outer perimeter and the odds of passing the two layers of guards without being seen were low.
“We could pull it off,” Fortuna assured him, and thus the final nail was hammered into that prospect’s coffin.
The east was the weak point, there was a dead-end alley there between the small buildings that ended in a wall about halfway through. Climb that wall and you’d end up on the square of empty space that stood between Asher’s own warehouse and the surrounding edifices on all sides. Ideal, except for the part where there were watchmen in front of that warehouse’s front door who could see right where you’d land. Tristan needed a distraction.
He took until nine to make sure he had the correct guard count, which had the unforeseen benefit of testing the perimeter for him. First, around eight thirty some drunk students wandered away from the barely contained riot on College grounds and ran into the guards out in the street. The students were promptly stopped, frisked and sent away with orders to go around the guarded ring of streets.
The one useful thing Tristan learned from watching that brisk process was the numbers of the standing reserve of watchmen by the warehouse door, which was four.
The second incident took place when an errant dog wandered in, chasing some scent. One of the watchmen made to put a bullet in him, but the other stopped him and instead they sent for another guard to get some chow from the warehouse where Lord Asher had made his home and fed the ragged hound before sending him off.
“We would need a lot of cosmetics to make work,” Fortuna mused. “How’s your barking?”
He gestured rudely in response, which earned him offended squawking and a speech about how some ancient emperor had once melted down every drop of gold in his capital to make a great statue of her and he really ought to be more grateful about how she deigned to grace him with her presence. This went entirely ignored, as was only fair.
He was in a fine mood anyway, for while he thought it unlikely that the guards would twice get distracted by feeding a stray he’d learned something much more useful.
That made it twice now the answer of the watchmen at any contact with an outside force was locking down the situation and sending for those watchmen by the front door. Considering the drunken students had wandered in from the opposite end of the perimeter as the dog, this ought not to be officer initiative but standing orders. Meaning that, if anything at all happened to infringe on the perimeter, they were going to stay there and call for the reserve.
That was it, then, the play to make: any number of eyes could be fooled if you got to decide where they were looking.
The nature of the grounds where Tristan plied his work dictated some measure of restraint, such as not setting a warehouse on fire to draw out the opposition. Instead he headed to his stash just outside the Triangle and grabbed one of the dirty oil containers he kept there – the Umuthi workshop was willing to sell them for literal coppers, since otherwise they threw the stained oil out in the bay.
The thief chose his angle: southeast, where the perimeter was closest to port and the street angles sharp enough the guard would have to take detours to get at the oil. A single match set the pot aflame, and away he scampered. The dirty oil caught with a roar and began billowing black smoke up, impossible for the watchmen on the rooftops to miss.
Since a fire would not care about their pretty perimeter the guards were quick to react and send in their reserve, by which time Tristan was in that dead-end alley facing the eastern end of the perimeter. There were watchmen standing on the warehouse rooftops either side of it, but the alley was so narrow and the buildings so close together they could see nothing unless they were standing at the very edge.
The need to hurry – he had only so long before the reserve returned – warred with the absolute necessity of silence, for it would take only a single look from above for him to be found out. He landed on the other side of the wall with the softest of sounds, glancing up to find he was still in the game. Good.
Now all that stood between him and the warehouse was about thirty feet of open ground. The wooden doors of the building bore a hanging lantern and a padlock but no light came from under the bottom of the door so there should not be anyone on the bottom floor. Still, going by the front was unfeasible. He could not pick that lock quickly enough that the guards on the rooftops would not notice and if he snuffed out the lantern in front he was good as announcing his presence.
Instead he waited for the right moment, when the sound of conversation revealed guards to be looking away, and set out from between the buildings. He immediately took a hard right, going along the side of Asher’s warehouse instead of staying at the front, and found what he’d been looking for: three shuttered windows on the side, meant to let in Orrery light during the day and thus save on lamp oil.
He slid his knife through a crack and popped up the bar keeping the closest shutter in place. It opened when pulled and he climbed through the window, dropping onto a dark floor. A single glance was spared to make sure no one was waiting inside – they were not – and he closed the shutter behind him, barring it again. He stayed standing there a long moment, breath uneven, and cocked his ear for any sound of alarm.
None came. He had made it through unseen, for now at least. The thief might yet get away with this.
Getting away from the shutters and angling his cloak to hide most of the light, he cracked a match to have a look at the room. Tarp-covered crates, piles of empty baskets and a rackety-looking pulley. More importantly he found stairs leading upwards to a room nestled against the back wall, set above an empty stockroom. That, he suspected, would be where Lord Asher stayed. If he was staying here at all and Tristan had not simply taken bait, which alas was looking increasingly likely.
It wouldn’t matter if he had, the thief reminded himself. What he wanted was to make sure the papers were seen by the devil himself instead of lost in a sprawling pile at the Rookery, with the added shine of having distinguished himself by the process of getting them to him. Getting those papers into a fake residence would not be as impressive, but if he managed to ghost in and out it would still be something.
Besides, the more he thought on it the odder it seemed to him how easy it had been to find where Lord Asher stayed. As if that information had been put out for anyone asking to find, as if the old devil wanted them to try their luck.
Killing the match before it could burn his fingers, the thief crept to the back. The warehouse was not commonly used, he thought, for the piled baskets smelled of mildew and the stairs were dusty. Ten steep steps had him before the door, which he found by feeling it out had a lock barely worthy of the name. Tristan knelt in the dark, waiting for his eyes to get entirely used to the gloom, then got to it. There was no need to even pull out his tools, the skeleton key did the trick. He grimaced, as such a shoddy lock was not auspicious of his having found where Lord Asher truly stayed.
With a gentle click he unlocked the door, cracking it open for a look. It was an office inside, not a bedroom. In the dark he could only make out shapes, picking out a large desk and several chairs. Behind the desk was a large cabinet, propped up against the wall with a small table besides it bearing what must be a lamp, and not a thing more. No bed, no sign of Lord Asher. And when he waited, breath held, he heard neither breathing nor movement.
He slipped in and reached inside his cloak, taking out the sheaf of papers. Atop the desk would have to do. Tristan was not fool enough to try to open any of the drawers: if he thought it sound policy to trap his belongings when feasible, it went without saying that the ancient Krypteia devil would have veritable catalogue of nastiness to unleash on anyone who went rifling through his affairs. He set down the shrine request papers on the middle of the desk, adjusting them so they were in a neat pile as if haunted by the ghost of Song Ren, and let out a long breath. Yes, this would do.
When the match was struck, the sound was so loud in the silence of the room that the thief flinched like he had just been lashed.
The oil lamp caught, light flaring and revealing that the cabinet behind the desk was in fact a hollow shell without doors. Inside were two slender folding chairs, upon which sat two men he had no trouble in recognizing. Lord Asher’s face was inscrutable as he killed the match with a twitch of the wrist, but Hage was smiling as he sipped at his small cup of coffee.
“Good evening, Tristan,” Hage said.
A beat passed. A spurt of fear as he found Asher’s face expressionless and it occurred to him that the devil might not smile on his boldness. Control, around devils you must always be in control. They could smell it when you were not.
“Oh dear, you mean this isn’t my room?” Tristan said, putting on a winning smile. “Manes, what an embarrassing mistake. I’ll, uh, just be on my-”
“Seven out of twelve,” Lord Asher flatly said.
His brow rose.
“Pardon?”
Asher Modai, he saw in the flickering light, had the marks of an old devil if you knew what to look for. Those fine spectacles bore lenses that changed little to vision, meant instead to obscure the odd dryness and stiffness that inevitably afflicted a longstanding shell’s eyes. That slight, constant tenseness around the neck muscles that came from them being worn from the devil’s constant use of them and thus needing to be held in place even at rest.
Devil pasted the inside of their shells with solid aether to warp it, like hermit crabs remaking their shell, but there were limits to what could be done in such a way. For one of their kind to wear the same face long enough for it to be affected by age was a boast. Of control, for they had neither ripped nor mangled their shell in all this time, and of might – that in just as long they had not been killed.
How long had Asher worn this face, how long had he been so untouchable that not a single nick marked the flesh of his shell? Long enough Tristan should have known not to risk this. A word from Asher Modai would be all it took for him to disappear without a trace. He swallowed.
“I do not follow, sir,” he said.
“There was no way for the oil pot to pass as accidental,” Hage said. “Two points right off the top, you might as well have raised the alarm.”
“You have already been made aware that annealed devils can see gods, yet while you kept out of sight you did not order your divine patron to similarly stay in cover,” Lord Asher continued. “Another point subtracted.”
Ordering Fortuna to do anything had a truly terrible track record, but he could not deny the reproached imprudence past that misapprehension. He shuffled uneasily on his feet, the conversation having taken something of an unexpected turn.
“There was tracking powder on the stairs,” Hage said. “It’s all over the sole of your boots. That brings you down to eight.”
Chagrined, Tristan glanced down at said boots. Ah, so that had not been dust. He had known for some time of the existence of ‘tracking powder’, which was a fancy way of naming a fine powdered compound whose scent was particularly pungent to devils.
“And the last point?” he asked.
Lord Asher reached for the cup by the lamp, bringing it up to his lips and sipping with nary a sound. He set it down with a faint scowl.
“My coffee cooled,” the devil reproached. “Pandemonium rafflesian has to be drunk nearly boiling or it loses the effluvium.”
Tristan wanted to crack a smile or a jest, at that, but something about the way Asher was looking at him… it was what an insect being looked at through a lens must feel, the brusque and austere intensity of the study. There was no pretension of civility in the way that gaze looked through him.
“Apologies, sir,” Tristan croaked out.
Nothing on Asher’s face so much as acknowledged he had spoken. Silence ensued and Tristan cleared his throat.
“I take it that my visit was not a surprise?” he tried.
“You are one of several expected,” Lord Asher replied. “I imagine your presence relates to that petition to raise a shrine to your patron.”
This entire warehouse affair was a test, then, and not just for him.
“It is indeed concerning the shrine, sir,” Tristan admitted, then hesitated.
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Did he want to elaborate? He was not sure how much he wanted to tell the Krypteia of the nature of his ties to Fortuna. Asher’s bespectacled gaze was knowing.
“You hope it will mend the instability of your soul.”
Tristan coughed into his hand, to hide his reaction.
“Sir?”
“Our kind feeds on aether emanations, Tristan,” Hage said. “Any devil older than a century would be able to feel the lingering contamination in yours.”
That had him swallowing a grimace. A more obvious weakness than he had thought, then.
“Bleeding out the surplus into an exterior shrine is a sensible manner of handling the matter,” Lord Asher said, waving his hand as if to dismiss the whole affair. “You are not the first watchman to near sainthood before pulling back from the brink, nor will you be the last. Nothing more need be said of it.”
Tristan slowly bowed his thanks, eyes wary.
“Your request is accepted,” Lord Asher said. “Details will soon be sent. You are not the only student – or indeed watchman – to make such inquiries. That is what held back the matter, for given the connections behind some of these requests, it was judged…”
“Politically prudent,” Hage suggested.
“Indeed,” Asher thinly smiled. “It was judged politically prudent to answer all requests at once rather than let the matter devolved into a petty skirmish of influence. This inevitably delayed the process.”
That explanation, Tristan thought, was as close to an apology as he suspected a devil like Lord Asher ever got. And considering that the ancient monster was in no way forced to offer him such a courtesy, he suspected this was not entirely about the delay. A glance at Hage saw the other devil inclining his head the slightest bit. So this was in part an apology over letting the Ivory Library hunt him like a stag.
Best to spend that coin while it was still in hand, else it was good as lost.
“Might I ask, sir, as to the current state of the Ivory Library?”
Asher nodded approvingly, as if endorsing what he was cashing in his marker for.
“As of last month, two libraries and one laboratory have been closed,” Lord Asher said. “Forty-nine watchmen have been executed, twelve of them covenanters – all either College or Academy. Nerei reports evidence of favor trading with nobility in both Izcalli and the Someshwar.”
The devil paused.
“Were these exchanges not largely for research purposes, we would have purged the entire correspondence society from top to bottom,” he said. “As it is, the apolitical nature of the arrangements means much of the Ivory Library’s inner circle will survive. While that particular name is as good as dead, our assessment is that within three years they will begin organizing under some other moniker.”
Tristan’s lips thinned. Not bad news, but not glad ones either. It meant his business with those hidden few might not yet be at an end – and thus meant he needed to know why they had come after him in the first place. How fortunate that he had one of the few souls likely to have an answer to that question at hand.
“Was it ever discovered,” he said, “what drew them to target me in the first place?”
“A leak in the reports about the Dominion of Lost Things,” Lord Asher replied. “A part of your file was restricted by the Krypteia, but the office of a member of the Obscure Committee was broken into.”
The old devil’s irritation was plain and Tristan’s brow rose. Not at the leak, but that there might have been anything about what he did on the Dominion that was worth putting a seal on.
“May I ask what was found worth sealing by the Krypteia?”
“Nothing of your little conspiracies cutting up the Cerdan boys, if that is your worry,” Lord Asher amusedly said. “Or, indeed, anything about the trials themselves. It was after them, during your stay in Three Pines, that one of our officers there reported the highly unusual rate of presence from your contracted goddess.”
Tristan breathed in sharply. Fuck. How could he not have thought of that? They’d spent weeks in Three Pines with Fortuna standing at his side without a care. All it took was one annealed devil among the Watch forces there to catch him out.
“Likely they wanted to study what it was about your contract that let you avoid sainthood,” Asher said. “Perhaps your near miss over that same matter on Asphodel will lessen their interest going forward, but that is not certain.”
“So they might come for me again,” Tristan said.
“Yes,” Lord Asher calmly replied. “You remain the finest bait on the table.”
Hage cleared his throat.
“They will have less room to act, now that we have no reason to tolerate their scheming, and will have to be much more circumspect in their methods,” Hage told him. “If they get caught going after another member of the Watch, extermination of everyone affiliated is the only possible outcome.”
Tristan nodded, not all that comforted. That meant they would only act if they were certain they could take him and would grow immediately desperate at any indication of being caught. An enemy with their back against the wall was a dangerous thing, every rat knew.
“You may expect the shrine papers to be delivered to your patron tomorrow morning,” Lord Asher said. “That will be all, Warrant Officer Abrascal. You are not the only one aiming to visit us tonight.”
“Sir,” Tristan saluted.
Alas, salute or not devils would be devils: they put out the lamp and left him to make his way out in the dark, no doubt snickering all the while.
--
Restless feet took Tristan on a wander, strolling past the crumbled walls overlooking the sea.
He had much to chew on after that talk with Asher and Hage. That entire bed of troubles with the Ivory Library, it reeked of someone settling accounts within the Watch. His neck had been put on the line for someone’s grudges, and the thought was pebble in his boot. Nothing for it, he told himself. He was neither child nor nobleman, to be taken in by the lie of fairness. You lived with the cards you were dealt.
Or died.
The hour was approaching ten, festivities lighting up the night far and wide. The College party was still raging at full strength, loudly enough that if he stood atop a tall stone its echoes were louder than the noise of the tide. The strident trumpet sound he caught once had him wondering if the three scholarly societies truly had brought in a trained elephant that could pour drinks.
By the looks of it, the ceremonies for some of the other covenants had ended as well: Arsay Avenue and the streets around it were full of students. Only to be expected, given that the Abbey was minutes away on foot and only a fool would stay out late in the part of the city where the Acallar lay.
He was debating whether to head to the brigade’s room at the Rainsparrow for the night or return to the cottage when he saw her. Tristan had already half-dismissed the figure sitting on the bench by the sea when she moved her head just so and he caught sight of those unmistakable silver eyes. He’d never met anyone who had eyes quite like Song’s Ren and doubted he ever would. A second glance swept the environs to make sure she had not come out here for privacy with… company, but Song appeared to be entirely alone.
He quietly made his way towards her, resisting the urge to try and startle her. Lemures sometimes slipped their way past the patrols to this part of town, and he did not fancy being shot – or tossed into the cold waters of the Trebian Sea. He cleared his throat well short of her, his prudence rewarded by the pistol that immediately appeared in her hand as if by magic, and met her wary gaze with a cocked eyebrow.
“If you are brooding, Song, I must say that the view here is a sharp downgrade from that garden atop Black House,” he said.
A twitch of the lips.
“Times are tough, Tristan,” she solemnly replied. “Not all brigades can afford a fine view.”
He closed the last of the distance, sitting at the other end of the stone bench, and noted that beneath her cloak she was still wearing her black ballroom dress. Fresh off the officer masque at the Galleries, was she? It wasn’t the longest walk here from there, but neither was it the short.
“You’re quite a ways off,” he said. “Did the ball end early?”
“It will last until the early hours of the morning, I expect,” she said. “I wanted fresh air.”
Something about the way she said that, the pronunciation… Were her cheeks flushed? Tristan squinted at Song, who sat with the slightly off straight back of someone too aware of how they were sitting.
“Song Ren,” he slowly said, “are you drunk?”
Silver eyes stared him down haughtily.
“I am not,” Song replied.
A beat, then she dissolved into titters.
“Maybe,” she added. “They served baiju, I had a few cups.”
Millet wine? When sold in Sacromonte it was not considered a strong drink, but supposedly every corner of Tianxia had its own take on the liquor. Smoothing away the edge of unease he felt at the sight of Song’s tipsy giggling, Tristan cleared his throat.
“I take it the evening went well, then,” he said.
Song proudly straightened, regardless of the fact that her spine was already fit to serve as a ruler.
“I won – we won – third place,” she told him.
He raised an eyebrow at the lack of elaboration.
“In your yearly Stripe rankings,” Tristan guessed.
She grinned, a rather unnerving sight – for the lack of control implied, if nothing else. It was like watching a stone tower bob in the wind.
“First Brigade took first, Ninth Brigade took second,” Song said. “Only off by a single point, Sebastian Camaron was livid. But we got third, and we crushedthe Second Brigade by a whole ten points. A massacre!"
Song snickered.
“De Tovar looked like she was going to flip the table,” she happily said. “Who’s coasting by on luck now, you yiwu shrew?”
The Tianxi sneered, drawing in on herself to – oh no. She was going to imitate someone. There would be no quarter given.
“Oh, my aunt is a marshal down south, I have jewelry made of tomic alloys,” Song parroted in a deep voice. “I complain there is not enough pepper in my meals because I think it makes me look sophisticated.”
Tristan made a note to look into where the Second Brigade lodged and how good the lock was on the door. If there was no signifier in that cabal, tomic jewelry seemed like something he could pawn at the Umuthi workshop in town for very tidy sum – and expect silence after, lest whatever the tinker used the materials on be scrapped to take them back.
“I do not think,” he noted, “that I will let you live down that for at least a month. I might have to arrange a Khaimov chorus rendition of it.”
Hooks was always game for making sport of others and Maryam would know it to be her solemn duty. His captain waved him off.
“Gibe all you want, it is a good night,” Song said, then grimaced.
His eyes narrowed.
“Something the matter,” he said.
That could have been a question, but he did not phrase it as such and she did not pretend it was.
“I,” she said, then licked her lips. “It’s nothing.”
“Nothing killed the wind in the sails of a full-blown Ren gloat,” Tristan noted. “That makes it quite the something."
“I don’t gloat,” Song muttered, lying. “And it is a family matter, nothing to concern the Thirteenth.”
Tristan would have been more inclined to take her at her word regarding that if ‘family matters’ was not a term that could be made to encompass a dawning curse god trying to poison the entire Ren bloodline and anything in the general vicinity of it. It was his guess that a deity made of literal hatred might not be the most discerning of entities regarding collateral damage.
Not that Song was to be moved on the subject, since for all that she liked to pretend it was for the cabal’s safety she kept silent he thought it more because of a twisted sort of shame over the whole matter. There was no arguing with shame, Tristan knew, it was trying to pet a porcupine. You had to convince the critter to flip to get at its belly.
“Use it as an excuse to sink Maryam’s boat,” he advised. “The damn thing will see us all thrown into debtor’s prison otherwise.”
She snorted.
“It will start earning coin when she is finally allowed to sail it,” Song loyally said.
“You know it won’t,” Tristan said. “She can tell herself whatever she likes, but the truth is that she wants to ship goods for the Watch on a largely wild island while barely knowing how to sail and using an untrained crew that will regularly have other demands on its time. It will be difficult, irregular work at best and the profits will be meager.”
Debt was a quicksand he had seen drown many a man, and Maryam’s nonchalance over the matter had him concerned. It was very nobleborn of her, a thought distasteful enough he did his best to bury it every time it crawled back to the front of his mind.
“If not for Izel offering his time she would be in trouble,” Song conceded.
Quite the understatement, that. Maybe if a bargain had been made with another Umuthi student the costs of maintaining the skimmer could have been kept at merely unreasonable, but for a proper tinker’s time? It would cost more than even their full brigade funds could bear. Throw in another year of this and Izel would have freely given services worth enough the Izcalli could have bought a boat of his own.
“She should sell the bloody thing to the Umuthi, I told her, but she wants to keep it for reasons of her own,” Tristan sighed.
Maryam had not elaborated but he could guess. A skimmer was likely the only sort of ship in Vesper that could cross the Aetolian Ocean and reach ‘Juska’, the northern continent where she was born, without fielding a crew of at least a hundred.
“She wants to go back someday,” Song said, echoing his thoughts. “To sail beyond the Broken Gates.”
Where the last of the Triglau still lived free, or so it was said. He felt a twang of fear at the thought – not at the journey but the thought that if she ever sailed through those Broken Gates it would be to never return – but choked it down. This would all be years away, if it ever came to pass. Making it through his time at Scholomance was hardly guaranteed, much less anything beyond that.
“I find it difficult to understand her urge to return,” Tristan admitted.
Silver eyes flicked his way.
“You would not return to Sacromonte, given the chance?”
He looked away from her gaze and out into the dark of the sea, broken up only by the colored Orrery lights, and thought of scores yet to be settled. There were still names on his list.
“Only for business,” Tristan said.
“I will always find it strange how little you care for your home,” Song muttered. “I can understand why, at least in principle, but not truly embrace the thought.”
Because in your heart of hearts you still think the Republics have the right to judge you, he thought, and that must mean they are above you. Tristan had no such fancies about the Six, or any of the lesser infanzones squabbling at their feet. A fat vulture had grown no closer to being an eagle.
“There is little to miss from the Murk,” he said. “Not that you would know much of such places. You are a country girl, no?”
She slowly nodded.
“Though not so far away from the city of Mazu itself,” Song said. “The estate was out of the way enough we drew little attention when we settled there.”
Estate. For all that Song thought herself impoverished, she had been anything but. Tristan knew it was different in Tianxia, where much of the land was commonly owned by families and clans, but no one who had grown up with servants to attend them could be called poor. But we always pay attention more to what we lost than what we have, don’t we?
“How long has it been since you last went?” he asked instead.
A long silence. Ah, Tristan thought. So he had been right after all. Song finally sighed, recognizing where he had led her and that it had been done on purpose even through the drink.
“They sent money,” she admitted.
“Would that I had your manner of troubles,” he drily replied.
“To pay for the journey to Mazu, so I might visit them over the break,” Song elaborated.
His brow creased as he tried his hand at sketching out the journey.
“The timing would be difficult, no?”
The Watch offered free berth on several of their ships that would dock in port over the next three days, which would take students to nearby ports where they might then buy a berth on a ship headed where they truly wanted to go. Still, Mazu was across the better part of the Trebian Sea from Tolomontera. Mind you, the city was also one of the largest trade ports on that same sea so the time she lost in distance would likely be made up by the ease of finding a ship willing to sail there immediately. There were islands mere days away from Tolomontera that it would take a month to reach simply for lack of captains willing to head there.
“If I head to the estate after making it to the port, I would have perhaps a little over a week in their company,” Song said. “If they join me in Mazu, twice as long.”
She sighed.
“All this assuming I leave on the first ship and return on the last.”
Knowing Song she would likely cut some days off from either end of the trip as a precaution, but it was telling she would phrase it that way in the first place.
“You do have matters to discuss with them that are best not put to ink,” Tristan noted.
“Mask,” she accused.
He shrugged, for it was true enough. As was the fact that her arrangement with the ambassador she had coerced on Asphodel was something dangerous to mention in anything but whispers.
“I am not certain I want to leave the brigade for three months,” Song said. “We are only just beginning to work as smoothly as I would like and-”
“And you are clever enough to know there will be general insurrection if you try to drill us during the break,” Tristan said. “Try again.”
“Given our finances-”
“We won’t get a copper more for you staying,” he said. “You are running out of powder charges, Ren.”
That got him a scowl.
“Fine, I’m not sure I want to go back,” Song bit out. “Not when I have nothing to show for my leaving.”
“You silenced talk that would have seen your family killed,” Tristan pointed out. “That is very much something.”
Her face clenched like fist.
“It does not bring me any closer to redeeming our name, either,” she said. “I did not put on the black to simply allow us to keep living like lepers.”
Song slumped back against the bench.
“Mother wrote we have family matters to discuss,” she told him. “What if one of them took sick? They are closer to the curse, Tristan. Physically, I mean. Purging still works for me, but what if…”
He let her gnaw at it without speaking, watching as she tucked back a strand of hair that had come loose from the breeze.
“I don’t know that I can sit there watching one of them die, doing nothing, and then just… come back here to take classes, like nothing happened,” Song whispered.
That had his stomach clenching. He knew a thing or two about that, sitting in a room that might as well be a tomb and then having to… go on. Have a day, have a life, like it was not still happening while he looked away.
“The helplessness is the worst part,” Tristan quietly said. “Having all that anger and nothing to turn it on, nothing for the whip save your own back.”
He could feel her gaze on him, all too heavy, and stubbornly looked out into the dark.
“Not your father,” Song said. “Your mother?”
How strange, he thought as he looked out into the dark, that he would pick at that old sorrow. He had not spoken of it since Abuela took him under her wing. But, to his astonishment, Tristan found he trusted Song Ren – over this, at least. To understand, to know what not to say. To never speak of it again after tonight.
“Consumption,” he forced out. “It took her more than a year to die.”
Not that there had been much of Mother left at the end. He remembered the smell, most of all – the sharp bite of clavos smoke, the reek of cheap liquorspilled on the sheets. A threadbare, rotting corpse in a threadbare, rotting room. Too weak to even cough.
“I’m sorry,” Song softly said.
“La muerte elegante, men call it,” Tristan said. “But there was nothing elegant about it, Song. It was just slow, painful rot. You hate yourself, by the end, but you hate them too – because you are just as much a prisoner of it as they are.”
His fingers clenched.
“I was glad, when it ended,” he said. “There was - it was unkind, to us both. And still, sometimes, I wish...”
Tristan swallowed.
“Just an hour at her bedside, holding her hand,” he said. “One more breath, one more smile.”
Song watched him in silence.
“It’s not for me to tell you what you might regret,” he hoarsely said. “But think on it, Song. Whether it will haunt you more to have seen it, or to never have gone at all.”
Song Ren slowly nodded, and for a long time neither of them spoke. They watched the tide lapping darkly at the shore, felt the wind running through their hair, until exhaustion and cold seeped into his bones. It had been a long night.
“To have never gone at all,” Song whispered.
They left it at that.