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Chapter 10
🕑 Added 2025-05-23 16:00:15 +0000 UTCAngharad got her arms up in time to cover her eyes, but the scorching wind still sent her sprawling.
Her back hit the cobblestone, smacking a breath out of her, but she swallowed the wheeze and rolled to the side. She had dropped her saber, so she scrabbled for it before rising to her feet. Her hands throbbed and the skin had darkened as if touched by soot. Angharad rolled her shoulder – good, she still had the full range of motion – and immediately reached for Song. Her captain was blinking on her knees, a sooty swath across her face. The skin around the edges of that soot had visibly tanned, the distinction clearer on the Tianxi’s skin than her own.
Song took the hand, letting herself be helped up even as she drew her pistol. Sight was returning to her eyes, they were focusing ahead instead of flitting about blindly.
The monster screamed, but even before Angharad’s eyes snapped to it she found the sound was not the same as its first stone-rattling bellow. It sounded pained, as if surprised that shattering the device had hurt its leg. The leathery gray skin of the limb was smoking, Angharad saw, falling off in patches and revealing beneath flesh wet with black ichor. It was sweating it more than bleeding, as if burned.
Ancestors, but the size of it. At least forty feet tall when rearing on its thick back legs, and that was without counting the horns. Beneath that ashen horse-like head dangled large folds of skin in a grayish flap and in the light of the lanterns Angharad saw that the lipless line of the jaw was akin to a crocodile’s, continuing with a slight curve two thirds of the way through the head. A bite of that jaw, she thought, could likely crush stone.
Any half-formed thought that this might be a test by the Watch was put to rest. A creature like this was beyond even what the Marshal would subject students to.
And it was plain that the students were not ready to fight it. There must have been around seven hundred students spread across the square a moment ago, but now at least a third were on the ground screaming and clawing at their eyes. Whatever that mirror-device had spit out, it had not merely been light and warmth. Time to worry about that later, she thought, for there was more urgent concern. If the creature got its bearings back before the downed students did, there would be slaughter.
“We need to distract it,” Angharad said.
Song straightened, breathed out. Silver eyes narrowed, the mind behind them turning its attention on the enemy. It was almost a physical thing, like hearing a key turn inside a lock with a solid and reassuring click.
“Agreed,” Song said. “Pistols to the hide will not work, I saw a dozen shots fail to pierce it.”
No telling if blades would do better before she had a stab at the problem, Angharad thought.
“Eyes?” she suggested.
“Eyes,” Song agreed.
You hardly ever went wrong with eyes. They moved as one, Song lengthening her stride to keep up with Angharad’s longer legs. They raced through a sea of groaning students and thinning powder clouds, pistols belching out fresh shots sporadically as shouts of fear and dismay echoed the lantern-cut gloom of the square. Some students, Angharad saw with a touch of contempt, were running. Either south towards the ruin-strewn alleys that led to Templeward Street, or east through the wrecked griffon temple. They were going against the tide, elbowing and pushing, and Angharad’s frustration mounted. If it kept up like this…
As she had feared, they were barely halfway through the square and the roiling mass of students when the beast shook off the surprise and turned its head on the half-panicked crowd. It had horse eyes, bulging and with an overlarge pupil, but pale and almost… clever. No mere witless animal. But before it so much as took a step there was a strident call that cut through the chaos. Captain Vivek Lahiri, for once unsmiling, stood atop the dry fountain top in the middle of the square holding a curved, S-shaped horn banded in silver. An Izcalli girl in a cloak and tunic stood besides him.
The creature glanced at them, just in time to catch sight of the shivering Sign traced by the girl, and it stopped. It cocked its horned head to the side, as if listening to something, and let out a soft whine that was still half a roar from the size of the throat emitting it. Captains were shouting up a storm to order the flight, to cease students trampling each other, but neither Song nor Angharad put their hand to that scale. Theirs was a different game, and the First Brigade had bought them the time they’d needed: three heartbeats later the pair were out of the crowd, running at full tilt towards the dazed creature through empty grounds.
Angharad mastered her breath, felt the blood pump through her veins. Song had not given her a plan, because there was no need to: Warfare class had hammered basic tactics into them. Angharad already knew her role was to close distance and serve as bait while Song placed her shot. Most pistols tended to wildly buck their shots past fifty feet, but her captain habitually made targets at eighty with the smoothbore piece she now had in hand. All that Angharad needed to do was get that beast back on four feet and looking in the right direction, the rest would take care of itself.
The old palace of the kings of Sologuer was gutted and bent, carved through as if some great spirit had swung down a sword in its heart and the impact had sucked in the sides towards the wound. It was in that central bed of ruins that the monster stood, but Angharad was not fool enough to approach through the gap. Limited space, uneven and sloped footing, a monster whose reach was longer than she could move in the span of a breath? These were dying grounds.
Instead, as Song continued towards the opening, Angharad veered left. The twog ruined wings of the palace had bent inwards towards the carve like lovers begging a caress, and their heavily windowed and towered facades formed what was almost a ramp. One steeply sloped, with the corner towers running up them like angular spines. She picked the left wing, for the way it would have the closest lantern’s light shining at her back.
Angharad barely had to put spring to her step for her boot to reach the lowest hole in the masonry, using it as a prop to jump up onto an angled windowsill. A heartbeat to steady herself, then she wedged a boot on the upper corner of the windowsill and pushed herself atop the corner of the tower. It was straight line all the way up from here, to a peak about two thirds of the monster’s height. She had barely taken her first step forward when the monster shook off the Sign, smashing at the ground in fury – the tower shook beneath her, masonry crumbling in parts, but she extended her arms either way and hurried up.
More shots fired from the square, and now shouts from older voices – the garrison had come – but Angharad could spare them not a breath for her movement had caught the monster’s attention. It turned its horned head her way and, for a moment, studied her almost curiously. Consideringly. Then, as she kept advancing unflinching towards her doom, it moved startlingly quickly to put its… hands, warped finger-like appendages with thick warts of hide, on the end of the tower. Shit. She glimpsed ahead and-
(The monster pushed straight down, tearing through part of the wall and collapsing the upper half of the tower Angharad stood on)
- her saber slid back in the sheath, to ease the distribution of weight, and instead of slowing down she sped up as much as the ridge let her. It was like trying to break into a run on a tightrope, and even as the monster began to press down on the masonry she raised her voice.
“Song,” she called out.
Two glimpses in quick succession, barely more than a heartbeat each, just enough that she timed her step forward perfectly with when stone cracked and the half of the tower she stood on broke off like a snapped bit of biscuit – and used that last moment of solid ground to throw herself at the surprised creature. Shit, she thought as she sailed through the air powerless, she had judged the height right – was set to land on its head – but now all it needed was to move its head slightly and it would impale her with its frontal horn.
“Song,” she screamed as the creature bemusedly angled its head so she would skewer herself.
The sound of the shot swallowed the end of the name. The wild, equine left eye of the monster burst into wet pulp. Not all the way through, just a thick chunk of it, but as the thick black ichor squelched the monster turned to roar at the source of its pain and Angharad only hit the body of the horn with her shoulder, falling in a sprawl atop the creature’s craggy hide. Rolling down the back of its neck, bouncing off like it was a bed of rocks, she fumblingly drew her blade and hacked at the hide in an attempt to find purchase
After hewing through the upper layer the blade got stuck, like an axe in a too-large piece of firewood, and though it almost wrenched her arm out of its socket Angharad was able to stop her fall using it. Momentarily so, for the monster screamed in anger and twisted, shaking itself, and her blade came loose – the mirror-dancer with it. Angharad flew.
She sailed through the cold night air, about to hit the top of the tower from the other side of the palace, but before she could break at least an arm and likely a leg darkness bloomed in front of her – a ball of Gloam forming with a crisp pop, which she hit head on. It was unnaturally soft, eating the impact, though Angharad struggled to keep hold of it with only one hand free. She slid down, only to realize that the sphere was already dissolving, falling apart like rain sliding down a windowpane, and reforming three feet beneath her.
She landed atop it and, madly, was able to simply leap down onto solid ground from this height of a mere ten feet. Angharad landed in a roll even as the monster smashed through the reformed sphere of Gloam, a man’s voice suddenly crying out in pain, then it began to furiously attack the ground where she had been a moment earlier – but no longer, wind screaming behind her from the monstrous blows as she ran for the open grounds of Misery Square. The beast pursued, by the sound of it, but Angharad could not afford to turn or slow so she glimpsed instead. Saw how the massive lemure caught up to her in barely an instant to- huh.
Angharad emerged from the glimpse and lengthened her stride, knowing she was mere moments away from… just as the titan’s shadow swallowed her whole, telling the tale of how it stood over her, she was swallowed by a flock of Gloam-black birds. Rooks, cawing and flapping and not a single one of them so much as brushing her cloak even as she took a hard turn left. The beast struck at the flock, guessing, but Angharad’s veering meant all she felt was a burst of wind and pressure that sent her stumbling forward.
It smashed more than a few Gloam-rooks, but by the way the creature then screamed it must have felt like kicking a thornbush.
Emerging from the flock, she caught herself on the offered arm waiting there. Maryam pulled her back on steady footing, slowly stepping back as the witch’s cold blue eyes studied on the monster like she was preparing to carve it up on a cutting board.
“My blade did not work well,” she told her friend. “Spears might get through.”
If that dense layer of skin beneath the hide was not too thick, and whoever thrust that spear knew their business.
“Go tell Song,” Maryam replied. “We’re to stay here and contain.”
We, Angharad saw, meant a coven of six Akelarre. Maryam, naturally, then a pair of Someshwari – the man from the Third, something Banerjee, and the Ninth Brigade’s own witch. She bore the same surname, and looked like him enough to pass as a sister. Then there was Qianfan from the Eleventh, already tracing a wobbling Sign in the air, and with him – to her genuine surprise, the Emain twins, who pressed the palms of one hand together while tracing with the other in an eerily simultaneous way.
A heartbeat later, through the simple subtraction of not having recognized Qianfan’s voice as the pained one earlier, she nodded at… Riwik, Ritil? No, Ritwik Banerjee. She nodded her thanks at Ritwik Banerjee for the Sign that had saved her from the fall, getting a surprised nod back in reply.
“Tristan?” she asked Maryam.
“Hasn’t emerged, but he can take care of himself,” Maryam grimly replied, then clapped her shoulder. “Go.”
Angharad caught sight of the Emain twins finishing their identical Signs, which seemed almost familiar. They were, she realized when the monster tried to charge into the plaza but hit what seemed like an invisible pane of glass. It was the same Sign the captain of the Bluebell had once used, which meant… the monster screamed and tried to shoulder its way past the unseen wall, only to bounce off as if pushed. Ancestors, let that hold it.
She continued forward, almost running, as the opposite way came reinforcements for the Akelarre. Armed students gathered into a band of more than twenty. Skiritai and Stripes, by large, and Angharad recognized many of the faces. Musa, Lindiwe, Short Bibek. Captain Nenetl, Ferranda, Tristan Ballester. Yaq from the Twenty-Ninth, and besides him Princess Yaotl. Angharad’s respect for the latter went up a notch at the sight. The chatty Savant from the Ninth swaggered at the back of them, cutlass in hand, and inevitably Tupoc Xical had shown up.
He spared her a wink, which Angharad pretended not to have seen as she hurried to the knot of officers gathering at the heart of the rapidly emptying Misery Square. Already half the students were gone, most crammed and panicking in the streets to the south. She saw the black-cloaked mass slipping on the hills of rubble and uneven heights that were the reason everyone used Crescent Street instead, elbowing and clawing at each other as they tried to flee towards the Triangle and in doing so, blocked the garrison soldiers trying to reach the square.
The clever ones had fled through the griffon temple instead, whose grounds were overrun with warped shadow-touched trees but behind which stood Crescent Street. The garrison men she had heard earlier had come from the north of the square, watching over the tail end of Arsay Avenue, and they were hurriedly redeploying to back the Akelarre students as well – but there were barely twenty of them, and their heaviest armaments were muskets. They would be no salvation.
If answers were to come, it would be from the officers she was looking at now: a small council of brigade captains, urgently talking. Vivek Lahiri from the First and Sebastian Camaron from the Ninth, Guadalupe de Tovar from the Second and Philani from the Thirty-Eight. And among them Song Ren, listening expressionlessly as others talked.
“-keep it contained until the garrison arrives,” Captain de Tovar was saying. “They will bring cannons and senior Navigators.”
“Signs can hurt it, we’ve seen that,” Sebastian Camaron insisted. “We need to kill it now, all in, before it turns tricky on us.”
He saw her approach at the same time Song did, and was faster on the trigger than Angharad’s own captain.
“Lady Tredegar, you return in glory,” he called out, gesturing for her to come closer. “Please, help me talk sense into them.”
Come closer she did, but there ended her gift.
“I return alive through the grace of the Akelarre Guild, mostly,” Angharad dismissed. “And I can tell you this: I swung with most of my strength and good steel at that hide only to barely cut into it.”
Grimaces bloomed.
“We are not armed for this fight,” Vivek Lahiri stated. “Pistols and swords to kill a dantesvara? It will be a slaughter.”
Dantesvara? So the monster had a name. Would that she spoke any of the Someshwari tongues so she might understand what it meant.
“Guadalupe is right,” he continued, “but I say she does not go far enough: we need to prepare a full withdrawal. Hold it until the scholar covenants are most of the way back to the Triangle then retreat after them.”
“If we leave that thing loose in the city, there is no telling where it will strike next,” Captain Philani warned. “It could be waiting on the road to Scholomance tomorrow, or even pursue us while we are split up and running instead of together and on war footing.”
“If it pursues us while we head south, it will run into the garrison’s fixed defenses,” Captain de Tovar said. “I can only pray it makes that mistake.”
Angharad’s gaze bounced back from one to another, as if following a twig carried by the current, but Song caught her eye and motioned for them to step away. None of the other captains commented, already back at their argument. Song spared a moment to squeeze Angharad’s arm, as if to reassure them both she had made it back, then lowered her voice.
“Your assessment on the odds spears could kill it?” she asked.
Angharad did not hesitate.
“They will punch through the hide,” she said, “but I have doubts then can pierce deep enough for a kill.”
She paused.
“If Tupoc has his segmented spear, the one with candlesteel-”
A glance.
“He does,” Song said, casually picking out a minute detail on a single man in the middle of a moving group across a chaotic Gloam-plagued square at night, as if it were nothing unusual.
It was easy to forget, sometimes, that reading contracts was not necessarily the most dangerous part of what Song Ren wielded.
“That I give decent odds,” Angharad said.
“Signs?” Song asked.
“It shook off that daze eventually, and while it clearly hated stepping on Maryam’s rooks…”
“We have no guarantees a Sign could kill it,” Song finished. “Vivek is right, then. We need to withdraw.”
“We could try to blind it in its second eye before we do,” Angharad suggested.
It ought to ease the retreat. Beyond the immediate distraction of pain blinding the dantesvara did not seem to have slowed it much, admittedly, but finishing the set ought to help.
“That won’t do much. The eyes are essentially ichor blood clots that it uses to sense things through the aether. Bursting them won’t blind it, only blur its perception a bit.”
They both startled. Standing right behind them, having approached quietly enough neither of them noticed, was a bespectacled Someshwari. Short, barely Shalini’s height, and slender of frame though her long and beautiful brown hair – kept in a thick three-strand braid - made her look larger. She had streaks of soot on her forehead and clearly rubbed more off her spectacles. Angharad frowned for she could swear she had seen movement around the stranger’s collar, a pale little thing scuttling.
“Ishanvi,” Song greeted the stranger. “You know this lemure? Captain Vivek knew the name from its appearance but precious little else.”
“It is a dantesvara,” the woman who must be Ishanvi Kapadia said. “Also called odontotyrannos, tooth-tyrants. A kind of lemure, dwelling mostly in southern Someshwar and only in large rivers.”
“Not horn-tyrants?” Angharad asked, surprised.
She snuck a look at the dantesvara, who was still raging against the invisible wall put up by the Emain twins – though others seemed to be bolstering their work, hemming it in. The three massive horns curving off the creature’s head were by far the most eye-catching part, two going towards the sides like an ox’s while the third curved forward past the head. Why would the Someshwari instead name it after- the dantesvara blinked its distressingly horse-like eyes, then lowered its jaw and revealed a malevolent ocean of teeth.
None larger than a knife, many slightly curved and jutting out haphazardly of the slavering gray flesh like weeds in a garden. They covered the entire roof of the mouth and the bottom of the throat, disappearing into the dark as the Lord of Teeth bellowed loud enough to rattle the ground.
“Question withdrawn,” Angharad faintly said.
Both were kind enough not to comment.
“What are its weaknesses?” Song bluntly asked.
“Cannons,” Ishanvi replied equally bluntly. “Armies, if you’re not too picky about the casualties. The Chronicles of Kanore claim silver burns them and they shy away from Glare, but neither will kill it. The memoirs of Raja Padamel claim it is frightened by great joy and great sorrow, but Padamel-”
“Also claimed he was the son of seven brother-gods and could walk on air because he was weighed down by no earthly desires,” Song flatly said.
“- was known to embroider in his accounts,” Ishanvi finished, looking a little irked. “Yes.”
She then cocked her head to the side. Angharad could have sworn she heard squeaking.
“The Lords of Teeth are theorized by some Savituri orders to be broken gods that the Second Empire brought to make war and were left behind in defeat,” Ishanvi added. “If true, then as all gods do they would have a bane.”
It was not that part Angharad honed in on, though she did fit it to her first thought.
“They live in rivers, you said?” Angharad asked.
“Exclusively,” Ishanvi agreed. “Rajas leave tend to leave them alone because they do not breed and they eat other lemures. They are quite intelligent, if not in the same way that men are.”
“I do not know how it ended up so far inland, or why such a creature is on Tolomontera at all,” Angharad said, “but it seems to me it will want to return to water.”
Song breathed out.
“And it is intelligent enough to be tricked by mind-affecting Signs, as when it was dazed earlier,” her captain finished. “If the Akelarre make it believe there is water near, it might well charge that way.”
Angharad nodded with a smile.
“A working plan,” Song said, sliding a look Ishanvi’s way. “Come, we will need to convince-”
The first and only warning they had was twin screams – the sisters Emain, letting out a sound like their nails had just been ripped out.
By the time Angharad had turned to look, there were already three dead blackcloaks.
No telling who, the corpses were little more than red splatter, and in the span of a single heartbeat what a situation handled became utter catastrophe. Plumes of smoke bloomed, the garrison men shooting their muskets as the Lord of Teeth barreled into the vanguard. Angharad swallowed drily as a man was casually stepped on, crushed like a red sugar cube. The jaws snapped open, shut, and blood flew – two more dead, and Sleeping God that was Tupoc missing an arm. It’d not been ten breaths since it got loose.
“We retreat,” Song said, tone forcefully even. “Get Maryam, I’ll get Tristan.”
Angharad wanted to argue, to demand they stay, but all she could think of was swinging her blade at that hide and what little it had done. What could she do when facing the beast, besides mar its hide? She did not have the means, the tools to kill such a monster. No one had come ready for this fight.
“You know where he is?” she asked.
“I know where he was,” Song grimly said. “And if he has any sense, he’ll find me.”
Angharad put down her hesitation, nodded and got moving. Twenty steps to where Maryam stood, to get her out before the Lord of Teeth finished with the vanguard. One, two, three – three strides, seven corpses. The monster did not even crush them with the jaw, just snapped them up to be torn to shreds by the teeth. Screaming. It echoed from inside its gullet, like a dimmed song. Spears punched into his hide, muskets shot point-blank tore through flesh and its eyes were shot so much they flew into chunks but the Lord of Teeth ignored the blows as if they were rainwater.
Fourth stride, death. Fifth, death. Sixth, deaths. Like ants under the boot of a cruel child.
Seven strides in, Angharad realized that the Akelarre were not running. Not most of them, at least – that Izcalli from the First was helping away the Emain twins, whose fingers were a red ruin, and some others had fled. But now twice as many as before stood in the coven, at least forty, their entire year’s worth of Navigators and more. Eight strides in, the first Signs flew – spinning, shrieking arrows that hammered into the Lord of Teeth like javelins. It screamed in surprise and hatred, turned their way and shook off the warriors pricking him with spears.
Nine strides and a row of Navigators reached their hands upward into nothing, as one, and pulled out roiling darkness. Wind carding, Maryam called it, and having pulled out smooth strings of black wind they began to weave them. Ten strides and hand-wide strands of Gloam were thrown at the Lord of Teeth, not to burn but to bind. Yet it was large, and the bonds still slender. It tore through, sucking screams out of a smatter if signifiers as it did, and fell back on four legs. To charge into the coven.
Eleven strides and Maryam Khaimov stepped out of the ranks, not backward but forward. Her head snapped back and her hands up, as if she were convulsing, and as she did two limbs of Gloam erupted from her side. Each hand wielded a single string of Gloam, a loose thread falling into the shadows that crisscrossed Misery Square and melding into them.
Twelve strides and threads of shadows slipped out of the Lord of Teeth’s own shadow, slipping up its legs like crisscrossing threads, and on Angharad’s thirteenth stride the sisters Khaimov pulled.
It fell, Sleeping God, all four legs impossibly dragged away from its body by tightened threads and it dropped on the ground – the cobblestones shook, and one of the students had been beneath it, but it was down. It fought to rise and the strings tightened, digging into its hide. Began to snap. With every snap Maryam convulsed, as if she had been struck, and Angharad was no longer counting strides. Just running, as fast as she could. An entire swath of strings gave all at once and Maryam let out a hoarse scream, dropping, and Angharad threw herself forward. She caught her friend before the back of her head could hit the pavement, feeling her convulse for a few terrifying twitches before she stopped.
Angharad hastily helped her up and it seemed as if Maryam was in half a trance, eyes seeing but not focusing, and she looked about to retch. There was not a trace of strings left on the Lord of Teeth, but Maryam had bought the others long enough.
The Navigator students of Scholomance were not masters of their craft, not yet, but they were many and that had strength of its own. The Gloam rose as a furious torrent and broad strokes of oily darkness, much thicker than the last bonds, struck at the Lord of Teeth. They tightened around its hide like ropes, forcing it down against the ground. The Akelarre were working together, some tracing their sigils in the air and wielding the Gloam around the monster while others fed them strands of darkness like squires handing archers their arrows.
It was at once a mundane and eerie sight, the gestures themselves almost familiar but what was being wielded a roiling and primal night that had Angharad flinching away, for the very air whispered of death and decay and everything unmade.
The Lord of Teeth struggled against the bindings, screaming and writhing and trying to unhinge its jaw but with a furious shout Qianfan muzzled it with rope of Gloam and forced the jaw shut. Kill it, someone shouted. Kill it now. And they wasted no time to try: Alejandra Torrero was tracing with unerring hand, assembling the body of a Gloam throwing spear while besides her the mute Zama Luvuno traced a jagged harpoon head and Ritwik Banerjee bound both parts with warped armature. They were not the only triumvirate to have come together this way, it must have been a Sign taught for war.
Maryam suddenly let out a wracking breath, coughing out black smoke, and Angharad uneasily held her up. The pupil of her dead eye had turned white, like a cataract, and in her shadow guttered violently behind her as if cast by a candle in the wind.
“Maryam?”
“They have to stop,” Maryam gasped out. “Now. It’s a trap, the thing is playing them.”
“It is nearly dead, Maryam,” Angharad hesitantly said. Was this a fit of mania? “Soon it will-”
“Look at the edges of the square.”
Angharad did, killing the girl who had hesitated and becoming one she liked better.
“Sleeping God save us,” she whispered hoarsely at the sight.
Misery Square had been drenched in long shadows since the start, too-deep darknesses with unearthly visions in them, but what had once been corners were now rivers. It was as if the entire square was now surrounded by torrents of darkness, oily Gloam that coursed deep and only grew as it swallowed the distant lights of the city and slowly the square itself.
“It sees aether,” Maryam rasped, and there was a subtle undertone to it. Like a second voice. “It could see how it was thinner here, because of what Sakkas did. The more Gloam we use the worse it gets, the fucking thing is trying to collapse the whole square into a layer.”
The pale-skinned witch twitched suddenly and her voice changed.
“If it dies, we all drop into the layer,” Hooks said. “If we keep leashing it, we still drop into the layer.”
They would not all die from that, Angharad knew. It was not impossible they might get out. But while they were in there…
“The deaths will have attracted mara like a blood does sharks,” Angharad whispered. “They’ll hunt us all like they did me.”
“Stop them,” the sisters Khaimov rasped out. “We can’t focus, the noise is getting too loud.”
Angharad reluctantly left her and began to shout, trying to catch the attention of the Akelarre, but the signifiers were ignoring her for they were consumed with work that punished distraction brutally.
“Tredegar, what are you doing?”
Captain Philani, handsome face perplexed, waved a hand in front of her. She told him, half-spitting out the words and making every sentence a blunt statement without any qualifiers – she trusted Maryam enough for that.
“Fuck,” Philani promptly cursed, pulling at his beard, and called out to his own brigade’s signifier.
Not alone, for the other captains had come for the kill and Angharad found herself explaining the same thing to Lahiri and Camaron everyone willing to listen – and none cared to argue with the sight of a torrent of Gloam rising around the square. She grabbed Camaron’s arm after.
“Where’s Song?”
He pointed behind, closer to the south of the square.
“Your Mask was found unconscious, she is moving him,” he said. “We will have to run, Tredegar. We’ll leave it bound as long as possible and make for the streets.”
He nodded gravely at her, not a trace of sneer in sight.
“Take your witch and go, the Unluckies have done enough tonight it would be shameful to ask more.”
Angharad swallowed, nodding in something not quite thanks or acknowledgement, and caught up to Maryam in moments for he was wobbling uneasily. Angharad slung her friend’s arm over her shoulder and half-walked, half-carried her to where she could see Song leaning over what had to be an unconscious Tristan. What had happened to him? Their captain was frowning at thing air, talking to it, and within a moment of reaching them Angharad stood before the Lady of Long Odds.
The spirit, she thought, looked worried in a way she had never before seen a spirit be.
“I do not know,” Fortuna bit out at Song. “It’s not sainthood, I am not becoming one with him he is dissipating into me.”
“What?” Angharad sharply said.
The spirit grimaced her way.
“When that thing first roared, it rippled out in the aether,” Fortuna said. “That knocked him into a trance, and he has been falling deeper into it this whole time.”
“I thought building your shrine was meant to fix this,” Song harshly said.
“It’s not like pulling a lever, girl, it still takes time,” the Lady of Long Odds snapped back.
“What can we do?” Angharad cut in.
“Take him to my shrine,” Fortuna said. “It will let me set the boundaries right again.”
“You mean right now,” Song replied, disbelieving.
“It’s already been too long,” the spirit fretted. “I don’t know how long he has. Every minute he’s coming closer to dissolving outright.”
It was telling of how mangled Maryam was that she did not so much as acknowledge anything that had just been said. Her stare was vacant, dazed. Angharad glanced back and found the captains by the beast were almost finished. Half the Gloam ropes on the Lord of Teeth were gone and many were already retreating, running for the southward streets. Angharad followed them with her gaze, saw the river of lanterns coming from the direction Triangle. The Watch was coming, veterans with killing tools, but they would not get there in time.
“Take her south,” Angharad said. “I will carry him.”
Song’s face hardened.
“Alone, carrying someone, it will easily pick you off,” she objected.
The Lord of Teeth roared, rattling the air, and one of its fingered hands broke free. Angharad froze, watching as it snatched an unwary Qianfan from the back. In a heartbeat it crushed him so hard that the signifier’s body came apart in two pieces. Angharad almost threw up.
“We don’t have time, Song,” she got out. “My contract gives me a chance. Go.”
Song’s stern expression lasted a heartbeat longer, then broke.
“Wo qu,” Song Ren cursed, giving in to the ugly reality. “Do whatever it takes to come back.”
Angharad nodded, and that was all the time they had. She finished hoisting Tristan over her shoulders in a soldier’s carry, one leg and one arm draped down the front of her and held in place. With a grunt of effort she rose. She the last of the Akelarre were running now. How the Lord of Teeth, still bound, popped Qianfan’s torso into its maw as if it were a candied date to savor.
Angharad ran for the broken temple. She was not the only one who did, and as she sprinted across the cobblestone with her friend on her shoulders she counted five silhouettes ahead – the first disappearing into the strange, tree-strewn ruin even as she caught sight of them.
It took five breaths before the Lord of Teeth tired of playing with Qianfan’s corpse and finally turned its attention to breaking free of the remaining Gloam ropes. Angharad had just caught up the last of the five runners, a young man in blacks with a twisted ankle who could not seem to run at full speed for the pain. Swallowing bile, she did not stop to help him. She could not carry two.
A breath later, there was thunderous crack in the air as the Lord of Teeth bit through the last rope keeping it down. It was free now. A glimpse told her it would hesitate one heartbeat, then head west. Towards her. Good, she forced herself to think. Those headed south, through the ruined streets, would not be able to move as quickly as she.
“Good,” she snarled, almost a lie.
Five more steps and she was past the crumbled wall and onto the temple grounds, running through a too-slippery field of moss and strange wine-colored flowers. In front of her a hallway with an arched ceiling went in a straight line, but the end had been swallowed up by a large and twisted tree whose leaves dripped with what almost looked like ichor. Left or right? She caught sight of someone turning the corner to the left, past a long-dry pool, and followed without hesitation.
In the distance, behind her, she heard a man’s voice begging and shrieking and finally one visceral scream.
She did not have time for grief or guilt. Tristan was unmoving on her shoulders, unseeing and barely breathing. He jostled on her shoulders as she jumped down into the shallow and empty pool, boots almost slipping on the moss that grew everywhere, and had to slow so she would not slip on it when she jumped out of the pool. She turned the corner a heartbeat later, only to swallow another curse. The hallway was a dead end after barely ten feet, roots leaving but a child-sized gap near the floor to get through.
Ah! The same tree that blocked the way had torn through the second-story wall and the roof above it, spreading those foul black leaves, so now climbing the ornately sculpted wall one could reach the second level and continue. Only ten feet high, and the student ahead of her – a Lierganen girl that could have been Ferranda’s cousin, if of fleshier frame and paler hair – was almost climbing onto the second floor already.
“You,” Angharad called out, and she turned back. “Help me get him up there.”
She pushed Tristan up slightly as she said ‘him’ to make it clear what she mentioned. The stranger eyed Tristan, then her, and snorted.
“Fuck off, Malani,” she said, and hoisted herself onto the second level.
Mastering her anger, Angharad instead took a running start. It was a good thing she had been taught to throw rope, because it would be very embarrassing to miss. Even as she moved she raised Tristan higher, cocking her arms, and with a groan of effort she used the momentum to throw her friend onto the second level. He made it there with hardly a bounce, and by happenstance hit the back of the Lierganen girl’s shins as she got up. She tripped forward, cursing loudly.
Angharad allowed herself a hard smile as she began the climb, catching the eye of the stranger as she visibly debating kicking Tristan back down – she thought of how little effort it would take, to cut in just the right spot of the tailbone to have her head come clean off, and with a snarl the stranger instead took off. At least she wasn’t there to see Angharad’s boot slip off the griffon’s head she was using as support, because the fucking moss had made the soles of her boots wet.
If she survived the night, she would be coming back here with a barrel of pitch and a torch.
She was more careful on her second try and made it in moments, sliding an unmoving Tristan back on her shoulders as she watched the Lierganen kick open some ancient rusted too towards the right end of the hall they now stood in. Part of the wall in front of her had crumbled, enough that Angharad could see through the space how the other woman had chosen a room that likely overlooked the back courtyard of the temple. A quick way out.
She glimpsed ahead, to find out if the stranger would be coming out snarling of a dead in a few seconds, but what she saw instead was that after eight heartbeats the walls of the hall and the roof of that room collapsed under… teeth? A closing jaw, Angharad realized as she emerged.
“This way,” she shouted, immediately going left. “It’s coming.”
The strange ignored her, entering the room, and that warning was all the mirror-dancer could afford. She sprinted down the hallway, finding at the crossroads that one way was filled by the same great tree from earlier and the other collapsed. Wait, no, the window – it was overlooking a knot in the tree. Angharad put Tristan through the window first, following him in, and moments later the temple shook like it had been struck by lightning.
She caught only a glimpse of a great maw swallowing masonry, weeds and a spurt of red before grabbing Tristan and looking down. Another pool, but this one was deeper still had water in it. Dark, dirty water full of reeds and wine-red nenuphars sporting thorns. Maybe poisonous, she thought, but that might not mean lethal. There was no such uncertainty about the Lord of Teeth, so she secured Tristan and down they went. The water was disgustingly warm and got into everything, but at least the cloak did its job and mostly caught the thorns.
Out of the pool she climbed, through stairs the water had made invisible until her boots found them, and the night was finally smiling upon her for across the courtyard was an antechamber whose back wall had crumbled. She could see the street through it. And above the edge of crumbling masonry, on the other side of the courtyard, she could see horns rising from clouds of dust.
Angharad ran again, boots squelching and neck bleeding where she realized too late a thorn had cut her. Nothing she could do. Her back ached and her mouth tasted of blood but she forced herself onwards, kept moving through the courtyard and the twisted sculpted walls of the antechamber until she was out. Onto the street behind the temple, Crescent Street which could go two ways: south, towards Regnant Avenue and safety, or north where just ahead waited a turn that led onto a westward street that would take her straight to the shrine district.
South she made out two silhouettes, which slowed at the sight of her, and even recognized one. Lord Zama Luvuno, the mute and nobleborn signifier from the Eighth. With him was a tall man bearing a musket, by his age not a student but a garrison survivor. North was the looming shape of the Lord of Teeth, but also her best chance at Tristan living through the evening. Fortuna had said they were running out of time. But she would be alone, if she went north. If the monster caught sight of her, there were no distractions left. Only her. She would be done, they would be done. Would going around not… Her fingers clenched.
Angharad beheld the girl who hesitated, who thought first of her own skin, and killed her. Let a better one be born.
North it was, though she tried to lower her profile and hug the back wall of the temple for cover. There was a disbelieving exclamation from behind her, but she kept moving. One eye on the griffon ruins, the monster still smashing its way inside, and moving as fast as she could. To her muted surprise, she made it to the corner. To the street headed southwest to the shrine district, whose lights she could see glowing in the distance.
In the shadow of ancient houses she began running down the street, but even as she turned the corner the back of the ruined temple broke and the Lord of Teeth burst out. Dripping ichor from half a dozen wounds, its foul and punctured eyes sweeping the night and finding her. The plan came half-formed to her already – toss Tristan into the closest house, through the door, and try to draw it away. But what if it ignored her, went for the prey that did not move? Shit, what could she-
The sound of a musket shot sounded in the night and the Lord of Teeth startled, though the impact on its hide could not have been more than a mosquito bite at this range. It turned, as if disbelieving, then stilled. It cocked its head to the side, as if hearing something, and began to sway its head back and forth. A Sign, the same that had been used on it earlier. She owed Lord Zama and that garrison soldier her life, but there was not time for gratitude. The daze had not worked for long, last time.
She ran down the street, ran until her legs throbbed and her knee spiked in pain and her lungs turned into a lake of fire with every breath. Angharad tore through the distance, not even daring to look back. She spared a glimpse instead, though the rising warmth in her veins told her she was nearing her limit for the hour, and found that even after eight seconds nothing was behind her. She still did not dare slow down, not even when she stumbled into the shrine district.
It was empty, at this hour, but still half a wonder – like a street market for spirits, small winding alleys of shrines no large than a house dedicated to a hundred different spirits. The way to Fortuna’s own, was…
“Follow me.”
The Lady of Long Odds was not too weak to make herself fully perceived, Angharad realized, for she was little more than an outline in the air. Like a sketch of Fortuna. She obeyed the spirit and discarded any thought of asking about her state. There was hardly one of their kind who would not take offense to it. She followed her guide through the winding alleys, cutting across what must be another spirit’s shrine once, but in barely three minutes they were there.
It looked like little from the outside. A small, ruined house with its tiled roof half-gone and the right wall missing. There had not been so much a trace of the door or shutters remaining, and still the shrine to Fortuna remained without anything warding entry. Angharad slid Tristan down her shoulders, carrying him like a princess through the threshold – on the other side of which the Lady of Long Odds waited, now entire and vibrant to the eye.
Like every time before Angharad spared a heartbeat to wonder at the sights inside. He was not a mason, Tristan, or a woodworker. So instead of attempting repairs or a statue, he had put his hand to work he was skilled at. The shrine to the Lady of Long Odds was not painted in the way that a wall would be, to fill with a color, but instead every wall and ceiling had been made into a canvas. The colors were almost radiant: gold and orange and red, white and yellows, subtler traces of browns and grays. Much of it was blind, great swaths and swirls that only subtly evoked spinning coins and golden winds or turning tides, but it led towards the central figure in splendid red that stood painted on what had once been the chimney.
The visage of Fortuna herself, regal in red with hair and eyes of gold as her skin burned pale as the Glare itself, stood at the heart of the room. She filled the place effortlessly, the trail of her dress slipping onto the floor and her fingers seemingly snatching a coin out of the left wall, and there was the elegance of it – half the room was gone, and once a week it rained in Scholomance. The water had winded through the missing tiles and wall, slid down the paint and bled them onto the floor where threads of color mixed in a chaotic mess painted entirely by chance.
The place for offerings was where a fire had once burned in the chimney, beneath the Lady of Long Odds, and Angharad caught sight of a clay bowl filled with small coins and trinkets besides which melted candles still bravely offered up a single wick and two sticks of incense lay half-burned. Angharad was startled out of her look by Fortuna brushing past her.
“Deeper inside,” the spirit said. “By the offerings, lay him down there.”
Angharad hurried in, laying Tristan down gently by the hearth. He did not stir, though his breath was steady. There was a sound like a crack of thunder in the distance. The Lord of Teeth had yet to die, though surely the Watch would soon catch it.
“Is it working?” Angharad asked, looking down at her unmoving friend. “Can I help?”
Fortuna sat by the thief, who looked so very young like this. He still looked thin, when stripped of all the smiles and swagger. The spirit stroked his forehead and Tristan stirred in his trance.
“He is coming back,” she said, sounding relieved. “Soon.”
The sound again. Closer this time. Alarmed, Angharad rose to her feet. She glanced questioningly at the spirit, who shook her head. She did not know. Fingers clutching tightly to her saber – and ancestors, how useless such a fine blade had felt tonight facing what they did – she strode out of the shrine. She blinked, getting used to the glow the lanterns hanging on poles, then froze.
It was there, barely a block down the street. Caught up to them.
But instead of having those foul eyes turned on her she watched as the looming, craggy shape of the Lord of Teeth leaned forward to swallow half a shrine. Gobbled it up, snapping its jaw shut and swallowing, and only then did it turn her way. She froze, the illusion of safety leant then suddenly snatched away having chased away all plans from her mind. It lunged forward and Angharad saw death, but death did not come for her. It came for the shrine.
The Lord of Teeth swallowed the hearth of Fortuna’s shrine, and half the shrine behind it, then raised its head to swallow. Angharad, stomach dropping, stepped into the twice-ruined shrine even as the monster stepped away and began devouring another, but against all odds Tristan was there. Sitting in the middle of the swirling paint on the floor, half-sitting as the light of the Orrery cast him in a golden glow. In the distance there were shouts, musket shots, and even something that must be a cannon. The garrison had caught up, but Angharad spared them not a thought even as the Lord of Teeth continued to rampage.
She crouched by Tristan, whose stare was distant, and lightly touched his shoulder.
“Tristan?” she quietly asked. “Can you hear me?
He did not answer.
“Are you all right?” Angharad tried.
Only then did he turn gray eyes on her, as if finally hearing her words.
“She’s gone,” he rasped out, sounding terrified. “Angharad, I can’t feel her anymore.”
And then, to her utter astonishment, Tristan Abrascal began to weep.
Comments
Jasus
I reaaaaallly hope Fortuna is not gone for good. I do not exclusively read this story for her and Tristan but they are the source of most of my enjoyment in this story
Aguido Horatio Davis
“First off, there is no such thing as a good gambling number,” he firmly replied. “And second it’s the worst possible luck, Song. We might as well just name ourselves ‘those unlucky bastards’.” From earlier in the series.
Blind
Interesting developments, the Unluckies aren't wasting any time getting into the shit. However, there seems to be a ton of grammatical errors and incomplete sentences this chapter. Normally there are a couple prominent ones I can move past quickly but there were enough to really interrupt the flow of the story I felt.
York
Becoming a saint is too much divinity being shoved into a person, but here Tristan was dissolving into the divinity. I guess the Lord of Teeth was trying to bring everything into the aether from the very beginning (causing Tristan to fall into the *almost* ever present Fortuna).
MeYouIt
I wonder exactly how unique Tristans and Fortunas relationship is? Has a god ever sacrificed themselves for a follower before? Probably, but it cant have hapened more than a handfull of times. Girl... Angahard honey, I see you're on self growth jurney since you've returned to Scholomance. And I love that for you. But 'killing' versions of yourself you dont like is not a healthy way to do it. It seemes to me to come from a place of self-loathing. Instead, dissmiss useless impulses for a later time where you can self reflect. Master the emotional version of mirror dancing 😤 Tftc! Great as always!
Aguido Horatio Davis
Because only people who have entered the cottage can find their way back to the cottage, and he entered the cottage before he first entered the cottage. Yo, dawg…
Ed
so let me have a guess, tristan will feel great sorrow, the bane of the monster, and maybe kill it. he will find that fortuna is injured and sleep, and in order to help her he will "borrow" all kind of troubles. also, i hope sakkas will appear again and answer why tristan could enter the cottage.
Omri Solan
He has built the wrong shrine. It should have been a casino
