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Chapter 22
🕑 Added 2025-08-15 16:04:15 +0000 UTCAngharad was first into the burrow.
Boar moles were almost as broad as they were tall, so while the ceiling on the tunnel was so low she had to bend her elbows Angharad did not feel too cramped at the shoulders. It had been a concern, given that she had a broader back than most. Mother’s inheritance: she’d liked to say that Tredegars were built to shoulder their way through life. Still, it would have been something of a blow to Angharad’s pride were she found to be broader than any manner of boar.
Keeping her head low and hoping her hat would keep the worst of the crumbling dirt out of her braids, she crawled forward and down. On three limbs only, however, as she had to carry forward the small lantern that Tristan had lit. The air in the burrow had begun to feel fresher and cooler despite the burning oil near her face, hinting she must be near the end. Moments later, a cut of light revealed that though the tunnel turned left the backwall had crumbled: the lantern glow’s rolled past the edge, into what seemed like dark cave. The larger tunnel Tristan had found.
Angharad crawled up to the edge, glancing inside – there was nothing but dirt and stone – then put the lantern’s handle in her mouth and twisted around in the tunnel until her feet were first. The cloak fought her even more than the sides of the burrow, but after a few moments of indecorous wriggling about she was set to drop down. She landed on her feet about ten feet below, on a bed of tightly packed dirt, and pricked her ear. The oil inside the lantern wobbled slightly, the light swaying as it did, but the paleness cast on the walls revealed nothing but dirt.
“Safe?”
Shalini’s head had poked past the edge, one of her pistols in hand.
“For now,” Angharad said. “We can proceed.”
She brought up her rifle, just in case, and cast a look around as Shalini made her descent. She could see why Tristan had hazarded a guess this might be a smuggler’s tunnel: the ceiling was more than ten feet high and almost as large. And while the dirt was tightly packed, Angharad saw there were small marks on it. She knelt, running a hand against it and found there were small regular indents of an almost oval shape. Some kind of digging tool, or perhaps a tamper to pack the earth? The indents were too regular to be from regular spadework.
In moments Shalini was down with her, Izel not far behind, and while the tinker helped down Zenzele she took a closer look at the walls. They had the same indent marks as the floor; the ceiling did too.
“That’s either some Antediluvian tool or a creature’s work,” Shalini noted. “Too even otherwise.”
Angharad, still kneeling, leaned closer to the slight angle where the floor of the tunnel touched the wall. The indents there were noticeably smaller. More than one creature, or different sizes of the same tool? She hoped it would be the latter, because while most of the tunnel was dirt some sections were stone and they carried the same marks at the rest. Teeth that could chew through stone would chew rather more easily through flesh.
“A creature that can carve through stone,” Angharad muttered. “I cannot remember one on the Steel list.”
Not that the Marshal had collected every fearsome monster under firmament, despite what had no doubt been a spirited effort to do so.
“Neither can I,” Shalini said, then hesitated.
Angharad glanced back at her, seeing from the corner of her eye how Tristan dropped down with a cat’s light feet. He must have been trained in that, she thought.
“What is it?”
Shalini cleared her throat.
“Speaking of the Steel List,” she said. “You never ended up setting a date for the slaying crew meeting you were putting together before Misery Square.”
“It has somewhat fallen by the wayside,” Angharad admitted. “The Marshal has barred me from the Acallar due to unforeseen circumstances, so I cannot lend a hand to the effort.”
Since Marshal de la Tavarin had dismissed Skiritai classes for the second years this week in favor of splitting his time between Lamb Hill and the underclassmen, Angharad had not had to tell any of her guildmates as much until now. Still, much as she would have preferred saving herself the slight embarrassment it had been bound to come out eventually.
“Huh,” Shalini said. “Then what will you do for lessons?”
“He has prevailed on Professor Nandi Khota to tutor me instead, though I will have to pay a fee,” she replied.
Angharad had no complaints in that regard. The Skiritai half of the wedded pair teaching them Warfare might not be a formal swordmistress, but Angharad suspected that if she reached for the title she would find obtaining it trivial. Angharad wasn’t even the only student to have such an arrangement, apparently. Shalini crossed her arms, clearing her throat.
“I’d suggest putting the word out that you’re ending the plan,” she said. “There’s been some grumbling about you dragging your feet.”
Angharad blinked. Most crew captains she had approached were part of either the hunt or the exploration now, why would they- no, not just most. All but one.
“Lindiwe Sarru?” she asked.
“Sarru’s ambushed me to ask about it,” Shalini acknowledged. “If you Unluckies didn’t have a secret house that no one can find, I expect you would have found her waiting for you in the street some morning.”
“I asked her in person, it would be polite to desist in the same manner,” Angharad conceded. “I will take care of it next firstday, my thanks for the reminder.”
Shalini shrugged, looking aside.
“I could come with you when you do,” the gunslinger airily suggested. “Make sure you two don’t get lost in the snippiness and actually talk.”
It occurred to Angharad, somewhat belatedly, that she might have missed a rather straightforward explanation for Shalini’s noticeable dislike of Lindiwe Sarru. Straightforward but flattering. She cleared her throat, rising back to her feet as she smiled at Shalini.
“Why, you al-”
She was interrupted by a hand protruding between her and the curvy gunslinger.
“I’ll take the lantern,” Tristan said, leaning it to ease it out of her hands. “Keep your hands free for the rifle.”
Angharad half-heartedly glared at the thief, who was being inconveniently helpful, and so did Shalini. Well, a vaguely sinister tunnel in the middle of lemure territory was perhaps not the best place for that conversation anyway. It would keep.
They set out armed and ready. Angharad taking point rifle in hand, Shalini and Tristan close behind with lantern and pistols while Zenzele and Izel took the rearguard. Zenzele had a musket at the ready, but Izel had declined to borrow Tristan’s rifle when offered – he wanted a free hand for the haversack full of grenades he carried, so he’d kept to his pistol and mace.
She’d poked fun at him for carrying a bag containing ten grenades, asking which fort he intended to assault, but he’d stared her down flatly. Just walking to Lamb Hill we ran into a briarid, he replied. If the first bag weren’t so heavy, I’d carry a second. The tinker also had a small leather sheath hanging off a bandolier in front, containing a part of this ‘aether spike’ he was crafting. He popped open the button on it every few minutes to glimpse inside, not that he’d elaborated on why.
Orienting themselves from the surface, it seemed that the tunnel ran parallel to the street above. It went both north and south, and after some discussion it was agreed they should head south first to make sure it did not reach all the way back to Lamb Hill. Thankfully, that was quickly ruled out. After a mere three minutes they ran into a dead end, which despite being nothing more than bare stone yielded some answers under lantern light.
The tunnel ended in a small, raised alcove and Angharad’s eyes lingered on the small crevasse an the back it. There was no telling how far it went, but the incline was upwards so she suspected all the way to the surface. More interesting was how the stone around it bore the smallest indents she had yet seen, barely larger than the head of a pin, and the tunnel expanded like an inverted funnel from the alcove until reached the proportions they were familiar with.
“This wasn’t made with tools,” Izel said, tone firm. “It is a creature’s work.”
“One creature, I think, that grew larger as time went on,” Angharad said.
Her fingers tightened around the rifle. How large must it have grown, to need so great a burrow to dwell in? Warier now, they turned back and walked north. There was no chatter – only the burning lanterns, the creaking of their boots and half-swallowed breaths. How long they walked, Angharad was not sure. Much longer than they had the other way, certainly. The tunnel as a straight line, and if not for darkness they might have been to see all the way to the end. As things were, though, there was nothing visible beyond the cast of the glow. So when Angharad caught sight of green hide ahead, it had her stilling in surprise. Immediately she glimpsed, cast ahead and-
(kicked the thick green hide, but the creature did not)
Oh. Ignoring the startled breaths from Shalini and Zenzele, she strode ahead briskly and confirmed what her glimpse had shown.
“It is dead,” she called out.
Even so it was quite a sight. The carcass was massive, almost as long as an elephant though perhaps only half as tall. Its shape was maggot-like, with the same sort of segmented ridges as the vermin, but the dead thing was covered in thick stripes of green hide between which hoarse hair sprouted in tufts. It had six legs, though they were small and looked almost infirm – the better to tuck under its body, Angharad guessed. She walked past the length of the carcass, finding the head, and almost retched at what she found.
It had been a foul-looking thing, even before someone pulverized part of its head. The head was outlandishly round and covered with longer strands of the same hoarse hair on its body, boasting smatterings of large round eyes on either side of it. Two broad mouths with rounded teeth stacked one atop the other, each dangling with a thick black tongue spadelike in shape, but what drew the eye was the top of its skill.
Where someone had rammed a rough sword made of beaten iron through its skull, all the way until it stuck into the packed earth beneath.
“Ancestors be good,” Zenzele said, reaching her side. “I think that’s a samir.”
Angharad blinked at him, for she had heard that name before in Teratology. It was… some kind of lares?
“Are they not meant to be the size of a grain of rice?” she skeptically said. “Used for engraving jewels and the like.”
The creature licked things with its tongues, coating them in a saliva which could turn the hardest of materials into something with the texture of lettuce, then grazed minerals with its teeth.
“They get bigger,” Shalini told her, having caught up to them. “I once saw one the size of a dog, back in Ramaya, held in a lead cage. Some Dragadan prince wanted it as a pet.”
“You could fit a whole kennel of dogs in this fellow, Shalini,” Tristan said. “But agreed, it does look like a samir. It’s like a gargantuan cousin to the ones I saw inside Old Town jewelers, back in Sacromonte.”
Angharad decided not to think too closely as to why Tristan, a man she had never once seen wear jewelry, would be familiar with the appearance of a lemure mostly used for precision work on precious metals and stones.
“The species does not grow quickly but will growing so long as it eats,” Izel said, sounding fascinated. “They prefer precious stones, but will grow off even stone and dirt. This one must have lived for more than a century, to grow so large, and eaten all the while.”
“So it was no threat to us?” Angharad asked.
“A samir will eat any sort of stone and ore, save for lead, but it will not so much as nibble a leaf or a cut of lamb,” Izel confirmed. “They are spooked by loud noises, but not aggressive.”
Tristan cleared his throat.
“Samir spit goes fifty ramas a bottle – and not a big bottle, either - and it is rumoured some unscrupulous sorts use it as a thief’s tool.”
A pause.
“It works very well on glass. I hear. Although so does a rock, and you can get those for free.”
Shalini, proving entirely Ramayan in some regards, immediately knelt by the lemure’s mouth and tested with the edge of her cloak whether there was still spit inside.
“Dry,” she sadly told them. “How quickly does their spit fade?”
“Not very much at all,” Izel said. “It must have been dead for days, if not weeks.”
“It does not smell strongly, for a carcass,” Angharad said.
“Its body is almost as much mineral as flesh,” Izel told her. “It will not rot for years, and even then only somewhat.”
“So its flesh is solid even when not covered by the hide?” she asked with a grimace.
He nodded, seeming surprised.
“Why does that displease you?”
“Because I don’t see any other wounds on the samir,” Angharad said. “Meaning that whatever killed it was strong enough to do it in a single blow, through hide and skull.”
That sobered their party significantly. She approached the head of the carcass, studying the sword more closely. Izel soon joined her.
“There is a grip but no guard,” she said, frowning. “And I am not certain the sides of that blade would cut.”
“I expect not,” Izel said. “Look at the marks around the point – it was sharpened like a stake, not a proper sword.”
He leaned in.
“This was an iron rod, or perhaps a pillar,” he said. “It was heated and hammered flat, then flipped twice to hammer a grip and the point sharpened after. Rudimentary work, but done with great strength and precision.”
“Devil work, do you think?” Zenzele quietly asked from behind them.
The tinker shook his head, drawing back.
“They wouldn’t bother with something so large,” Izel said. “This is lemure’s work, one of the smarter breeds."
They traded a look, for their party had encountered one such creature recently: the briarid roaming the streets. Suddenly the tunnel felt cramped. She looked at it with a fighter’s eye and found it was the worst of both worlds. Too cramped for real maneuver yet too large to be used as a chokepoint.
“If there is truly a briarid at the end of this tunnel,” Zenzele said, “perhaps we should reconsider this expedition. I am no Skiritai, but these do not seem to me good grounds for facing such a creature.”
“They aren’t,” Shalini agreed. “And there’s an argument to be made that we found out what we were after: the samir was the digger and it’s dead. The briarid won’t be coming up that mole burrow.”
“That… is a fair point,” Angharad conceded.
Her eyes strayed to Tristan, whose shadowed face was unreadable. Suddenly, he reached into his coat and produced his watch. He popped it open, then hummed.
“I’ll subtract two minutes for our gawking at the carcass,” Tristan said, tone absent-minded. “And three for the time it took us to double back from the other dead end.”
He then smiled, closing the watch’s case with a snap.
“Ten minutes, give or take,” the thief finished, everyone’s eyes on him. “That is how long we have been walking in a straight line, and we aren’t even at the end of the tunnel.”
Izel was first to catch on.
“It’s an underground road,” the tinker said. “You think this might be a safe shortcut to the Old Canals.”
“Exactly,” Tristan said. “If we secure this tunnel, we may have already achieved what the Marshal asked of us: more than lemure scalps, he wants a usable route to the Lord of Teeth.”
“Securing this tunnel may involve fighting a briarid,” Angharad reminded him.
“We don’t need to fight it today,” he said. “We can come back with more guns and a plan. But the only way we’ll ever know what’s at the end of this tunnel…”
“Is if we go,” Angharad finished.
He had already sold one of them on it, she saw. Izel was rubbing the sole of his left boot on the dirt with a smile.
“We could roll cannons through ground like this,” the tinker said. “We’d need to dig up a proper tunnel down from the wormway, certainly, but going underground would allow us to field heavy cannonry when we face the Lord of Teeth.”
Her eyes flicked to the pair from the Thirty-First. Shalini seemed skeptical but not hostile. She will go along with it if most of us agree. It was Zenzele’s word that would tip this one way or the other.
“If we fight a briarid with this crew, there will be casualties,” Zenzele evenly said.
“I don’t want to fight it,” Tristan frankly replied. “The moment we see so much as the shadow of a limb, we should beat an immediate retreat.”
The one-eyed man grimaced, hand rising to paw at a hat he had been forced to leave behind, and lowered it with muted embarrassment.
“If we can find an underground road, it would be a major achievement,” he finally said. “But I will hold you to your word, Tristan: immediate retreat in face of the briarid, or anything in that league.”
“Sold,” the thief replied without hesitation, then glance at her. “So long as Angharad agrees?”
She worried at the inside of her cheek. If they found the lemure waiting for them, she was not sure she would be able to keep all of them alive – and it was likely that should there be a fight Shalini would draw on her contract, meaning the situation would swiftly degenerate. On the other hand, from what she recalled briarids were not underground dwellers. It was odd for one to have come down here to kill the samir, assuming that was truly what had taken place.
“Izel,” she said, addressing her brigade’s best Teratology student. “Briarids tend to have multiple lairs, no?”
The tall tinker nodded.
“They clean out the local fauna too quickly otherwise.”
Meaning there was a chance nothing at all was what waited at the end of the tunnel.
“It is an acceptable degree of risk,” Angharad finally said. “You have my agreement.”
A murmur of intertwined nerves and excitement thrummed through the group as they checked their gear and put themselves in order again. They set out steadily, preferring quiet to quick, but within five minutes they had reached the end of the samir’s work. The wall of the tunnel had collapsed, partially eaten away and partially smashed open. They approached softly, the lanterns half-shuttered, and found that past the ragged edge waited a manmade room.
Tristan crept up to the ragged stone, bringing up the lantern, and Angharad popped in her head. The inside, she found, was an ancient stockroom. A tall square of a room stacked with piles – dusty ingots of steel, copper and even a few that looked like silver but also crumbled stacks of lumber and barrels of coal. There were also long rods of iron propped up against the wall, half of them fallen and others scattered around the room. The ceiling was stone, and there had once been a stairway at the end of the room but nothing more than the bare bones of the wood remained.
“No sign of it,” she whispered. “Be careful.”
The fanned out across the room, lanterns up. Izel was on the steel rods in moment, frowning at them, while she and Tristan instead eyed the floor. There was dust everywhere in here, but parts of it were smudged. It was hard to make out exactly what had done it, but it was clear that something had come down from upstairs and rummaged around the room. More than once, from the uneven layers of disturbance.
“Either several people or one large creature,” Tristan murmured, crouched by the dust.
“This is the same sort of iron that was used for the sword in the tunnel,” Izel then told them, voice low but pitched to carry. “Five or six rods put together would be more than enough.”
They gathered close again, slowly moving towards the missing stairs. She was not the only one to glance at the piled-up silver. Only four ingots, at a glance, but that still represented a tidy sum and the Watch had been clear that anything students salvaged from Allazei was theirs to keep. Alas, an ingot of metal was not something you could simply pocket. Still, if there was opportunity Angharad intended to return. There were five of them, but they could sell the ingots and split the sum equally.
The stairs were not entirely crumbled, only mostly – some supporting logs inserted in the wall to support the structure had not rotten away, their heads protruding like jutted thumbs. Looking up, she saw that the upstairs was a much larger room than the basement and rather luminous.
“We can climb up using the logs,” Tristan murmured. “Objections?”
Shaken heads all around, not that she was surprised. Warfare class ran them through more difficult gauntlets regularly. Angharad went up second, after Tristan, and the trickiest part was keeping her rifle from dangling off – the shoulder belt attached to it was just a little too tall for her. In a sense, she thought as she moved from one protruding log head to the other, the stairs still stood. They had merely been diminished. Three minutes later she was on the floor, crouching alongside Tristan as they advanced carefully into the room.
This was a forge, she thought, in the same way that a king was a nobleman. It was a large, rectangular room with a tall curved ceiling that reminded her of a glasshouse – in no small part because the very top of the curve was rows of glass panels, half of which were missing or broken. Large balcony platforms in rusting iron stood on either side, looking down at rows of elegant working tables in pale stone inset with gold that swallowed much of the room. They were covered with dust and debris and broken tools, while the back held a large foundry and a set of gilded casting moulds.
There were a few strange machines, most of them bearing drills or blades, and on the opposite side a more traditional smithy with coal-burners and anvils. Tristan silently moved his hand to draw her attention there as Zenzele climbed up, slightly panting. The thief was pointing at the end of the row of coal-burners, where two anvils had been pushed together and the coal-burner looked like it had been used to burn coal sometime more recently than the last century. The briarid used the forge here.
Like most of the clever lemures their kind could not make metal out of ore, but they had learned to shape simple tools from the work of humans. It was why lemures like onjancanu sometimes ‘ruled’ villages of darklings or enslaved lucents, using men’s work for their own purposes.
They spread out, making room for the others to climb while staying low and avoiding making noise. Angharad looked foremost for ways in and out. There were heavy bronze gates halfway through the wall of the great forge, engraved with letters and appeals to a spirit she did not recognize. Old, then. They were kept closed by a bar of some dull alloy, which appeared to have been welded shut. Not through here.
Near the foundry out back part of the wall had fallen apart, leaving a plant-strewn hole through which some Orrery lights filtered, but it was too small to be how the briarid had come in. Where was – a soft gasp had her looking back. Shalini was pointing up. At the upper level of the forge, which Angharad had dismissed it as little more than glorified storerooms. The pillars supported space barely larger than a balcony on either side, in order to leave the middle of the forge unobstructed so light could come through the glass panels unimpeded.
Shalini was pointing near the foundry, where some heavy stone cube counterweights hung from a chain above a machine not unlike a stamp, and Angharad’s gaze swept up the pillars to the iron balcony. Just past the edge of it one could glimpse toes. Without nails, even the smallest thick as a fist and grayish in color. Shit, she thought. The Unluckies truly deserved their sobriquet, for theirs was the worst of luck: that had to be the briarid, though since it had not moved it might be sleeping.
Flicking a glance up at the ceiling, Angharad no longer thought it a coincidence that the nearest four rows of glass panels were gone, even the frames broken. That must be how the briarid came in: up the balcony and through the ceiling, leaving the same way.
Silent signs had all of them informed within moments, and an unspoken debate ensued. The hole in the corner, or back down? Angharad strongly advised back down and that side carried it. Slowly, excruciatingly carefully, they began crawling back towards the basement. Not one of them had argued for attacking it by surprise, wisely. They did not carry anything with the teeth to kill a briarid in a single stroke, and fighting such a lemure inside the forge would be… tricky.
Zenzele was the first to begin the climb down, the rest of them clustered together with guns at the ready. The diplomat’s boots touched the first loghead and he hung, but as he prepared to move down onto the second his sole slipped as he misjudged the distance – he caught himself on the wall, swallowing a curse, and hung there on the edge of falling. They all tensed, Angharad’s jaw clenching tight, but the briarid’s foot remained unmoving.
She let out a shallow breath. Sleeping God, let them hurry and get out of- an ear-piercing eagle’s shriek sounded from outside the forge, loud enough that even in here they all winced.
A heartbeat passed, the foot moved and everything went to shit.
Even as Angharad rose and shouldered her uncle’s rifle, the lemure burst out of its hiding place like a monstrous jack-in-the-box – the briarid was so large that even with its two massive hindlegs on the worktables, part of its body was still on the balcony. She glimpsed ahead and-
(the briarid threw itself down among the tables, Izel’s grenade bouncing off its back. Tristan had been running forward and it casually snatched him out of the air, squeezing, and the scream)
“If we go down into the tunnel, it will catch up to us,” she evenly said, lining up her shot. “We fight.”
A curse from Zenzele, who was still struggling to get off the log, while Shalini drew her first pistol. She laid a hand on Tristan’s arm before he could run off and get himself pulped.
“Izel?” she prompted.
A match was struck behind her. He must have reached for his haversack the moment the creature outside screeched.
“Lit,” the tinker replied.
But she knew better than to wait on the wick, having seen that outcome, and tossed out two throwaway glimpses in quick succession to adjust her aim and timing.
“Throw it now,” she ordered.
The moment the briarid finally dragged the head of its body off the balcony, pushing off with its overgrown segmented arms, the grenade went flying in a perfect arc. Angharad waited until the very moment it turned the too-large blind head at the end of its body towards them and pulled the trigger, closing her eyes immediately.
The shot smashed through the grenade, and even through closed eyes Angharad felt the burn of exploding phosphorescent salts sear her eyelids.
The briarid screamed in furious pain, convulsing against the opposite balcony and ripping off a chunk of railing with flailing limbs. It was blind now, at least for a time. She threw aside her rifle on the closest worktable and drew her saber, moving to close the distance. From the corner of her eye she saw Tristan run past her in a streak, but she paid it no more mind. She had–
The briarid screamed again, smashing against the floor. Stone shivered beneath her feet and with gritted teeth she covered her ears as best she could. Any louder and her eardrums might burst. She almost missed the shout behind her - Zenzele, who had just gotten back onto the second floor, had tumbled down into the basement when the ground shook. From that height, he was sure to be hurt. Shit. What can we- stop, breathe. It is just another Acallar fight, she told herself. Make the decision.
“Izel, go help him,” she said. “Shalini, with me.”
Tristan had a plan of his own, no doubt. He could take care of himself. Angharad rolled her shoulder, limbering it, and lengthened her stride. The creature was smashing about cracking tables and breaking machines, but soon it would have its sight back.
“Fisherman?” Shalini suggested, half a step behind her.
“Fisherman,” Angharad agreed.
Would that Salvador were here, but they would have make do. Shalini hung back, pistol in hand, and Angharad advanced. Sleeping God, but the briarid was huge. Limbs flailed and clawed along the side of its body as it convulsed, a wriggling worm on the forge floor, until Angharad’s partner opened the dance – the shot hit its left arm, the segmented one near the top of its body. One of the four limbs it used to control its movement.
Pain and Shalini’s contract price claimed the creature’s attention, stilling its wild throes long enough for Angharad to close in. There would be nothing clean or elegant about this, she thought. It wasn’t that kind of a monster, that kind of a fight.
So she swung, shoulders in like a lumberjack, and hacked her way through the closest dangling arm. Ichor sprayed black on uniform, the limb flopping onto the floor, and-
(the briarid bent its torso forward, a heartbeat later sweeping the back of its body through the)
-no hesitation. Angharad climbed a worktable, boots scuffing the gold, and she leapt – the biarid’s body barreled through where she had just stood, the mass of it rustling her cloak, and she landed in a crouch on the edge of a table on the other side to-
(a dozen dangling arms grasped tables and pillars to push themselves off, the body sweeping back)
-fall forward into a roll, nestling between two worktables as the blow meant to crush her instead swept off her hat. The briarid wriggled against the stone, the tables cracking under the weight but holding, even as the briarid turned to shove its limbs into the gap. A dozen arms scrabbled blindly at the ground, looking for her, but Angharad almost laughed – she began hacking away. A hand, a forearm, an elbow. The briarid above screamed, ichor sprayed and the eyeless faces on its body moaned at her as it lost a fourth limb. It drew back, making room to strike with one of its forelimbs, and…
One, two shots. Shalini’s placement was impeccable, hitting the same spot as earlier. Skin and muscle pulled, pale white bone showed, and between the pain of the salt munitions and the contract price the briarid was turned her way.
The fisherman had pulled the line, so Angharad climbed out be between the tables to slip behind the monster and claim another limb. It turned back her way, raising itself up on its back legs until its head was higher than the balcony, and now she had it. It stood in a man’s shape, now, and would strike the same. That meant she could predict the blows.
She stood with her saber extended to the side, facing the monster, and breathed out. Watch only the limbs that matter. The rest are a distraction.
Right arm, leading and down. It went for a table first, ripping out half and tossing it her way, but she had circled left so the angle would be off – it hit the wall and burst into chunks, but Angharad closed on the left leg and burst forward. Clean thrust, aimed at the knee, but beneath the skin it touched a patch of cartilage and slid off. Even as she withdrew it lunged forward with the right hand but it was a simple matter of two steps forward, the hand whistling past her like a cannon ball.
She carved away at one of the elbow-segments, finding muscle and scything clean through it.
Right knee, going down. It was going to drop. She juked hard to the left even as the briarid flopped down onto the ground, kicking up dust, and swallowed a scream as a flailing hand caught one of her braids. She cut it off at the wrist, but that cost her a precious moment and as the creature rose again- it fell back down, the explosion shredding an entire chunk of limbs. A grenade; Izel was back. A whistling sound drew her eye – Tristan, further back and near the wall. Standing by some sort of lever?
“Draw it there,” he said, pointing at great press she had seen earlier.
She spared him a nod but no more, for the briarid was back on its feet. Looking the way of the others – Zenzele snapped a musket shot at it, hitting its torso and wincing as he was almost blown off his feet – so it was Angharad’s turn to pull at it again. Ducking under two swinging hands, she sliced at the back of its right knee. Shallowly, the movement had weakened the angle, but the briarid was just clever enough to realize that if it lost the guiding limbs they might just kill it.
It swung a blind backhand at her, almost like swatting a fly, but she was already a step back. She drew and fired her pistol, hitting an empty eye socket, but the burn of the salt munitions was enough to keep its attention. It turned fully her way and Angharad backed away, holstering the pistol, and it leaned forward – one hand on the top of the balcony, the other drawing back to smash her. She glimpsed ahead, picked out its angle, and swallowed. Ancestors, but it was quick.
She stepped to the side just before it struck, the wind rustling her braids and cloak as movement blurred past her. The blow that would have pulped her like an overripe tomato instead dragged it forward in a stumbling half-step, just enough of the front of its body inclining forward to- Tristan pulled the lever, the stone weights went up like it had been shot and the press came down. It hit the briarid just past its shoulder, punching through flesh and bone, and nailed it to the floor.
The scream it out had her falling to her knees, almost dropping her blade, but that wasn’t the worst of it – the convulsing briarid was still clutching the balcony, grip tight, and even as it tried and failed to drag itself out of the press it pulled at the iron.
Hard enough to collapse half the balcony, right on top of Tristan’s head.
“No,” Angharad shouted, scrabbling to her feet.
Ignoring the others as they caught up, she ran to the debris. The shower of iron and stone had been oriented away from him, she saw, but would that - there was a rasping cough and she found Tristan pinned beneath a piece of metal railing. He was covered in dust and the side of his face covered with small cuts, his cloak and coat carved through by a sharp piece of iron that’d only narrowly missed his throat. But he was moving and breathing.
“Don’t move,” she said, putting down her saber to hoist off the railing. “Are your legs all right?”
He coughed again.
“Fine,” he rasped. “One of my ribs hurts, but I can walk. Help me up.”
She took his arm, gently got him back on his feet, and grimaced at the nasty cut. It was shallow, but bleeding much. They had to get that cleaned before he took sick. The others were on them in a moment, Zenzele limping and leaning against Izel – he had sprained his ankle falling. Angharad spared a look at the pinned briarid, which no longer moved. Was it dead? She did not feel any different, but for all she knew this was glory enough to bring Cai Wei back to life in the Acallar. She absent-mindedly took back her rifle when Izel passed it to her, sheathing her saber.
“Tristan is bleeding, we shouldn’t risk a surface route,” Shalini said. “We need to get back into the tunnel.”
“We can’t,” Zenzele said.
Everyone turned eyes on him, but he was looking at empty air. Frowning.
“Zenzele?” she asked.
“The briarid isn’t dead,” he grimly replied.
“How do you know?” Izel rasped out.
“Because it is holding a grudge, and I can see that,” the diplomat said. “We need to go before it-”
The stamp rattled. A few of the briarid’s limbs twitched.
“Grenades,” Tristan rasped out.
“It ripped out some of the support pillars when it dropped that balcony on you,” Izel replied. “If I throw another grenade at it, there’s a chance that wall comes down.”
“Out,” Angharad exhaled. “The hole in the wall, now.”
If the briarid caught up to them in the tunnel it would be a massacre. They sent the wounded out first, though Zenzele had to hack up the greenery with his sword to be able to make it through the thick greenery. She kept an eye on the pinned briarid as they crawled out, watching as more and more limbs began to twitch. Soon they were scrabbling at the ground, as if trying to find leverage to drag itself out from under the press.
“Angharad.”
Her turn, she saw. Angharad crawled through a bed of severed green to emerged onto the other side. She rose, scabbard rattling against the ground, and found she was atop a low hill facing the edge of an escarpment. In the distance she could see the half-filled trenches of the Old Canals, but she wasted not time sightseeing. In moments she was caught up with Tristan, who was lingering at the back. The others were already at the head of a curving path that hugged the escarpment, though Shalini turned to glance back and make sure she was following.
“Hurry,” Angharad shouted.
The gate shook, the large bonze doors holding under the blow but she knew better than to think that would last. Even if the door kept, the hinges would break. Izel half-carried Zenzele down the hill path, Shalini not far behind, while Tristan stood besides her with measured calm, blood dripping down his throat.
“We need to head back to camp,” he said.
“It won’t be that easy,” she grimly replied. “You’re bleeding, it will draw lemures.”
“We’re past having a choice in the matter,” Tristan said, just as another blow rattled the gates.
He was, Angharad thought, likely right about that. She almost flinched at the thought of a fighting retreat through a lemure-infested unknown territory while casting bait that would draw everything with a nose, but what else could they do? The two of them hurried down the path after the others, half-tumbling past the ridge only to find the others had stopped near the bottom. What did they-
“Fuck,” Tristan hissed.
“Fuck,” Angharad solemnly agreed.
That was going to be trouble.
“Hold it down, hold it down,” Captain Guadalupe de Tovar shouted. “It needs to breathe the-”
The others had stopped because on the flat grounds bottom of the hill the Second Brigade was wrestling with another lemure. A horse’s back and an eagle’s front, hooves in the back and clawed hands in front. A hippogriff, Angharad saw, and they had downed it – the lemure was trying to get out a net with heavy iron weights, wildly bucking and screeching. This the noise that woke the briarid.
Alizia Salas and Lord Khosa were keeping it from batting its wing with pikes while the Second’s signifier held a wavering Sign tight in his grip – Gloam was glimmering over the iron weights of the net like oil patches, though she could only guess as to why. Captain de Tovar had her hands in front of her as if she were holding a vase, swirling mist extending in a tendril towards the captured lemure.
Behind them, in the distance, Angharad heard stone crack. Well, the time for delicacy was past.
“Briarid,” Angharad shouted. “Briarid coming this way!”
The rest of the crew followed behind her as she skirted the edge of the flat grounds, looking to swing around the workshop hill to make their way back to camp. There were a handful of southwards streets there, one of which would eventually intersect with the wormway.
“Tredegar, what in the Wheel are you doing here?” Captain de Tovar spat out, unmoving. “This is our hunting ground.”
“There is a briarid in the forge up the hill,” Angharad told her. “It will soon to get out, you need to-”
There was splintering sound, then a teeth-rattling screech and one of the gates tumbled past the edge of the ridge.
“-run,” Angharad finished in a hiss.
Face gone red with fury, the Lierganen snarled.
“Kill it,” she shouted at her brigade. “Fuck the pelt, just take the scalp.”
Had they been hunting? No, it didn’t matter. Angharad’s wounded were already running off, Shalini escorting, but Tristan stayed with her at the back as Second’s captain sucked the mist back into the space between her hands – and much faster than it had been extending.
“You cost us a clean hippogriff corpse,” Captain de Tovar bit out.
“You lot are the ones who woke the briarid,” Tristan scorned, and tugged at her sleeve. “Angharad, leave the idiots to die for their scalp and-”
And before he could finish the briarid was at the ridge, bleeding ichor in rivulets and howling at them. It had a hole from the back all the to a ragged wound in its chest that pulsed disgustingly. There was a shot from Alizia, but it was at the hippogriff and it only struck the side. The creature went wild with pain.
“You can’t fight them both, de Tovar,” Angharad hissed. “We need to go.”
The Lierganen snarled out another curse.
“Retreat,” she shouted.
Her brigade moved skillfully, immediately wheeling back towards the road Angharad’s wounded was already fleeing through, but the briarid leapt down. It was among them in a moment, casually ripping the net off the hippogriff and tossing it at Lord Khosa – in the same breath the Second’s signifier screamed, his Sign broken, and Fanyana Khosa slapped his own chest. In the following breath the Malani lordling was blown away as if shot out of a cannon, a solid twenty feet away and toppling on his back just beyond the net’s cast.
The hippogriff screeched, free but surrounded by enemies and none to pleased about that. It lunged at the briarid, a blur of feathers and claws, and as far as Angharad was concerned that was their way out. She helped up Fanyana on her way to the southward streets. His breath was labored but he nodded his thanks as they caught up to Captain de Tovar, who was dragging away her stumbling signifier. Behind them the two great lemures were fighting, the hippogriff on the briarid’s back and tearing out limbs as flailing limbs tried to rip out its wings.
But the noise had drawn attention. In the shade between two houses, she saw amber wolf’s eyes. The creature watched them patiently, too-long legs still, and where you could see one lycosi there were bound to be six more.
“Scavengers are coming,” Angharad said. “We should retreat together.”
Captain de Tovar sneered.
“You already cost us a bounty, I’ll not serve as your rearguard for the privilege,” she said.
“It is your fight that woke the briarid,” she evenly replied. “Not us.”
“Guadalupe, there’s no time for this,” Lord Khosa said. “With them or without, we must move.”
“Without,” Captain de Tovar replied without hesitation. “Run back if you will, Tredegar. I am not so easily chased off.”
The Second Brigade gathered to their captain, closing ranks to follow her into the tangled mess of bushes to the west. They were, Angharad thought with some relief, no longer her burden to bear. She turned clean heels on the foolishness and picked up the pace to catch up with the others, Tristan keeping watch at the head of the street but falling in with her as soon as she passed him.
Neither of them talked, every speck of willpower reserved to getting out of this mess without further trouble. Three minutes in it was, she reluctantly thought, looking as if they might. No footsteps shook the ground: the briarid was not chasing them. Either it had preferred chasing the Second or it had retreated after being bled so badly. The lemure was powerful, but it was wounded – and there were sure to be other monsters just as lethal dwelling in Allazei. That was a relief, but a short-lived one.
It was only the one, at first. A tall, slender silhouette watching them from a rooftop. But the shade did not remain alone for long. Soon there were three, then ten. A quarter hour in, there were at last a dozen on either side of the street, following them as they moved.
“They are going to attack soon,” Shalini tightly said. “They’re waiting until a narrow street so they don’t have to be as afraid of the guns.”
“We have to keep moving,” Angharad replied. “If we stop or fight, we’ll end up facing a lot worse than shades.”
It wasn’t a solution, but what else could they do? Turning back was death, and the only safety in this part of town was on Lamb Hill. Heading anywhere else was just delaying the fight. They ran, or as close as they could with Zenzele’s limp, and with every city block the shades were closer. Shalini snapped off a shot, wounding one, but somehow that only seemed to draw more of them. Angharad could feel them closing in, preparing to-
“Firing line!”
And down the street, ten students in black cloaks formed a line with the muskets held up. Angharad could barely see the faces, but there was one she recognized even from the distance – no, two. Rong Ma stood there with their gun, but the one who had shouted the order was an older acquaintance.
“Hold your shots until the shades get closer,” Ferranda called out.
And Angharad’s shoulder slumped. The shades would not attack, not now that there were so many humans together and armed. They had, against all odds, made it out.
It was an unusual thing to be pleased to see Ferranda Villazur, these days, but this once she would allow it.
--
They were not the only ones to come back early, or with wounded.
Half the brigades were in camp, bandaging their wounded or washing off dirt and bloods. Angharad saw only one corpse, laid to rest under a black shroud near the promontory atop Lamb Hill, and there was no telling if it was a soldier or a student. Not that one death would be lesser to the other. They settled by their firepit, Angharad shedding her cloak and her tunic to see to her bruises. None were bleeding, not even her scraped-raw chin, but her arms would ache for a few days.
It was only two minutes in that she realized Tristan had disappeared. He only reappeared a quarter hour later, with a cleaned cut and a bandage, dropping down next to her and fanning his face with his hat. Unlike her, he had salvaged his from the disaster in the forge.
“Where did you go?” she asked.
“To find out what happened to everyone else,” he said. “The broad strokes? The outskirts of the Old Canals are a shitshow. They’re crawling with lemures and fighting them draws others by the basketful. I’ve already counted three different lycosi packs from the retellings and those are the least of what’s left.”
Angharad let out a low whistle.
“That is… unusual,” she said. “Lemures are usually territorial even with each other.”
“It’s the Lord of Teeth,” he said. “I think it didn’t just displace the local order, it must have killed a few larger lemures on its way in.”
“And now would be replacements are staking their claim,” Angharad slowly said. “And by spilling ichor doing so, they draw ever more lemures from the Nests.”
He nodded.
“It’s like this small slice of Allazei turned into a battlefield,” he said. “That hippogriff the Second had in their net? I’d bet it’s not even from this part of the city. It must have come from Floret Hill, drawn by all the free carrion.”
“Which means we could have winged lemures from all over the city swooping down if it carries on for too long,” Angharad grimly said.
She had fought enough in the Acallar to know there were few things more dangerous than a lemure capable of flight. There was a reason she had never seriously considered fighting one of the monsters from the Steel list with wings.
“It is not that fighting in the outskirts causes a sandpit,” Angharad continued, looking up at the sky. “But that the entire region is a sandpit, and anything making noise there looks like prey.”
“It’s a constant feeding frenzy,” Tristan agreed. “If the dantesvara had settled anywhere else in the city we’d run through the local lemures, but this close to the Nests…”
“It is a wall of corpses we must climb over to get to the Lord of Teeth,” Angharad said, passing a hand through her hair. “We must find exactly the right amount of violence to employ, and do it quickly enough that every flying predator from here to Scholomance does not make this their new hunting ground.”
She scoffed.
“This did seem too simple a test, for one given by the Marshal. Now I grasp his intent.”
Tristan nodded, then let out a tired breath.
“We won’t be able to sneak through,” he finally said. “And even if we did, it would not be enough – we need to mark a usable path before the Marshal commits the garrison to an attack, and there is no way we can sneak cannons in. We can get them to the forge, maybe, but all the way to the canals? I doubt it.”
“Agreed,” Angharad said. “We need to dictate the enemy’s movement. The sole tactic I could see working out is to purposefully start a sandpit drawing every lemure with one team, then set out with another.”
He drummed his fingers against his knee, humming.
“You’re right,” Tristan said.
“It has been known to happen,” Angharad drily said.
“A distraction, though, is rolling the dice every time,” he said. “Sooner or later we’ll hit snake eyes. If we are going to gamble, best we do it only the once and make it stick.”
“I am listening,” she replied.
“If we can’t do quiet, let’s lean the other way and make it as loud as we possibly can,” Tristan said.
And the plan he outlined after that was, in a word, lunacy.
“You are skeptical,” he said afterwards, reading her face. “And I admit it would come at a cost to you, but-”
“Oh no,” Angharad Tredegar grinned. “We are most definitely using that plan, Tristan. It is madness, but I would feel rather robbed if we did not. I am just wondering where we might get the amount of guns and swords it requires.”
Tristan Abrascal grinned back.
“Oh, don’t you worry about that. I will obtain them, my friend, through… skillful diplomacy.”
Comments
Patneu
"But you also wonder why Angharad doesn't use her contract to scout more." Possibly because she still needs to keep it secret. We, as the audience, have gotten pretty used to her being open about it by now, so it's easy to forget that this only applies to the Thirteenth, whom she extended this knowledge to, both as a sign of trust and because she had nothing else to offer them so they'd take her back in. But she still cannot let it become truly public knowledge if she ever wants to see her homeland again and restore her family's name. So she can only draw on knowledge she couldn't possibly have if not for a vision, in front of an audience, if she can somehow play it off as confidence or fearlessness.
Alex
I hope we EE one day writes a description on how she views Tristan's luck manipulation (once he DEFINETLY gets Fortuna back), it would be so interesting to see first hand how her contract rationalizes the seemingly irrational way his contract warps reality to work for him for a small while. I don't think we've gotten an Angie POV on seeing Tristan fuck with luck yet, atleast not while she's simultaneously using her own contract. Just for example if she sees a future where Tristan 100% dies, and then with absolutely no changes made, suddenly the future snaps to something completely different. I ask for this because it could provide some very cool anti-synergy where Angie's power goes haywire whenever she's in a fight where Tristan is pulling on his luck. Could really mess with her ability to make judgements on what her next move should be, ESPECIALLY if he's pulling on it multiple times. One second she's on scenario A, and then with 0 adjustments from her end, she's on Scenario, B, C, D, E etc. all because Tristan's reality warping luck shenanigans is just messing with every future that she sees.
Sheyaan Bhesania
Alright, that went about how I expected. You really do see this and wonder 'Would they have done better if Song or Maryam were there?' It's possible Song could have spotted the Briarid faster and they could have left, and Maryam is a powerhouse. Granted, I wonder if they'd gotten in the tunnels faster if that would have had them dead. But you also wonder why Angharad doesn't use her contract to scout more. At least during times where they aren't even going to want to fight, her contract could have had them avoid all the trouble. I know there are others around who she isn't gonna want to reveal it too, but there must have been a discussion on how to ask her that covertly or a way to do so even if not. And if they need a reason for that knowledge they gathered, they could try and say just her and Tristan will go for a bit ahead and use that time to create a lie. Basically, there are considerations, and it never seems to even pass Angharad's mind or be so much eyebrow raised by Tristan, when it really should be. I know contracts tend to be touchy in this world, but they've literally studied Angharad's and it doesn't come at a price except at some exhaustion, which, this is probably the only time of the day she really, really needs it. It's worth the use. Also yeah, that moment with Tristan felt... a little too much like a time his contract would have been used. The way that entire moment went felt like that, he managed to get the Briarid, and then gets a consequence that nearly kills him, in a way that seems very lucky. I'm not sure anything of note actually happened, but I won't be surprised if we come back to that moment either.
Joseph
This story kills me . I’m always wanting more , never satisfied.
TheLunaticCo
Poor Hippogriff, They make such good mounts!
Stylemys
I’m betting that part of Tristan’s diplomacy is going to be baiting the 19th into going after him only for them to end up fighting in the middle of the battle.
