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Chapter 17
🕑 Added 2025-07-11 16:00:20 +0000 UTCMaryam tended to like Mandate class best when it was stepping on Saga’s toes, redrawing the history they had been taught by Professor Sasan with the Watch’s own brush, and today’s class was no exception.
“- by the end of the Century of Accord, Hell’s positioned had weakened,” Professor Iyengar lectured. “While no serious attempt to breach the wall of Pandemonium had taken place in twenty years, that time was not spent idle.”
Of all the things the mornaric possessed, the one Maryam envied the most was the maps. That had surprised Song when she said as much, her friend admitting she had assumed it would be guns. But Izvoric were perfectly capable of making powder and muskets. Maryam knew of at least two kingdoms who’d begun making their own flintlocks before Mother’s death, and Izvoric blackpowder was rough but often purer than what the Malani brought from across the sea.
No, it was the maps she envied most because those maps were the key to a certain understanding of the world that the Izvoric had been too slow to seize.
Few of Maryam’s people even called the land they had been born on Juska, for all that it was the name of the continent. Most of them called it ‘the coastlands’ or ‘the lowlands’, with a few scholar-taught souls calling it Trecikrov as it was in the oldest stories. It meant ‘Third Roof’, as the myths all agreed that the Izvoric had been the last of the three Triglau peoples to settle. Maps that depicted the entire coastlands were rare and those that went further even more so – usually sold at obscene prices by the Skrivenic.
The only map of Juska as whole she had ever seen had been a copy of the ‘world-bowl’, the priestly depiction of the world as built by the gods, and though she had been moved at the time it now felt… shoddy. It had been inaccurate, presenting the coastlands as if they were as large as the highlands – when they should be no larger than a quarter – and the northern ‘edge’ of the world on the map was no such thing, just the beginning of the Chalklands.
Besides, the world-bowl also claimed that not far past the isle of Arpadi, to the south, the sea fell off into eternal darkness like a waterfall. The Malani had proved otherwise, sailing past the ink-dark sea.
So Maryam had been staring at Professor Iyengar’s map on and off throughout the class, as fascinated as she was envious. It was a beautiful thing, hanging on a large wooden frame. Old parchment lovingly preserved and displaying more of Aurager than Maryam had ever seen put to ink before. Not only was all of Issa there, from the western mouth of the great Biscarosa River to the shadowed lands of the far east laying past the Sierra Gris, but the upper half of the map was the most comprehensive depiction of Serica she had seen.
Most cartography only went as far as the eastern land borders of the Someshwar, one to the south and the other to the north with two large basins in between. The border to north was with the Desolation, and to the south with the ashenlander kingdoms that had long resisted expansion into their quake-wracked peninsula. This one, though, went half again as far east. Across the two great basins hemming in the eastern Someshwar it showed the rest of the great wasteland called the Desolation, and even the mountains that lay beyond it.
To the south, past the ashenlander kingdoms it showed the Sorrows, the narrow strait between Issa and Serica that fed into the Bato Sea, and then across that same sea it displayed the wealthy coastlands of the Jahamai Empire. Though the Desolation continued all the way from the Someshwar to the lands of the Jahamai, little was known of those territories. The few Someshwari expeditions and free companies of the Watch that had tried to reach Jahamai through the Desolation had all disappeared to a man.
To the north of that empire the map grew detailed again, however, for there stood the tall plateau on which the infernal city of Pandemonium was built – and, in turn, the great fortifications the Watch and the Jahamai had built to seal it
It was the location Professor Iyengar was currently pointing at, for she was still speaking of the century-long siege of Hell’s capital and sole city.
“The ringforts whose construction had begun under Grand Marshal Luisa were finally finished, and bolstered by the cannons sent by the Republics they proved highly effective at containing the devils,” Professor Iyengar continued. “After several attempted sorties by Marquis Leriac were broken on their ramparts, the siege became a stalemate."
The Mandate professor tucked her hands behind her back, gold hoop earrings shaking as she did.
“Most histories consider the Battle of Tolomontera the turning point of the war, since it put an end to Lucifer and the last of the great infernal army that had ravaged the Trebian Sea for forty years,” she said. “This largely incorrect. While Lucifer’s third death certainly sowed disorder in Pandemonium, the true source of change was unrelated. Would one of you care to name it?”
Maryam actually knew this, having been taught by Captain Totec, so she raised her hand. She was not alone, more than two dozen doing so as well – predictably, most of them Izcalli. It was the captain of the Forty-Fourth, pale-haired Tristan Ballester, who was called on. Lady Knit had done a number on him, Maryam thought. His presence in the aether felt wan, worn.
“The Kingdom of Izcalli put an end to the Whirlwind,” Captain Ballester provided.
Professor Iyengar graced him with a nod.
“That is exactly right,” she said. “With the Southern Solin period coming to an end in 91 Accords with the fall of Tumurqu, reunification of Izcalli under the House of Solin was achieved,” she said. “This was smiled upon in the Rookery: the Solin dynasty had been the Watch’s most ardent backers since our founding, and our open support of them during the Whirlwind left us genuinely beloved in Izcalli.”
Izcalli had always been the closest of the great powers to the Watch, Maryam knew. A source of pride to Captain Totec. It was a beloved tale in that land how the warlike King Namacuix III had once threatened to raze the Rookery for what he called arrogance, but after losing his capital to a cult during the infamous Moonless Month he had changed his mind and become the Watch’s strongest supporter instead. He’d gone as far as waging a flower war on Tariac to make it sign onto the Iscariot Accords after it refused.
Professor Iyengar thinly smiled.
“Of course, not all surrounding powers had such friendly ties to the Calendar Court,” she said,
She moved her finger east on the map, towards Tianxia.
“The reaction in the Republics could be best described as panic,” she said. “Its miraculous rise after the end of the Cathayan Wars had just been checked by resounding military disaster that was the First Tiaohe War, leaving the northern republics exhausted and bankrupt. They were in no shape to resist invasion.”
Maryam snuck a look at Song, whose lips had thinned. She did not look like she disagreed, nor should she. The First Tiaohe War, Tianxia’s initial attempt to reconquer the former Republic of Jiushen, had been such a debacle that most of the war was actually fought on the lands of the Republic of Jigong. After such a bloody mess Maryam was surprised there had been another attempt, much less two.
“The Imperial Someshwar, meanwhile, feared that the resurgent House of Solin would not be satisfied with simply reclaiming its old tributaries on the west bank of the Upratha River. What did it fear, and why?”
This time many a hand went up, Maryam’s own among them, and after a moment she was surprised to find herself called on. Professor Iyengar’s were dark, expectant. Maryam cleared her throat.
“The Maharana of the time, Tirumala the Great, feared that Izcalli would campaign in the Towers Coast as it had the previous century,” she said. “It was a concern for Tirumala in particular because she relied heavily on taxes and tariffs from the region to pay for her armies.”
“Accurate,” Profess Iyengar said, which as close to a compliment as she usually got.
The professor’s finger then dipped south, to Sacromonte.
“Meanwhile, Sacromonte was facing the beginning of a crisis: its costly campaigns in the Chelae had yielded nothing, it had lost Artecale to revolt and its hegemony over the Riven Coast dissipated into mist,” she said.
Maryam’s eyes dipped to her left, but the space besides her remained empty. Would Tristan have been saddened to hear of the beginning of Sacromonte’s fall from prominence? She suspected not.
“What the Six needed most of all was money,” Professor Iyengar continued, “but they had not the strength to take it or the legitimacy to ask for it.”
The finger never went back up to the isles of Malan, since they’d just finished discussing the High Queen in the Century of Accord. She had spent those years feuding with the Watch through the Lunkulu Crisis, putting down a rebellion in Uthukile and trying out the now habitual foreign policy that was propping up Tariac against the Calendar Court. Angharad still looked a little skeptical that anyone had ever rebelled against the Queen Perpetual, as if such a thing was simply unthinkable.
Considering who’d built the schools teaching Malani to think, maybe to them it was.
“Which leads us to the Conference of Ixta, in 93 Accord,” Professor Iyengar said. “It would be an exaggeration say that the great powers of Vesper committed to a fresh offensive against Pandemonium largely to keep Izcalli pointed away from their own borders, but it would not be untrue.”
She paused.
“Sacromonte, in this case, joined in for an excuse to squeeze war taxes out of its Trebian tributaries it knew would be enforced by the Watch.”
Iyengar’s finger traced a long journey across the Trebian Sea and Pastel Sea, then through the Sorrows and the Boto Sea all the way to the great Jahamai port of Aosane.
“In 94 Accord the first ships of a twenty-thousand strong expeditionary force landed in Jahamai, ready to serve as the hammer that would crack Pandemonium open,” she said. “In a matter of months the first battle took place south of the city, the first recorded mass use of cannons and arquebuses against devils.”
The Battle of Hell’s Gate, Maryam thought. Three days of death on the plains south of Pandemonium, the hordes of Hell against the finest soldiers the Iscariot Accords could muster. There was hardly a history of the Watch that did not call it one of the order’s crowning glories.
Iyengar, apparently of a different mind, snorted derisively.
“Despite the myths you were no doubt fed about the crushing victory that was the Battle of Hell’s Gates, the thirty-thousand strong army that fought there lost almost a third of its number,” she said. “It was a brutal slog and the rain on the second day almost cost them the war. While they took the field and cannon fire then broke open the gates of Pandemonium, none of the generals present were willing to risk storming the city without reinforcements from Aurager.”
She raised a finger.
“But, before this could happen, the devils opened negotiations,” she said. “To this day the reasons why that is are hotly debated.”
She hummed.
“Certainly, Hell’s position was the weakest it had ever been: without the unifying presence of Lucifer their people grew fractious, while a mostly-allied Aurager had the manpower to simply throw bodies at them until Pandemonium was taken and with it the greatest infernal forges.”
Which would have been a crippling loss for devilkind, Maryam knew. The infernal forges in Hell’s capital were said to be nothing like those that could be found around Aurager, each large as a house and capable of shaping devils in ways that the lesser forges could not. Professor Iyengar cleared her throat.
“Yet it must be said that a sufficiently bloody defense of Pandemonium may well have shattered the fragile peace in Aurager, and that tensions between Jahamai and the foreign soldiery were rising.”
The professor’s eyes flicked back west on the map, to the young Republics.
“An attempt by a Tianxi general to get her hands on a velvet loom turned into a major scandal, and the crown prince of the empire openly spoke in court of expelling the ‘foreign locusts’ devouring the wealth of his people.”
Some unkind laughter from a handful of Someshwari, no doubt mostly Ramayans. Ramaya had been squabbling with the Republics over control of the trades routes going through the Sorrows for almost two hundred years. The Cordial War, as some called it, boasted few bloody battles but near two centuries of raiding each other’s trade outposts. Iyengar shrugged.
“It would have been a race between which happened first: the fall of Pandemonium or the coalition’s collapse,” she said. “What happened, instead, was that a portion of the nobles of Hell seized the infernal forges and threatened to destroy them if peace talks were not opened with the Watch.”
Maryam blinked even as murmurs spread across the hall. That was now how she had heard that tale told, not even by Captain Totec. The professor’s face was emotionless.
“Indeed,” Professor Iyengar said. “Never forget that we did not force the submission of Hell – we were offered it, for a price, and that bargain may not survive the next coming of Lucifer. Though officially we are at peace with Hell, it is not a signatory of the Iscariot Accords. That is why it remains sealed by the ringforts and the Watch enforces its isolation from the rest of Vesper at swordpoint.”
Her fingers left the map.
“The devils that dwell among us signed onto the Accords as individuals,” she continued, “agreeing to be bound to the provisions set down for their kind: that they shall not slay men save in their own defense, that they will not take the skin of the living or employ the wiles of Hell.”
A cleared throat.
“The latter of the three means using an infernal forge to make other devils, or provide help to the Office of Opposition,” she specified. “It was phrased thus to avoid spreading knowledge of infernal forges.”
The professor walked away from the map, towards her desk, and picked up a cup of water from it. She wet her lips then set it down.
“The devils who forced the peace talks were widely considered traitors by their ilk and exiled to the last,” Professor Iyengar said. “Many joined the Watch, brought into the fold by the devils who have been with us since the founding, while others scattered across Issa and Serica.”
Mostly Tianxia and Trebian states, Maryam knew. Few had gone to Malan as their kind was despised there. Devils could become citizens in most Tianxi republics, could become priests or tradesmen in Izcalli and were offered varied status across the many states of the Someshwar and Liergan, but in Malan they had no rights and were not allowed to settle.
“I would leave you today with a thought,” Professor Iyengar said. “It is not uncommon, in our order, to encounter frustration that the Watch does not throw its weight around more often. That it bends where it could stand, bargains when it could demand.”
She jutted a thumb at the map besides her.
“Should you ever share that frustration, remember that the sole seal on Pandemonium is the blood of soldiers wearing black,” Iyengar said. “That every sword rattled to play politics here isn’t over there, pointed at Lucifer’s patiently waiting kingdom.”
Her smile was thin.
“Is the petty victory you seek worth stripping guns off that wall?” Kavita Iyengar said. “Ask yourself this, children, because that is the very question the Conclave must ask itself every time it makes such decisions.”
And on that grim note they were dismissed, left to put away their affairs.
Maryam had sat leftmost among the Unluckies, at the edge of the long desk they all shared, and her gaze lingered on the shade of the man not present. That and on the faint but noticeable ring of space around the Thirteenth, no brigade quite willing to sit directly next to them – only to abut them slightly or indirectly.
The first was the cause for the second, as since Tristan had shot that Izcalli girl in the back most second years were keeping a polite distance from the Thirteenth. Not shunning them, the way the remains of the Nineteenth Brigade were being treated like plague-carrying rats, but kept at arm’s left like a stray dog that couldn’t help biting or a spilled powder keg.
It was not as bad as Song had feared when they heard the news from the Old Playhouse, but the blade that day had certainly cut both ways.
Yaotl Acatl’s brigade now only numbered four, including herself, and she was a pariah. But the garrison’s obvious displeasure with Tristan had ensured that the episode was not without costs to the Thirteenth. For one, Tristan was still under arrest even though the girl he’d shot had left the island this morning. She’d taken Lady Knit’s price so her health had returned, but whatever it had cost left her unfit to study at Scholomance.
Tristan had first been arrested by the garrison to be held in case the girl died, which would see him expelled and possibly executed, but even after this Ahuic took Lady Knit’s deal they had kept him in custody. A point was being made. Song’s hand came down on her shoulder.
“Come,” Song called out. “We need to get moving soon, if we are to have time to eat before the hunters leave.”
Maryam shook her head, dragging her gaze away from the empty spot. If not the thoughts that had accompanied it.
“Do you think they’ll have let him out by now?” Maryam asked.
Song’s lips thinned.
“No,” she said. “I expect they’ll only release him tomorrow morning, still claiming the paperwork has not been received.”
Another rap on the knuckles, since it meant Tristan would miss the hunt’s departure for Lamb Hill this noon. Angharad grunted in disapproval. Not, as Maryam had first expected, that Tristan was not further punished. Very much the contrary.
“It is ill-done of the Watch to behave this way,” Angharad said.
She stood straight-backed, bag ready, and only moved aside to let their fourth join them.
“They had to, Angharad,” Izel said, pitching his voice low. “Gunning the girl down would have cost him a slap on the wrist, after that speech, but the poison? They can’t let something like that stand without making their disapproval clear.”
Else everyone would be stocking up on dragon snail poison or some other equivalent, the substances seeing employment whenever brigades threw hands with any degree of seriousness. So instead the garrison was making its disapproval known, and through more than merely inconveniencing Tristan by keeping him under house arrest for two days. Captain Wen had been clear about what was coming.
The same rules that protected me when Kang got disciplined will protect the Nineteenth when they come for the little idiot, Wen had told them. By the unspoken rules of the Watch the Nineteenth was allowed a swing at Tristan, and so long as Yaotl Acatl and her fellows kept their retaliation within certain bounds most officers would look the other way.
“He broke no law of this island,” Angharad insisted.
“He shot the girl in the back after she’d sheathed her sword, then poisoned her with one of the worst poisons I’ve ever heard of,” Song replied flatly. “If he’d kneecapped her from the front while she had steel out there would have been cheers, but the way he acted made him look unhinged.”
‘Made us look unhinged’, that was the thought the sharpness in her tone betrayed.
“And I have told him that if ever poisons an unarmed, wounded opponent again I will not stop the blade the next time it comes for his head,” Angharad said. “But if the Watch sets only three rules on Tolomontera, it is hypocrisy for them to then punish actions that do not break them.”
It was rare, these days, for the gap between those two to be so obvious. But it betrayed what they cared most about there: the Watch for Song, honor for Angharad. Song looked at everything through the understanding or reputation, of control, while Angharad saw a matter like this as one of personal honor, intrinsically marred by any outside intervention.
Maryam did not care for either opinion. The Watch whining of scalded hands after throwing the Scholomance students in a slowly boiling cauldron seemed petty to her, but treating this like a personal matter was equally ridiculous. The Watch’s ‘three laws’ were there for a reason, not because they’d been inherited from some ancient stele. The Obscure Committee had put death as the line in the sand because they wanted student to be able to settle accounts with violence but without corpses piling up.
Tristan’s poison had made a corpse in all but name, so of course they were coming down on him.
Her concern, however, was that he’d made himself a target for the Nineteenth and he had to know it. And Tristan wasn’t the kind to simply take a beating, not even if he was expected to: he’d go for them before they went for him, and if he did that then Maryam feared that an order would come down that Tristan Abrascal was to have an unfortunate accident.
But what was the alternative, let the Acatl have a free shot and trust in the restraint of a publicly humiliated princess trained to be a killer since she could walk? There was no good way out of this mess now, Tristan had made sure of that. Hooks slid a finger across their veil, the touch faint – as it had been since they expended themselves on Misery Square.
Disagreement, irritation. Hooks thought him right, to have struck first. That letting Yaotl walk off after such a boast would have empowered her and harmed the Thirteenth. Maybe it would have, Maryam thought. But you could walk away from weakness, recover.
She wasn’t so sure of the same about what was coming Tristan’s way.
“-a test, and he failed it by acting that way,” Song said. “This does not mean I turn my back on him, Angharad, but neither will I pretend that if anybody else had done what he has I would not want at least what is taking place to happen to them in consequence.”
“I understand what you say,” Angharad stiffly replied. “But I will say this: anyone who draws live steel on another and then complains of violence is a fool. That ending was courted, and I see no need to submit meekly to the coming blow as if it were deserved.”
Honor again, Maryam thought, was getting in the way. The way Pereduri saw it, if they took the Nineteenth’s retaliation on the chin without a word it would be good as admitting they’d been wrong and Angharad didn’t actually think that Tristan had been. In method and in proportion, maybe, but not at the root. That was all honor codes came down to, in the end: when someone slaps you, slap them back or prove yourself their lesser.
“We can’t fight them, Angharad,” Maryam said.
That it was her speaking instead of Song gave the other woman pause.
“We’ve killed too many students,” she said, keeping her voice barley above a whisper.
There was no one close to them and most the class was already through the door, but talking about this made her feel unpleasantly exposed.
“There’s a point where it doesn’t matter how skilled we are,” Maryam continued, “the Watch loses out on too much by keeping us around. If the Nineteenth takes a swing and we retaliate by crippling them all, we are dangerously nearing that point – if we haven’t crossed it already.”
It didn’t matter if the deaths and dismissals were deserved, or forced upon the Thirteenth. Someone in the Obscure Committee would look at the accounts and see how many students the Unluckies had cost them, then decide that the brigade-killing brigade was something that needed burying. After the skirmish with the Morcant at the docks, Commander Salimata had already warned them against escalating.
The patience of the higher-ups was visibly thinning, and every instinct Maryam had screamed that their luck was already pushed as far as it could be pushed.
“Then what do you suggest?” Angharad said. “That we ought to simply let them cripple Tristan, hoping Lady Knit then returns him to haleness at not too expensive a price?”
“I don’t know,” Maryam admitted, passing a hand through her hair. “But I know this: Yaotl Acatl is no longer a problem we can afford to solve by violence.”
Maryam hadn’t expected the almost pathetically grateful look from Izel, for once she wouldn’t look the gift horse in the mouth.
It was rare enough she made anyone happy, these days.
--
Colonel Cao had announced the day after Misery Square that the meet for the exploration crews would take place on terceday at noon, at the Old Playhouse.
Marshal de la Tavarin had then promptly held his hunter’s meet at the Old Playhouse two days earlier and announced that huntsmen would set out for their camp at noon on terceday. Maryam could only aspire to one day reach such a level of effortless assholery, which as far as she could tell had been inflicted for no good reason. Either way, it had seen the delvers set to meet in the early evening instead, at the Colored Arches. That left her time to spare after seeing off Izel and Angharad by the chapterhouse and she intended to make good use of it.
The five Orels had picked out a pair of houses near the edge of the Triangle, a mere three minutes’ walk away from where Captain Wen lived, and were settling in well considering their limited funds. While the houses were sparsely furnished, they were already painted and their roofs rebuilt. Poltava was looking for somewhere she might do smith’s work, but there were some complications with that – as an auxiliary she would not be allowed to sell goods – so for now looking was all she did.
Still, instead of visiting their homes again Maryam had asked them to meet her by the Rainsparrow as she saw no point in crossing the Triangle just to cross it right back on the way to the docks. She found the five of them standing close to the hostel’s door, close enough they could almost lock arms. She knew why. Pale skin in these parts earned stares from almost everyone passing by, quite a few of them unfriendly. And unlike her, the Orels did not have a black cloak or a hood.
The greetings were quick, the five of them visibly eager to leave. Hooks traced against the veil, a reminder that her sister was just as eager to get out of sight so she step out.
“Come,” Maryam said. “I’ll show you to the ship.”
It was not a long walk and the day was pleasant enough at this hour. Young Koval was eager to have a look at the sea again, or perhaps simply to be out and about: his father did not let him onto the streets alone when there were students around, and most the children in Allazei were wary of playing with a ‘hollow’. She suspected the boy was getting lonely.
Her ship was on the rightmost pier, carefully moored as its brass hull shone under the Orrery light. There were a few gasps at the sight, to her pride, and Old Horvat muttered a prayer to Grandfather Groat for protection. Right, in Dubrik the old god was still held to have some mastery over fate.
“What is it called, princess?” Young Korval curiously asked.
She cleared her throat, hiding her embarrassment. The truth was that Maryam had yet to name the skimmer. No name quite fit, no matter what she tried.
She had first thought to name it after a the fallen – Mother, Father, gods even Jakov. But it was an ill thing, weighing down a ship with the burdens of the dead. Bad luck, and she was ever thin on the good sort. She had thought to steal some junak’s name then, even considering Orel himself, but the more she thought of it the more it felt… childish. Like a girl hiding behind the heroes of her childhood after she was grown.
Hooks had suggested Zeleni Grobovi, after the greatest of the sacred groves, but even aside from the pure pettiness that would have seen her refuse any suggestion of her sister’s regardless of how good it was Maryam thought it a bad omen to name a ship after a place the Kingdom of Malan had put to the torch. It seemed as if every name she had it in her to dredge up was dead, maimed or cursed. But what was she to name if after, then?
The spit of rock she had lived on while being taught by the Navigators, the Dominion? Hasty names, borrowed names, and none of them beloved. As for naming the ship after a god, she and Hooks shortly discussed it before deciding it would be the worst of mistakes. Gods were greedy things: name a ship after them and they might just decide to drag it down into the Nav so they might sail it themselves.
“It has yet to be named,” Maryam replied. “There is paperwork involved.”
Which was even true. Keeping the ship without a name even meant having to sign an additional paper.
“It looks rather… elaborate, for a ship,” Koval the Elder dubiously said. “How fast can it sail?”
The man had been a fisherman, once, but the Izvoric had never been great shipbuilders. Few of her people had dared risk the deeper waters, where Gloam storms and Arpadi pirates were like to ensure you never found shore again.
“The highest is has reached is sixteen knots,” Maryam replied.
At her left, Bolic choked. As a former free knight of Zarla’s Drift, he would know his way around warships – and those of Malan, which the smugglers and pirates of the Drift had once been foes to.
“Not even Malani carvers can beat ten knots,” he said.
“Malani carvers are just sailing ships with ironwood hulls,” Maryam said. “This is a skimmer, Bolic. There’s a reason the discovery of the shipyard that built this almost brought about the return of the Succession Wars.”
“Would that it had,” Old Horvat muttered. “Let the Malani bleed, for once.”
Maryam could sympathize with the notion, but she doubted Malan would have done all that much bleeding. More likely after some losses the High Queen would have pulled back behind the Straying Sea and let the other great powers smash each other up, building her empire out of sight while the would-be successors of Liergan fought over the ashes of the Second Empire. She cleared her throat, pushing away the grim thought.
“I’ll show you the works,” she said, climbing aboard.
The skimmer was about seventy feet long, and even after having walked that deck many a time part of Maryam still felt that it should be dipping backwards into the water. Below the waterline, the back third of the ship bore a massive half-moon of brass made up of cogs and wheels that went noticeably further than the keel. As well they should, since most the skimmer’s mechanical propulsion came from there. Yet instead of dipping, the ship was unnaturally still in the water. Fixed in place.
She showed them the empty turret nest near the front, how it could turn two-thirds of a circle, and explained it was meant to be armed but she had yet to decide on what manner of cannon should be installed. Not that we can afford any manner at all, Hooks traced against the veil. Then they went further back towards the two-story glass cabin, the first level with the navigation wheel while the second was half a crow’s nest and half Navigator’s den.
Then through the brass-covered stairs that went down belowdecks, and finally Hooks was able to slip out of her shadow. Her clothes were less traditional today, Maryam noted. A gown in blue, with long sleeves and enough silver around her neck and wrists for the two of them. Instead of fear Hooks was greeted with a small ripple of surprise followed by enthusiasm – Old Horvat, in particular, fervently greeted her by taking a knee. She ‘magnanimously’ helped him back up, like Maryam couldn’t feel her eating it up through the veil.
“The engine room can wait,” Hooks smiled. “Come, let me show you to your cabins.”
There were six, all comfortable enough, and of these Maryam told them she reserved three for use of the Unluckies but they could split the rest as they wished. Their company kept on walking past them to the small cargo hold, which was largely empty. The sole clutter was the brigade supplies in a corner that Song generously floated Maryam a fee for holding every month. Poltava was eyeing the brass walls with fascination and Young Korval seemed intent on trying out every door handle personally, but Maryam’s eyes lingered on Bolic.
The tall, dark-eyed man was gauging the cargo space. No stranger to smuggling he.
“It would best if Young Korval did not enter the engine room,” Maryam said after they’d looked their fill. “It is a dangerous place.”
His father was all too quick to agree, despite the boy’s betrayed cries, and Hooks accompanied him offering words of comfort as he was send off to unpack some of his family’s bags in their room. It was an effort not to look incredulously at her sister – who was rhis supposed to be, exactly? The adults followed Maryam to the engines, their curiosity soon turning to wariness.
The sight behind the door was admittedly troubling, a nightmare of cogs and wheels all converging on the core of the aether engine – that oddly flexible steel heart moved by unseen hand, commanding a symphony of whirring cogs and chains and even the occasional spout of steam.
“Black fucking Goat,” Poltava breathed out. “That is witchery, all right.”
“Just an imitation of the work of the Ancients,” Maryam told her. “Think of the ship as a beast made of metal: the heartbeat here carries blood to the limbs that let it move.”
According to Izel, that was even mostly accurate: the engine core was what made every other part work, like the wind in a windmill. Apparently her skimmer had the ‘clear marks of a first draft’, being at once extremely intricate and extremely simple. As far as Maryam could tell, that was a mixed blessing: it meant that the parts involved were simple, of a kind that even a blacksmith like Poltava should be able to make, but that there were so many of them something would always need fixing.
“It would best that no one approach the heart without Izel present,” Maryam said.
“He seemed such a steady fellow,” Korval the Elder muttered. “I would not have expected him the sort to deal with… this.”
She hid a grimace. Of all the lands of the Triglau, the coastlands had the fewest ruins of the First Empire. The superstitious sometimes called them cursed. Old Horvat was certainly white as a sheet, and had not actually entered the room. He’d picked up the prayer from earlier and stopped only when Hooks returned a lay a hand on his shoulder, whispering something to him.
“The blackclads are like roving junak, Korval,” Bolic said. “It is their trade to handle such things.”
Maryam’s fingers clenched. She should have been the one to say that, to find the words to reassure the fisherman. They were all her responsibility, but she’d never looked to be responsible for anyone – she’d not learned how to do this, and it was becoming humiliatingly obvious she had no natural talent for it. The kind of talk she preferred, the jest and insults, it would have scared these people.
Knowing that left her mouth empty of anything to say, so Maryam cleared her throat and tried to think of something Mother might have said instead.
“Familiarize yourself with the moving gears, Poltava,” she ordered. “If smithwork is asked of you, it will be to replace them.”
“That I can do,” the older woman replied, coughing into her hand with some embarrassment. “I am not familiar with the metal, but it looks a little like what some highlands trinkets are made of.”
Likely she meant another Antediluvian alloy, though for all Maryam knew the Tratheke brass might not be unique to that city.
“Steel will suffice as replacement in a pinch,” she told the blacksmith. “Though I will ask Izel about obtaining a piece of Tratheke brass so you can practice recasting it.”
The Umuthi Society could probably get its hand on one easily enough. It was not a tomic alloy, merely an Antediluvian one, so rarity would be the only reason for it to be costly. Bolic, she noticed, was peering at the heart with open curiosity.
“How does it work, exactly?” he asked.
Maryam, who only mostly knew the answer to that question, put on a mysterious air.
“The aether engine is near-perpetual motion machine,” she said. “What looks like a beating heart feeds aether ‘wind’ into the aetheric reflection of the engine, which in turns makes the parts move in the material world through conceptual symmetry.”
She cleared her throat.
“The blades up front are relativistically fixed, of course.”
Meaning that their relative distance in the aether compared to the engine was mirrored in the physical, effectively dragging the ship forward whenever it began to move forward. Izel claimed that mostly served to reduce the ship’s drag, one of the reasons it could remain so quick even going against wind and currents.
“Of course,” Orel Bolic repeated, an amused glint in his eye. “I’d assumed as much.”
The smile he flicked her way was just a little bit wicked and Maryam found herself looking away, cheeks burning. He’d seen through her. How much older than her was he, anyway? At least four or five years, she wagered. He was visibly older than Scholomance students but well shy of any patron’s age. Hooks traced against the veil, the nuances taking a moment to decipher and– oh. Maryam almost rolled her eyes. Bolic’s mustache was handsome enough, but too old-fashioned for her own tastes.
She led them away from the engine, locking the door behind her and lingering at the hall as they went on to claim the rooms nearest the cargo hold. The two Korvals would share one, naturally, then Poltava and Old Horvat the second and Bolic would claim the third alone. The only one who seemed like she might argue that for a moment was Poltava, and she thought better of it after a look at the smirking vitez. A hierarchy was forming, Maryam thought. She wasn’t sure how to feel about that, but she knew one thing: she disliked that she was not the one who had set it down.
Hooks went off with Poltava and Old Horvat, repeating some old story their father had once told at a banquet that made the blacksmith laugh loudly it was loud even out here. Maryam’s teeth clenched and she crossed her arms. She should go out there, speak with one of them, but she could not think of a single thing to say. She could hardly look at one of them without the taste of guilt on her tongue – at how she had failed them, at how she could not help but resent them for what they were costing her. Then guilt about that, in turn.
Bolic came out to join her in the hall, leaning back against the brass wall besides her. She cocked a questioning eyebrow at him. She traced on the veil, a question, and Hooks soon slipped away from the others to join them.
“So what is it you two mean the ship for?” Bolic frankly asked.
Maryam cocked head her to side. No weakness around this one, she thought. He was too dangerous for that.
“I assume you mean besides the obvious,” she said.
“A good way to travel for this yearly trial that the Watch puts you through,” he said. “To get there, and get around when on assignment. But how else will you be putting this beauty to work?”
His eyes lingered on her when he said beauty. By habit she pushed away the embarrassment, but Hooks just as casually batted it back her way so Maryam found herself coughing into her fist.
“Shipping,” she replied. “I have negotiated to have my pick of contracts.”
The man frowned.
“You mean moving things between this port and the other Watch fortresses on the island,” he said.
“It will not be as lucrative as I had first hoped,” she acknowledged. “But it should be enough to keep the ship functioning and the five of you fed.”
He clicked his tongue.
“You have been wearing black for too long,” he said. “Are you no longer Goran Khaimov’s daughter?”
Her eyes hardened.
“Careful, now,” she evenly said.
Hooks flicked her wrist, Gloam curling around her fingers like smoke.
“We are also Izolda Cernik’s daughters,” her sister said. “Best to remember that, Bolic.”
His eyes flicked to the Gloam, but there was no sign of fear on his face. It was, Maryam reluctantly admitted, a mark in his favor.
“No offence was meant,” Bolic dismissed. “Your father was the most cunning of the hill kings, it was said he could turn songs into straw and straw into gold.”
“He also turned Volcesta into a Malani town,” Maryam coldly said. “If you have something to say, say it.”
Bolic smiled, thumbing his horseshoe mustrache.
“I have looked at this port every day since you freed us,” he said. “The only ships in it belong to those dwelling in the fort by the bay, or bringing in supplies for the soldiers and school. Yours is the only ship here that does not belong to some great officer.”
“And?” she flatly asked.
“Do not run trade for the Watch, it has ships already,” Bolic said. “Yours is quick, but it has a small hold and a small crew. You should run trade for the students instead.”
She paused.
“Trading with other ports, not just on Tolomontera,” she said.
Where was the nearest island to here? Kofoni, she recalled. A sleepy spit of rock about a day’s sailing away, a few villages that lived off fishing and in the summer dove for pearls. So small the Watch did not even use it as a supply port. But three days away there was – Soriada, Hooks traced against their veil. Maryam traced back thanks. Soriada boasted a town by the same name which was home to a few thousand souls and sold tar, she recalled. The Watch used it for ships. Also olive oil and the fruits of orchards. The food was the important part.
If Maryam could bring food into Allazei later this year, when the prices began getting out of hand? She would be making gold hand over fist.
“That could work,” she murmured. “Especially in a few months, but even now there are goods that simply aren’t sold on Tolomontera. Many of them would need longer trips, so I never considered it, but…”
Bolic smiled.
“We are not students, unlike you nothing prohibits us going off sailing for a week to pick up some faraway treasure.”
Save, of course, the possibility that they would leave with Maryam’s skimmer and never return. Oh the Watch would try to reclaim it – though she doubted they’d simply hand it back after, they’d make demands – but few ships were faster than skimmers and at least two in this crew were experienced sailors. Bolic read her silence correctly.
“I will not say the thought did not occur,” he said. “But then we would have to spend the rest of our lives hiding in backwaters – five Izvoric in a metal ship? No dockmaster would forget such a sight. And should the strange engine ever break down, how would we repair it?”
Wiser to sell the ship and try to settle somewhere, Maryam thought, but then the people wealthy enough to afford buying a skimmer were much more likely so simply take it. Five foreigners, including a boy and an old man, would not be able to contest even a small squad of armed guards. Hooks laughed, the sound of it rich.
“Oh, the engine would be the least of your troubles,” Maryam mildly said. “We’ll lay a curse on the ship and on its captain, that should he ever betray us he would rot from inside until nothing is left but stinking pulp.”
Orel Bolic swallowed. His eyes moved between them, as if hoping one’s face would betray the other, but Hooks offered only an icy smile.
“Of course, princesses,” he said. “I would expect nothing less. And if I may offer a suggestion?”
“We’re listening,,” Hooks blandly replied.
“I have seen the prices at market,” Bolic said. “Compared to what I recall of Malan, using the coin rates that the shops offer, the goods in town are strangely inexpensive.”
He must have been a smuggler as much as a pirate, Maryam thought, to have such a keen eye. Perhaps even more the former than the latter, for by the time Orel Bolic was old enough to captain a ship Zarla’s Drift would have been in Malani hands and its waters patrolled by their navy. Only the hardiest of vitez had kept raiding the Malani then, while smuggling would have been just as lucrative and a lot less likely to get him killed.
“Only temporarily,” Maryam told him. “They will rise.”
He inclined his head.
“Competing with them as they are now would be difficult, nonetheless,” he said. “So best to sell goods where there isn’t competition, yes?”
It took her a second to catch on.
“You mean smuggling in forbidden goods,” she said.
It was already happening, admittedly. When taking back their affairs from the Ninth Brigade, they had found quite the pile of forbidden items in the hidden stash. But the Orels were not students, or as well-connected as the Ninth Brigade.
“If auxiliaries get caught breaking Watch law, the contract could be at risk,” Maryam told him.
“Then we will not get caught,” Bolic grinned. “I assure you, I am a very good smuggler.”
“You can’t be that good, if the Malani caught you,” Hooks said.
Ouch, Maryam thought, tracing amusement on the veil. Brutal but not unwarranted. To his honor, Bolic hardly batted an eye.
“Ah, but they did not catch me smuggling,” he said. “They caught me drunk and in bed with the harbormaster’s daughter.”
Hooks looked amused. Maryam was not.
“Is that meant to impress me?” she asked. “I don’t care about who you shoved your dick in, and drinking’s not a habit I’d want in a man whose trade depends on silence. There will be no smuggling, Bolic. My brigade put their neck out to keep you all on this island, and if you are caught it’ll splash back on them as well.”
She leaned in.
“Should that happen, I assure you it won’t be the Watch pulling the trigger.”
They were her responsibility. If they became a mess, it would be hers to clean up.
“Of course, of course,” Bolic agreed. “It was but a suggestion. No doubt trading luxuries for the wealthy until the prices rise on other goods can still turn a profit.”
He had smiled too quickly, she thought, and too easily. She would have to keep an eye on him. He folded his arms, and a moment of uncomfortable silence stretched.
“You know, I’m not sure I would if I were you two.”
Maryam glanced at him with a frown.
“Would what?”
“Go back,” Bolic said.
She breathed in sharply.
“Seems to me you have a promising career here,” he idly continued. “It is said that those who are taught in this school will become great officers of the Watch and I hear your ‘brigade’ is already famous. You could become someone of means here.”
“And not back home?” Hooks lightly said.
On the surface, at least. Maryam could feel the sharp anger beneath without even needing to reach out for it. The black-haired man scoffed.
“What home? Old Horvat and Poltava cling to that illusion, but the fisherman and I know better,” Bolic said. “The lowlands are finished. No doubt they’d rise in rebellion for Izolda Cernik’s daughters, but if the Malani could end the Wintersworn they can end that last gasps of Izvoric defiance. There is no future left there.”
“They are not invincible, Bolic,” she sharply said. “I have made a study of their empire, and it is fragile. Their wealth comes from the western continent, these days, and there are more of us than them over there.”
The first colonies out west had been almost entirely Malani, but the later ones had been built when the High Queen’s ambitions grew to outstrip the number of her subjects willing to settle across the sea in such rough lands. A problem solved through the broad and brutal use of Izvoric slaves. Her fists clenched.
“There are entire towns of us,” Maryam said. “They live and die there laboring for the Malani, tilling fields of wheat and tobacco. Digging in mines and cutting down trees under great pits of Glare. If there is a rising there at the same time as on Juska, Malan will begin eating itself alive.”
The Kingdom of Malan made its coin selling goods in the Trebian Sea, but a great many of the goods it sold had their roots out west now. Without the fields and mines of the western continent, Malan would go back to being what it had been for much of Succession Wars: the weakest of the great powers, spared the depredations of its rivals mostly by the moat that was the Straying Sea. And if the prosperity the High Queen brought ends, the vultures will turn on her.
“Maybe,” Bolic shrugged. “But there’s no fight left in the coastlands, princess. Not in enough of us.”
“Then I will find people who still have that fire in their belly,” Maryam harshly replied.
He smiled, cocking his head to the side.
“So that’s the play,” he said. “Going to the Toranjic. It might even possible, now that you have a skimmer. If anything will be able to cross the Broken Gates, it’s this sorcerer’s ship.”
Maryam almost cursed. He had been baiting her. Even worse was that Hooks felt reluctantly impressed at his gall.
“That would be years away,” she dismissed. “I have much to left to learn.”
“Don’t we all?” Bolic easily said.
He pushed off the wall.
“My thanks for the talk, princesses,” he said. “I’ll keep the contents of it to myself.”
Bolic offered them a sweeping bow.
“We can revisit the conversation,” he said, “after I’ve proved I am useful to you.”
He sauntered away, back up to the deck, and they watched him leave. She felt Hooks stir the moment he was out of earshot.
“Don’t you say it,” Maryam warned.
“I would,” Hooks replied, grinning. “And if you’re going to say you wouldn’t, put your finger on the veil as you do.”
She wouldn’t dignify that with a response.
“He is blatantly untrustworthy,” Maryam growled out.
“How boring would a trustworthy pirate be, Maryam?” Hooks replied, wrinkling her nose. “Like a horse that never gallops.”
“He wants something,” Maryam said.
“Of course he does,” her sister replied. “And when he steps out of line, we can crush a toe for his trouble. But he hasn’t yet, has he?”
Maryam breathed out slowly.
“We have more pressing matters on our hands,” she told Hooks.
“It’s not a crime, to enjoy it,” Hooks quietly replied. “Neither of us has made promises to anybody.”
Maryam’s fingers clenched. That was true enough. Sometimes she wondered if things that came easy were not harder to keep for it – because you’d not bled when making the choice, found the weight in it. But the thing the two of them left unspoken, she would rather remain so while they stood in the hallway of a ship.
“I did make a promise,” Maryam finally replied. “Let’s wrap this up, Hooks. We need to meet Song to prepare for the exploration crews."
They left it at that.
Comments
Aguido Horatio Davis
So did they ever find out where the Watch are sourcing the beef from? Or is this Chekhov’s Ranch?
Rune of Doom
Yes. A little puzzled as to the "why", but it's a fine chapter indeed, so happy to have it.
Joseph
Anyone received d chapter early?
