This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Copyright © 2023 by Matthew Ward

Excerpt from The Sword Defiant copyright © 2023 by Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan

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Cover illustration by Joe Wilson

Author photograph by Photo Nottingham

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2023941578

ISBNs: 9780316476607 (trade paperback), 9780316476706 (ebook)

E3-20231005-JV-NF-ORI

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Dramatis Personae

SKELDERS AND OTHER UNDESIRABLES

Katija Arvish | A most uncommon thief
Azra | An exceedingly uncommon thief
Skerrik | Roguish lock charmer
Marida | An old soul
Darravon | Dissatisfied employee
Tatterlain | Wearer of many faces
Yali | The greatest lock charmer in Khalad
Jaîna | Fugitive apothecary
Trajian | Convict
Maxin | Hired muscle
Zephyr | Veilkin navigator
Rîma | Wandering swordstress
Bashar Vallant | Notorious rebel
Amarid | Upstart rebel
Vathi | Morose rebel

UPSTANDING CITIZENS

Ardin Javar | Redeemed ne’er-do-well
Ihsan Damant | Castellan to House Bascari
Elinor Bascari | Countess of Tyzanta
Sherabi | Devoted servant
Yennika Bascari | Elinor Bascari’s outcast niece
Tanith Floranz | Disowned heiress
Jorais Bascari | Son of Elinor Bascari
Mirela Bascari | Elder daughter of Elinor Bascari
Salenna Bascari | Younger daughter of Elinor Bascari
Julan Aroth | Minister to the King’s Council
Zaran Ossed | Hierarch of the Alabastran temple
Terrion Arvish | Artist and scholar (deceased)
Raith Bascari | Count of Tyzanta (deceased)
Tythia Bascari | Elinor Bascari’s daughter (deceased)

THE REGAL AND THE DIVINE

Caradan Diar | The Eternity King
Isdihar Diar | Voice of the Eternity King
Nyssa Benevolas | Goddess of Benevolence
Nyssa Iudexas | Goddess of Judgement

Notes on language and place can be found in the Glossary on page 547.

One

Kat plunged, rope hissing through her gloves. Leering grotesques and arched windows rushed into the upper darkness. A heartbeat, and the tower’s wall gave way to the thick, jutting dais of its foundation, then to stone archways and corroded steel braces. And at last to the hollow, empty void.

Giddy with exhilaration, she clenched her fists and clamped her insteps tight. The rope’s sibilant hiss became an angry rasp. The sharp, warm scent of friction-scarred leather mingled with bitter chimney smoke.

Kat’s knees juddered as boots struck moss-crusted tile. Swallowing a gasp of relief, she let go. Too late, she realised she’d misjudged the roof’s pitch. She skidded backwards, grabbing at the rope. Lunging fingertips nudged it beyond reach.

Azra, one hand gripping a chimney’s coping stones and legs braced against the ridge line, grabbed her wrist. “Graceful as ever, darling.”

The wry, elegant crook of her lips belonged more to a privileged Overspire heiress than an Undertown skelder. Azra was always smiling, save when lost to fearful temper. Compromise and concern were alien concepts, whatever her mood.

Azra hauled Kat up to the relative safety of the ridge line. “Better?”

“Thanks.” Kat tested her balance, trying not to think about the plunge. “I left my stomach somewhere up there.”

A chink of concern broke through Azra’s smile. “Not your finest hour.”

Levelling her gaze, Kat stared across the city to settle her queasiness. Her vertigo didn’t care that she was high up so long as she didn’t look up or down.

Bathed in starlight and dotted by leaping watch-flames from torch house minarets, Tyzanta possessed an unlikely beauty. Over the centuries, strata upon strata of new buildings had been raised atop those that had come before, buried in turn as the wealthy sought escape from squalor. The broad-based spire towered over the crumbling tenements and bow-roofed warehouses of the Undertown slums, honeycombed with forgotten streets and encrusted with mansions, temples, ramshackle townhouses and overgrown gardens, all served in turn by tiered canals and spiralling roadways, and supported by a precarious tangle of archways, buttresses and struts that seemed always on the point of collapse.

With midnight past and dawn yet distant, Tyzanta slumbered, but was never truly quiet. Gusting wind carried owl-hoots and the trilling of nightjars down from nests in the spire’s overhang, the clop of hooves and the clamour of roaming drunkards rising from nearby streets. Beneath it all, the distant, breathy rush of waterwheels driving the mills, and the wheeze of furnaces that laboured whether sun or stars ruled the heavens. Only in the darkness beyond the city walls, where mesas jutted above central Khalad’s arid, ruddy plains and bristling black pine forests, did silence reign.

Like the spire to which it clung, the building upon which Kat stood hadn’t been constructed to a particular plan so much as it had expanded in fits and starts when need and opportunity arose, swallowing outbuildings and overrunning gardens. The balcony along the ridge line – where a be-silked and languorous darling would once have taken the sunshine – now simply provided access to chimney stacks dotting mismatched roofs.

True firebloods – as the nobility called themselves – had long since retreated higher up the spire, leaving such dwellings to be claimed by upstarts purchasing their way out of Undertown. By all accounts Ardin Javar was very much the latter. But Kat was in no position to judge. Better a rising upstart than a debtor in free fall.

She fixed Azra with a glare. “Thirty yards, you told me. Forget to mention the other thirty, did you?”

Azra dismissed the complaint with an airy hand. “Must’ve slipped my mind.”

“You should have told me.”

“Would you have followed if I had?”

“I—” Kat sighed. “You know I wouldn’t.”

“And that’s why I didn’t tell you.”

Careless of the treacherous footing, Azra darted forward and kissed her on the lips, the warmth fleeting as she withdrew, her eyes shining with mirth. “Forgive me, dearest Katija?”

Kat maintained the semblance of a scowl only through supreme effort. It was hard to stay mad at Azra. “No.”

Azra kissed her again, lingering a heartbeat longer than before. “What about now?”

Kat hung her head, annoyance bleeding away. “You’re impossible.”

She smiled. “You wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Kat had hated that smile at their first meeting a year before. A fugitive from her father’s creditors and in her naïveté an easy mark, she’d been on the sticky end of four-to-one odds after crossing the wrong people in the wrong part of town. Then, Azra’s smile had accompanied a helping hand out of the gutter and a desperately needed ally. Battered, bruised and with worse in the offing, the last thing Kat had wanted was a witness to her humiliation. Dislike hadn’t survived the ensuing brawl. Come dawn, it had been no more than a memory, dissipated by a fierce hangover.

Azra’s features were sharper than Kat’s and her deep bronze skin a shade paler, but matched hazel eyes and ink-black hair meant that most strangers mistook them for sisters. Kat didn’t see it. Even on her best day – tressed, perfumed and a well-cut gown clinging like a second skin – she felt ungainly by comparison. Fighting for balance on that rooftop, her bunned hair fraying in the breeze, timeworn coat and trousers damp with sweat despite the cold, she felt every inch the graceless lump. Azra looked stunning – of course – even with her breeze-blown hair writhing. But then so much of that was attitude, the unblinking elegance born of certainty in place and purpose.

Inevitably, the strangers who thought them siblings invariably judged Azra the elder. She might well have been – though as she was habitually evasive about her age, the truth remained a rare secret between them. By contrast, Kat knew her own time of birth, now some twenty-five years in the past, down to the second. Her father had wasted a small fortune commissioning horoscopes as birthday gifts. Not one had ever come to pass, except in the very broadest of terms. Had the reverse been true, he’d likely still be alive and she not forced to a skelder’s life on society’s fringe with all the other thieves, heretics, throat-slitters and debtors.

Azra picked her way along the ridge line with practised grace and clambered onto the balcony. Kat edged after her. An unconscious man lay beside the balcony door, gagged, blindfolded and trussed with Azra’s trademark efficiency.

But his absence wouldn’t be missed for ever.

Kat squatted beside the guard. With its simple black cloth and golden vine-leaf embroidery at collar and cuffs, his uniform aped those worn by House Bascari’s custodians. It was hard to imagine Tyzanta’s ruling family tolerating his unshaven and broken-nosed appearance, or the serrated dagger tucked into his belt. He might have passed muster elsewhere in the kingdom of Khalad. Kat’s father had claimed that all manner of standards declined the further one travelled the Copper Road towards the tumultuous province of Qersal. But this was Tyzanta… and the man clearly a thug, despite attempts to pass him off as something more.

A sentry crest in the likeness of the goddess Nyssa stared out across the balcony, her sculpted beauty and benevolent smile wreathed in the flames of her flowing hair, the silver-black prism of her eyes stark against otherwise pale stone. Kat’s left forearm itched, warning her that she’d drawn the interest of the hestic ifrît dwelling within the prism. Idle curiosity, at least for the moment. Hestics were thin scraps of soul, and lacked the sentience for anything more proactive than guard duty. Which wasn’t to say things wouldn’t go poorly if she crossed the threshold.

She nodded at the unconscious guard. “He give you any trouble?”

“Does he look like he gave me any trouble? Poor lamb never even saw me coming.” Azra shook her head in disappointment. “If we’re doing this, we need to do it now. Unless you’ve changed your mind?”

A piece of Kat longed to walk away – one did not lightly cross a man of Javar’s standing – but that meant losing the opportunity to clear the inherited debt that had destroyed her life. She’d done well to stay ahead of the temple bailiffs, but they’d find her sooner or later. They always did. If that happened she was as good as dead. Worse than dead.

She jerked a thumb back at the rope. “It’s not like we can go back the way we came, is it?”

“Glad to hear it. I’d hate to think all this suffering had been for nothing.” Azra tapped the prone guard with the toe of her boot. “His in particular.”

“You’re all heart.”

“And that’s why you love me.”

“Could be.”

Baring the guard’s forearms, Kat uncovered the black spiderweb tattoo on the inside of his right wrist. She pursed her lips, partly at the scarring from the artist’s amateur hand, but mostly because that same artist had made no attempt to conceal the curling geometric spiral of the soul-glyph within a pleasing design.

She removed her left glove and drew back her sleeve. Her own tattoo blossomed from the base knuckle of her middle finger, broadened across the back of her hand to a triangle at her wrist then wreathed her forearm in thin, graceful lines down to her elbow. Where the guard’s uneven tattoo was sullen and dark, Kat’s shimmered with a pale indigo flame that cast neither shadow nor warmth. Any halfwit with dinars and the right connections could have a simple glyph inked, but Kat’s aetherios tattoo was one of a kind. Her father’s greatest work. One she’d improved upon in ways he could never have imagined.

Holding her breath, she shut out the sounds of the streets and focused on her tattoo. Indigo fire rippled beneath her skin. Lines faded, leaving unblemished flesh. Others crept outward, rich and ink-bright, mimicking the soul-glyph in the guard’s tattoo. Or to mimic how his soul-glyph should have been, had its creator possessed a steadier hand.

“Can’t you hurry up?” muttered Azra. “It doesn’t have to look pretty so long as it works.”

Kat stifled a smile and nudged the last lines to completion. Azra might possess an elegance she’d never match, but this was hers, and hers alone. For all her swagger and savvy, Azra couldn’t do it. No one could. A skilled artist might add to a completed design across painstaking hours and craft a new glyph from the framework of the old. But wholesale manipulation of an existing tattoo? Let alone in a matter of moments? That was impossible. Kat loved accomplishing the impossible in front of Azra. It made them equals.

She reached for the door. Her forearm throbbed as the hestic ifrît’s curiosity darkened. Invisible still, it uncoiled from behind the sentry crest’s graven eyes. Kat tensed as tongues of soulfire grazed her skin, neither hot nor cold. Most folk couldn’t see the flames, much less feel their caress – they only witnessed the consequences of a hestic not finding what it sought – but Kat’s aetherios tattoo brought her deeper into the spirit world than most folk came before death.

The ifrît’s fires burrowed into her skin. The world boiled away into a black haze. She flinched at the hot flash of the hestic’s envy as it tasted the vibrance of her still-living soul. Barely sentient the ifrît might have been, but it was aware enough to know that it had once been a person and no longer was. It grew heavy with resentment, thunderheads building at the fault line of their entangled souls.

Panic wormed into Kat’s thoughts. Stronger hestics could bind an intruder or turn their blood to flame, the fires invisible until the victim began screaming. This one felt too weak for either, but even something as simple as raising the alarm would spin the night into disaster.

Even as that unhappy thought gathered pace, the hestic at last brushed the forged soul-glyph on her wrist – or rather, the shadow it cast in the spirit realm’s darkness. A heartbeat skittered by as the ifrît satisfied itself that the glyph marked her as someone it should allow to pass unmolested.

Sleep, Kat breathed wordlessly.

Sighing, the hestic bled back into the sentry crest. The spirit realm’s smothering darkness yielded to the mansion rooftop, leaving behind nothing but the ghost of its telltale lavender scent. Kat blinked the last of it away and found Azra’s hands tight about her own and her eyes taut with worry.

“How…” Kat swallowed to clear a claggy throat. “How long was I gone?”

“A solid twenty-count.” Azra’s voice trembled with accusation. “You’d stopped breathing.”

“I had not.” The rebuttal was instinct. Time flowed strangely when communing with an ifrît. Sometimes eternities passed between heartbeats. At others, heartbeats stretched to eternities. Kat forced a smile. “It was stronger than I expected, that’s all. It’s sleeping now.”

Azra scowled. “Marida should have warned you.”

“Warned me about what? That Javar values his privacy?” Kat glanced down at her tattoo. The skittering flames were dimmer. The hestic had taken more of the tattoo’s fire – more of her vigour – than she’d expected. She tugged her sleeve into place. “She’d expect us to know. We’re not children. And it could be worse.”

The scowl became a grimace, then bled away. “How?”

“We could be going in through the front gate.”

The front gate, with its high wall and never fewer than three of Javar’s thugs standing guard. There were quicker ways to die, but not many.

Kat eased open the balcony door and slipped inside. A lantern beside the inner door – the lumani ifrît sealed within diffuse almost to the point of dissipation – roused the room’s undulating contours to murky greys.

Musty air thick in her nostrils, she slid her feet along the threadbare carpet, the better to detect a loose floorboard before her weight set it creaking. Reaching the inner door, she spied a second sentry crest above the lintel. The stone was discoloured and pitted with age, the prismatic eyes cracked and lifeless. Whatever hestic had dwelt within the stone had faded to nothing long ago. Either Javar didn’t expect intruders to enter this way, or there was something else at work.

Kat opened the door and peered down the empty stairs. A warm glow suffused the lower landing from the archway beyond. No signs of life.

So why did she feel like she was being watched?

No. Not… watched exactly. It was more of, well, a presence. Some holdover from the hestic’s embrace? Hestics, lumani and most other household ifrîti weren’t generally a chatty lot. However, most had some notion of others in close proximity, in much the same way that while Kat never made eye contact with her fellow tenants and spoke to them only out of dire necessity, she was broadly aware of their existence.

Azra glided to her side. “Are we clear?”

“Yes. No.” Kat shook her head, hating to look indecisive. “Maybe.”

Azra sighed theatrically. “I’ve always admired your precision.”

“Let’s just be careful, all right?”

She grinned. “When am I anything but?”

Two

Azra descended the stairs with customary grace and flattened herself against the archway’s flanking wall. Her expression uncharacteristically serious, she pressed a cautioning finger to her lips and jerked her head at the open archway. Kat slipped into place opposite. Noting muffled footfalls in the room beyond, she slid into a squat and eased her head around the corner.

Javar’s rumoured wealth was at last on display on that circular landing. A three-tiered crystal chandelier banished shadows from a thick carpet whose intricate gold, black and scarlet knot-work made it an expensive import from distant Phoenissa. Mahogany balustrading looped the outer edge of a double-spiralled stair. An extravagant waste of space, but the twin spiral was beloved of those who strove to prove their piety, representing as it did the goddess Nyssa’s mirrored aspects of Benevolas and Iudexas, forgiveness and judgement. The stained-glass window that filled the opposite wall with a glittering, flame-wreathed Nyssa Iudexas, armoured and cloaked for war, suggested Javar’s preference for the latter.

Of more immediate concern were the patrolling guards. Both had the droop-shouldered tread of folk going through the motions until shift end. They looped around the balustrade’s rightmost end and curved back towards the nearest stairway head.

Kat ducked out of sight and held her breath. The footsteps approached, passed and vanished behind the creak of a door away to her left. She gave them another ten-count, just to be sure, then followed Azra out onto the landing.

“West wing?” murmured Azra.

Kat leaned out over to the balcony to check the coast was clear. “So Marida said.”

Azra flitted across to an ornate doorway, the mirror of the one through which the guards had departed. It was easily half as tall again as she, embossed with the motif of a snake wound about a yew tree – the heraldry of some long-vanished fireblood family. No sentry crest graced its lintel. Presumably Javar hadn’t felt the need to ruin the plasterwork by having one installed.

She tried the handle. “Locked.”

Kat nodded. No surprise that Javar didn’t trust his minions with his inner sanctum. “We should have brought Skerrik.”

“He’d have fallen off the rope.”

More likely Skerrik would’ve refused to even attempt the descent. Like most skelders, he possessed a keen sense of self-preservation. The payment in kind Marida had offered for the night’s endeavour held nothing to entice him, and Kat didn’t have anything like the funds to make up the difference. “Can you get it open without bringing the household down on us?”

Azra splayed a hand across her chest, eyes wide in mock offence. “Honestly, darling. I’m embarrassed for you.” She unfurled a battered cloth roll from her belt and laid it in front of the door. After a moment’s consideration, she slid two lock picks from their pouches.

Kat made a slow loop of the landing. Through one of the stained-glass panels, she made out the adjoining atrium’s low roof and the high curve of the gate just beyond. Motion betrayed the presence of at least two sentries.

Drawing back, she peered up at the chandelier. She wondered briefly at the rage the lumani’s progenitor had known in life for it to blaze so bright in spirit.

Taking a deep breath, Kat drew as close to the chandelier as the balustrade allowed and reached out her left hand. The ifrît reciprocated eagerly, its light rippling with shadow as it extended what portion of its soul-flame it could beyond the chandelier’s prism. Kat adjusted her tattoo as they made contact, instinctively re-inking the design as she sought a soul-glyph the ifrît would obey.

Its invisible flames lapping about Kat’s forearm, the ifrît gladly shared what it knew, not in words or even images, but as slivers of light and patches of shadow that required guesswork as much as interpretation. A host of lumani dotted the three storeys, none of them as impressive – at least in the ifrît’s own estimation – as itself. Kat also read half a dozen echoes of hestic watch-spirits in immediate proximity, the exact locations rendered uncertain by the lumani’s contempt for soul-slivers that knew nothing of radiance. Further out, impressions grew ever more vague. The lumani was almost certain of a pyrasti sleeping in the feast hall hearth, sated by the embers from the evening’s fire. There might have been an ailing motic shackled to a broken-down clatter wagon out in the courtyard. The west wing remained a black, roiling abyss in its thoughts.

Undaunted, Kat pushed, wielding her tattoo’s soulfire as a goad. The ifrît’s mood darkened, the chandelier’s light dimming alongside.

Pride became angry pleading, the ifrît’s choking, wordless demands for freedom so overwhelming – so heartbreakingly reminiscent of the mortal being of which it had once been part – that Kat shot a defensive jolt of soulfire through its being. Wailing at her betrayal, the lumani hissed back into the chandelier with enough force to set it swaying, leaving Kat trembling against the balustrade.

Azra stalked across the landing. “Stars Below! What was that? You were supposed to be keeping watch.”

Tamping down a guilty pang, Kat pushed upright and stared at the west wing door, now ajar. “There’s something through there.” She glanced down at her tattoo, its flames noticeably weaker. Breaking free had cost her precious soulfire. “The lumani was afraid.”

The anger in Azra’s eyes hardened to determination. “Then we’ll handle it. We—”

She broke off at muffled footsteps drawing nearer behind the east wing door.

Kat winced. “Go.”

Azra darted into the west wing, scooping up her lock charmer’s tools without breaking stride. Kat cleared the threshold with moments to spare. The soft click as she tugged the door shut came just ahead of its counterpart’s creak from across the landing.

The only light in the corridor was that which crept under the door or around the windows’ heavy drapes – barely enough to shape the oil lantern hooked beside the architrave. As the patrol’s footfalls retreated, Kat fished a matchbook from her pocket. A hiss-scratch, a waft of sulphur, and she coaxed the lantern to greasy life.

“See?” breathed Azra. “Nothing to worry about. Except Javar’s taste in decoration.”

“I tell you the lumani was afraid of something.”

“All the more reason to get this over with.”

Kat nodded unhappily. Distance from the lumani made it easier to untangle its glut of emotions from her own. Ifrîti were echoes of living men and women, instinctive slivers of soul that existed only in the moment. It was foolish – even dangerous – to accept their worldview without question. Very probably the lumani, like the hestic on the balcony, had read the absence of other ifrîti in the west wing as portending danger and poisoned her with its own uncertainty.

Beyond the next door, the corridor branched into a suite of rooms every bit as dark and lifeless. Dust sheets lay atop dressers, chairs and tables. If Javar didn’t trust guards to patrol his sanctum, he certainly wasn’t about to give the cleaning staff full rein.

While there were prisms aplenty among the darkened chandeliers and another in the cold hearth of Javar’s private dining room, their ifrîti had long since dissipated. Even the bold lumani in the stairway would eventually fade into the misty netherworld, there to languish until Nyssa judged its sins redeemed and permitted rebirth.

At the corridor’s end, they at last found the room they sought.

“That’s what I love about the wealthy,” Kat murmured, “they don’t like to show off.”

“Of course,” Azra replied, deadpan. “One must be discreet.”

“Wouldn’t want to be thought gaudy.”

“Blessed Flame, no.”

The room was a shrine to old glories, its altar of worship a tall glass cabinet against the far wall. Within stood a wicker mannequin in blackened lamellar scales and an ash-white tabard. The crest of the Alabastran temple – a mirrored indigo and gold flame – gleamed at the centre of its chest. A white cloak flowed from gilded pauldrons.

Raised platforms flanking the carpeted approach held what Kat took to be other mannequins, three to each side. Though protected by sheets rather than glass, the outlines of shoulders and heads were unmistakable.

Smaller cases lined the wall to either side, given over to polished and gem-set weapons. Two scimitars. A flanged mace. A rounded silver shield with a brass rim. A straight short sword of the type favoured in the northern cities, seemingly crafted from polished black stone, rather than steel. A ritual flamberge, the rippling blade almost Kat’s height. Smaller cabinets held jewellery. One piece in particular urged her along the aisle: a ring of reddish gold, the metal wrought in an endless spiral. The communion ring was least of all the treasures in that room, but it was the only token by which Marida’s help could be bought.

Tension bled from Kat’s shoulders. “This must have cost Javar a fortune.”

“Not really.” Azra tugged at a sheet. It came away in a spill of dust, revealing a wicker figure in black robes of judgement. Another tug and a second sheet slid away, revealing a more elegant iteration of the same. “They’re all his.”

Kat blinked. “Javar is a templar?”

“Was. I thought you knew. I thought everybody in Tyzanta knew.”

“I’ve only been here a year, remember?” Kat retorted. “I thought the only way a templar retired was through death.”

“Thirty years ago Javar got it into his head that Nyssa herself had charged him with freeing Undertown from House Bascari’s tyranny.” Azra’s eyes gleamed with scandal. “Roused half the slum before anyone took him seriously.”

That couldn’t have gone down well. Alabastra wasn’t permitted to raise soldiers of its own. Instead, they purchased the services of armed custodians from a city’s ruling house – an arrangement that kept the firebloods wealthy and the Alabastran temples protected. To retain an air of control, Alabastra sometimes elevated a sufficiently pious and reliable custodian to the honorary rank of templar. Such men and women served as liaisons between Alabastra and the firebloods. By his actions, Javar had betrayed both masters.

“What happened?”

“The countess made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. Javar chose wealthy turncoat over penniless corpse and gave her all the names she needed to… settle things down. It didn’t stop the hierarch excommunicating him.” She spread her arms. “I’d say he’s not let go of his past.”

“So much for him being a man of the people.”

“Principles are expensive.”

The chamber no longer resembled a shrine to glory and achievement, but their tomb. No wonder Marida wanted the communion ring. She and Javar were deadlocked for control of Undertown, neither able to oust the other in a war that saw lesser gangs used as proxies. At the very least, stealing a beloved tie to a forsaken past was spite. At best, it was leverage of a singular sort.

“I’m surprised they let him live,” said Kat.

Azra flashed a smile. “He’s worth more as an example than as ashes on the wind. That’s Khalad. You find your place or one’s found for you. The world goes on either way.”

“You sound like you approve.”

She shrugged. “Why not? It’s elegant. Life should be elegant.”

“Even when it’s unfair?”

“Don’t be tedious, darling. ‘Unfair’ implies rules, and we both know there aren’t any.”

Kat flinched, but no amount of wishing could change the facts. Probity should have prevented Alabastra from bleeding her father white, gobbling up possessions and property to satisfy ever-growing debts. The conventions of friendship should have demanded that Kat’s peers, the sons and daughters of Zariqaz’s ruling elite, rally round when she inherited those debts, but they’d feared Alabastra more than they’d loved her. Likely they’d not loved her at all. Yes, Azra was right. There were no rules. Not any that mattered. You found a place or one was found for you.

And she’d be damned if she’d let anyone else decide her fate without a fight.

She smashed the glass with her dagger’s hilt and snatched the ring from its velvet cradle.

Something rippled free of the spirit realm.

“Kat!” shouted Azra.

Too late, Kat realised there had been an ifrît in the west wing the whole time, but she’d been too busy looking for hestics and lumani to see it. The thing that had awoken when she’d touched the communion ring was an order of magnitude stronger. Searching for trees, she’d missed the forest.

She spun around just as a mannequin lurched down from its pedestal.

Its thrashing arm sent a neighbour crashing to the ground. A swathed hand ripped at the dust sheet. With a rasp of tearing cloth it yanked a section free, revealing a sun-bleached, pitted skull, the bone scrimshawed with dark, geometric glyphs. Indigo fire blazed in empty eye sockets and coiled along jerking arms as the corpse ripped away the remainder of its shroud, laying bare layered lamellar armour.

Kat’s heart skipped a beat.

A koilos. Javar had set a koilos to guard his private shame?

Benevolent Nyssa, but they couldn’t fight that.

She glanced at the frozen, gaping Azra. “Run!”

The koilos uttered a soul-shivering shriek and lumbered forward, fire swirling behind. Ill-fitting lamellar rattling and clacking against fleshless bones, it shouldered Azra into a weapon case then bore down on Kat. Heart pounding, she feinted left and flung herself right, ducking low under a flailing arm.

Skeletal fingers clamped about the back of her neck. She yelped, her heels furrowing the expensive carpet as the koilos reeled her in. Breathless, she shattered the lantern across its head and fumbled for her dagger. It came free of its sheath on her second attempt. Spinning her about, the koilos transferred its grip to her throat and hoisted her high. She screamed defiance and stabbed at the flames in its left eye socket.

With its free hand, the koilos twisted the dagger from her grip and flung it away.

Lungs heaving for breath that wouldn’t come, Kat clutched at the koilos’ arm and scrabbled for a connection with the ifrît bound within the glyph-etched bones. Hopeless. Divining an unknown soul-glyph required trial and error and a calm subject. The koilos was far from calm and orders of magnitude stronger than household ifrîti. Rumour claimed some even used two glyphs: a warding glyph to mark friends, and a more complicated control glyph to indicate its master. In her desperation, Kat found trace of neither.

Swollen thoughts pulsing as unconsciousness claimed her, she clawed at the fingers locked about her throat, each effort less than the one before.

Darkness rushed in.

“Let her go!”

Azra hacked down. The koilos’ outstretched arm shuddered. Once. Twice. Three times. Bone splintered on the fourth strike. The hand and most of the adjoining forearm broke away in a spray of foul, choking dust. Kat hit the floor, all elbows and knees, and whooped down the sweetest breaths she’d ever taken. Beside her, the severed hand twitched and thrashed like a belly-up crab.

Azra dragged her upright. “Come on!”

Kat half ran, half staggered, navigating the dark via instinct and bashed shins. Glancing behind, she saw Azra topple a cabinet into the koilos’ path and scramble frantically away as its good arm batted it aside without effort. She clutched the precious communion ring tight and kept running.

A dozen loping paces on, she flung her shoulder against the landing door and stumbled into the light. Half blinded, she barely saw the guard bearing down on her.

Then Azra was at her side, her borrowed scimitar flashing.

The guard howled and spun away, clutching a bloodied arm. Three more edged across the landing, taught caution by their fellow’s mistake. Another two waited at the nearer of the stair heads, serrated knives drawn, blocking the only obvious escape.

“Behind me,” Azra snapped, flickering the scimitar’s point to drive a guard back.

A third guard mustered to the stair head. Emboldened by rising numbers, the others edged forward beneath Nyssa’s appraising stained-glass gaze.

“No way out,” said the nearest. “Come quietly, and we’ll not let the koilos have you.”

A crash of furniture sounded from the corridor behind.

Where were their glyphs? Kat wondered dimly. Likely on the nape of their necks, given how quickly the koilos had gone for hers. She’d not thought to check the balcony guard for a second tattoo. Stupid. She’d remember that next time. If there was a next time.

She tightened her grip on the communion ring. There was a way out. If the racket had drawn the guards from the gate. If she’d not drained the last of her aetherios tattoo communing with the lumani.

She slipped her free hand into Azra’s and squeezed. “This has been fun, hasn’t it?”

“Ask me later,” Azra replied, eyes on the approaching guards.

Behind them, the koilos shrieked in triumph and broke into a run.

“Close your eyes,” said Kat. “And when I move, move.”

“Close my eyes? What do you mean, close—”

With a last, wordless prayer to Nyssa, Kat thrust her hand towards the chandelier and poured the remnant of her tattoo’s flame into the lumani – not to communicate or cajole, but to kill.

The ifrît gulped down all she offered, gorging on power it could never hope to contain, not realising that in so doing it doomed itself. Or perhaps on some primal level it knew exactly what she intended, and recognised the only freedom it would ever again know. Kat hoped so.

She pinched her eyes shut as the chandelier detonated.

A silent thunderclap of searing white light swept the landing, the screams of blinded guards hard on its heels. Blinking back splotchy after-images, Kat launched herself at the window. Her shoulder struck an inch or two below Nyssa’s divine navel. Then she was out into the cold night air, glass shards and Azra’s wild laughter exploding around her.

Three

Dawn broke across the Thornless Rose’s courtyard and the columns of its central roofed stage, the light gracing drunks and dancers with equal favour. Patrons exchanged hushed conversation over emptied bottles and upturned goblets while couples lingered in what shadows remained beneath the perimeter’s brightly coloured awnings, seeking a final tryst. That morning, as many others before, the tavern was a first resort for scoundrels and the last for everybody else.

Kat was never entirely certain into which category she fell.

Limping and sore, she navigated the panoply of temple acolytes, off-duty custodians and weary factory workers. Further out, bright, metallic silks marked the presence of slumming firebloods, indiscreet bodyguards close at hand. There were even a pair of royal guardsmen in their lacquered black lamellar and the scarlet capes from which their notorious “redcloak” nickname sprang. A rare sight so far from the capital, Zariqaz – known as the City of Lost Souls, for it drew the restless and dispossessed like a flame drew moths – let alone in Tyzanta’s Undertown slums.

Nose wrinkling at air sour with revels gone too long, Kat collapsed at a table in her favourite perch – a decaying pulpit from which archons had once harangued tavern-goers – and let the music of drum and lyre carry her away.

The thump of a glass bottle snapped her out of reverie.

Azra slid into place opposite. “Can’t leave you alone for five minutes, can I, darling?” Her hand trembled as she splashed wine into two goblets. She held Kat’s gaze, daring comment. “You’re a mess.”

“And you say the nicest things.”

Kat peered at her wine bottle reflection’s cuts and bruises. The one above her left eye was oozing again. Worse was a mottled throat to match her stiff neck. The koilos’ parting gift. Not exactly the badge of a master thief.

She took a pull from her goblet. A bitter vintage from Tyzanta’s parched hills, where no amount of irrigation could coax forth the sweetness of lowland grapes. “Did you find Marida?”

“No, but I spoke to Magali.” Azra slumped across the table and rested her chin on threaded fingers. “We’ll be called.”

Kat suppressed her frustration. One didn’t storm into the Thornless Rose and make demands. Desperate for distraction, her eyes touched on a man and a woman arguing in the shadow of a blue and yellow awning, the exchange half spoken, half signed. Kat was too far away to catch the words, but the man’s gestures – the woman’s hands were partly hidden by her body – shaped one half of a lovers’ quarrel.

Aware she was intruding on a private moment, Kat shifted her attention to the courtyard’s stage. A dancer, naked to the waist save for silken scarves tied about wrist and bicep and his dark skin slick with sweat, gave his all to quickening drums. He turned each step and pirouette as gracefully as any performer at an Overspire theatre, though here the dance held a primal frisson – a hint of the licentiousness more “civilised” acts left veiled.

Kat stilled the urge to tap her foot. Though she couldn’t imagine ever putting herself on display like that, modesty didn’t forgo admiring another’s exhibition. “He’s good. What’s his name?”

“Jocozah.” Azra raised a hand to her throat and toyed with her pendant of Nyssa Benevolas. Honest folk preferred Nyssa Iudexas and her promise of swift judgement against transgressors over a promise of forgiveness for themselves. Skelders took all the mercy they could get. “And he should be good. Did you ever see Ilsyn Karalem?”

“Once. Count Rashace gave my father tickets for The Caliph of Traios. Karalem danced the part of the caliph’s daughter.” Even at eleven years old Kat had noted the affronted glances from the theatre’s adjoining boxes. As renowned an artist as her father was, they’d been cinderbloods, and unwelcome among those of lineage… although Kat had afterward learned that Countess Rashace had been rather more inviting to her father, at least in private. “It’s the same dance. More than the same. It’s identical. Step for step.”

Azra’s eyes shone. “You’re sure?”

Kat ignored the jibe. “You know I am.”

Azra offered a sly grin. “Marida bought Karalem’s soul after she passed and had it sliced into delicious little talent wisps. I dread to think what she charges Jocozah for each one she doles out.”

While Alabastra permitted the souls of the worthy to speed directly to Nyssa’s judgement, their shriversmen hovered like carrion at the deathbeds of debtors and criminals, whose souls they teased apart to serve as ifrîti, replaying sin through service and easing a path to Nyssa’s forgiveness and thence rebirth. From the accomplished dead they also harvested talent wisps which, once imbibed, allowed the living brief mastery of skills perfected by the dead.

“How long?” asked Kat.

“Has Jocozah been drinking her in?” Azra’s slump muffled her shrug. “Long enough that his neighbours hear two voices raised in argument some nights. Both of them his.”

“Artistic temperament, maybe?”

“But whose? I saw Karalem dance for Countess Bascari. Eventually. She refused to go on until the stage was strewn with rose petals. Delayed the performance by three hours.”

The petal-strewn stage assumed fresh significance. A muscle twitched in Kat’s gut. Ifrîti were little more than raw emotion and instinct, but talent wisps retained shards of personality. If one partook too often – or if the shriversmen misjudged their craft and teased too potent a wisp from the greater soul – then it was anyone’s guess whose psyche might dominate the body, and for how long. Jocozah was doomed to the Gutterfields on the city outskirts, mind broken by the push and pull of conflicting wills.

Kat shuddered. She struggled for intimacy at the best of times. Granting another’s spirit free rein in her psyche horrified beyond words. She shot an edgy glance at the brass dome of the Thornless Rose’s main building. “Still nothing. What exactly did you say to Magali?”

“That we have the collateral and want a meeting.” Another muffled shrug. “You worry too much.”

“I should. It’s my life at stake, not yours.”

More than her life. If she couldn’t clear her father’s debt, Alabastra’s shriversmen would sear the flesh from her bones and cage her soul within the remains. Another koilos trudging about in deathless servitude until the temple considered her account settled. If they ever did.

Offence prickled beneath Azra’s tone. “I’m well aware of that.”

Kat grimaced. Azra had been there for her when no one else had. In a life notable for loss more than gain, what they shared mattered beyond words. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.”

Squeezing between the table’s end and the pulpit’s inner edge, Azra settled onto the bench beside Kat and stroked her cheek with the back of her hand. “Be patient. A few hours and this past year will seem like a dream.”

Kat met her gaze, surprised as ever at how easily Azra stole intimacy from a crowd, and wished she could better read the mood welling behind those hazel eyes. “I don’t want it to.” The words didn’t come easily. They never did. “Not all of it.”

“If that’s what you want, then it won’t.”

“You promise?”

Azra’s brow flickered. “Our futures were entwined from the moment we met. Nothing can alter that unless you want it to.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Only that one way or another tonight will change everything. If it changes how you feel about us – about me – I’ll understand.” Azra crooked a soft smile. “I won’t like it, but I’ll understand.”

Letting her heart take the reins before her head could counsel against, Kat slipped her hands about Azra’s neck and kissed her. Let the coming hours unmake her father’s mistakes and her own misfortunes. But not this. Never this. “I won’t let us be parted.”

Azra grinned. “Who said anything about being parted? You’ll never be free of me.”

Kat sighed in mock despair. “You just made it creepy.”

Arching an unrepentant eyebrow, Azra leaned in for another kiss, only to pull up short as Skerrik loomed over the table. Or at least loomed insofar as much as his scarecrow physique allowed. Thirty-five years in Undertown had bestowed a wiry frame and gaunt, sallow features to match brown hair turned salt and pepper before its time. Only periwinkle-blue eyes retained a measure of receding youth.

“Well, well, well. If it isn’t my two favourite skelders.” He sounded pleased with himself. He always did, the soft burr of his accent a cat’s contented purr.

“Skerrik? Magali didn’t tell me you were here.” Beaming, Azra cocked her head, the better to let him plant a stubbled kiss on her cheek.

Ignoring Kat’s filthy look – even though she knew Azra’s flirtations were about control and distance, not desire, she couldn’t help resent them – he dutifully did so, then withdrew to the bench opposite. “I’ve just this moment arrived. Busy night, you know?”

“Busy how?” Kat demanded. “You said you were keeping a low profile.”

“And I was, I was.” Skerrik gave the wine bottle an exploratory swirl, glugged, and wiped his lips on the sleeve of a shirt that might once have been white. “But a fellow has to eat, does he not? Can’t pass up dishonest work.”

“And what if you’d been taken?” Skerrik was the best lock charmer in Undertown. Azra couldn’t hold a candle to his flame. If he’d ended up in the cells it would have ruined everything. “Blessed Flame! We had an agreement.”

He took another swig. “A slip of a job for Chevlie’s gang. In and out. Nary a trouble.”

“What if you’d been taken?”

“I wasn’t.”

Azra sat bolt upright, smile replaced by cold, chiselled stone. “I don’t like people who break promises. Perhaps we should ask Marida what she thinks of them.”

Skerrik froze, bottle halfway to his lips. His eyes flitted from Azra to Kat and back to Azra. He set the bottle down. “What if I return what you paid me?”

“I don’t want it,” Azra ground on. “I want to be sure you’re reliable. Or maybe you’re no longer interested in your cut of tonight’s score? You’d prefer to settle for the scraps Chevlie tosses your way?”

“Give it a rest, would you?” he growled.

Kat squeezed Azra’s hand. Humiliating the man gained them nothing. Azra shot her a sidelong glance and gave a reluctant nod.

Skerrik twitched an eyebrow. “Besides, I hear you’ve caused quite the commotion yourselves this night. Mischief in the Overspire.”

Kat’s heart sank. She’d hoped to see Marida before the news broke. No point asking how word had reached the Thornless Rose so fast. Gossip flowed readily between Overspire and Undertown, its passage eased by the clink of coin. Folk knew about the raid on Javar’s mansion. Had any guessed at what would follow?

“Do you indeed?” she asked from behind an expressionless face.

“You’re the talk of the courtyard. Word is that Javar’s guard master will be looking for his own head come morning.”

The Katija Arvish of a year before would have been appalled to learn she’d cost a stranger his life. The woman who wore her face that morning barely blinked. Some things you just couldn’t worry over. “It’s nice to have made an impression.”

Shaking his head, Skerrik guffawed. “Very poetic.” He looked up as a shadow crawled across the courtyard. “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear,” he said, not sounding at all sympathetic. “That poor miss has seen better days.”

The shadow belonged to the sky-carrack drifting – only the charitable would have described it as sailing – fifty yards above their heads, following the bright chain of torch houses from Tyzanta’s perimeter to the Overspire. Torn canvases scarcely billowing, it yawed drunkenly, pallid vapour wisping from cracks in buoyancy tanks along its belly. Had it been the seagoing vessel its design mimicked, it would have sunk long ago. Shading her eyes, Kat made out the wreckage of spars about its for’ard mast and the torn canvas of what had once been pinion sails used for banking and changing altitude.

“Heading for Kazzar’s Quay,” said Azra. “They’ll make it if the buoyancy tanks don’t rupture.”

“A tetram says she ran afoul of Vallant,” said Skerrik.

Azra snorted. “You don’t have a tetram.” He’d never more than a score of copper dinars to his name, and a gold tetram was worth ten times that amount.

Kat shook her head. “Vallant’s dead. Has been for months.”

“So they say,” Skerrik replied. “But they would, wouldn’t they?”

Ex-custodian Bashar Vallant had been a thorn in Countess Bascari’s side Kat’s whole life. His brigands – or rebels, depending on who you asked – mostly prowled between Tyzanta’s southern holdings and the line of torch houses that repelled the Veil’s hungry mists at the kingdom’s border. At word of his death, Undertown folk had drunk themselves insensible in mourning, the nobility out of unbridled joy. But then folk loved a shaggy tale. Throw a rock in the Thornless Rose and you’d hit someone who believed Vallant was still alive. Throw another and you’d find someone who’d talk your ear off about the Obsidium Cult, who claimed special knowledge of Nyssa’s will and who – conveniently without trace – ruled Khalad from the shadows. And so on, and so on. Lies travelled faster than truth, especially when they made for a good story.

Azra shook her head. “Pfff. Hero worship is so tedious.”

Skerrik snorted. His bunched right hand brushed backwards from his temple in one of many nuanced Simah gestures of disgust. All wasted on Azra, who’d never bothered to learn the sign language, commonplace though it was. “Least I care about something beyond myself, lass.”

The musicians had fallen silent with Jocozah’s departure from the stage. Most patrons were finally drifting to the gate, accepting that the night was done. Kat’s gaze idled to rest on a blonde sitting alone in the pulpit’s shadow, her elbows propped on the table and her chin atop threaded fingers. The gold trim and close tailoring of her black coachman’s coat marked her as wealthier than the rabble, but such garb was hardly in fashion with nobility. Moreover, no woman of good breeding would have applied that ebony eyeshadow with so heavy – yet skilled – a hand. Nor would an Overspire heiress have worn her flaxen hair in tight braids tied straight back from her pale forehead – wealth laughed at practicality.

The woman’s lips curled to a superior smile. Her eyes met Kat’s in idle challenge. The smile softened, but the challenge remained.

Kat glanced back to her companions, still lost in good-natured debate.

“Azra?” she murmured. “The woman at the table below us. Blonde hair, black coat, eyes like she’s fought one bout too many in a brawler’s ring. Do you know her?”

Azra gave an imperceptible nod. “All I’m saying,” she told Skerrik, “is that I bet you’ve a creepy little statue of Vallant in that squalid little hovel of yours that nobody visits, and that every night you take it down from the shelf and you—”

Eyes still on Skerrik, she reached for the wine bottle, fumbled the grab and set it tottering. With a muttered curse, she lunged and caught it at the table’s edge… giving her all the time in the world to make a sweep of the courtyard without appearing to do so.

Bottle in hand, she straightened. “I don’t see her, sorry.”

Frowning, Kat turned. The woman was gone.

Skerrik joined them at the pulpit’s edge. “Do we have ourselves a problem?”

Kat took a deep breath and ran the possibilities. One of Marida’s underlings keeping tabs. One of Javar’s, trailing the culprits of the night’s humiliations. An informant for House Bascari. A woman on the prowl for companionship, if brashly. Or nothing more than a blameless vessel into which Kat had poured her fears. Whatever the case, she’d not been close enough to hear anything. Caution was one thing, paranoia another. “I don’t know.”

A polite cough drew Kat’s attention to the pulpit’s stairs.

Magali Zyn, imperious and collected as ever in frilled blouse, waistcoat and velvet skirt, tapped the butt of her walking stick against the flagstones with a loam-brown wrinkled hand and brushed a strand of grey-white hair from unblinking eyes. “Marida is ready for you.”

“Aha. That’s my cue to leave.” Skerrik beat a careful retreat down the stairs.

“What was that about?” asked Kat.

Magali twitched an eyebrow in quiet amusement. “He has debts. Why else sign on with this foolishness of yours?”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

Magali set off across the courtyard, arrow-straight towards the main building. Clientele scattered from her path. They weren’t so eager to do so for Kat, who struggled to keep pace while weaving her way behind the tip-tap of the walking stick. Azra simply shouldered folk out of her way, meeting indignant challenges with an icy glare.

Some claimed the interior of the Thornless Rose harkened back to the legendary City of Silks, long since swallowed twice over, once by desert and again by mist. Kat remained dubious. Thick carpets concealed original tile-work while bunched Phoenissan drapes granted the low ceilings a vaulted, pavilion-like feel. Lumani prisms behind the drapes struggled against the gloom, while braziers smouldered to send the fragrances of honeysuckle and jasmine to feed the iridescent haze coiling around furnishings and statues – none of which were of Nyssa. Some things were best kept hidden from the goddess.

Kat glimpsed patrons in adjoining rooms, though vying light and shadow concealed all detail. Those who sought anonymity found it in abundance, or so they thought. Kat knew better. Her tattoo itched with the constant curiosity of lumani and pyrasti. Through them, Marida would know which guests indulged in the mind-expanding pleasures of isshîm powder, and which preferred the warming embrace of ambrosial wormwood, just as she’d learn the detail of every negotiation, every infidelity and every misspoken word. Hers were the only secrets in the Thornless Rose.

At Magali’s nod, hooded attendants drew back a pair of intricate silvered gates. Two more waited in the chamber beyond. These too stepped aside, robes swishing at the thick carpet. Bathed in light from a vast ceiling-set circular window – the only natural light Kat had seen since entering – a red-haired waif barely into womanhood uncurled her legs from a velvet chaise. She rose to greet them in a swirl of shimmering layered silks.

“I apologise for the delay.” The soft vibrance of Marida’s voice matched her youthful appearance, but something cold and calculating slithered beneath. “A demanding night.”

Kat’s aetherios tattoo writhed as she approached the throne. However young Marida’s face, however youthful the flush of colour in skin otherwise as pale as sun-bleached timber, the soul beneath was far older. She’d overseen the Thornless Rose for as long as it had plied its trade. Common rumour suggested more distant origins – that Marida’s true body had gone to the catacombs even before deathless Caradan Diar had claimed Khalad’s throne during the first Age of Fire and saved the kingdom from the ever-encroaching Veil.

Marida was a qalimîri, a soul strong enough even after shriving to wrest control of another’s body. Most were lonely wretches, preying on travellers or Gutterfields paupers until Alabastra’s archons at last exorcised them. That Alabastra allowed Marida to operate at Tyzanta’s heart spoke to the influence she wielded.

“I hear you’ve had quite the night.”

Kat exchanged a glance with Azra and received a shrug. “Things… didn’t go to plan.”

Marida arched sculpted eyebrows in polite surprise and drew closer with the confidence of ages, every word laid down with the inevitability of nightfall. “You were careless.”

Azra flinched, customary bravado in abeyance. “You can’t plan for everything.”

Marida drew closer still. Close enough that Kat couldn’t escape the pull of jet-black, glimmerless eyes set within that ash-pallored face. Most qalimîri wore painted lenses to hide their nature. Not Marida. At their first introduction, months before, she’d worn an older woman’s body, voluptuous where its successor’s was aethereal; her hair raven-dark where it was now auburn. Beauty was the sole common thread.

For all her fine silks and the bejewelled chains shining in her hair, the new girl had the hollow cheeks and scrawny limbs of a wisp addict. Had debt driven her to Marida’s embrace? Threats to family? Or had she simply indulged her cravings and found herself beguiled by the ancient, calculating spirit? How much was the girl aware of what her body did while the remnants of her soul screamed beyond those oppressive black eyes? Was there even enough of her left to notice?

“As I said,” breathed Marida. “Careless.”

Kat steeled herself. “I have Javar’s ring. That’s all that matters.”

“Humiliating Ardin does little good if your antics bring custodians down on me.”

“They wouldn’t dare.”

“I’d usually agree, but I hear that Castellan Damant feels he has something to prove.”

“He does?” Azra frowned. “How forward of him.”

Marida shrugged, iridescence racing across her silks. “With the countess’ health failing, he’ll be looking for a new patron. Her heir, whoever that proves to be. Better a bold show of restoring order to the streets than fighting rebels in the south. He’s learned his lesson there. Or maybe not. He wouldn’t be the first to take outrageous measures to secure his future.” A sly smile tugged at her thoughtful expression. “But you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

Azra glowered. “Do we have a deal or not?”

“I keep my promises, little glint,” snapped Marida. “But you’ll compensate me for your sloppiness.”

“How much?” asked Kat.

“A twenty/eighty split from tonight’s endeavour.”

Azra started forward. “That’s outrageous!”

A glare from Marida froze her in place. “Then you’ve only to find someone else to fence the take. All things considered, I don’t think Ardin will be inclined.”

Kat grimaced. The original terms had been for a forty/sixty share. They’d now have to steal twice as much. Additional risk on an already uncertain venture. “He might… if we return the ring.”

“But I wouldn’t like that.” Marida let the threat linger. “You’ll be paid on exchange, as agreed, but even I can’t dump scores of tetrams onto the market in one go. Buyers have to be courted, wooed. After last night, they’ll be reluctant. If none are forthcoming, I’ll be forced to break the coins down for their essence. You know how dangerous that is. Dangerous is expensive. Even at twenty/eighty, I’ll barely break even.”

“What if we delay?” asked Kat, the words ash on her tongue. Delay meant more time for security measures to change.

Azra shook her head. “We need tonight’s celebration. All eyes will be on Countess Bascari. Her custodians’ most of all. We won’t get another chance like this.”

Kat gave a slow, resentful nod. The banquet to celebrate the conquest of distant Qersal – at last bringing all of Khalad under Caradan Diar’s singular rule – would fill Overspire and Undertown alike with confusion. There’d never be another opportunity like it.

“I incurred no small expense acquiring my part of the trade.” Marida’s gaze lingered on Azra. She ran her tongue lazily across her lower lip. “You’ll settle that debt before you leave.”

Azra’s throat bobbed. “Kat?”

In a way, Kat was grateful to have the decision made for her. She’d always been better at dealing with what was than what could be. She held out Javar’s communion ring. “Have it your way.”

Marida hesitated, eking out her small triumph. “Magali? Give them what they came for.”

With a nod of her grey head, Magali retreated from the throne room. With a last glance at Marida’s saccharine, insincere smile, Kat followed.

The tip-tap of Magali’s walking stick led yet deeper into the Thornless Rose, down a spiral stair and into a rough-hewn cellar, once a state room of the long-buried manse that had become the tavern’s foundation. Beneath flickering candlelight – here, at least, there were no ifrîti to spy for their mistress – his copper flesh not yet mottled with blue-greys, waited a corpse in the high-collared, silver-trimmed robe of an Alabastran archon.

“Will he serve?” asked Magali.

Kat peeled back the black silks of the corpse’s sleeve and peered at a tattoo vastly more complex than that worn by the guard at Javar’s mansion. Unbuttoning the robe, she found another looped across collarbones and shoulder blades. Hundreds of lines. Scores of soul-glyphs woven across his dead skin.

“He’ll do,” she murmured. “But I’ll need privacy.”

The corner of Magali’s mouth twitched. “My mistress would dearly love to know how it is done.”

“She’ll have to live with her disappointment.”

Magali nodded, the answer as expected as the question had been inevitable. “I’ll be in the passageway should you need me.”

Azra waited a full ten-count after Magali closed the door. “This is it, darling.”

Kat’s pulse quickened with the challenge to come. “Watch the door.”

Rolling back her left sleeve, she set to work.

Four

Direct sunlight rarely made it so deep into Tyzanta, where Undertown’s battered adobe streets gave way to the Gutterfields’ shanties. The spire-cast shadow joined that of the aqueduct carrying precious water from the distant Zaruan Mountains to the heart of the city.

The Zaruan were holy, for when Nyssa grew sick with the world’s sinfulness, it was from their snow-capped peaks that she sent crawling flame from the Stars Below to hasten the wicked to judgement. History recorded no pattern to these Ages of Fire – a score of generations could pass untroubled, or merely a handful – but agreed that no more than a dozen had raged in the centuries since the Eternity King’s ascension to the throne immortal. Alabastra taught that the worthy prospered anew as each Age of Fire cooled, but ever since coming to live in the shadow of the Zaruan Mountains, Kat slept poorly when the ground shook, and tried to forget that the current age had lasted some two hundred years, and that the lowest levels of Tyzanta’s foundations were thick with volcanic slag.

Then again, she often slept poorly, and seldom through fault of her own. Already heavy from a long, stressful night, her heart sank a notch further at the chorus of bellows and shrieks that greeted her across the overgrown, rubble-strewn gardens of her current home.

Azra propped her back against the remains of the gatepost. “Someone’s in a good mood.”

Kat sighed. “Just another day on Kedvir Street.” Tellwind Manse had long since been carved into a maze of squalid rooms for the poor or desperate. The argument raging back and forth in a fluid combination of Daric, which Kat spoke fluently, and Qersi, which she barely recognised, originated in the tenement directly above her own. “Every day since they moved in.”

Something shattered a palm-sized glass pane and swished away into tangled grasses. Azra winced. “Come back to mine.”

Tempting, but for all that Azra’s tiny garret was fractionally less squalid, a leaking roof meant it forever stank of damp. Distracting at the best of times – and they’d shared plenty of good times there, despite the confines and the broken-springed bed – but disastrous when Kat needed every scrap of sleep. “They can’t keep this up for ever.”

“Maybe you’ll get lucky and one of them will kill the other.”

“Could be.” Passing days had marked steady escalation. The woman Kat had glimpsed in the shared corridors – the girl really – was half her partner’s size and scurried about with the timidity of a scrab-rat.

Kat chased away a scowl. Not her problem.

“That reminds me.” Azra dipped a hand into her pocket and held out a corked vial of shimmering white vapour. “To take the edge off.”

Kat pushed it aside. “I don’t need it.”

“You can’t go marching into Xanathros Alabastra looking like you’ve been dragged from beneath spirefall rubble.”

Kat scowled. Xanathros Alabastra was the highest of high temples in Tyzanta. Even the humblest pilgrim made some effort to look presentable when entering its halls. It wouldn’t do to stand out. Not tonight. “Make-up will cover the worst of it.”

Azra made a moue and fluttered her eyelashes. “Oh yes. Nothing but powdered courtesans up there. You’ll fit right in.” Voice and expression turned serious. “Please. It wasn’t easily come by.”

Kat reluctantly took the vial. “I’ll think about it.”

“Good.” Azra’s smile returned. “See you tonight.”

Kat nodded. “Eight bells, beneath Lorrima Tower.”

“I’ll look in on Darravon,” said Azra. “Make sure he’s not had a change of heart.”

Without Darravon, the night ended before it began. If he’d had second thoughts? Kat shook her head. There were problems enough in the coming hours without borrowing more. “Take care.”

Azra’s smile broadened. “Always, darling. Always.”

A brief embrace, and she slipped out into the street, climbing the crowded, mud-rutted cobbles until she was lost to sight.

The rising pitch of the quarrel awoke regret as Kat reached the heavy oaken door. As ever, the hinges shrieked like a dying ifrît. Maybe the smell of damp wouldn’t have been that bad. She started across the atrium for what had once been the servants’ passageways and froze as a door whispered open behind her.

“Rent’s overdue, Six.”

She offered the sweetest smile she could muster. “Difficult week. Day after tomorrow and it’s yours.”

Chritor glowered and grasped the lapels of his robe. An imperious gesture in one less overweight and more clean-shaven, but then the manse’s landlord was a good fit for his property. Both had their glory years long behind, and however handsome they might have been in that storied past, ill-maintenance had taken ruinous toll. “See that it is.”

Kat nodded wearily. “Twenty-One are screaming at each other again.” No one in Tellwind Manse used names. A name made someone a person. Worse, if anyone knew yours, they might wonder why you were hiding. That you were hiding was a given, otherwise you’d be living somewhere else. “And I could really use some sleep.”

Chritor rolled his eyes. “Now do I go digging into your private affairs, Six?”

In other words, why should he get involved with whatever was going on at Twenty-One? One part discretion to four parts laziness. Azra would have flattered his ego and flashed a smile that offered promise without actual commitment. Kat had energy for neither. “Thanks a lot.”

He turned away, upraised finger circling idly beside his ear. “See that you’re paid up by Satasdir. We don’t want any trouble. Do we, Qori Arvish?”

Chritor had his door closed before Kat’s brain stumbled past the unwelcome familiarity – qori was the Daric pet term for a daughter – to that the fact that he’d used her family name. Her spine and shoulders locked rigid. He knew who she was, and if he knew that, what else did he know?

“Kiasta,” she breathed, giving rare life to her father’s favourite curse.

She swallowed hard. No. Chritor only knew her name, not why that name mattered, otherwise Alabastran bailiffs would already have taken her and he’d be counting the bounty. A threat and a warning, that was all.

Kiasta indeed.

As a small mercy, the argument in Twenty-One had faded by the time Kat navigated the detritus of the servants’ corridor and reached the door with the jagged, uneven “6”. After a careful fifteen-count, ears straining for possible intruders, she busied herself with the locks at waist and shoulder height, and slipped inside. No bailiffs in sight, thank the Stars Below. Just a cracked ceiling, moth-eaten drapes drawn across a circular window, and an empty lumani prism that hadn’t seen wisp or weft of an ifrît for long generations.

Tossing Azra’s vial onto the sagging dresser, Kat sank onto the bed and tugged off boots and coat. Questing fingers found the loose floorboard and retrieved the coin purse from the musty space between the joists. She emptied a spill of copper coins and the last of her stashed tessence crystals into her palm.

Scarcely thirty dinars, and most were Undertown counterfeits that might or might not pass muster in the Gutterfields’ souks, and certainly wouldn’t deceive stallholders in the spireward bazaars. Nor Chritor, for that matter, whose slovenliness in no way extended to matters of coin. Maybe enough to book passage on a railrunner out across the plains to Nassos or Ophrid if things went badly. If things went well? Even after Marida’s cut, she’d have hundreds of thousands of dinars. Most would go to paying her father’s debt to Alabastra, but even so…

Kat shook the coins back into the purse and took the tessence crystal between finger and thumb, shaking it to shimmer the grey ifrît residue within. A hair more pressure cracked the crystal. The dust turned to heatless, liquid flame as the air hit, dribbling through her fingers and across her outstretched forearm. A hint of indigo raced through the labyrinthine soul-glyphs. Not enough to be useful, not yet, but a good night’s sleep would set that right.

She trained blinking eyes on the still-unfamiliar sight of her aetherios tattoo’s new configuration. Two wearying hours it had taken to copy the custodian’s tattoo, with another to painstakingly check the details after the work was done. All the while with Magali Zyn an impatient, brooding presence in the corridor. Kat had barely completed it to her satisfaction before the last of the tattoo’s fires had slipped away, leaving it cold and dark against her skin, indistinguishable from common ink.

Even inert, it was by far and away the most intricate and impressive forgery she’d ever attempted. With so many glyphs etched into the design, even a single line out of place could have annulled something vital. If such mistakes had invited bitter consequences at Javar’s mansion, they’d assure nothing short of disaster at Xanathros Alabastra.

Her heart warmed with pride. A regular tattooist would have needed days to copy the design. Days in which the archon’s disappearance would be noticed, even if his body was never found. As it was, they’d maybe thirty-six hours before he was missed and small changes inked into his comrades’ tattoos. Until then, almost every ifrît in Xanathros Alabastra – from the mightiest koilos to the most dissolute lumani – was Kat’s to command. It was the fulcrum about which the entire plan turned.

She wished her father could have seen it.

She’d never forget the smell of the library’s dusty antechamber. The mingling of dust and the cold copper of blood turned stale, her father’s soul fled to the spirit world so long before her arrival that the shriversmen found no trace clinging to his corpse. Terrion Arvish’s skills and his secrets were gone for ever, leaving his only daughter as the canvas for his great unfinished work.

He’d lain down the foundations of the aetherios tattoo in her twelfth year, bribing her to stillness with sweet cinnamon cakes. Kat supposed it must have hurt as her father’s thin artist’s fingers had guided the needle in those deft, swooping curves, but she mostly remembered how pleased she’d been that she could make the lines move if she thought just so.

Each month had brought more lines, the pigment always black but its recipe in flux as her father’s research progressed at Zariqaz’s Great Library. He spoke of it often enough, eager for Kat to comprehend that the undertaking needed a child’s malleability to properly take root, though she’d been more interested in the treats he’d offered than the reason that he bestowed them.

Even later, when the tattoo was complex enough that Kat could shape the lines into whatever pattern took her fancy, she’d understood little. His tales of veilkin cuneiform and withered scrolls from Khalad’s dawning – all laid down in dog-eared notebooks carefully shelved beside the intricate snow globe Kat had loved so much for its tiny, perfect buildings whose people surely lived equally tiny, perfect lives – were as jumbled as only obsession could make. He’d been so erratic by that point that when Kat discovered that the tattoo allowed her to touch the spirit world – could even command ifrîti, if she figured out the proper glyph – she’d not told him, fearful he’d command her to stop… or even attempt to remove the tattoo.

Through it all, he’d bidden her to keep it secret – even from the rare visitors to their house who aided him with his research. He remained certain that someone would pay a princeps’ ransom for the secret of a tattoo that could be altered according to the wearer’s desire and prevailing fashion. He’d seen it as a lifeline out of rising debt caused by attempts to stave off his beloved wife’s descent into omen rot and his own gambling.

And perhaps it might have been, had some skelder not cut his throat. Just another victim of a pointless crime. Hardly remarkable – even in Zariqaz – but enough to destroy Kat’s whole world.

The Rashaces had made great show of mourning the man whose brush had gifted them a palace filled with incomparable frescos; the countess more stricken than her husband, but then her relationship with Kat’s father had been a singular and necessarily clandestine one.

But over time, talk of bringing the killer to justice faded. The cottage that had been Kat’s home her whole life had been relet to her father’s successor. Offered a modest stipend by the grieving countess, she’d taken up rooms in the lower spire’s Shriza district. Respectable, but not respectable enough that friends who’d once treated her as a fireblood by association for being schooled alongside them could bring themselves to visit. When the countess’ stipend became erratic, then ceased altogether, Kat took altogether more squalid lodgings in Zariqaz’s Undertown, where a housebreaker who’d stolen what few of her father’s notebooks she’d managed to keep hold of had also smashed the beloved snow globe, leaving her with only memories. By the time Alabastra acquainted her with the dizzying scale of her father’s debts – and what she’d forfeit if they weren’t paid – she was wholly alone. There was no profit to be made from the aetherios tattoo the way her father had intended, as the pigment’s secret had died with him.

So she’d run, and put his work to other purpose.

Kat dropped the purse back into its hiding place and swung her feet onto the bed. She closed her eyes, and willed sleep to take her.

Thoughts chased round and round in the darkness. The close calls of the night before. Fears for the night to come. Again and again she told herself that she’d prepared as best she could. That the plan was the plan, and she couldn’t do anything more to hone it. Yes, no one had ever stolen from a xanathros before. Yes, every skelder she’d met swore it was impossible. But something was only impossible until it was done for the first time. Be the first, and wouldn’t that show everyone?

When doubts finally receded, the night’s injuries made themselves known, the ache from where the koilos had sought to squeeze off her head most of all. The more Kat strove to ignore it, the more insistent it became. As she rolled onto her side, a chink of light through the imperfect drapes glinted off the vial of last breath. Admitting defeat, she swung her legs round and grabbed blearily at the vial. Whitish vapour danced about the rim as she slid the stopper free. Bracing herself against the inevitable nausea, she inhaled.

Dizzy, she sank back onto the bed. She pinched her eyes shut, fighting the sudden feeling of distance from the world. That only gave free rein to sonorous whispers muttering in the darkness. Little by little the disorientation faded, the whispers alongside. They took with them the leaden ache from her neck, the twinge from an ankle jolted during her escape, and a dozen lesser pains.

Gasping, she opened her eyes.

A glance in the dresser’s warped mirror showed neither scratches nor scars upon brow and cheeks. So too had the koilos’ handiwork faded almost to nothing.

She grimaced away the last of her nausea. The first and rarest part of the soul to escape with death, last breath offered a transfusion of vigour no physical balm could contest. Even without the childhood memories of her mother slipping away beneath its vapours, the partaking was too reminiscent of those who indulged in talent wisps. The tessence she used to replenish her tattoo was merely the last scrapings of dissipated ifrît, but last breath still held a spark of mortal soul. It was too easy to imagine closing her eyes and someone else looking out when they opened.

Last breath commanded a high price. In Undertown it was rare to the point of non-existence. There was no way Azra could have afforded it, which meant she’d stolen it.

Because of course she had.

Lying back, Kat closed her eyes. This time, sleep took her almost at once.

The light from the window was greying to twilight when fresh shouts and the thump of floorboards woke her. Half-remembered dreams of indigo flame retreating into blackness, she glared blearily up at the ceiling.

“Blessed Nyssa, do you never give it a rest?” she shouted.

An indecipherable bellow and the crash of breaking pottery were her only replies.

Sighing to the tips of her toes, she rolled over and screamed into her pillow. It felt good. So good, she did it again. Only then did she half climb, half fall out of bed in search of food. Fortunately, the Katija of the day before had possessed the foresight to leave a little bread, two figs, a chunk of spicy komestri sausage – even a little thin wine. The Katija of the present attacked them with gusto, and silently allowed that her counterpart could occasionally be trusted to handle events without making a hash of them. What the Katija of tomorrow thought was as yet unknown, but Kat was sure she’d make her scathing opinion known when the time came.

To her delight, the communal washroom was empty and as close as it ever came to clean, sparing mould older than Kat herself. Nose wrinkling at the sour fragrance of soap sprung from uncertain provenance and one heel wedged against the door to prevent unwanted interruption – both lock and door handle had long since departed – she hurried through her ablutions and returned to her room noticeably cleaner and fractionally more awake.

Argument still raging above her head, she pulled on her coat and brushed it into some sort of shape. The purse and its thin bounty went into a pocket. She then spent five minutes searching for her dagger before remembering that the Katija of yesterday had lost it during the scuffle with the koilos.

Typical of the flighty trallock.

She cast her eye around the cramped room. It wasn’t much. It was barely anything. But it had been home. One way or the other, it wasn’t any longer. If the night went to plan, she could afford something better. If it didn’t, somewhere to sleep would be the least of her problems.

She hesitated in the doorway, trying to dredge up attachment. As little as two years ago, the thought of leaving the familiar behind and casting herself adrift in the city would have terrified her. Now, it felt like freedom.

Maybe Azra was right. You found your place before one was found for you. Sometimes that meant leaving and never coming back, bridges ablaze behind.

A muffled thud sent dust trickling from the ceiling’s cracked plaster. A woman’s scream sounded above Kat’s head. Not angry. Afraid. Just another morning in Tellwind Manse.

Kat suppressed a flash of guilt and supposed a better person would have done something. She liked to think she might have, had there been less at stake. But interfering risked injury – or worse, drawing the attention of custodians, and the Alabastran bailiffs soon after. She could afford neither. Not today of all days. Besides, the woman in Twenty-One had made her choices. Sometimes that meant living with them.

Lorrima Tower was waiting.

Without so much as a backwards glance, Kat went to meet it.

Five

The citizens of Tyzanta might not have cared for Countess Bascari or even their distant king, but they loved a party. Fires blazed beneath the lumani lamp posts of the palace square, the hot waft of charcoal and honey-roasted meat driving out the humble earthiness of Kat’s neighbours in the crowd. Hymns vied with bawdy tavern songs, brazen trumpets and the thump of drums. Black-uniformed custodians walked the seething mass in twos and threes, their impassive silver masks – representations of the androgynous vahla spirits who in legend escorted the unwilling to Nyssa’s judgement – as much a deterrent as their scimitars. Beyond the leaping flames, the coiled domes and fluted minarets of the Bascari palace shone white and silver against the southern skies.

“Is it always—” Unable to hear herself, Kat tapped Skerrik on the shoulder and switched to Simah. ||Is it always like this?||

||The king’s footing the bill for tonight.|| His imprecise signs took a moment to parse. For all that Simah had passed into common usage long ago, a gulf separated familiarity and mastery. ||Easier to be generous with other peoples’ coin.||

“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” shouted Azra.

||Do what?|| Skerrik returned her murderous scowl with a grin. “I said it’s a busy night.”

“Every fireblood in the spire will be screaming for protection. The custodians will be run ragged.”

Kat drew her coat tight. Even in the shadows, Tyzanta was seldom cold during the day, but thin clouds and the sun’s retreat made nights bitter. “Let’s hope it’s enough.”

The ornate towers and flying buttresses of Xanathros Alabastra loomed to the north, its spiralling towers overwrought by comparison to the elegant palace. Giant golden statues of Nyssa Iudexas and Nyssa Benevolas flanked the dual coil of its broad stairway. The former wore ceremonial armour, her cold beauty half hidden by the hood’s heavy shadow; the latter a revealing gown and a welcoming smile with arms spread wide.

Picking her way past a small child more interested in mud-flecked skirts than staying out from underfoot, Kat peeled off towards the temple’s colonnaded gardens. Memorial pinwheels dotted ochre foxgloves and waxy-leaved bushes, their black and white sails discoloured and flame-crimped edges frayed with the passing seasons. A few still gleamed, fresh varnish shining with the hope that the goddess would forgive a loved one’s sins and permit an early rebirth.

Ahead, shuffling pilgrims climbed towards the temple gate. No matter that Countess Bascari offered a feast not seen in a generation, there’d always be those who chose piety over pleasure. Skerrik joined the queue a little ahead of her, Azra a few paces behind, both of them waving away the attentions of capering young women wearing stylised wooden masks and tattered black robes – festival-goers playing the role of seductive palka daemons, tempting wayward souls to turn their back on Nyssa’s judgement in favour of the oblivion of the Outer Dark.

Within the temple, lumani chandeliers woke polished basalt walls to splendour and the golden lettering of floor-set remembrance stones to fire. Great stained-glass windows recounting parables of old glittered like gemstone. Incense billowed from brass censers set at shoulder height on the flame-graven pillars, and every scrap of wood was polished to a rich sheen.

“You have to admit,” Azra muttered, “they have style.”

“They can afford it,” Kat retorted.

She waited until a custodian’s attention was elsewhere and skirted behind the wooden choir stalls. A suspended tapestry of Nyssa Iudexas rendering judgement onto tiny flame-wreathed figures hid the vestry door from sight. It also concealed Skerrik’s kneeling form as he probed the lock with his charmer’s tools.

A scowling Azra rounded on him. “Didn’t you say this would be easy?”

“It’s not difficult,” he said tautly, without looking up. “But it takes time.”

Kat reached out to the sentry crest above the door. At once, its hestic ifrît uncoiled to taste the glyphs woven about her forearm, its invisible fires probing and prodding.

“You might want to hurry it up,” Azra murmured.

More officious than its distant cousin at Javar’s mansion, the hestic lingered over each glyph in turn before finally latching onto a bloom of geometric petals halfway between elbow and wrist. Authority confirmed, it gladly accepted Kat’s command for it to sleep.

Kat peered around the edge of the tapestry and ducked back as a pair of custodians emerged from the incense clouds. If they came close enough to hear Skerrik scraping at the lock it was over.

“Nag, nag, nag.” Rising, Skerrik tugged the door open. “It’s all you ever do.”

Azra cuffed him about the head and slipped inside. Kat followed Skerrik through. Pulling the door shut, she found herself face to face with a custodian, his maskless face pale above the gold leaf-embroidery of his high-collared hooded tunic.

“You’re late,” Darravon hissed. “What was I meant to say if the hierarch returned before you got here?”

Azra patted his cheek. “That you’d had warning of a daring heist and were standing guard.”

“Stop worrying, lad,” said Skerrik. “We’re here now, aren’t we?”

Proof that martial clothing did not always make the man, Darravon smoothed a restless hand through bristly chestnut hair. He paced back and forth between desk and the simple hearth where a pyrasti crackled happily among the coals, his tanned cheeks hollow with concern. “Were you seen?”

“By about a thousand people,” said Kat. “But there’s being seen and being noticed. Do you have them?”

He nodded tautly at the smaller of the two inner doors. “Through there.”

The three custodian uniforms belonged in the hierarch’s ceremonial wardrobe no more than Kat herself, their knee-length black tunics and woollen trousers drab alongside the overwrought finery of the high priest’s ivory robes. Their silvered masks were stylised, contemplative representations of the ever-vigilant androgynous vahla spirits. The scabbarded jade-pommelled daggers were each a hundred times more valuable than the one Kat had lost the previous night.

Skerrik stripped off his shirt and pulled on the largest of the three tunics. “Would you look at that?” He twisted the buttons closed and tugged brocade cuffs into place. “My mother always said I’d look good in uniform.”

Azra rolled her eyes. “She just wanted to cover that ugly face with a mask.” She reached for the second tunic. “A little privacy?”

“Privacy’s for firebloods.” But he turned his back all the same.

Kat’s new tunic was tighter across the chest than she’d have liked and the trousers a hair too long, but it was a rare custodian who could afford a tailor’s services. Just as well, or Darravon might never have responded to Azra’s overtures. Two decades of plodding at Countess Bascari’s bidding and passed over for a templar’s sponsorship at least twice. Azra had a knack for seeking out the disaffected.

Kat tied the mask’s ribbon beneath her tightly bunned hair. Her nostrils wrinkled at the closeness of her own breath. Already her cheeks and forehead itched.

“Kiasta, I don’t know how you last a shift in these things.” Muffled by the mask, her voice sounded hollow. Not a part of her at all.

Darravon pulled on his own mask. “You get used to it.”

Azra, of course, made the simple uniform look glamorous, her inky black hair framing the mask to perfection. “Well, darlings? Shall we?”

Kat bundled her old clothes out of sight. “How do we stand upstairs?”

“My lot won’t look past the uniforms,” said Darravon. “Captain Tazah loves random patrols and spot checks like you wouldn’t believe. You’re sure you can bypass the vault ifrîti?”

“I got us in here, didn’t I?” As an afterthought, Kat nudged the outer door’s hestic awake. Most folk couldn’t tell if a hestic was sleeping or awake until it grew angry, but better not to take the risk. “We keep our heads and it’ll all be fine.”

Skerrik nodded at Azra. “So long as this one stops dancing about like she’s expecting applause.”

Azra blew him a kiss. “You’re just jealous because I make these rags look good.” Hands on hips, she strutted a tight circle. “How do you want to split this, Katija?”

“Once we’re off the elevator, I’ll handle the vault ifrîti,” said Kat, Darravon’s sketches of the temple layout at the forefront of her thoughts. “Azra watches my back. Skerrik and Darravon secure the mooring house. We load the hierarch’s sky-barge with as many tetrams as we can, and sail off to new lives.”

“You make it sound easy.”

“It will be,” she replied, with more confidence than she felt.

The tattoo she’d painstakingly copied wouldn’t cut it in the vault, whose hestics responded only to a closely guarded design borne by the hierarch and his two senior archons. That meant refining her aetherios tattoo on the fly and hoping the ifrîti didn’t get restive – and that she didn’t exhaust her tattoo before she was done. Assuming that all went to plan it’d be easy enough to convince the barge’s helmic to chart a steady course across Undertown. With the bulk of Tyzanta’s custodians concentrated in the Overspire for the banquet, those in Undertown would be spread too thin to stop them abseiling into the shadows and handing off their haul to Marida’s runners.

Darravon scowled. “I couldn’t get the elevator key. Tazah has it, and he’s out in the grounds.”

Skerrik grunted. “Let me worry about the locks, lad.”

“Gladly.” Darravon tugged at his belt, re-siting the shrieker holstered against his left hip. The short, stubby weapon bore fleeting resemblance to a crossbow’s stock, with a brass barrel running where the flight groove should have been, a moulded handgrip sitting perpendicular beneath and an octahedral ifrîti prism set in brass filigree above. A squeeze of the trigger goaded the captive ifrît into spitting a bolt of invisible flame at whatever lay in the wielder’s path. At least, that was what happened if the wielder bore a matched glyph. If not, the ifrît remained at slumber, reducing the shrieker to a useless lump of brass and wood.

“Be careful with that thing,” said Skerrik. “A stray shot hits a stack of tetrams and the custodians won’t have to chase us down… they’ll be mopping us up.”

Darravon glared at Skerrik. “I know my business, skelder.”

Kat flirted with the idea of having him leave the shrieker behind. But a good many of the custodians in the upper floors would have their own. If things went wrong, firepower might tilt the odds towards survival.

Of course, that wouldn’t have been a problem had they been stealing modern tetrams. However, the first tetrams hadn’t been minted from gold but prismatic crystal, their value determined not by the metal of their striking but the worth of the unsplintered soul caged within – easily ten thousand dinars where a golden tetram was worth two hundred. But if the crystal cracked, that soul tore free in an explosion more destructive than blasting powder. Not for nothing had prismatic tetrams been retired as currency.

“Enough.” Kat glanced at Azra, seeking and receiving a nod of approval. “If something goes wrong, we split up and get out as best we can.”

Darravon led them out into the passageways, approaching each twist and turn with the certainty of a man who’d spent twenty years in thankless patrol of such places. Kat fell into step alongside, mimicking his unhurried pace. Azra and Skerrik made up the rear, forming a truncated column two bodies wide and two deep.

Two custodians waited at the door to the next hallway, a sentry crest glinting on the archway keystone above their heads. A koilos stood motionless on a low pedestal beside the door, its gloved hands locked about a flamberge’s point-down blade. Unlike the one at Javar’s mansion, this koilos wore the golden robes, black lamellar plating and armoured, flame-etched crown of an ember-saint – Nyssa’s first, deathless apostles who in legend served as scribes and sentinels in her Obsidium Palace in the Stars Below. It wasn’t any such thing, of course, but Alabastran theatricality saw no hypocrisy in dressing the corpses of criminals in saintly finery. Penance was the finest redemption.

Where the hestic in the sentry crest brimmed with curiosity, this koilos was a void of intent, the fires of its indentured soul coldly awaiting the hestic’s cry of alarm. Suppressing a shudder, Kat broke the runed skull’s hollow stare and set the hestic sleeping. The custodians looked her group up and down and waved them through the door without a word.

“Might be we’ll actually pull this off,” Skerrik murmured when the sentries were out of earshot. “They’re so reliant on ifrîti they’ve forgotten how to be watchful.”

Darravon bristled but said nothing.

“I told you before,” Azra replied, just as quietly. “It’s arrogance. They need shaking up.”

Kat nodded. “Not tonight. The last thing we need is a burst of competence.”

No such competence was on display as they passed another checkpoint and entered the scriptorium. At that hour, most of the chandeliers were dark, their lumani sleeping fitfully. Piled ledgers, stubby sticks of sealing wax and ink-stained blotters on the rows of desks gave some clue to the industry of the day. Yet more ledgers lined the shelves, uneven pages arrayed in ranks ceiling to floor – records of offerings made and debts incurred, from the paupers who owed pennies to firebloods whose entire estates lay on the line. Alabastra never forgot a debt.

Skerrik started forward.

Kat grabbed his arm. “Wait.”

The entire room buzzed with watchful ifrîti. Kat probed the nearest, and immediately withdrew from its rising suspicion. Whatever latitude the glyphs of her tattoo granted elsewhere, they were worthless here. And no wonder. The right ledger could make or break the wealthiest of Tyzanta’s firebloods. Even archons couldn’t be trusted with that temptation.

“There are hestics everywhere,” she said. “Walk where I walk. And touch nothing.”

She clung to Skerrik’s arm until she was sure the message had sunk in, then set out into the maze of desks. Tongues of spirit-flame licked at her skin whenever she brushed the outer edge of a hestic’s territory. Each time she withdrew to safety and threaded another route, nausea building beneath the pressure of silent voices. At last reaching the onward door, she braced her palms against the wall and blinked back a wave of dizziness as the others joined her.

Azra laid a concerned hand on her shoulder. “You all right?”

Kat slipped off her mask. Having fresh air against her skin helped. Straightening, she cuffed sweat from her brow. “That was not fun.” She glared at Darravon. “Thanks for the warning.”

“I thought you had this covered.”

She bit back a retort. Darravon had probably never even spoken to one of the shriversmen who bound ifrîti to their prisms. Most such craftsmen burned out young, their essence leeched away by their charges’ instinctive thirst, the bulk of ambition and skill stolen alongside. The aetherios tattoo served as a buffer between Kat’s own soul and those ifrîti she touched. But making contact with so many in so short a time invited risk, all the same. She pulled back her sleeve. Fire glinted along the maze of glyphs. Diminished, but not spent.

Azra stepped between them. “Are we good?”

Kat took a deep breath and straightened. “Let’s get this over with.”

Six

Beyond the door, unadorned walls gave way to portraits of long-dead worthies. Letting Skerrik take her place, Kat slipped to the back of their makeshift column. Azra’s hand found hers and gave a brief, reassuring squeeze.

“Almost there,” murmured Darravon. “One more checkpoint. I hope our lock charmer’s as good as he claims.”

“So do I,” said Skerrik cheerily. “I hear he’s an unreliable cuss.”

To Kat’s dismay, the checkpoint’s custodians stood taller and straighter than those already passed, but their koilos – once again arrayed in an ember-saint’s black and gold glory – was no more aware than its counterparts had been. As she soothed the accompanying hestic, the nearest custodian stepped forward to block the corridor, hand on her holstered shrieker.

“Who goes?”

Darravon gave a slow shake of the head, his voice without a hint of worry. “Easy, Glynin. It’s just me.”

“Thought you were off duty.”

“So did I. First public banquet in years, and Tazah has me walking the corridors? Bloody templars.”

“Don’t let him hear you say that.” Shoulders relaxing, Glynin waved them through.

“Still, stay vigilant,” said Azra as they passed, her voice no longer languorous but a flawless imitation of an imperious fireblood. “I heard there’s a crew of skelders fixing to ransack this place.”

Another custodian grunted. “Yeah. I bet.”

Kat sighed with relief as the door clicked shut behind.

“Have you lost your mind?” hissed Darravon.

Azra offered a dead-eyed stare made easier by her borrowed mask. “It’s called hiding in plain sight. You should try it.”

They passed through the maze of rooms without further incident, the intervening hestics succumbing readily to Kat’s wishes. Adjoining chambers buzzed with the pressure of countless ifrîti. Lumani, pyrasti, a handful of heraldics, waiting to memorise messages too sensitive for fallible mortal couriers. Few were curious, much less aggressive.

At last, the elevator lobby and the gilded railings of its gate came into view. Pulling off his mask, Skerrik knelt beside the lock housing and slipped his pouch of charmer’s tools from beneath his robes. “Hello, beautiful,” he murmured. “Let me take a look at you.”

Kat glanced at their backward trail. Just because Glynin had seemed satisfied with Darravon’s answer didn’t mean she couldn’t change her mind. Or a real patrol couldn’t come marching through.

Seconds creaked by, marked by the scritch and scrape of Skerrik probing the lock. Darravon returned to pacing. “This is taking too long.”

Kat snorted. “You can always take the stairs.” Not a viable option. Level after level of living quarters for wardens, templars and archons – not to mention that the entire floor below the vault was given over to the hierarch’s private suite. Even at that hour, with celebrations raging in the plaza, there’d be folk on the roam, any of whom might become suspicious.

Two custodians rounded the corner from the main stairway.

One started forward, hand going to his shrieker. “What—?”

Azra’s right forearm took him across the throat. Her left hand yanked his wrist into an armlock. Kat broke into a run as the second custodian went for his holster. The brass sights came up, the ifrît prism glinting behind.

She threw herself into a slide, the shrieker’s muzzle still tracking when her booted feet swept the custodian’s legs away. He thudded to the floor beside her. She rolled to her knees and slammed his masked forehead against the floor until his struggles ceased.

Azra’s custodian went limp for lack of air.

Kat glanced back. “Skerrik, we need to go.”

There was every chance the sound of the scuffle would draw attention. At least they hadn’t got a shot off.

Skerrik rocked back on his heels and scrambled away from the opening gate. “Shall we?”

Working in pairs, they dragged the unconscious custodians into the elevator. As Darravon pulled the gate closed, Kat reached out to the control prism and the motic ifrît within. It recoiled with a dull growl, heat flickering in its wake.

“Ah!” She grabbed at her tattoo.

“What is it?” asked Azra.

“The glyphs aren’t right.” Kat bent her thoughts on her aetherios tattoo, riding the after-image of the ifrît’s expectations. There. A coil of asymmetric spiderwebs inverted from their correct configuration. “Someone built a flaw into the design to prevent forgeries.”

Azra glanced up from gagging and binding the two custodians with an inventive mix of strips torn from their robes and a slender cord produced from inside her own. “That’s paranoid.”

“I don’t know. We’re here, aren’t we? There are probably different flaws woven into every design.” Kat nodded at the unconscious custodians. “Keeps everyone in their place and protects against the likes of us.”

Darravon scowled. “Then we’re done.”

Kat nudged the lines, correcting the flaws, and laid her hand on the control prism once more. The elevator lurched upwards as counterweights and pulleys whispered into motion. “Have a little faith.”

Her smile didn’t touch her eyes. Resisting the scriptorium hestics had already taken too much. The elevator motic had at least been annoyed, rather than confrontational. But the vault ifrîti would be shaped of sterner stuff. Azra strapped on one of the unconscious custodians’ shrieker belts. She handed the other to Kat. “Don’t worry about those two.”

Kat buckled the belt into place. The shrieker’s ifrît barely noticed her before returning to its slumbers. Not surprising. The archon’s tattoo she’d forged wouldn’t have included a shrieker activation glyph – House Bascari guarded them too jealously for that. But the shriekers at least completed the illusion of the borrowed uniforms.

The elevator shuddered into its bay. Darravon hauled the gate open. “We need to make this fast. Someone’s bound to notice the elevator’s gone.”

Azra nodded at the short, straight stair leading to the roof. “Then you’d better secure the barge, hadn’t you? Keep it quiet. No shriekers and no screams.”

He shot her a look of pure poison and drew his dagger. “I’ll handle it.”

Skerrik in tow, an unhappy Darravon made for the stairs. Kat and Azra skirted the double spiral of the main stairwell and passed beneath the honeycomb archway of the vault approach. Storerooms filled wall to wall with impounded possessions passed away to either side.

“Darravon’s about to have a seizure,” said Kat.

Azra shrugged. “Let him. He provided the uniforms and the layout. Now he needs us far more than we need him.”

The muffled thud of a falling body whispered down the corridor, so quiet that Kat doubted she’d have noticed had she not been specifically listening out. Darravon indeed knew his business. The mooring house sentries were formality more than anything else, set to guard against the unlikely possibility of skelders scaling the temple’s outer walls. Likely they hadn’t even seen him coming.

The corridor widened out to a pillared hallway. Scores of alcoves yawned wide, half hidden in the shadows beneath vaulted windows. A skeletal koilos stood within each, arms folded across its black-robed chest and yoke-like collar, gilded letters embossed into each naked skull. Scraps of broken chain hung from ceremonial bands about their wrists, representations of the shackles of avarice that had sealed their fate. Misers, debtors and cozeners all, their penance was to guard in death that which had ruled them in life. A gentle probe confirmed that her stolen glyphs held no sway over these koilos. If they woke, it would get very nasty very quickly.

Kat shuddered and kept to the centre of the hall. Did a koilos know anything of the person they’d been or the slaves they’d become? Would she, if her turn came? Even the thought of being trapped behind those empty eyes, screaming as Alabastra made a puppet of her body…

Better to settle the debt and never know the truth.

The vault door stood three times Kat’s height, with dizzying golden curlicues etched into the polished stone. It was otherwise smooth, with neither lock nor hinges to mar the perfect surface.

Azra tossed her mask away and offered a brilliant smile. “Well, darling. This is it.”

Kat nodded and removed her own mask and gloves. Pressing her fingertips to the cold stone, she slipped into the spirit world. The flames of ifrîti filled the darkness, coiling and squeezing through a space that seemed entirely too small to contain them. Their thoughts pressed in, smothering, stifling.

“There are so many,” she whispered.

“You can do this.” Azra’s voice echoed through the blackness, indistinct and breathy. A dream in a place that was itself barely real. “Take your time.”

Drawing strength from the words, Kat examined the flames, probing their form and desires. A handful belonged to hestics similar to those that guarded the checkpoints below. Slowly, carefully she let them inspect her tattoo’s glyphs. They retreated, a measure of her claustrophobia fading alongside.

Encouraged, she examined anew those that remained, sifting them into a knot of dull, heavy motics, each responsible for one of the vault door’s heavy lockstones. They rumbled with displeasure, finding her soul-glyphs wanting, but in their voiceless complaint offered after-images of the design they sought.

Focusing her thoughts, Kat teased apart the glyphs on her outer forearm and rewove them line by line. She was rewarded by a chorus of dull, grinding rumbles as the motics retreated, drawing back the lockstones with them. The oldest of the ifrîti required the most cajoling – a last reknotting of a swirling nine-bladed cross that left her dizzy – but with a sigh like thunder it at last sank away.

Azra’s laughter pealed brightly through the spirit world. “You see? I knew you could do it!”

Dizziness fading, Kat re-emerged into the light of the living in time to see the vault door’s trailing edge slide away into the ceiling. A narrow archway beckoned.

A smile crawled unbidden across her face.

She’d done it. She’d actually done it.

So why was her stomach turning somersaults?

Azra hugged her. “What are we waiting for?”

She started for the threshold. Kat grabbed her arm. “Wait.”

She frowned. “What is it?”

“I don’t…” That was it. The emptiness at Javar’s mansion that hadn’t been emptiness at all but a koilos awaiting transgression. This sensation was the same. “There’s something else here.”

Kat closed her eyes and probed the vault anew, casting her frame of reference wider.

At last she saw it, a brooding, throbbing flame so black as to be invisible against the darkness. It permeated everything, suckling off the lesser ifrîti to feed its own roiling majesty.

“There’s something else,” she murmured again, not knowing if Azra heard her. “Something I’ve never seen before.”

The black flame was bound not only to the vault’s ifrîti but also to the ranks of koilos in the corridor approach. Maybe even to every other ifrît in the building. Dredging up the last of her failing tattoo’s power, Kat brushed the black flame’s edges. It hissed and recoiled from her glyphs, offering no clue as to what she might do to placate it.

That left instinct.

She worked slowly at first, halting at every disapproving growl, but faster and faster as her confidence grew. Through the spirit world’s suffocating murk she felt the winnowing of her tattoo’s fires. As it fell dark, the black flame burrowed through its defences, cold and leaden beneath her skin. Her hurried breaths scraped and scratched at lungs. Ice trickled through her thoughts as the blackness claimed her.

With a sick start, Kat realised it wasn’t a hestic at all.

It was a qalimîri, and it wanted her body for its own.

With a scream, she tore free of the spirit world, the qalimîri’s tendrils scattering like smoke into the light.

“Kat?” Azra crowded in, eyes welling with concern. “What is it? Talk to me!”

“There’s… there’s a qalimîri on the threshold. It nearly had me.” Gagging, Kat clenched chattering teeth, frantically rubbing warmth back into her limbs. She’d nearly ended up like that poor girl Marida wore. With utmost caution, she probed the threshold again. She felt only the dregs of the black flame. The qalimîri had retreated to its prism to lick its wounds, its connection to the other ifrîti severed. At least for the moment. “It’s gone now.”

Azra paled. “Blessed Nyssa. I thought archons banished those things, not kept them as pets.”

Kat snorted. “And discard something useful?” Still shivering, she stumbled for the vault. “Come on. We’ve maybe a few minutes before the qalimîri recovers its courage. It won’t back down as easily next time.”

Before her nerve failed, Kat crossed the threshold into a shadow-cast space easily ten times the size of her room at Tellwind Manse. Drape-fronted cabinets waited in serried ranks on the thick carpet. She pulled back the curtain on the nearest. Octagonal crystal tetrams the size of her palm glimmered in the light of a lone lumani. Ten coins to a stack, six leather-packed stacks to each wooden crate. A dozen wooden crates snap-clasped and chained to a shelf. A king’s ransom, theirs for the taking once the locks were broken.

Azra laughed. “We’re rich!”

A high-pitched whine of a shrieker shot echoed down the passageway, a gargled scream on its heels.

Seven

The vault hestics lurched awake at the shrieker’s discharge, invisible flames darkening as curiosity spiralled into alarm. At once, the koilos sentries stirred to bleak awareness.

Kat pinched her eyes shut and frantically set about calming the hestics. One by one they returned to rest, suspicions soothed by the authority of her glyphs. Robbed of the hestics’ goading, the koilos sentries sank back into grim silence.

Cuffing sweat from her brow, Kat grabbed at the wall. Thank Nyssa the qalimîri was still licking its wounds. At that moment it could have gobbled her up without effort.

Azra ran to the vault entrance and stared down the corridor. “What are they playing at?”

Kat followed her gaze, straining for distant sounds and hoping to hear none. “I don’t know.”

“Take a look. I’ll get started here.”

“You’re sure?”

Azra nodded, worry creasing the corners of her eyes. “You think I can’t handle a few snap clasps, darling? What if they heard that on the floor below? Go!”

Kat hesitated, but Azra was right. It might take time for the custodians to organise a response, but they’d be coming. “I’ll send Skerrik to help. Stay safe.”

“You too.”

Azra’s gaze lingered on hers. Then she darted back into the vault, a roll of charmer’s tools already in her hand. Kat made one last sweep to be sure the vault’s ifrîti were asleep, and bolted down the corridor.

She slowed as she approached the elevator lobby, warned by a rasping whimper from the mooring house stairs. Hugging the wall, she eased her dagger from its sheath and cursed the fact that Darravon hadn’t stolen scimitars from the armoury. Sparring with the Rashace children had at least given her a feel for swordplay. For all Azra’s attempts at tutelage, the closeness of dagger-work still appalled. Still, she drew reassurance from the weight. Better a dagger than empty hands.

She took the stairs in soft, loping strides. At every step, the whimper grew louder, more ragged. Her straining ears caught the whisper of the wind – a match for the cold draught trickling down the stairs – and what might have been the murmur of the distant plaza crowd. The mooring house’s slipway doors were open to the night. Two more steps, and the creak of rope joined the other sounds. The whimper bubbled, faded, and spluttered wetly back.

The stairway door hung open. Broken glass from a smashed lumani prism glittered on the narrow landing. Kat strove for a sense of the ifrîti in the room beyond. With her tattoo drained from the struggle with the vault’s qalimîri, all was muddled and opaque.

Taking a deep breath, she edged out onto the landing.

Of the mooring house’s four lumani prisms, three were dark and cracked against the vaulted ceiling. The one survivor stuttered fitfully, casting peculiar shadows across stowage lockers, wooden pillars and burnished brass handrails.

At the top of the slipway, the hierarch’s sky-barge strained at the wrist-thick belaying rope anchoring it to the motic-driven capstan. With its hinged mainmast folded back and Deadwinds’ outriggers furled, it looked for all the world like a leashed swan straining for freedom. An egotist’s toy more than a true skyship, it could barely have held a dozen travellers.

Kat ghosted to the barge’s prow. The kindly smile of the Nyssa Benevolas figurehead turned threatening in the strobing shadow. Beyond canvas and rigging, stars sparkled through the mooring house’s open doors, the green haze of the Aurora Eternis warning of Mistfall come the dawn.

Breath frosting, she crept along the barge’s starboard flank. Bodies took shape as her eyes adapted. A custodian face-down in a pool of blood. Another propped up against the slipway rails, mask cracked and his posture the shrunken huddle of the recently dead. And at the foot of the barge’s gangway, mask gone and eyes open to the rafters, lay Darravon, shrieker inches from his hand, muzzle wisping with recent discharge.

Kat started towards his body. Hard to mourn a man she’d not liked, but the ragged wound at his throat demanded sympathy. The injury had all the hallmarks of an attack from behind, yet Darravon was facing both dead custodians, who lay several yards away. The scream and shrieker discharge had both been his, but who then had killed him? Options were limited.

“Skerrik…” she murmured.

A wet cough sounded away to her left. A limp shadow stirred beside a coil of rope.

“Here, lass. I’m…” A choked gurgle swallowed the breathy words.

She darted to his side. Breath caught in her throat as she took in fingers knotted across his belly and the oozing red ruin beneath. A death wound, beyond even the miracle of last breath.

“What happened?”

“I tried to warn him… I did…” Blood welled up over Skerrik’s lower lip and trickled away through his stubble. “Cut me open. Barely… barely saw her move.”

Ice crept into the pit of Kat’s stomach. “Barely saw who move?”

Skerrik’s lips parted. His eyes widened in alarm, fixing on something behind her.

Kat threw herself aside in the same moment the rush of air reached her ears. Her shoulder hit the floor and she rolled away from the heavy thud of boots.

As she made to rise, the shadows surged.

Acting on pure instinct, she rammed her dagger forward. The attacker twisted aside and drove a boot heel against her thigh. Flailing for balance, Kat crashed against the slipway railing, winded.

Her assailant drifted closer, unhurried. Blue irises shone in the powder-darkened eye sockets of an otherwise pale face. Stuttering light from the dying lumani danced across a tailored black coachman’s coat and tight blonde braids.

The woman from the Thornless Rose.

Kiasta. She should have trusted her instincts.

The woman cocked her head. A bloody straight-bladed dagger dangled carelessly from her right hand. “Not bad.” The guttural, syrupy accent of Khalad’s eastern provinces accentuated her soft mockery. “Now… Are you going to stay down, or do I have to hurt you some more?”

Kat pushed off the railing and flung herself forward. The woman grabbed her wrist. Kat grabbed hers. The woman rammed her head forward. The world rushed red and black, the hollow thud of impact heard more than felt.

Head ringing and vision swamped, Kat never saw the blow that struck away her leg. She hit the floor, breath exploding from her lungs. Her borrowed dagger skittered from numbed fingers and vanished over the slipway’s lip.

Still on her feet, the woman grimaced and blinked furiously. “I don’t want to do that again. Stay down.”

Kat dragged herself painfully to one knee. “What do you want?”

The woman offered an expansive shrug, her hands upturned. “I thought I was pretty clear. I want you to stay down.”

Kat swallowed hard. Keep her talking. Buy time for the room to stop spinning. “You’re a custodian?”

“Do I look like a custodian?”

Rising on wobbly legs, she swung at the woman’s head. She fetched a gut punch for her trouble and collapsed, knees cracking against the floor. She doubled over onto splayed hands.

The woman sighed. “Will you stop?”

“You didn’t say ‘please’,” Kat gasped.

The woman might be a custodian, a rival muscling in on the score, the hierarch’s psychotic mistress getting her grins, one of Marida’s runners playing the angles for her employer. Anything, really. What mattered was that she was faster and stronger. She’d made no attempt to use the bloodied dagger. As soon as she did, it was all over.

The woman rolled her eyes. “Please will you stop?”

Why did she care if Kat gave up or didn’t? She’d murdered Darravon and Skerrik without blinking. For that matter, who was to say that she hadn’t been the one to kill the two custodians? Why turn squeamish now?

Kat decided she didn’t care. At least, so long as the woman kept hesitating to kill her. Hilariously outclassed and her body already a massive throbbing bruise, she needed every advantage. And maybe she had one more? One that the woman couldn’t possibly know about. Assuming the vault qalimîri hadn’t drained all the fire from her aetherios tattoo.

Clinging to the slipway handrail, Kat clambered to her feet. Under cover of the motion, her hand brushed the grips of her holstered shrieker. Her tattoo responded to her insistent goading – sluggishly, but it responded. Slowly, carefully, determined not to be drawn all the way into the spirit world, she made contact with the firearm’s ifrît.

“Maybe we can cut a deal.” It took no effort at all to sound as though she were on the point of collapse. “It’s a big vault. There’s plenty to go round.”

“I don’t care about coin.”

“Everyone cares about something.” Kat gasped as the ifrît coiled about her thoughts, seething resentment at her flawed attempts to mimic its soul-glyph. Under cover of another stumble, she glanced down at the looping knot-work coalescing on the back of her left hand. “Try me.”

“I want you to sit down like a good little skelder while I tie your wrists. Is that so much?”

Kat deliberately missed her footing and grabbed at the rail for support, the motion carrying her a pace further away. “I guess it is.”

“Then we’ll do it the hard way.”

The shrieker’s ifrît let out a contented burble as the trailing edge of the soul-glyph formed, taking the last of the tattoo’s soulfire with it.

“Yes.” Kat hardened her expression, all pretence gone. “Let’s.”

She tugged the shrieker free of its holster and squeezed the trigger. A bolt of invisible flame screeched over the woman’s head, punching a fist-sized hole and a shower of wooden scraps from a stowage locker door. She’d never shot a crossbow before, let alone a shrieker, and was vaguely pleased to have fired in anything like the right direction.

Coat tails whirling, the woman planted a foot on the slipway rail and leapt for the barge’s deck. Already tracking the wrong way, Kat’s second shot went hopelessly wide, gouging a charred splinter from the barge’s bulwark and setting part of a sail ablaze. Her third sliced the belaying rope to flaming scraps halfway along its span.

With a yawning groan, the barge shuddered into motion. It rushed backwards along the slipway rollers towards the open skies, picking up speed as a restrained, careful descent ran out of control. Aghast, the woman sprinted for the port side bulwark. She dived for cover as Kat sent another shot screaming over her head.

The mooring house’s outer gatepost scraped an ugly black scar across pristine starboard paintwork and the sky-barge slipped into the night. Sails unfurling at the command of a helmic ignorant of its sole passenger’s desires, it vanished from sight.

Kat stared down at the shrieker, exhilarated and aghast at the power in her hand. “Skerrik? Are you still…?”

He wasn’t, his thin soul having flown sometime during the fight. Kat sagged. Darravon she’d barely known, but Skerrik she’d liked, infuriating though he’d so often been.

“Goddess forgive your—”

A howling outrush of hot wind from the inner door swallowed her words, the breathtaking roar of an explosion hard on its heels. The floor bucked like the deck of a fisher-skiff in heavy seas, slamming her bruised ribs into the slipway guardrail once more.

Kat righted herself, triumph lost in the crackle of distant flame.

Azra.

She left the mooring house at as close to a run as aching limbs allowed. Stairs juddered away beneath stumbling feet, an out-thrust hand against the wall her only means of balance.

The crackle of flame grew as she approached the vault. Dust choked her lungs. Rubble crunched under her feet. The once-beautiful windows were jagged eyes on a star-streaked sky, the glass blown outwards by the explosion’s backwash. A koilos had toppled from its alcove, spilling broken bone across the floor. The air hummed with the pressure of stunned ifrîti. At least, those whose prisms survived.

“Azra!” Pushing past the pain, Kat ran for the vault’s smoke-wreathed archway. “Azra, where are you?”

“Here!” A paroxysm of coughs echoed along the corridor. “Katija?”

Kat closed the distance on a surge of pure, panicked adrenaline. Parting smoke revealed a ragged spill of broken stone where the archway had been. Azra’s grimy hand reached through an uneven gap in the rubble. Tossing her shrieker aside, Kat scrambled up the wreckage and squeezed the fingers tight.

“Azra?” Relief left her light-headed. “Kiasta… What happened?”

The hand slipped away. The right side of Azra’s drawn, smoke-stained face appeared at the far end of the makeshift tunnel. Hungry orange flames crackled behind, racing along shelves and dancing into the night sky through a ragged hole in the outer wall.

“I don’t know… I don’t know,” she babbled. “There was… a pressure wave. Then a crate exploded. At least… I think so. It was all so fast.”

Kat swallowed a lungful of bitter, dust-flecked air. A pressure wave. A detonating ifrît? Were Alabastra really so jealous of their wealth that they’d sooner destroy it than let it be stolen?

Of course they were.

All around her, flames uncurled across the spirit world as the surviving hestics regathered their senses. Kat pushed them from her thoughts. Let them scream their insubstantial heads off. It didn’t make any difference now.

“Skerrik and Darravon?” asked Azra.

“Dead. They’re dead. We’re done. I’m getting you out of here.”

Azra pinched her eyes shut. “No.”

“No?” The pressure in Kat’s chest shifted, no longer relief but foreboding. “What do you mean, no?”

Azra’s throat bobbed. “Even if you could clear the archway, my leg’s… buried under half the roof.” She winced, a thin gasp escaping her lips. “The bones grind when I try to move.”

“I’m not leaving you!”

Desperate, Kat scrabbled at the rubble. A spill of smaller stones rushed away under her hands. The larger remained obstinately in place. She gripped one tightly and pulled. Her fingers slipped free, blood welling up beneath torn skin. Undaunted, she braced her feet and tried again. She lost her balance and struck the ground on elbow and hip.

The first hestic screamed. The bleak essence of a koilos lurched in answer. Blinking away hot tears, Kat crawled to her feet and stared back down the smoke-filled corridor.

A skeletal hand flexed in an alcove.

“Katija. Kat.” Azra broke off, coughing, as the flames crackled higher. “Listen… When the fire reaches the rest of the tetrams…? It’s been fun. But you have to go.”

“I can’t.” Kat nearly choked on the words. “Don’t you see that?”

“You have to… otherwise they win. I don’t want them to win.”

“It’s not like I can escape. They’ll have heard that explosion in the Gutterfields.”

“Try, darling. For me.”

Azra’s face vanished. Her hand snaked out one last time. Cheeks streaming, Kat banished the rising shadows of the awakening koilos from her thoughts and held it tight. Clasped it as though willpower alone could make that moment last for ever. As though love alone could smother flames and roll stone aside.

But a moment was only a moment, and even love had its limits.

Azra pulled free. “I’ll see you in the next life.”

It took everything Kat had to turn away. Nerveless fingers hooking about the discarded shrieker, her limbs stiff and her heart a swollen, leaden lump, she rose and faced the mindless automata grins of the awakened koilos, the flames flickering from their limbs growing brighter and angrier with growing awareness.

Her point-blank shot blew the first apart. She barely noticed the stinging bone fragments across her face. There was only the heat and the heartache and the trigger beneath her finger. A second shot, a third – both targets almost in arm’s reach and too close even for Kat to miss – and then the way was clear.

Bone crunching under her boots, she ran for the elevator.

Loosing a chorus of ear-splitting screeches, the surviving koilos lumbered in pursuit.

Kat half stumbled, half fell across the elevator’s threshold, tripping on the bodies of the still-unconscious custodians they’d ambushed on the lower floor. Not even bothering to drag the gate closed, she flailed at the motic’s prism. A koilos loomed in the doorway, indigo flames writhing about its skull. Kat levelled the shrieker. Trembling hands sent the shot wide, scoring a black line along the elevator’s polished wooden wall.

Screeching its triumph, the koilos lunged.

The elevator shuddered into motion, falling away as counterweights and pulleys surged to life. Caught halfway across the threshold, the koilos exploded in a shower of gilded bone and dying flame.

Heart hammering, Kat sank into the far corner just as a second, roaring explosion from the floor above set the elevator shaft trembling.

The vault. The vault was gone.

Azra was gone.

That sick, harrowing realisation had barely sunk in when the sharp report of snapped cable split the air. The elevator lurched, steadied and plunged.

It crashed almost before it began. The impact flung Kat against the far wall. Her head chimed against a stanchion and she tumbled out into the lower lobby. Urgent voices and running feet rang out. Her back flat against cold stone, Kat scrabbled blindly for the shrieker.

A grizzled grey-haired man in a Bascari castellan’s uniform loomed. His olive-skinned brow furrowed above a milky-white eye bordered top and bottom by a jagged scar.

“Try it.” His lip curled to a sneer. “Please.”

It was the contempt in his voice that did it. Or perhaps it was the knowledge that Azra was dead, and with her everything that mattered. Kat closed her fingers around the shrieker’s grips.

The stomp of the castellan’s boot swept her into darkness.

Eight

Seven days since the Aurora Eternis had shimmered its warning of Mistfall. A week of mist clinging to eaves and coiling through the streets, muffling the rumble of industry and the temple bells. More than enough time for the skittish to start worrying that their city would be swallowed up, never to be seen again, and they with it. Long years stationed on Khalad’s border had taught Ihsan Damant that the Veil had a particular scent – half-forgotten memories and longing recalled at midnight. Tyzanta had none of that smell, especially in the lush, irrigated palace gardens where regrets blossomed with the crocuses. Sometimes, mist was simply mist.

Tugging his woollen cloak into place – on such days a castellan’s silk robes alone were of little comfort – Damant left the coiled spire of the conclave hall behind and set out for the residence, feet treading the crazed path through the topiarised yews out of habit. The palace’s torch house at least stood apart from the panic elsewhere in the city. Indigo flames atop the minaret’s summit were a dull glow, the scent of jasmine and juniper from the blesswood kindling faint. The Countess understood that a ruler should never act out of panic – or be seen to do so.

If only others had the wit to follow her example. With Mistfall came rumours of daemons. Malevolent ifrîti too twisted and selfish to ever hope to earn reincarnation. Light-fingered ilfri stealing coins, toenail clippings and hanks of hair. Soul-sucking amashti ensnaring prey with wanton promise. Qeenaki wailing through the night to warn of impending death. Mischievous palkas with their promises of a haven beyond Nyssa’s judgement. A few folk might remember Alabastra’s teachings and trust to Nyssa to keep such creatures at bay, but most shovelled the precious, consecrated blesswood into the furnaces to make the flames leap. Soon they’d scream for the ration’s increase when their stores fell empty.

Civilians.

Damant skirted the fountain and climbed the stair to the residence’s double doors. Proximity dissipated the building’s beauty, the bas-reliefs and grotesques pitted and softened by the passage of time. Patina choked the creases of statues’ silver robes while cracks in yellowing paint marred shrunken window frames. A legacy of neglect as much as of the dust storms that blew out of the plains three or four times a year.

Duty custodians snapped to rigid attention.

“Good dawning, Castellan,” said one.

“Is it?” Damant growled. “I’ve yet to see the sun.”

It was out there somewhere, beyond the meld of rising mist and ochre bloodstain of falling cloud. But Damant was never at his best in the mornings – especially when the mist lent stiffness to an already inflexible knee.

“Sorry, sir.” The silver mask did nothing to hide the custodian’s sudden fear that she’d overstepped.

Damant twisted his lip in self-rebuke, the motion tugging at the old scar on his right cheek. Too many thought him a monster for his manner and his scars. The woman’s uniform was in order, her holstered shrieker and scimitar polished to a gleam. You wielded fear where it was needed, and only where it was needed.

Harnessing the twin cues of voice and build, he cast about for the woman’s name. In this, at least, he succeeded. “No, Sinair. The apology is mine.”

Sinair’s shoulders eased a hair, then returned to rigidity. “Thank you.”

She hauled open the rightmost of the heavy, ornate doors. Too ornate, with its hundreds of armoured figures in stylised bas-relief. The Countess’ grandfather had been determined that his exploits on the Qersali frontier be at the forefront of any visitor’s thoughts. Damant had only ever known him as a wizened, bitter old man who’d walked with the aid of a stick. He’d spent so much on his grand palace that his descendants could neither afford to keep the building properly maintained nor replace it with something new.

Damant nodded at the second custodian. “Josqa.”

Josqa’s posture, already rigid, stiffened further at recognition – his habit ever since Damant had brought him up on charges for indulging isshîm powder while on duty. Savouring the moment – one could take a little joy in being monstrous – Damant passed inside and handed his cloak to a waiting servant.

Boots thumping into carpet with a purposeful rhythm seldom heard in those luxurious halls, he climbed the stairs to Countess Bascari’s chambers. He noted with dismay that the paint was bubbling and peeling in yet another spot above the spiral stairway. The roof’s leading was long overdue replacement. Perhaps with Qersal at last settled, the metal’s price would fall to something the Countess could bring herself to pay.

A maid waited at the veil-draped doors, eyes averted; a girl on the cusp of womanhood, stick-thin and hollow-cheeked. She wore the short waistcoat, ivory blouse and diaphanous green skirt currently in fashion and her tight black curls cropped close. Another “project” rescued from the streets of Undertown, no doubt.

Damant made eye contact, tapped twice at his chest with cupped fingers, then clasped his hands level with his breastbone and parted them like a glintwing taking flight. Simah had never come naturally, though the twin spurs of battlefield application and common courtesy had driven him to persevere. Come what may, a soldier had to make himself understood – as too did the courtier he’d somehow become. The maid bobbed a curtsey, parted the veil and beckoned him through. She even offered a nervous smile.

Clearly she’d not heard the stories about him.

Damant halted beside the fourth door on the right and rapped respectfully.

“Enter.”

Countess Elinor Bascari kept her back to the door as Damant entered the room, her full attention given over to a painter’s easel by the arched window. Artist’s palette across her left forearm, she brandished a brush in her right, the bristles smearing a highlight across her subject’s brow. A dozen framed canvases sat propped against the walls and ill-treated furnishings – all unfinished. Those at either end belonged to notably different hands. In the middle, the scratchy, uneven line-work was that of a child’s effort. All depicted the same copper-skinned woman.

“Ah, Ihsan.” The Countess fixed Damant with a thoughtful, unblinking stare. One of her better mornings. After two years of omen rot eating her inside out and six months of clinging to waning life purely through the daily imbibement of last breath, she was too often a shadow of the woman he’d known so long. But not that morning. The dark circles under her eyes were in full retreat, her grip on palette and paintbrush rigid as rock. “What do you think?”

He stepped across the threshold between carpet and rucked drop-cloth and made play of examining the unfinished portrait. Emerald eyes gleamed beneath the subject’s narrow brow, both appraising and inviting. The rest of the face was unfinished, the shadows and highlights scarcely under way, but already unmistakable as a rendering of Tythia Bascari, the Countess’ daughter. “It’s an excellent likeness, lady.”

“Not yet.” She frowned, the curve of her features foreshadowing what awaited the woman in the portrait when black curls turned grey and laughter lines resculpted youthful vibrance with encroaching age. It took but little imagination to see the Countess as she’d been when Damant had entered her service thirty years past. When his own steel-grey hair had been black as night and he’d lost his right eye fighting her enemies. “But it will be. Two or three more, and it’ll be perfect. She’ll be perfect.”

“I’m glad.” As ever, Damant’s sentiment applied more to the Countess’ manner than the artwork over which she laboured.

Passion for creation had carried the Countess through the tragedy of her eldest daughter’s death, but age had numbed whatever spark had bound hand and eye. The middle span of the abandoned portraits marked those years, just as the study walls still bore scars from vases flung in frustration. The paintings that lay towards the right-hand end owed existence to a recent renaissance of skill, though Damant – and everyone else in the household – was careful never to pass comment at how the character of their brushwork differed from those on the left. If the Countess indulged in talent wisps to restore skills and happiness, there was little reason to draw attention to the matter.

It wasn’t the only topic carefully avoided. Mention of Sadia – Tythia’s daughter, and thus the Countess’ grandchild – was one of the few subjects guaranteed to provoke the Countess’ fury. That tragedy had been struck from history as much as possible – indeed, the subject was all but forbidden – however, it was seldom far from Damant’s thoughts. And from the Countess’ too, he was sure.

The Countess set paintbrush and easel aside on a low table and darted out a wiry hand to catch a pot of pigment before it tumbled to the floor. “She’s the very spit of Tythia, isn’t she?”

Almost too much so. A reminder of failures past. “Oh yes, lady.”

“Not her, Ihsan. Sherabi.” She turned her piercing green stare on him, then sighed her frustration as she always did when someone couldn’t keep pace. “The maid? At least, I assume she was still on station. She’s a wilful one, but we’ll make something of her yet.”

“Ah.” To Damant’s mind, Sherabi bore little resemblance to the long-dead Tythia, save for a passing semblance in colouring and build. Some of it was manner, of course. A skelder rescued from the slums could never have the self-assuredness of good breeding. “I confess, I hadn’t really noticed.”

The Countess paused in the act of tugging her smock clear of a silver and crimson gown and shot him an appraising glare. “I won’t bite, Ihsan.” The glare softened to a smile. “If you don’t see it, just say so.”

He grunted. “I don’t see it.”

She twitched a shrug. “She sits for me, and we talk. Sometimes, if I’m not looking directly at her, I hear…” Her voice took on a faraway tone heard too often in recent months. “I honestly think she might be the one, Ihsan. I think Nyssa might finally have sent my daughter back to me.”

Damant smothered a frisson of unease. “Does she remember you?”

“No… No, of course not. Her new life muddles her. But I’m sure that will pass in time.”

More likely Sherabi’s thoughts were fixed on a family left behind in Undertown, assuming she had one. And if not that, her prospects for the future. “I’m sure it will, lady.”

“Liar.” Again a smile softened the Countess’ words. “You’re like Mirela. You think I’m just a foolish old woman, looking for hope where there’s none to be found, don’t you?”

Knowing the Countess’ eldest surviving daughter, she’d been blunter even than that. “I just want you to be happy and whole, lady.”

“I know.” She sighed, her eyes on the half-finished portrait. “She was everything good in me. The others are too like their father – restless eyes and greedy hands. But you haven’t come here to humour an old woman. I take it I’m wanted at conclave?”

Conclave, and the reprisals for what had happened at Xanathros Alabastra.

“They can wait.”

“Oh yes, they can. I’m afraid this will be a difficult one, Ihsan.” She brushed the portrait’s cheek. “Nyssa help me, but I’m almost glad this is finally coming to a head. Mirela called the conclave, didn’t she?”

“Yes. Although the hierarch would have forced the matter soon in any case.”

“He has every reason to be impatient. We failed him. Mirela is merely frustrated that I’m still clinging to life.”

“To the family title, lady.”

The Countess smiled without mirth. “Don’t quibble. I know how they whisper. They say I’m losing my wits. That my thoughts are so often with the dead because I’m ready to join them. Salenna said as much to my face last week.”

Damant grunted. Salenna was the youngest of the Countess’ offspring, and seldom displayed the tact for which her mother was renowned. He’d once thought it would come with passing years, but the more the sand flowed through the hourglass, the likelier it seemed that she simply knew no other way than to be brash. “So prove her wrong.”

“Maybe she isn’t. Maybe I’m tired of fighting them.” Her expression hardened, the moment of vulnerability gone. “Jorais tells me you opposed his punitive expedition into Undertown.”

Damant hesitated. For all that he and the Countess shared a particular outlook on Tyzanta’s governance – one not shared more broadly within House Bascari – his authority as the family castellan had limits. His was the role of the Countess’ aide and enforcer, his authority peerless in all matters… save when contradicted by his fireblood masters. It certainly didn’t govern Jorais. “I merely thought it best to double the watches of the gates and quaysides. If the raid on Xanathros Alabastra had been Vallant’s work—”

“Your responsibility for that man ended long ago. Let it go.”

Perhaps he could have done so, had folk not found needlessly inventive ways to skirt a forbidden subject and offer constant reminder of how he’d trained Khalad’s most notorious rebel. Vallant would never have risen so far, so fast without his patronage – indeed, marriage had placed Vallant above Damant himself, at least societally – but who could have foreseen that the diligent, dutiful young overseer would become Tyzanta’s greatest traitor? Damant had lost track of the occasions on which he’d pleaded for the authority to hunt down his former protégé once and for all – as if that could have undone the damage to both Tyzanta as a whole and to the Bascari family in particular. But the Eternity King’s decree had been clear: Vallant was a distraction to be ignored. Alas that a distraction in Zariqaz often proved lethal in Tyzanta. So instead, Damant strove – when he was permitted by others – to forget the mistakes of the past. And what they had cost.

“I have. There’s no proof Vallant had anything to do with it.” He hesitated, too honest for his own good. “However—”

“Yes. We all see our greatest fears while the fire rages.” She gazed at the portrait once more. “You didn’t want Jorais steeping wounded pride in innocent blood, did you?”

And Jorais had brimmed with spoiled pride when he’d learned that skelders had breezed past his so-called security measures at Xanathros Alabastra. That Damant – and not Jorais’ own creature, Captain Tazah – had been responsible for the capture of the surviving culprit had only made matters worse. It had not been a pleasant conversation. In fact, but for the Countess’ patronage, Damant had no doubt Jorais would have found reason to have him removed from service, or worse. Not that he’d have lowered himself to violence. Not when plenty of others, within the ranks of the custodians and beyond, would have gladly done the deed for a purse of tetrams or the promise of Jorais’ favour. After all, the Countess wouldn’t rule Tyzanta for ever.

“No, lady.”

“You should have told me.”

“I didn’t want to trouble you.” Damant shrugged. “He backed down at once.”

“Of course he did. He’s scared of you – but only when there are witnesses. I’m an old woman. I worry about what becomes of you when I’m gone.”

“So I should crawl to Jorais and beg his forgiveness?” Damant snapped.

“There’d hardly be any point, but you should learn to tolerate one of the others, and soon. Make yourself indispensable. Smooth their rough edges with careful words and flattery. Otherwise, you’ll be gone and there’ll be no one to curb their excesses.”

Damant strove for stillness. The Countess was right, of course. Her children saw Tyzanta as nothing more than a den of opportunities in which to indulge their pleasures. A far from uncommon sentiment in firebloods – especially the young and callow, who considered Nyssa’s judgement a distant and unconcerning thing. But such attitudes jeopardised more than mere morality. Tyzanta, like the broader kingdom, operated on a careful balance. Mindless reprisals and score-settling created opportunity for men like Bashar Vallant to spin things into anarchy. Leaving aside the possibility that the timid Sherabi might indeed be Tythia Bascari, reborn by Nyssa’s grace – though even in that unlikely event, there’d be all manner of legal obstacles to her claiming her heritage – Damant had no choice but to pick the least bitter of the fruits within his grasp.

“You’re right,” he said at last. “I apologise for my actions… and my tone.”

“All forgotten.” The Countess smiled. “And now, I believe, I am ready to face the conclave.”

“Of course, lady.”

Damant nodded to Sherabi on his way out of the suite, looking for any trace of Tythia Bascari in the girl’s face or manner. None presented itself. But so long as she brought the Countess happiness there was little harm, save to much abused notions of hope. Let the Countess indulge herself in what years remained.

“Mistress, please.” Sinair’s words carried easily up the spiral stair, as did her fraying tone. “The countess isn’t to be disturbed. I have very clear orders—”

“Don’t be impertinent.” A sadly familiar voice cut her off in a burst of impeccable tutored diction, thick with impatience and despair. “This coat is Sumarand samite, and if you so much as scuff the hem…”

Damant rounded the last coil of the stair to find the embattled Sinair mask-to-face with a young woman whose cropped jet-black hair, scarlet coat and frilled shirt lent her a distinctly bohemian aspect.

“It’s all right, Sinair.” Damant folded his arms behind his back. “I’ll handle this.”

Sinair bowed and withdrew.

“An unexpected pleasure to see you again so soon, Mistress Yennika,” said Damant. “I understood you were still living in Zariqaz.” The City of Lost Souls was a perfect refuge for the Countess’ flighty niece.

Dark, luminous eyes blinked in surprise. “I was – I mean, I am – but it was all getting so terribly exhausting, and I haven’t seen my aunt in such a long time. So I came back.” She flashed a winning smile. “You are pleased to see me, aren’t you, Ihsan?”

“Castellan,” he corrected.

“Is that a ‘yes’?”

Yennika Bascari was fourth in line to the title. She moved through life with a combination of obliviousness and saccharine cheer. Her return had likely nothing to do with missing her aunt, and everything to do with vast debts or romantic entanglements from which she now surely sought familial relief. When she’d left Tyzanta years before to adopt an untaxing position in one of the family’s trading concerns, Damant had celebrated. Discreetly, of course. But not so discreetly that the Countess, as worn away as anyone caught in Yennika’s orbit, hadn’t shared both sentiment and a bottle of wine. It was no secret that the two women cordially detested one another.

“I’m… glad to see you well, Mistress Yennika.”

Her eyes gleamed. “You see? I knew you’d missed me. This is Tanith.” The airy wave of her hand encompassed a younger, slender woman standing deeper in the doorway. Garbed in belted ivory robes, her hands gloved to the elbow and her pale, rose-blushed cheeks framed by tight blonde ringlets, she looked for all the world as though she wanted nothing more than to bleed away into the stone of the entryway’s arch. “Tanith, this is Castellan Damant. He takes care of, well, everything around here. If he likes you, he might let you call him by his first name. He has a tendency to forget his place, but you shouldn’t hold that against him.”

“Mistress Tanith.” Damant offered a slight bow and received an abashed smile in return. “Welcome to Tyzanta.”

“Thank you.” Tanith’s eyes flitted about the hallway’s sumptuous furnishings. All tension and edges, a fawn seeking a reason to bolt. Nyssa alone knew how so delicate a young woman endured in Yennika’s wake.

Yennika slid an arm around Tanith’s shoulders and drew her firmly across the threshold. “There’s been a lot of unpleasantness surrounding her inheritance, so I said she could stay with us while it gets sorted out.”

Ah. So that was it. The Countess wasn’t the only one in the family with a penchant for taking in waifs and strays. Unfortunately, Yennika was likely more interested in Tanith’s inheritance than Tanith herself.

“Stay with us?” The Countess, a thick cloak now impeccably draped over her scarlet dress, drew up at Damant’s side and looked both women up and down. “Stay with me, you mean.”

A touch of uncertainty entered Yennika’s smile. “Of course, Aunt Elinor. But if you’d rather we took rooms further down the spire, then naturally—”

“Don’t be foolish, child. But would it have killed you to send word of your arrival? You’re quick enough to write when your allowance proves insufficient to your… appetites.”

“I’m sorry, Aunt Elinor. I wanted to surprise you.”

“My dear Yennika, I suspect I will never have a shortage of surprises where you are concerned. You needn’t trouble yourself to construct them on my account.” It would certainly be a surprise for the Countess’ own offspring, who all had rooms within the palace grounds. The Countess turned her attention to Tanith. “What is your name, child? Your family name?”

Tanith glanced up at Yennika, sapphire eyes seeking approval. Yennika squeezed her shoulders tight and offered what was – for her – a reassuring smile. “Don’t worry. You can tell her.”

“Floranz,” Tanith murmured. “Oraham Floranz was my grandfather.”

The name dragged Damant back from the abyss to which he customarily retreated whenever a family quarrel beckoned. House Floranz had torn itself apart over the course of years. Accusations of treachery, assassination, blasphemy and worse, culminating in the hanging, drawing and quartering of Count Oraham by parties unknown. All too familiar in the principle, if not the detail. “A nasty business.”

Tanith flinched. The Countess sighed. “Tactful as ever, Ihsan. Yes, a very nasty business.” Her manner softening, she took Tanith’s hands in hers. “You will find only safety here. Bascari and Floranz were once bound tighter than blood. The old ways may not always have the respect they deserve, but in this house they will reign supreme so long as it is my house. I’ll see that my housewarden finds you a room and has your glyph altered so the hestics don’t trouble you after dark. I’m afraid you’ll be limited to the west wing. My son Jorais has claimed the east, and he’s never been good at sharing.”

Every building in the palace had an array of hestic watch ifrîti to guard against intruders. Different glyphs allowed access to different areas without meeting a brief, fiery fate once night fell. As castellan, Damant was one of the few permitted unrestrained access not only to the residence, torch house and conclave hall, but also the lodge and the overlook cottage where the Countess’ daughters dwelled. He seldom exercised it. Mirela and Salenna barely tolerated him. In turn, he preferred not to antagonise them.

“You needn’t trouble Quellan,” Yennika put in hurriedly. “I can get Tanith settled.”

The Countess fixed her with a stare belonging to a younger, more vigorous woman – a sign that the maudlin sentiment that had previously ruled her was now in full retreat. And not, in Damant’s judgement, before time.

“Oh no, my dear. If you’re home – and let’s not pretend you have designs on leaving any time soon – then I shall put you to work. It should be a new experience for you. Now come. It appears that Nyssa calls us both to conclave.”

The Countess swept out through the front door and into the misty morning. Yennika shot a pleading glance at Damant, who enjoyed every inch of his helpless shrug. Abandoned to her aunt’s unspoken intent, Yennika scowled and trailed in her wake.

Nine

With its stage-top dais and concentric tiered seating open to the sky, the conclave hall’s interior bore passing resemblance to the theatres scattered up and down the spire. However, no theatre was so richly appointed in gilded wood and velvet drapes. Nor was any overseen by a statue of Nyssa Iudexas, the sword of judgement held like a trophy in her hands at the dais’ north-western compass point – the approximate direction of Zariqaz – thus implying that the goddess herself would carry word of deliberations to the Eternity King if no other thought to do so.

Damant hung back as the Countess took up position opposite the statue. In the company of strangers, none would have judged him for standing between his mistress and her enemies, but family was different. Even when they presented the greatest danger of all.

“You’re late, Mother.” A perpetual sneer haunted Jorais Bascari’s upper lip. He’d elected to join the circle – not coincidentally, Damant suspected – at Nyssa’s right hand. Jorais resembled his mother little in looks or character, having inherited both his father’s arrow-straight hair and patrician profile. And like most average men, he thought himself exceedingly clever. “Did your ageing war hound get distracted and curl up by the fire?”

Damant offered a basilisk glare.

“Enough, Jorais.” Salenna’s green eyes, copper skin and ready laughter made her the most alike to her mother, though she seldom bothered to find amusement in words not her own. “She’s here. That’s all that matters.”

“Yes,” said Mirela from her position a pace or two clockwise from Nyssa’s left hand. Furrowed brow suggested a grim mood, but then Mirela rarely laughed, or even smiled – a trait she’d inherited from her father, along with the tawny, lightly freckled complexion she shared with her brother. She’d always been cheerless, even as a child, having divined early that earnest aspect added years to a youthful face. Now into middle age, and with three children of her own now learning that same lesson under strict tutelage, she’d a tendency to make even her ownmother look young. The silken gown and woven shawl she wore didn’t come close to softening her. “I’m sure his eminence is eager to draw this matter to a conclusion.”

Across the circle from Mirela, Zaran Ossed, Hierarch of Tyzanta, nodded sagely. He’d been part of the celebrations at the Bascari palace on that fateful night – which had probably saved his pudgy neck and generous greying brown beard, given that the explosion had scythed his personal chambers clean off Xanathros Alabastra’s upper floors. The white robes of state he now wore – no more than half a dozen shades paler than his habitually sun-starved cheeks – were the only ones to have survived.

“Indeed. We pay well for House Bascari’s protection.” Icy fury crackled beneath the words. Neither Alabastra – nor Ossed himself – were accustomed to being humbled. “The Qabirarchi Council expects a full explanation. By the Stars Below, I mean to see they get it!”

“The Eternity King too requires an explanation,” said the thin, darkly handsome man standing opposite Salenna. The lopsided shrug of his heavy scarlet robes oozed self-deprecation, a display of effortless charm Damant would have found more compelling had it not so plainly been rehearsed. Emissaries of the throne were seldom given to spontaneity. For all his cultivated diffidence, Julan Aroth wielded the greatest power of those present, for he reported to the Voice of Caradan Diar – which was as good as speaking directly with the deathless king as made no difference. Indeed, no one had spoken with the Eternity King in living memory – not for many Ages of Fire – for his entire attention was fixed on holding back the all-consuming Veil through force of will. “The king treasures the friendship of Alabastra more highly than gold, and recent events pain him greatly.”

Aroth’s words flowed with an exquisite balance of languor and precision. Though not, Damant decided, with any passion. Plainly neither he – nor the Voice to whom he answered – cared that much about recent events, but considered it important to keep the august prelates of Alabastra’s Qabirarchi Council mollified. That might mean that Aroth wouldn’t argue for the Countess’ replacement. A slender hope.

Yennika took her place in the circle opposite Jorais, her manner subdued. Conclave was no place for a dilettante and she knew it. “Cousins. Excellency.” She offered Aroth a small, lingering smile that contained the merest hint of something suggestive. “Minister.”

Jorais knotted his brows. “What is she doing here?”

“Your cousin has returned to the bosom of her family.” For all the asperity in the Countess’ tone, weariness crept in beneath. Even the short walk from the residence had taxed her.

Mirela sniffed. “Is she so destitute these days she can’t even afford suitable clothes? Or does she mean to serenade us for a few dinars? After all, she already looks like a vagabond minstrel.”

Yennika’s smile slipped away. “And you look as though you’ve been dead for three years. Tell me, does your mirthless husband lock your crypt at night, or do you come and go as you please?”

Jorais and Mirela wore horrified rictuses that more than ever made them resemble the twins they weren’t. Salenna flashed a sly smile and covered it up at once. Yennika set her lips in that prideful, fragile glower common to young folk who know too late that they’ve overstepped. Ossed maintained the stiff-necked posture of a man determined not to admit he’d heard, while Aroth remained urbanely unflinching throughout. A minister to the Eternity King’s court heard worse daily.

Only the Countess smiled openly, revelling in the chaos she’d wrought by dragging her niece to conclave. In the unforgiving strata of formal family, cousins – especially cousins whose parents had proven themselves as worthless and callow as Yennika’s – were always poor relations. Despite himself, Damant felt a pang of sympathy for her.

Aroth cleared his throat. “If we might dispense with the pleasantries? As his eminence has already noted, it is well past the time for answers.”

And blame. No one said the words, though Damant heard them plainly enough.

“Indeed,” rumbled Ossed. “By the Stars Below, Alabastra will have justice, and assurances as to why we shouldn’t place our security in the hands of House Jovîna.”

House Jovîna was the only other fireblood family with a claim on Tyzanta. Though their influence had faded, the rivalry remained. The prospect of Alabastra transferring their allegiance – and their disbursements – made for no small threat.

It was clear that Alabastra wanted a head. At conservative estimate, the temple had lost some five thousand crystal tetrams – some fifty million dinars – plus the rebuilding of Xanathros Alabastra itself, which would run to hundreds of thousands of dinars more.

As for the damage to the temple’s reputation as a haven for wealth – a reputation carefully cultured across centuries? It could never be repaired. Only the grandest gesture could ease that debt.

Mirela raised a chastened hand, her expression softening to as close an imitation of humility as she was capable. “On behalf of House Bascari, I pledge you shall have it.” She turned her attention to Damant, softness giving way to steel. “Your investigation is complete, Castellan?”

“Investigations are seldom wholly concluded, lady,” Damant replied, careful to offer what he considered an unearned honorific. Antagonising Mirela achieved little – especially if she were the architect of the morning’s conclave. “But I have some answers.”

“I for one would be interested to hear them,” said Aroth.

The Countess nodded. “Ihsan?”

“Lady.” Damant suppressed a frisson of vulnerability and entered the circle. With the conclave’s members arranged around the perimeter, it was impossible to keep everyone in view, no matter which way he faced. A useful configuration for trial or interrogation, where unease might shake loose all manner of unintended treasures, but for a simple report? There was nothing to be gained by setting him ill at ease.

Unless, of course, this wasn’t a simple report at all, but a show trial. Had the Countess already tallied the odds and elected to stake him out for the vultures? Possible, but irrelevant. Whatever their friendship, he was first and foremost her servant. It was his place – his privilege – to face danger in her stead. Duty demanded it. Not that anyone else present would have understood.

Scowling the thought away, Damant folded his arms behind his back and paced the circle. “Our surviving culprit is one Katija Arvish. Her mother, Siette Arvish, passed some years ago. Her father was Terrion Arvish, a celebrated fresco painter in Zariqaz who ran up a considerable debt to Alabastra before his passing.”

Jorais sniffed. “Many do. Wealth is a privilege some are ill-suited to wield.”

“As I understand it, there was little wealth involved,” said the Countess. “Alabastra cultivates debt as diligently as any farmer does his crop.”

“Those who take our coin enter a sacred contract.” Ossed’s imperious gaze swept the circle, daring gainsay. “It must be honoured… no matter the debtor’s station.”

Damant grunted. “If it’s any consolation, it seems this Arvish felt the same way. She’s not saying much – certainly little I’d repeat in this company – but it’s clear she intended to settle her debts with the proceeds of the robbery.”

“Then her crimes in the goddess’ eyes are threefold. Penury, robbery and fraud.”

Damant halted before Ossed. “You forget murder. Several custodians died, including Captain Tazah.”

Ossed clasped his hands and inclined his head. “Martyrs all. They will be rewarded for their sacrifice in the next life.”

For men like Ossed, mere custodians were collateral damage. They perished to preserve something greater than themselves.

“What of the damage to the building?” asked Mirela.

Typical she’d ask that, given her responsibilities to the Bascari holdings across the city. Likely she was already mentally composing the contract by which her engineers would undertake repairs, just as Salenna would be quietly slavering at the levies imposed on imported materials.

Damant recommenced his pacing. “Unintended consequences. The skelders weren’t prepared for the volatility of antique tetrams.”

“She admitted this?” asked Salenna.

“Not in so many words, but I’d suggest the outcome speaks for itself.”

The Countess tapped a thoughtful finger against her lower lips. “Katija Arvish. I feel like I’ve heard the name before.”

“Quite likely,” Mirela interjected drily. “It’s all over the city.”

“Oh yes,” said Yennika. “Everyone in my railrunner carriage was talking about her. When they could talk, that is. One of the windows blew out at Evrios, and you wouldn’t believe the amount of dust that—”

“By name? How did that detail get out?” The Countess turned an aggrieved gaze on Damant. “I thought you had her sealed away.”

He shrugged. “This past week she has been my guest at the Central Custodium. No one has seen her save through my direct authorisation. A physician for her wounds. Guards to deliver her meals and prevent any attempts to deliver herself to Nyssa. As to the rest, how does anything get out? Rumour has a way of passing through stone. And yes, in the days since the explosion, she seems to have gained quite a following. Alabastra is not without its detractors.”

“Alabastra is the vessel of Nyssa’s will,” snapped Ossed. “We will not be mocked. An example must be made.”

“I sought to deliver one,” said Jorais. “The castellan refused to cooperate.”

“He was right to do so,” said the Countess. “Turning a disaster into a riot serves no one.”

“So you’d have us do nothing?”

“You do not impose order through chaos.”

Aroth cleared his throat. “I’m still waiting to hear how this was done.”

Damant nodded. Here, at least, he was on firmer ground. “Arvish has a collection of soul-glyphs like you wouldn’t believe, tattooed into a single pattern across her forearm.” Raising his left arm, he tapped at elbow and wrist. “Flawless workmanship. I brought in shriversmen. They confirmed the glyphs as identical to those in use at Xanathros Alabastra.”

Jorais started forward. “Who authorised you to bring in outsiders?”

“You did, as soon as you placed me in charge of the investigation. You were very clear that I was to have full access.” Because otherwise Jorais – as head of the family custodium, which despite its duties under the law was effectively a private army – would have had to conduct the investigation himself, which he was too lazy to do. “It will surprise no one that a senior archon has turned up missing. By which I mean to say he hasn’t turned up at all. I don’t imagine he ever will.”

Ossed offered a brief, remorseful nod. Custodians were expendable. Archons were not.

“You’ve had the tattoo burned from the skelder’s flesh, of course,” said Jorais.

“There’s no point,” Damant replied. “The designs are already compromised. There’s no telling how many copies might have been made.”

“It would serve as an example to others. Especially if performed on the xanathros steps.”

The Countess scowled. “Can you not curtail your bloodlust even for a moment, Jorais?”

He fell silent, a sullen scowl on his lips.

Damant let quiet reign a moment longer before pressing on. “I’ve been unable to ascertain if the skelders compromised the vault ifrîti in similar fashion, but it seems likely.”

“Impossible.” Ossed shook his head, the words addressed more to his beard than the conclave. “Those glyphs are known only to myself and the most trusted devotees. I have spoken to each of them this past week. They are blameless and very much alive.”

“Nyssa’s fortunate that only honest folk enter her priesthood.” Salenna graced the words with a thin smile. “The advantages of divine judgement.”

Damant ignored her. “‘Impossible’ is too often a word that merely frames what has not yet been accomplished. It may be the design is not so well guarded as the hierarch believes.”

Aroth arched an eyebrow. “That’s a serious accusation, Castellan.”

“I agree it would be, had I made one. I’m merely presenting the facts.”

The corner of Aroth’s mouth twitched. “The distinction is noted. Please continue.”

“I regret there’s very little else to tell. Interviews with surviving guards suggest that Arvish had three accomplices. No identifiable bodies were recovered, but under the circumstances that’s hardly surprising.”

“Any indications as to the identity of these others?”

“Again, Arvish has remained close-lipped – at least while conscious. She occasionally mutters a name while sleeping. ‘Azra’.” He shrugged. “It’s just common enough to be meaningless.”

Yennika frowned. “It’s the name of the heroine from Midnight Over Abizond, isn’t it? I hate that play.”

Mirela rolled her eyes. “Why, of course you do. All those long words.”

Damant stifled a sigh. As ever, conclave was one part governance to three parts cat-fighting. Far preferable to submit a written report and stay out of the squabbling, even if the squabbling was part of what made Khalad work. Firebloods were too busy scoring points off one another to really change anything. “In any case, the name does us no good. Dead’s dead, and the city’s been breathing in her remains for several days now.”

Salenna made a disgusted noise and pressed a knuckle to her mouth.

“And the other accomplices?” asked the Countess.

“Two men, according to eyewitnesses,” Damant replied. “No leads on one, but the other was a custodian assigned to the building: Parl Darravon. By all accounts, a man in good standing. Diligent. Professional. But I note that it’s unusual for someone with his record and age not to have been put forward as a templar candidate, or at least be promoted to overseer’s rank.”

“Perhaps this Darravon acquired the vault glyphs?”

“Security at Xanathros Alabastra may have been lax, but not that lax. As a custodian he had his own glyphs, of course, but he’d have had no access to those on the upper floors.”

“So Arvish may still have a living accomplice?” asked the Countess.

Damant nodded. No surprise that she was swifter on the uptake than her children. “It’s possible. But unless she grows talkative, I don’t expect we’ll find them now.”

She nodded. “A more fruitful line of enquiry would be to track the person or persons with whom Arvish intended to trade the tetrams.”

“Indeed. I mean to discuss the matter with her later today.”

Salenna examined her nails. “You really think she’ll give you anything?” Boredom yawned beneath every word.

“She might, with a suggestion of leniency.”

Ossed swept the possibility aside with an angry wave. “There will be no leniency. This woman humiliated us. Worse, she meant to cheat the goddess of her due. She is to be executed immediately and put to service as a koilos.” His lips cracked into a thin smile. “I will instruct the shriversmen to ensure she remains aware of what she once was. Her ifrît will be a thousand years screaming for release and only the goddess will hear.”

Damant regarded Ossed sourly. “I must counsel against an execution so soon. At least wait until she fades from memory. Right now, she’s a hero. But skelders are fickle. They’ll forget her soon enough.”

“Like they forgot Vallant?” Jorais paused, a sneering smile suggesting he was considering developing his point further, even to the point of broaching a forbidden subject. But he was ever the coward. “If you took as much delight in punishing criminals as you do in creating rebels, we’d not have to worry about unrest.”

There it was. The familiar, inevitable refrain. Damant gritted his teeth. “Indulging petty brutality invites unrest in Undertown.”

“So why not send Arvish to Zariqaz?” asked Yennika. “Execute her on the Golden Stair.”

Such was the fate of traitors. And those foolish enough to earn the Eternity King’s ire.

Jorais rounded on her. “Why would we possibly do that?”

She flinched, then diffidence hardened into determination in her dark eyes. “She’s a celebrity. Let her die a celebrity’s death. Make her a lesson. If someone had done the same with Vallant all those years ago, we might all have had fewer sleepless nights.”

She glared defiance a moment longer, then shrank inwards from Jorais’ fury.

“Actually… I rather like that idea,” Aroth put in smoothly. “As will the Voice, I expect. Qersal may be settled, but there are always those closer to home who need a gentle reminder that those who oppose the throne do not prosper.”

Ossed’s cheeks flushed a deep and angry red. “Her crime was here. Against my xanathros!”

“Her crime was against Nyssa. Do you suppose the goddess sees matters clearer in – and I mean no offence – this little backwater of a city, or at the kingdom’s heart?”

“You seek to lecture me on matters of faith?”

“No, of course not.” Aroth spread gloved hands to match conciliatory tone. “But I know what the Voice will say should the question be put to her. Which means I know what the king will say. And I’d much rather report your enthusiastic cooperation.”

“I…” At last realising he’d entered dangerous waters, Ossed stumbled to silence.

Aroth pressed on with urbane cheer, but Damant didn’t mistake the threat behind. “You should consider this woman – and her debt – a gift, to reaffirm the bond between Alabastra and the Eternity King. And of course her soul will remain yours to do with as you wish.” He shrugged. “I’m sure the Voice will want to compensate you for any personal loss of face. Hierarch Lorant is in ill-health and her seat on the Qabirarchi Council will need someone who understands when to rise above provincial squabbles for the good of the kingdom. Don’t you agree, your eminence?”

Ossed’s throat bobbed. “I would— I mean, Nyssa would find that acceptable. But there remains the matter of House Bascari’s debt. By their failure they are forfeit in their contracts.”

“Indeed we are.” Mirela stood taller, a trick of her posture and her gown’s shimmering silks giving the impression of an uncoiling serpent. “Castellan, you spoke before of Xanathros Alabastra’s security being inadequate.”

Damant stifled a wince. He’d hoped the phrase would go overlooked. “Recent events bear out that claim.”

“Tell me… what was your opinion of Captain Tazah?”

Damant had heartily disliked Tazah, but one didn’t speak ill of the dead. “He was loyal. Dedicated. A good soldier.”

“But you argued against his appointment?”

“I did.”

Mirela stepped into the circle, breaking protocol and cover in a smooth whisper of silks. “Why?”

“He was an excellent second, but a flawed commander. A slave to routine. Predictable.” Even to Damant’s own ear, the reply sounded insolent. After all, firebloods liked their underlings to be predictable. That which you could predict, you could control.

“But not you?”

“No.” Somehow Damant kept the bitterness out of his voice. He was predictable all right, otherwise Mirela would never have led him so easily down this path. Drop him into Undertown with a sword and shrieker in his hands, he’d give good account of himself against the longest odds, but at conclave, when weapons were the only words?

Mirela stepped closer. “But you were overruled.”

The thrust was obvious. Too late to avoid, but perhaps not late enough to deflect. “The hierarch sponsored him for templardom. That carried more gravitas than my opinion.”

Not surprising, given that he’d proposed Vallant for that same honour mere days before everything had fallen apart.

“As it should,” Mirela replied. “However, templardom was granted after Tazah’s appointment, not before. So who was his patron?”

“I—”

The Countess stepped into the circle. “Stop tormenting Ihsan, Mirela. You know very well I took the decision. I stand by it. As Ihsan has already attested, Tazah was loyal. We once valued loyalty in this family.”

Ossed stirred. “So you admit the failure is yours? You will pay your debt to Nyssa?”

In the silence, the Countess turned her gaze on each of her children in turn. One by one they glanced away.

She stood alone and hunched, her head bowed. “Have you not one word of support for your mother?”

Ossed hobbled closer, his eyes shining with anticipation. It wasn’t often that even a hierarch humbled the head of a fireblood house. “Lady, will you meet the forfeit, or shall I beseech the goddess to send fire from below to settle the matter?”

The Countess cuffed away a tear and stood tall. “I apologise for the failings of my family. I take full responsibility, as is my right and duty as head of the house.” The formal words caught in her teeth, but she stumbled on. “In recompense, I offer my only son, Jorais Bascari, to serve Alabastra in whatever capacity Nyssa deems fit.”

“Mother, no!” Jorais started forward, his face pale. “You can’t do this!”

Damant intercepted him at the centre of the dais, one hand outstretched and the other on the grips of his shrieker. Jorais snarled like a wounded animal, but stopped short of testing his luck.

The Countess rounded on him. “I can’t do this? The custodium is your responsibility, Jorais. Its failings are yours. I may have approved Tazah’s promotion, but you made the suggestion. And while I knew you proposed him in order to buy his silence, you never knew why I agreed. So many little accidents while you were dragging the family name through the Gutterfields’ mire. So many secrets to be kept and bodies to be weighted down. Tazah knew them all. His reports were very thorough. And eminently verifiable.” The anger faded from her expression until she simply looked tired. “You should have supported me just now, Jorais.”

Eyes still on Jorais, Damant raised his voice. “Guards!”

As the chamber door creaked open, Jorais spun about, wild-eyed. “Mirela… Salenna… You can’t let her do this. We agreed!”

Neither met his gaze. It was one thing to remove a matriarch, quite another to do so in defence of a disgraced sibling.

The Countess stared up at the cold likeness of Nyssa Iudexas. “Jorais is of House Bascari no longer. He belongs to Alabastra.”

To Damant’s surprise, Jorais accompanied the custodians without a fight. But then he’d never been one for bravery, desperate or otherwise.

“I trust the matter is resolved to your satisfaction, eminence?” said the Countess.

Ossed bowed low, the creak of bones audible in the hushed hall. “Indeed, lady.”

“Good.” She raised her voice. “Yennika, my dear, authority over the family custodium now falls to you. I trust you won’t let me down?”

“What? I—?” Yennika’s jaw dropped, then snapped shut. “I mean, of course I won’t, Aunt Elinor. I’m honoured to serve.”

“I’m sure you are.” At last the Countess let her gaze fall from Nyssa’s cold likeness. “Now if you’ll all excuse me, I need some fresh air. Ihsan?”

Damant bowed to Aroth, nodded at the still-flustered Yennika and followed the Countess down the long stair that led from the conclave hall. As they reached the doorway, he glanced behind. Mirela and Salenna had already departed by the far door. Aroth and Ossed were embroiled in conversation. But it was Yennika’s expression that captured his attention – no longer the borderline panic of a young woman thrust into responsibilities beyond her ken, but the thin smile of someone well pleased with events.

“That will make the second child I’ve lost to misjudgement,” the Countess murmured, her voice thick with a peculiar mix of pride and revulsion. Her thin shoulders trembled. “How many more, I wonder, before Nyssa calls me?”

Damant slowed his pace to match hers. “I never suspected Tazah was reporting to you.”

“Of course he wasn’t.” The Countess snorted bitterly and offered a wan smile. “But I know my son. It was a lie, Ihsan. Do try to keep up.”

It wasn’t until they were out in the gardens proper, concealed from prying eyes by the morning mist, that she sank against him for support.

Ten

The metallic screech banished fitful dreams more emotion than substance. Drowning in old ghosts and shapes half seen, Kat flailed for balance. Cold, hard tile beneath her palm jarred her eyes open onto the grey, peeling plastered walls that had become her home. Groggy with the dream’s retreat, she lay motionless as long as she dared, face-down, with head and half her left shoulder hanging over the cot’s edge. Long enough for the stale, earthy stench – part her, part the windowless cell – to thicken in her nostrils and a dry, scratchy throat to make itself known.

Long enough to note the dull, heavy throb of her heart, and to remember why it ached so.

Azra.

“On your feet, skelder,” a custodian growled from the open door.

Kat rolled onto the cot proper. The ceiling spun. “Give me a moment, would you?”

Booted feet thumped on tile. A shadow smothered the light from the doorway. “Now.”

Swallowing her lingering nausea, she gripped the cot’s edge. It helped to have solidity beneath her hands. It helped more to feel the scrap of broken tile wedged beneath the frame. Barely two inches long – hardly enough to hold – it wasn’t much of a weapon. But it offered the hope that life was still hers to control, if only in a small way.

Palming the makeshift blade, she planted her bare feet on the floor. They’d taken her boots when they’d stripped away the stolen custodian’s uniform. The simple trews and shapeless cotton shift that had replaced it served modesty rather better than comfort. A single black stripe running from neckline to hem front and back denoted convict status. When that judgement had been passed, Kat wasn’t wholly sure. Probably on that first day of rage and misery. In any case, the formality of law was the preserve of those who could afford it.

The custodian stepped closer. “I said now.”

Kat clambered to her feet. No point resisting. She’d tried that. On the second day, she’d earned the bruises still pulsing on her right cheek and along much of her arm. On the third, they’d dragged her from the cell by her heels. On the fourth, she’d walked out without confrontation and hated herself for it, but that same afternoon she’d found the cracked floor tile. It had taken most of the time between to work the sliver free.

All that remained was to use it in a manner that counted.

She met the custodian eye-to-eye, or rather eye-to-gilded-forehead, the man being somewhat shorter than she. “I don’t think much of the room service.”

She scarcely recognised her own voice. Parched days and teary nights had driven it past the threshold of “husky” into a deep, dry rasp. It only added to the unpleasant sensation of being in a stranger’s body – a stranger’s life. She dreaded what a mirror might show.

The custodian shoved her towards the cell door. “Get moving.”

Kat wended a stumbling route through draughty, lumani-lit corridors. Decades of alterations couldn’t disguise the cell block’s origins as a narrow, sloping street, repurposed during Tyzanta’s creeping sunward rise, one building at a time. The flame-haired likeness of Nyssa Benevolas peered from lintels at hip and knee height, markers of bricked-up windows and repurposed doorways. Some still had hestic prisms behind their eyes, though they were cracked and dark. Jutting stones marked beams and stairways torn out during alteration; uneven brick pillars and bowed timbers where those that remained had proven insufficient to support the floors above.

Cells passed by to left and right, doors locked and spy-hatches sealed. Pride argued she conceal her weakness. Practicality demanded she play it for all she was worth. She’d few enough advantages. Let the custodians think her beaten.

Azra would have done the same.

Choking back fresh sorrow, she staggered past the jail-keeper’s desk – and the cold, dead stare of its masked occupant. Beyond, a stone stairway rose out of the subterranean chill. She clung to the banister with every creaking step at last stumbling into the window-lit cloister. Mist hung heavy beyond glass, the custodians outside little more than wisps against the veil and their voices the thin chatter of wraiths.

For all that its slab-sided walls resembled a fortress from without, from within the above-ground floors of the Central Custodium exuded majesty as desperately as any fireblood mansion, the wood-panelled walls and sombre stone caryatids who bore the vaulted ceiling aloft declaiming that this was a place of worthy toil.

Kat had once – and only once – accompanied her father to the Central Custodium in Zariqaz. She’d beheld the gilded finery of the judicial chambers with a child’s breathless wonder. At the time, she’d not really understood her father’s explanation that beauty too could be wielded as a weapon – that an opponent awed was an opponent already half beaten. As a fresco painter, he’d made his livelihood helping firebloods create that awe.

“In.”

A heavy shove sent her staggering across chequered tiles, through an imposing sculpted doorway and into a small, low-ceilinged room with a table and two chairs. The arched backrest of the nearest took her across the lower ribs. Gasping for breath, she doubled over and steadied herself against the chair.

The scrap of tile skittered away across the floor.

Her heart lurched. Kiasta. Had the custodian noticed?

She turned heavily about and fixed him with an insolent stare – all the better to keep his attention on her and away from wondering what the soft, scratchy sound might have been. “I’m getting the idea you don’t like me.”

His empty masked gaze met hers. Impassive. Unreadable. “Don’t go anywhere.”

He slammed the door.

Kat threw herself across the room, hunting for the sliver of broken tile. “No,” she breathed. “Where did you go?”

It ignored her, refusing to be found. Kat dropped to hands and knees, pulse racing. Her straining fingers brushed the floor. She scried the shadows cast from the barred window and glimpsed nothing.

Where was it?

Light. She needed more light.

She peered up at the ceiling rose and its simple lumani prism. No help there. With her tattoo completely spent during the disaster at Xanathros Alabastra, she could barely feel the slumbering ifrît, much less communicate. Just as well, as if her tattoo had been at all aflame, her captors would surely have had questions. They’d have peeled it from her in search of answers. No point even thinking about the table and chairs – all were too heavy to lift, and useless as weapons.

Kat stared into the shadows. So easy to imagine Azra standing there, hand on hip and head cocked in appraisal, her disappointment tempered by affection. So hard to believe she was gone, even now. She’d known when her father had passed, even without being told. She’d felt the emptiness. With Azra, it was different. As if she could strut in at any moment, beaming a smile. As if she wasn’t really gone. Wishful thinking or a bond between soulmates that even death couldn’t break?

“So much for that plan. Eh, love?”

You’ll work something out, darling. You’re better than they are.

“I miss you.”

I know.

Footfalls in the corridor sent Kat scurrying to her feet. A key scraped in the lock. Castellan Damant entered the room, a scimitar belted across his black robes and a shrieker on his hip. Setting the door to, he drew back his hood, his steel-grey hair richer and his olive skin darker when touched by the shadows from the barred window.

She fixed him with as defiant a stare as she could manage. “Can’t get enough of me, can you?”

His cheek tugged at his scar in what might have been mirth but might equally have been contempt. Even after a week of interrogation, Kat didn’t have a read on him.

“You’re shaking. Have you eaten?” His harsh, sonorous tone undercut concern.

Kat clamped her fingers tight about the chair’s backrest to still the tremor. “I might, if I’d been fed since yesterday.”

His brow furrowed. “I didn’t know. I’ll have something sent once we’re done here.”

Two statements. Two lies. “And how do I earn it?”

“Earn it?” He shook his head. “This isn’t a game. If I wanted you to suffer, there are more direct ways. Please, sit.”

Kat snorted. It was never a game. Not if you were the one making the rules.

Damant sighed. “I’m a busy man. We had a servant die up at the palace last night, and Lady Mirela’s convinced there’s an amashti loose in the grounds. She’d prefer I spend my day chasing soul-hungry daemons than sparring with a stubborn skelder.”

“Amashti are superstition.”

“Perhaps you’d tell Lady Mirela for me? The fellow was so old and worn even the lustiest ifrît would have found him slim pickings, but there’s nothing so stubborn as a fireblood when the mood takes them.”

“Then send an archon,” Kat replied, wondering why she bothered. There was no such thing as inane chatter in her situation. A man like Damant would exploit any opening. “They’ll be glad to take her coin in exchange for a mumbled banishment.”

“The thought had occurred to me. Please sit down.”

“And if I don’t?”

He drew back a chair and sat opposite. “Then you’ll stand.”

Slowly, and with the unpleasant sense that she’d already lost some kind of contest, Kat eased herself into the chair and folded her arms.

“You see?” he said. “Isn’t this more civilised?”

She untwined her left hand enough to brush a forefinger across her bruised cheek and brow. “Yes. Very… civilised.”

Damant grunted. “I do not condone needless cruelty. The custodians responsible have been disciplined. But you’re not the only one who lost friends that night. And you did deliver a substantial beating to Custodian Cajan before they pulled you off her.”

Kat examined the words for trace of a lie, and found none. Certainly Damant hadn’t laid hands on her. Then again, not getting your hands dirty was a perk of command. She opened her mouth to say so, only for a renewed pang of loss to thicken her throat. She pinched her trembling lips tight and dared Damant to pass comment.

“Tell me,” he continued. “Why attack Cajan?”

That had been the first day, before thin rations and isolation had worn her away. It hadn’t taken much. Just blonde hair beneath the custodian’s hood. It wasn’t until she’d torn the woman’s mask away that she’d realised her mistake. “I thought she was someone else.”

“Ah. Let me guess. The woman from the mooring house. I must talk to the hierarch about the perils of giving skelder harlots the run of his private quarters. It’s not exactly against the law, but nor is it to be encouraged.” Leaning forward, he planted his elbows on the table and steepled his fingers. “I think you’ve said more in the last few minutes than you have all week.”

Kat blinked back nascent tears and met Damant’s grey eyes iron for iron. He was so close now. Not even arm’s length across the table. Close enough to slice open the vein on his neck and take his weapons for her own. His shrieker was worthless. A man with Damant’s authority would have a personalised weapon and a bespoke trigger glyph. Even if he didn’t, his shriversmen had certainly found the makeshift glyph she’d used to command the shrieker in Xanathros Alabastra, which meant the designs had been changed. The scimitar had no such restraint. Then it would just have been the matter of a custodium crawling with guards, all of them better trained and better fed than she.

Not that it mattered, thanks to her clumsiness in losing the sliver.

“What do you want?”

Eyes still on hers, Damant steepled his gloved fingers and tapped them to his lips. “I have news. One of my custodians received a report of a woman taken into St Qamfel’s Hospice the morning after the explosion. I saw her today. She’s very badly burned. The physicians say she’s spent the past week lost to fevered ramblings, when she’s been awake at all. But she regained consciousness long enough to tell them her name.”

Kat’s heart leapt. She swallowed, fighting for composure. “And what was it?”

“Azra.” Fingers still pressed to his lips, Damant tilted his head. “I see it means something to you.”

Kat clenched her teeth. So much for giving nothing away. What was it about her expression that had betrayed her? Too little sleep, too little food… too much heartache. They took their toll. Likely Damant had meant them to do so, for all his fine words. But in the final analysis, did it even matter? She’d not told anyone Azra’s name. Skerrik and Darravon hadn’t lived long enough to reveal it.

Blessed Nyssa, but could she still be alive?

She pressed a clenched fist to her lips. The pressure beneath her breastbone – a pressure she’d borne for a long, miserable week – faded. “She means everything to me.”

Damant arched the eyebrow above his milky eye. “Your accomplice?”

“Will she live?”

He sat back, hands folded in his lap. “With time and care. I’m having her brought here as soon as she’s well enough to be moved.”

Relief soured at the back of Kat’s throat. “So she can stand trial, of course.”

“You didn’t see the inside of a judiciary chamber. Nor will she. Some cases don’t need to be proven. No.” Damant shook his head. “You’ll both go to execution.”

Feeling the tremor return to her hands, Kat laid them palm down on the tabletop. “I thought you didn’t condone needless cruelty.”

“I don’t.”

“Then why tell me?”

“I thought it might be of some comfort to know that you’ll die together. It’s better than your father managed, wasn’t it? Then again, Terrion Arvish kept such peculiar company – at least when he wasn’t tempting Countess Rashace to ruin through infidelity. A good match for his peculiar interests: skelders, apostate historians… even a few misguided souls claiming allegiance to the Obsidium Cult. He set you on a bad path from the first, but perhaps there’s hope for you. If Alabastra permits, yours and Azra’s souls might earn redemption together. They do say that koilos paired in life are inseparable in eternity. Yearning makes them so.”

Kat pinched her eyes shut to keep the room from spinning. There it was. Her own fate had been written from the moment her father had died a debtor. Perhaps even before that, for his unpardonable sin of loving above his station. She’d even made her peace with it that past week, except for in the darkness when sleep wouldn’t come, and all she could think about was what it would be like to be a koilos, aware but with no sense of self save loss. But Azra? The thought of that wonderful, vibrant soul who’d lived every moment to its fullest enslaved by Alabastran misers? Better for her to be dead already, her soul flown to Nyssa’s judgement before the shriversmen could snare it.

The ache in her chest returned, heavier than ever. She glared at Damant with stinging eyes. “Get out.”

Had he any decency, he’d have withered on the spot. But decency was ever in short supply in Khalad. Instead, he nodded. “I understand. It’s a lot to process, but there is another possibility.” Rising, he braced his palms on the table and leaned over until his face was level with hers. “Tell me who was to fence your take, and maybe – just maybe – I can do something.”

“Why?” Kat croaked.

“Because my duty’s to keep order in this city. If someone’s encouraging impressionable little skelders to grandiose schemes I want them taken off the board. That’s worth a lot.”

Kat shook her head, an attempt at bitter laughter stuttering in her parched throat. Marida hadn’t encouraged Azra, quite the opposite. It had taken all Azra’s beautiful wiles and a month of running petty scores to get the mistress of the Thornless Rose to agree to her plan.

“Just give me a name,” said Damant. “That’s all I need.”

Could it be as easy as that? It wasn’t as though she owed Marida a thing, or that the qalimîri would stick out her deathless neck for Kat were situations reversed. Theirs had been a purely business relationship. Damant was offering another.

“And this name?” She fought to keep her voice steady and lost by inches. “It’s enough to save Azra’s life?”

“I can’t promise anything.” Damant spoke evenly, never breaking eye contact, never blinking. “But you’ve become quite a hero in certain quarters. Half the rabble-rousers in Undertown have your name on their lips. We can use that. Maybe I can sell Countess Bascari the idea that you went along with the heist intending to sabotage it from the inside.”

“She’ll not believe that.”

“No. But she might accept it for the sake of a compelling narrative. There’s nothing like the collapse of a criminal conspiracy to encourage stability. Troublemakers never quite know who they can trust.” He straightened. “We’ll enrol you in the custodians, perhaps. It’ll keep you visible, and you can work off your debt to Alabastra through public service.”

For a heartbeat, Kat was back in Ardin Javar’s miserable trophy room. A man who’d sold his reputation in order to survive. “I’d be a liar.”

“You’ll be alive. So will Azra. It’s better than hearing one another’s dying screams as they cut out your hearts on the Golden Stair.” Damant looped his hands behind his back. “One way or another you will serve as an example to the masses. Better to do it on your own terms, surely? If it helps, Azra was lucid long enough this morning to agree my terms. Providing that you did too. Both of you or neither, she said.”

Kat stared at him without really seeing him. Yes. That would be exactly like Azra. Inseparable, for all the distance lying between. They’d been so almost from the start. Could they really be so again?

She owed Marida nothing and Azra everything.

It was just a name.

No, it wasn’t. It was more than that. It was her word. Her honour. Alabastra had taken everything from her family and might yet take her soul, but no one could take that from her. It could only be given freely. Set against Azra’s life, it was nothing. So why was she hesitating?

Damant’s lip curled into something approaching a smile. “I suppose I should be jealous. I’ve certainly never earned that kind of devotion.”

“Yes,” said Kat. “She has a way with her. I was lost from the moment I looked into her laughing emerald eyes.”

“I can see why you would be.”

Kat supposed she should have felt triumph, but some victories gave no pleasure. Worse, with hope stripped away, she beheld the precipice on which she stood. “I don’t want them to win,” she murmured.

Damant cocked his head, the skin tightening about his mouth and eyes. “I’m sorry?”

Kat closed her eyes and saw again Azra’s calm, soot-smeared features amid the ruin of the vault, bright flames raging hot behind. “I don’t want them to win. It was just about the last thing Azra ever said to me. She’d want me to honour that.” She leaned back in her chair and made a morsel of Azra’s calm her own. “And her eyes were hazel.”

“Ah.” Damant’s shoulders drooped a fraction. “No hard feelings. I wanted to give you every reason to agree. It seems I overreached.”

“You lied to me.” Why wasn’t she angry? She should have been angry. She wanted to be angry. But there was… nothing. Just an empty, hungry void where her heart had been. No hope. No laughter. No love. Azra was gone. Alabastra couldn’t touch her. Nothing else mattered.

“Of course,” said Damant. “You’re a skelder, and that’s my job. But everything else I’ve said is true. Just give me that name. Someone has to pay for what happened, but it needn’t be you.”

“How did you know her name?”

“You talk in your sleep.”

So that was it. A simple trick, perhaps the simplest, and she’d almost fallen for it.

He stepped closer to the table and held out a hand. “Take the offer, Katija. Help me keep order in Tyzanta. Let me save your life.”

She shook her head. “You don’t get to touch that part of me.”

“So there is honour among skelders. Is it really worth so much?”

She stared pointedly away into the far corner. “When you have nothing, it’s everything.”

He sighed and glanced down at his open hand. Fingers flexed, then closed. The hand withdrew. “Then nothing is all I can do for you. I’m sorry.”

“I’m not.” Because in the room’s shadowed corner, she at last glimpsed the sliver of tile.

“As you wish.”

Damant turned towards the door. Kat vaulted the table, seized the shard between forefinger and thumb and hurled herself at the castellan’s retreating back.

He spun about in a whisper of robes. His meaty hand grabbed Kat’s wrist, then slid upward to pinch the makeshift weapon from between her fingers. His other closed about her throat and hoisted her backwards. Her flailing foot set a chair rocking. Then Damant had her against the wall, his eyes inches from hers and his brow knotted in fury.

“You talk of honour and then attack when my back is turned?” He shook his head in disgust. “You’d have made a fine fireblood.” He raised his voice. “Guards? Drag this skelder to the quayside. She’s expected in Zariqaz.”

Eleven

The clatter wagon rattled across the cobbles, the unwashed reek of the lower spire yielding to the perfumed fragrance of the spice markets. Ramshackle streets beyond the barred window shone bright in the afternoon sun, the last of the mists burned away. Gloom reigned inside the wagon – in Kat’s mood most of all.

It wasn’t despair, not as such, for she’d no longer any tears worth shedding. More, she found herself beset by stillness, diffuse thoughts scattered by every buck and jolt of the wagon’s four steel-shod wheels.

A clatter wagon’s axles were driven by motic ifrîti who took instruction from a helmic bound to the vehicle’s boxy cab. From there, the driver supplied direction via guidance wheel and levers, a task requiring rather more concentration than most were prepared to give – which meant that the helmic’s hazy perception was often the only thing preventing a collision. In the crowded streets of Tyzanta the arrangement was more economical than providing stabling, fodder and care for draught horses. It was a deeply utilitarian solution, used for cargo and commodities – which Kat bleakly supposed she’d now become – and avoided by those who could afford a horse, a sedan chair or simply had the time or desire to walk.

But even by the standards of its kind, this clatter wagon seemed in particular trouble. Its veering course and the sharp, shuddering changes in speed suggested that at least one of its motics was beginning to dissipate. Either that, or the driver was deliberately making the journey uncomfortable for his passengers. With her aetherios tattoo drained, Kat had no way of knowing. Had it retained even a spark of life, she might have brought the wagon to a standstill, or ordered it to drive headlong off a precipice.

No such luck.

She closed her mind to the bench seat’s rough timber, the dead-eyed stares from the masked custodians sitting opposite, and clung to a smouldering memory of defiance.

Azra peered out of the shadowed corner, her face oddly earnest.

I don’t want them to win.

“They won’t,” Kat murmured.

Azra faded into memory.

A custodian stirred. “What was that?”

Kat snorted away the threat. “You wouldn’t understand.” She leaned as far forward as the chain binding her shackled wrists to the wagon’s wall allowed. “Then again, that doesn’t rule much out, does it?”

“What?” The confused scowl was palpable even through the mask.

“And there you go.”

Growling, the custodian started to her feet, a hand braced against the low roof to keep her balance. The other – a heavyset man of middle years that neither black robes nor scuffed, silvered mask could conceal – laid a lazy hand on her arm.

“Don’t rise to it, Nesca.”

She gave a taut nod and sat back down.

He shifted his attention to Kat. “And as for you? We’ve still got a ways to go. You can walk out at the other end, or we can drag you out by your heels. Doesn’t matter any to me. Do we have ourselves an understanding?”

Kat hesitated. The custodians weren’t armed beyond stubby truncheons – neither scimitars nor shriekers would have done much good in the wagon’s confines. But with her wrists shackled and ankles hobbled, there was only one way any physical confrontation could go. Sometimes the key to not letting the other side win lay in not inviting a contest.

“Oh yes,” she replied drily. “You’ve been very clear.”

He grunted and sat back. “That’s better. All friends again.”

Kat glared at him. She broke off when she realised the other custodian was doing the same.

“Load of skrelling rot you talk, Delk,” muttered Nesca.

Kat snorted. Allies in the strangest places. Under other circumstances she might have found comfort in that, although the rough timber seats and the wagon’s lurching rumble made all manner of solace hard to come by.

Delk slid along the bench and peered out through the bars. “Not long now.”

“I can’t wait,” said Kat.

The wagon shuddered to a halt. A heavy hand banged on the door. Nesca slid back the bolts and hurled it open. Stifling hot air rushed in alongside the chatter of voices. Another custodian waited on the cobbles with shrieker drawn. His mask’s forehead bore the inverted crimson triangle of a ranking overseer.

Delk shuffled heavily to Kat’s side of the wagon and unlocked the hasp anchoring her to the wall. Electing not to wait for the inevitable shove, she made her way into the outside world, blinking in the bright sunlight.

Kazzar’s Quay, with its gaudy brass-domed tower overlooking the long warehouses and their narrow wooden piers that stretched out into the windswept skies. She’d been there before, months ago, running a simple score for Chevlie. Three crates of fine Nicorum wine, snaked out from under the watchmen’s supposed vigilance. She’d skinned a knee jumping between two warehouse roofs. Better days.

The quay had been all but empty that night. Now, no fewer than six vessels cast long shadows across the dockside. One was the battered carrack whose arrival Kat had witnessed from the Thornless Rose, swathed in sheeting and scaffolds as scurrying shipwrights effected repairs. Two were shallow trader’s barges.

The fourth ship was a soot-blackened mining scow, served by chainways and bucket lines unloading a bounty of ores bound for Undertown’s factories. A graceful three-decked military dhow occupied the full length of the middle pier, its sails furled and the gun ports along its crimson and black flank battened shut. A thin column of redcloaks shuffled up the gangway while boom-armed cranes delivered bundled supplies to the upper deck. It dwarfed the sleek black-hulled carrack moored alongside, the stern end of its high aftercastle crafted to resemble the crescent and hunting hawk of House Bascari.

“This way,” snapped the overseer.

The custodians closed about Kat in a diamond formation. She was forever on the cusp of being trampled by Nesca, walking immediately behind her. Every few steps, a heavy shove kept her moving, the manacles digging into her leading shin as the hobble chain went tight. Each time, she gritted her teeth and staggered on.

The crowds parted readily but disinterestedly, dockhands too lost in their own business to care. Those Kat passed glanced hurriedly away, not wanting to get involved. The overseer slowed as they approached the sentries at the carrack’s gangway. Grateful for the reprieve, Kat reduced her jerk-knee pace to match. Not so Nesca.

A heavy boot slammed into Kat’s left calf. A palm against her spine set her stumbling. Fighting for balance, she made the mistake of glancing up at the carrack, her eyes drawn up and up by ratlines and rigging. A wave of dizziness swept away what little balance remained. She collapsed atop a mooring bollard and clamped her eyes shut to blot out the brilliant blue sky spinning above her head.

“Nyssa’s Light.” Through her nausea, Kat recognised Delk’s voice. “What’s with you today?”

“What do you care?” Nesca rejoined. “She’s only a skelder. Dead one too, soon enough.”

“If Damant had wanted her delivered in pieces, he’d have done the breaking apart himself.”

The darkness steadied. Kat shifted her grip on the bollard and creaked open her eyes. She found herself staring down between the smooth curve of the carrack’s lower hull and the pier’s heavy planks. Far below, people scurried like ants across impossibly small roadways and rooftops. Her vertigo – never one to quibble about whether she was high above or far below so long as she was one of those things – rushed back. She swallowed hard and clamped her eyes shut a second time.

“Enough,” snapped the overseer. “Get her to her feet and get her aboard.”

A tug on Kat’s arm brought her upright.

“Eyes open, lass.” Delk’s breath was warm on her ear. “Dragging you’s still an option.”

Slowly, cautiously, Kat opened her eyes and was glad to find herself vaguely level. She found herself staring at the overseer, whose folded arms and thrust-back shoulders more than adequately conveyed the impatience hidden by his mask.

Behind him, the dockside crowds continued about their business as they had before. All save a familiar figure two dozen yards distant, her shoulder propped against the wooden cabin serving as a quaymaster’s office. A woman in a black coachman’s coat that might otherwise have passed notice amongst the dockside labourers but for her braided blonde hair and heavy eyeshadow. The woman from the Thornless Rose. The assassin who’d killed Skerrik and Darravon. Who’d distracted Kat when Azra had needed her the most, and was therefore directly responsible for her death.

Their eyes met across the heaving dockside. The assassin blinked, wide-eyed surprise replaced by a crooked smile. She offered an exaggerated wave of farewell, right hand raised and fingers spread, then turned and threaded her way back into the crowd.

Adrenaline burned away the last of Kat’s dizziness.

“Wait!”

She shouldered Delk aside and started towards the assassin. Lost to the moment, she quite forget the hobble until the chain went tight. As she fell, fingers closed about her upper arms and held her some semblance of upright.

“Let me go!” she shouted. “She’s right there! I have to—”

The overseer stepped in front of her and brought the butt of his shrieker crashing down.

Stars blazed behind Kat’s eyes and gave way to darkness.

Twelve

Kat awoke to a deep throb somewhere above and behind her left temple. Motion came next. The gentle, almost imperceptible sway to left, then right, left, then right. The soft creak of straining timber and the sigh of release. The musty stench of stale sweat and seasoned wood. Finally, a constrictive closeness about feet and shoulders. Cloth, not metal. The shackles were gone.

She gripped the rough cotton of the hammock’s outer edge. With a tug and a twist, she sat upright and found herself in a small cell barely two yards across. Sparse illumination from a pair of lumani prisms just about shaped the cages adjoining Kat’s as well as the mirroring row set across the narrow, low-ceilinged walkway. A dozen to each row. All of them with their doors open. All of them empty.

Most folk travelling from Tyzanta to Zariqaz had to make do with a long journey along the dusty roads, or at least a crowded railrunner carriage. Not her. Sailing the skies in style, even as a prisoner.

She brushed crusted blood from her hair and probed her swollen scalp. Less of a lump than the heaviness of thoughts suggested. Not as bad as it could have been, so there was that.

Blinking away the last of her unwanted sleep, she dropped from the hammock, rather less gracefully than she would have liked. Her foot clipped a thick-rimmed bucket – empty, thank Nyssa, given its likely purpose – and sent it flying to clang into the cell wall.

“Kiasta!”

Slitting her eyelids against renewed throbbing, she rested her forehead against the cool metal bars and willed the world away.

Green eyes stared back. Inches from hers.

Kat suppressed a flinch. A mischievous smile curled the corner of the stranger’s mouth. A girl with tawny-brown skin, her convict’s garb hanging loosely from a rangy body still deciding what shape it wanted to be. She stepped away, thin, dexterous fingers slipping from the bars to twist her fraying chestnut ponytail into some semblance of order.

“Who are you?” said Kat.

The girl shook her head and tapped clenched knuckles against her ear to indicate that she was deaf. She brought her hands forward, fingers dancing. ||Simah?||

||How long since we slipped moorings?|| Kat’s signs came slowly at first, smoother as the cobwebs cleared from her thoughts.

||Couple of hours.||

Two hours down. Maybe ninety to Zariqaz. Four times faster than the laborious railrunner trip Kat had made in the other direction a year before. Call it five days until Caradan Diar’s royal guard tore out her heart and dropped it on the glittering steps of the Golden Stair? A week at the outside. ||Anyone else down here?||

||Just a custodian.|| The girl jerked a thumb over her shoulder. ||The rest of our lot went up on deck.||

At last, Kat noted the masked guard lurking in the shadows by the companionway door. That made two of them she’d missed. More proof, had she needed it, of how out of it she was. ||Our lot?||

||Winners of the Golden Lottery. We’re all of us off to see the king.|| She flashed a bitter grin. ||Thought I’d see if you pulled through.||

||Thanks.||

The girl’s eyes gleamed. ||I wanted first claim on anything valuable if you didn’t wake up.||

Kat grunted. ||You think the custodians would have left me with anything?||

||Nothing wrong with being an opportunist. Not until they catch you.|| She shrugged, her signs more expansive and excitable as she warmed to her story. ||Had the lock of the jeweller’s night safe charmed in the blink of an eye. Stuff of legend, honest and true. Picking out the sparkliest pieces when a hand fell on my shoulder. No fate for the greatest lock charmer in Khalad.||

Kat smiled. Impossible not to in the face of the girl’s irrepressible cheer. ||You needed someone watching your back.|| Simah might have been widespread enough to allow ready communication, but it didn’t help you catch a creaking floorboard announcing a custodian’s arrival.

||He ran out on me. What’s the world coming to when one skelder can’t trust another?|| For all the maudlin words, the girl’s expression retained a quiet, sly humour. Her signing was rhythmic but lyrical, possessed of musicality Kat had never observed in Simah’s hearing practitioners. ||I’m Yali.||

||Kat.||

||Kat… Katija.|| Yali blinked. ||Wait. Not… the Katija Arvish?||

A chill ran down Kat’s spine. ||That’s certainly my name. I can’t speak to the rest.||

Her signing grew hurried, excited. ||Did you really destroy Xanathros Alabastra?||

Kat shook her head, willing away the familiar pressure building behind her eyes. She’d wept too much of late. ||I was there when it exploded. Can’t speak to the rest.||

Yali hung her head in mock dismay. ||Just my luck. Always wanted to meet a celebrity. Finally do and she doesn’t have a dinar worth stealing.||

Kat snorted. She didn’t know the half of it. ||That’s me. Selfish.||

||Good of you to admit it.|| Yali grinned. ||Still, all those tetrams up in smoke. Breaks my heart.||

The pressure behind Kat’s eyes returned redoubled. Insistent. Angry. “And what do you know about heartbreak?” she snapped, in the heat of the moment forgetting to sign.

So much for composure. She glared through the cage, daring Yali to complain. But as had so often been the case that past week, guilt found little to feed on and guttered to nothing, leaving her spent. She sank against the bars and gripped them tight. She was better than this. She had to be. For however long she had left. Otherwise they won.

Knuckles creaking, Kat released her grip. ||I’m sorry,|| she signed with stuttering fingers. ||That was rude.||

Yali twitched a shrug. ||It happens.|| Her brow creased. ||You lost someone? I can lip-read a little, even in the dark. Your face told me the rest. Shouted it, really.||

A shame the truth was likely neither as heroic nor dramatic as whatever tale Yali had heard. Kat wondered if she understood events any better. Take the assassin who’d haunted her since the Thornless Rose. Two meetings might have been coincidence, but three?

She’d assumed that the woman had been one of the hierarch’s mistresses – Castellan Damant clearly thought the same – but the more she considered the matter, the less likely it seemed. Men like Hierarch Ossed preferred demure, cowable companions, the better to soothe their fragile egos and weather their unhappy temperaments. Kat couldn’t imagine the woman she’d fought – or rather, had been roundly thrashed by – tolerating such an arrangement. No, she was something else.

And then there was the notion that Azra had triggered some kind of ifrîti trap. While an unwilling guest at the custodium, Kat had spent many bitter hours re-examining her memories of the vault. She’d been so careful, examined the ifrîti with such care. Could she really have missed something like that? Perhaps it was just arrogance returning with distance from the tragedy, but she didn’t think so. Something had happened at Xanathros Alabastra, something she didn’t understand. But what?

||Did you say I could get out on deck?||

Yali’s cheek twitched at the blatant change in topic. ||Freedom until sundown, the overseer said. Then they lock us up.||

||I might take a walk.||

||No one’s stopping you.||

Kat drew back from the bars and managed a small smile. ||Staying so you can search my hammock? Good luck finding anything worth the effort.||

A shadow passed across Yali’s face, as soon vanished as seen. Her signing faltered. ||I don’t like crowds.||

Kat paused in the cell doorway. She was about to ask what was wrong when she remembered that there was no point getting attached. They’d both be dead within the week. But that didn’t mean she’d go without a fight. Azra would expect nothing less.

Five days to Zariqaz. She’d better make the most of them.

After a couple of false starts that sent her grabbing at cage bars for support, she made it from her cell to the companionway door. Braced open and secured to the wall by steel hasps, the door boasted no fewer than three conventional locks – another driven by a motic prism – and a hestic sentry crest set above the frame. Even with her tattoo drained, Kat made out thin whispers of its curiosity.

The custodian beyond the door watched idly as she approached. “On the move?”

“That a problem?”

“Just don’t fall over the side. Comes out of our bonus.”

Belatedly Kat recognised the voice behind the mask. “Dragged me aboard after all, did you?”

“You didn’t give us much choice.” Delk shrugged. “No hard feelings?”

Plenty, but with her head throbbing and her last meal a day behind, Kat didn’t fancy her chances. Especially as Delk had added a scimitar and jade-pommelled dagger to his armaments since their last conversation. She made for the companionway door.

He grabbed her arm. “Overseer Vashrîq doesn’t have my forgiving nature.”

Kat touched fingers to the throbbing lump on the back of her head and threw him a sour look. “I’d never have guessed.”

She shrugged off his hand and clambered up the steep companionway steps, holding tight to the brass handrail. As she emerged from a canvas porch into the open air, the uninviting smell of below-decks yielded to air sweeter than any she’d tasted since arriving in Tyzanta.

The sky was awash with the warm ochres and brilliant blues of the dying day. The Cloudsea, she’d heard it called. Not a scrap of land lay in sight off either bow, the infinite horizon marred only where sparse clouds held sway.

In theory, you could chart a course to anywhere in Khalad so long as the weather held, the ship’s helmic navigating via proximity to the Deadwinds that forever spiralled above mortal currents. No matter how the seasons shifted, the Deadwinds were unchanging, an aethereal vortex that swept the souls of the deceased to Zariqaz, and thence to Nyssa’s keeping.

In times past, outspoken prophets had claimed the goddess sent her voice upon the winds, a notion Alabastra decreed heretical, arguing that if Nyssa dwelled beneath the world, her palace graced by the unchanging light of the Stars Below, then the voices in the Deadwinds could belong only to daemons and the damned. Kat’s father had claimed that the archons would have banished skyships from the Deadwinds entirely but for the expense such travel saved in time and dinars. After all, without the Deadwinds, skyships would have been deeply impractical, slaves to every gust and lull, driven wherever the mortal winds decreed.

To Kat’s way of thinking, plenty could still go wrong. If a helmic unexpectedly dissipated, an experienced captain could navigate by sun and stars. But if the armoured buoyancy tanks along the keel split? If the helmsman steered through a cloud that wasn’t a cloud at all but an unheralded Mistfall? Well, that was that. She wasn’t sure which she’d have preferred: plunging from the skies or being devoured by the Veil.

Wind tugging at her thin convict’s tunic, Kat shaded her eyes against the sun sinking off the port bulwark and awaited vertigo’s inevitable onset. It never came. For all that intellect recognised that she was hundreds of feet off the ground, her body remained none the wiser. She risked an upward glance. Far beyond billowing sails and mast tops, bright indigo and magenta motes plucked at the wispy cotton wool of cirrus clouds, flaring like hearthside embers as the spiralling Deadwinds drew them to Khalad’s heart – it wasn’t only the lost souls of the living that ended up in Zariqaz.

The deck between main mast and towering forecastle was fenced in on all sides by iron railings twice Kat’s height, bordering a space roughly twenty paces by twenty. Those railings curved inwards at the top, creating a spiked overhang to deter even the most determined climber. Beyond the rails, fore and aft, paired custodians stood watch at heavy iron gates, scimitars belted at their shoulders and shriekers holstered at their waists. Within the stockade, a dozen or so convicts gathered in small groups, the soft murmur of their conversation blurring into the whispering wind.

The nearest two broke off from their discussion and walked over. The woman was shorter and darker than Kat, with quick, appraising eyes. Her stubbled scalp spoke to a head once shaved in a style popular in the southern cities but that now edged steadily towards disarray with access to a blade forbidden. The man’s wiry physique left Kat feeling soft by comparison and his tanned skin spoke of a life lived outdoors. His straggly black hair and beard had lost any presentational battle long ago.

“So you’re alive?” he asked in rumbling Daric. “Guess I lose my bet.”

Kat met him eye-to-eye, or at least eye-to-chin. “Seems I’m disappointing everyone today.”

The woman rolled her eyes. “He’s just trying to sound important, aren’t you, Trajian?” She splayed a hand across her chest in the Simah sign of greeting. “I’m Jaîna.”

“Kat.”

Trajian scratched thoughtfully at his beard. “What, the—”

Kat sighed, already tired of her new-found celebrity. “Yes, probably.”

Rumbling a great belly laugh, he clapped her on the back with enough force to set her staggering. “Long past time someone humbled those misers. Wish I’d seen it.”

Jaîna fixed her with a stare. “So you’re the reason we’re all here.”

“I don’t follow,” Kat replied.

“I was expecting a nice dignified decapitation in the custodium courtyard, but since they were shipping you out to Zariqaz, they decided to empty the cells to give you some company. Ought to be quite the spectacle.” Jaîna paused. “Lucky us.”

“I see.” Kat peered at the filthy bandage tied across Trajian’s left palm. “What happened to you?”

He scowled. “That voiceless skirl skrelling bit me, didn’t she?”

The missing piece of a puzzle slotted into place. No wonder Yali was hiding below-decks. Trajian was easily three times her size. Kat passed up correcting Trajian’s assertion that Yali was voiceless – he didn’t look like the sort to trouble himself learning Simah. “Why’d she do that?”

He snorted. “You’d have to ask her. Me? I was just being friendly.”

It wasn’t so much his words that set Kat on edge as his tone. A defensive petulance with no place in a confrontation between a man his size and a slip of a girl like Yali. A timely reminder that there were likely worse than thieves among the ship’s cargo. “Friendly or not, I’m thinking you’d better leave her alone.”

Trajian folded his arms and loomed, his lips curling to a sneer. “And if I don’t? What are you going to skrelling do?”

Kat tried not to think about the fact that Trajian could break her in half with one hand. No point calling for the custodians to intervene. If they cared at all about what their cargo did to one another they’d not let them mingle in the first place.

“You’ll never know, because you’ll be asleep when it happens. And you won’t wake up.”

For a long moment, Trajian said nothing. Then he spat on the deck and walked away.

Swallowing a sigh of relief, Kat surreptitiously wiped a sweaty palm on her leg and wondered why she’d so swiftly set aside her determination not to get involved.

Jaîna arched an eyebrow. “I might start believing some of the stories I’ve heard this last week.”

“Don’t. I’m all talk, and whatever you’ve heard is nothing but corpse rot.”

“What’s spoken matters more than what’s done. At least, if enough believe it.” She spread her hands. “Isn’t that the fine truth of Khalad? But still, I’m impressed. I hear the subjects of Trajian’s friendliness tend towards bad ends.”

“I had that feeling.” Kat gazed across the stockade at her fellow convicts. “Anyone else I should worry about?”

Jaîna snorted, a woman surrounded by two-legged disappointments. “I’m sure the custodians will play it up on the Golden Stair, but most of these poor wretches were up before the judicator on petty crimes. Theft. Unpaid taxes. Expired merchants’ licences.” She nodded at a squat, bald man with the same rich tan as Trajian – part of a motley trio deep in conversation on the opposite side of the stockade. “Maxin was one of Ardin Javar’s enforcers. The kind he sends round when he’s not too picky about it getting messy.”

“Sounds like custodian material.” Kat regarded Maxin without wanting to appear too interested. A spring wound tight, its energy revealed in the short, stabbing gestures with which he punctuated his speech. A rough trip in the offing. Enforcers didn’t forget their loyalty after something as trifling as incarceration, and she doubted that Javar had forgotten the theft of his communion ring. She brushed a windswept strand of hair out of her eyes. “Anyone else?”

“Only me,” said Jaîna. “I was convicted of poisoning Lady Jalan Jovîna.”

“Is that so?” Jaîna didn’t look like a poisoner, but what deed in the great pantheon of criminality revelled more in unassuming aspect? “I’ve never met a poisoner before.”

She offered a slight dip of the head, her expression unreadable. “You’re my first revolutionary, more’s the pity.”

“It was a robbery, not a political statement.”

“Stealing from Alabastra is a political statement.”

Kat sighed. She didn’t have to like it for it to be true. But that didn’t mean she wanted to talk about it. Especially with hunger pangs gnawing away. “Do they feed us on this scow, or are we being handed over as skin and bone?”

Jaîna nodded at a low, heavy table bolted down at the centre of the stockade. A water butt and a battered cast-iron cauldron sat close by. “You might find a few scraps left.”

“Thanks.” Kat started towards the table. Struck by an unpleasant thought, she stopped and glanced back at Jaîna.

“Oh, don’t look at me like that,” said Jaîna, mirth dancing beneath her words. “I’m worthless without an apothecary’s store.”

By no means convinced, but increasingly aware she’d not eaten in what felt like for ever, Kat decided to take the risk.

As Jaîna had warned, pickings were slim. A few hunks of flatbread remained amongst the scattered wooden bowls. The cauldron’s thin stew had long ago congealed, a mottled and unidentifiable skin formed on the surface. A thick, bitter aroma yielded no clue as to the ingredients. Still, food was food.

She’d eaten worse in Tyzanta.

Aware of eyes on her from across the stockade, she wolfed down what scraps of edible bread remained, then helped herself to the cleanest-looking bowl among the detritus and scooped a generous helping of stew from the cauldron. A helping that if taken at initial glance was about five parts mushy beige vegetables to one part grey and gristly meat. Breaking the skin released a sweet, cloying waft that suggested some or all of the ingredients had been past turning before the cooking began. A muscle twitched in Kat’s gut. Another at the back of her throat.

She’d probably eaten worse in Tyzanta.

Still, bread alone wouldn’t keep her alive long.

Careful not to breathe, and thus invite another burst of the stew’s aroma, she tipped the bowl to her mouth.

A heavy hand struck it from her grasp.

Thirteen

Contents spattering a slimy brown crescent across the deck, Kat’s bowl skittered drunkenly on its rim and tottered face-down.

“You should watch your step,” growled a gruff voice.

Kat flicked her stinging fingers to numb the pain and glared down at Maxin. “I was.”

“Don’t think so.”

Laughing, Maxin spread his hands. The two unshaven men immediately to his rear joined in the guffaws. Part of the performance. Either old cronies or ones forged during incarceration. Both bore the marks of one beating too many. A broken nose in one case, and twin knife scars – or possibly claw wounds – running diagonally from right brow to left cheek. Two or three voices joined in from about the stockade’s perimeter, though Kat’s surreptitious glances to left and right confirmed that neither Trajian nor Jaîna had done so. Nor had any of the custodians, who continued their watch from beyond the bars.

Silent consent for the inevitable.

She looked Maxin up and down. Hunched shoulders and barrel chest spoke to physical strength cultivated for its own sake. Not unusual in an enforcer. Kat had rubbed shoulders with plenty during her time in Undertown. They barked loud, bit harder and did so purely for pleasure. Events had made her worth biting.

“Tell you what,” she said. “I’ll go back to my corner, you go back to yours, and we’ll call it even.”

He prodded her in the chest. “Apologise.”

She stifled a sigh. On the one hand, Maxin had managed a four-syllable word, easily double what appearance suggested. On the other, he was no more interested in an apology than he was honest about her having walked into him. It was all a game with a single, obvious conclusion. The longer it went on, the worse it would get.

“If that’s what you want.”

She balled a fist and slammed it into his gut.

It was a move Azra had taught her after their first meeting, one to use against a larger, stronger opponent. You didn’t simply hit your enemy. You braced against the ground and drove your fist forward with the full weight of your body. The real power, however, came from twisting your forearm from knuckles down to knuckles up before your fist slammed home. It worked better with surprise, as all such things did, and left the victim either doubled over or curled up on his side, gasping for breath.

Unless you were hitting a tree.

Or, apparently, Maxin, who barely grunted.

The grunt rose to a growl. His expression turned to wolfish joy.

He lunged.

Swallowing her dismay, Kat reached deeper into Azra’s borrowed bag of tricks and stamped down on his instep. He snarled, off balance, the punch meant for her face instead scraping a hot red line across her cheek and spinning her about. The follow-up gut punch crashed her backwards against the table, its thick planks jarring her spine.

Maxin reached her before she was fully upright. Arms thick as tree trunks closed about her in a bear hug, pinning her arms to her sides.

He squeezed and hoisted her off the deck. His face, inches from hers, broke into a broad triumphant grin. Desperate, Kat kneed and kicked at him, but closeness robbed her blows of force. Behind him, Broken-Nose and Twin-Scar roared with laughter.

“Apologise,” Maxin rumbled, green eyes gleaming.

The one-sided embrace tightened. Kat gasped as her ribs creaked.

Arms pinned. Legs useless. Only one thing left to try.

Before she could talk herself out of it, she rammed her head forward.

A dull red pain burst behind her eyes, but the crunch of breaking cartilage and Maxin’s agonised howl made it all worthwhile.

His embrace slackened. Kat’s feet hit the deck. Still blinded by red, she fought for balance. Through blinking, watery eyes, she saw a stooped Maxin staggering to and fro, one massive hand clamped to a streaming, bloody nose.

Girding the last of her strength, she seized the back of his bald head with both hands and slammed his face-down on the table. The stockade’s laughter gave way to a hushed, empathic gasp.

Maxin dropped to his knees. One hand clutched blindly at the table for support as he made to rise. Halfway there, he collapsed and rolled onto his back, blood gushing from his nose and a ripening bruise on his brow.

The stockade fell silent.

Kat doubled over, one palm braced against her knee. “I’m sorry…” She gasped for breath. “But you… picked that fight.”

Maxin moaned and twitched fitfully. Kat doubted he even heard.

Hauling herself upright, she wiped sweat from her brow. Her fingers came away bloody. Kiasta. Between that, her aching ribs and the bruise inflicted by the table, she was in for a sore few days.

On the other side of the ledger, her head wasn’t throbbing any longer.

A blow from behind drove her to her knees. Broken-Nose and Twin-Scar loomed overhead, expressions close kin to the one Maxin had worn at the start of the fight.

“Really is true, isn’t it?” she said, as drily as she could manage. “There is no honour among skelders.”

A high-pitched whine split the air. Twin-Scar screamed and fell backwards, his chest ablaze but the fires already fading as his thrashing body hit the deck. The air filled with thudding boots and a harsh, authoritative voice.

“Show’s over! Get them up against the port fence!”

Convicts streamed past Kat in ones and twos, goaded onwards by scimitars. Broken-Nose scrambled away with the rest. Two custodians took Maxin by his shoulders and dragged him into position alongside the others. Twin-Scar gave a last shudder and went still.

“Get her up!” the voice shouted.

Kat made to stand. Her legs, wobbly with the aftermath of adrenaline and Maxin’s beating, buckled at the knee.

A custodian caught her and manhandled her upright. “You’ve a real knack with people, you know that?”

Delk. Somehow Kat wasn’t surprised. She let him steer her towards the port side fence. “Just lucky, I guess.”

“Remember what I said,” he murmured. “Don’t antagonise Vashrîq.”

“Why do you care?”

“I’ve got a generous soul.” He sounded genuinely offended, but who knew what expression lay behind the silver mask? “Just stay quiet and let this play out.”

He propped her against the fence about as far from the groggy Maxin as the stockade’s confines allowed and joined the custodians lining up along the deck’s midpoint.

So close to the gunwale’s bulwark, Kat had a clear view of the arid landscape rolling away far below. A grove of bristly carobs and yews nestled amid the jutting rocks. The thin, dark wind of a river as it snaked through broken plains and patchwork irrigated fields. Further off, and toylike at that distance, a line of torch houses dotted a bar-straight roadway, their leaping flames holding back a bank of mist with their blessed flame. And midway between the carrack and the ground, a murmuration of birds in flowing, helical breeze-blown dance.

Vertigo’s blurring dizziness returned. Clinging to the fence’s bars, Kat twisted about and turned her attention inboard. Six custodians in all. Too many for the convicts to rush – and that was before the ship’s as yet unseen crew were counted into things. Not that Kat felt like rushing anyone. All she wanted was to lie down or to have her head fall off and have done, whichever came first.

The overseer holstered his still-smoking shrieker and took up position a little in front of the line’s centre. He slid back his hood and removed his mask, revealing an archly handsome face the colour of weathered sandstone and a neat pointed goatee.

“I’m Overseer Vashrîq. It is my privilege to serve the Lady Mirela Bascari. While you’re aboard the Mornwake, you are mine.”

He spoke calmly, collectedly, his clipped diction a telltale of education in some fireblood academy rather than Undertown streets. Kat had emulated it for years, the better to fit in with the other children on Countess Rashace’s estate. But more than the accent, there was a tone. A clinical and wholly unconvincing friendliness she suspected would linger even as Vashrîq twisted the knife or salted the wound. Delk had wasted his warning. She knew better than to cross a man like that.

Vashrîq prodded Twin-Scar with his foot. Fire flickered briefly in the charred ruin of the corpse’s chest, then sputtered out. “I will say this once, and once only. You’re all under sentence of death. You want to eke out your moments until you reach the Golden Stair, that’s up to you. But there are a hundred terrible things that could happen to any of you before we reach Zariqaz, and no one will ever care. Am I understood?”

No one said whether or not they understood. No one said anything at all. It seemed to Kat that the entire stockade was holding its breath.

“Good.” Vashrîq gestured at the nearest custodian and again at Twin-Scar’s corpse. “Throw that over the side.”

The woman moved smartly to obey, dragging the corpse out through the for’ard gate and out of sight. A pair of sailriders in grey tunics scurried into the stockade and deposited a sloshing pail and a mop beside the table before departing as quickly as they’d arrived.

“You and you…” Vashrîq addressed two of the convicts before waving at the deck fouled by Kat’s brief brawl, “I want this mess cleaned up. As for the rest of you? Do not provoke me.”

He made a last, lingering sweep of the line then turned on his heel and departed the stockade. The remaining custodians filed out after him one by one. After a moment’s hesitation, the two convicts assigned to clean up left the port fence and busied themselves mopping away blood and spilt stew.

Bone-weary, Kat set her back to the bars and slid down into a sitting position.

Jaîna squatted and set a bowl of water between them. “I thought you were all talk?” Cupping Kat’s jaw, she tilted her head to one side. With the other hand she squeezed out a rag and dabbed it against the wound on Kat’s cheek. “He got you good.”

Kat winced at the sting of the cold water and pushed Jaîna’s hand away. “Really? I hadn’t noticed.” She cast a glance to where Maxin lay, still staring at the sky, wits gone and oblivious. “I got him better.”

Jaîna regarded her as a mother beholds a wayward child. “Do you want me to clean that or not?”

Kat grimaced, nodded and endured the renewed assault with stoicism.

“What possessed you to do it?” said Jaîna. “I warned you he was trouble.”

“He wanted the fight. I changed the timing, that’s all.” Kat stared at the smeared black ashes marking the spot where Twin-Scar’s body had dropped. “I didn’t mean it to go as far as it did.”

“Vashrîq, you mean?” Jaîna gave a musical snort. “He was looking for an excuse. He’d have found one sooner or later. Keeps the cargo quiet until the sedative kicks in.”

Kat gaped. “The what?”

Jaîna twisted Kat’s head firmly back to its previous position and continued her assault on the wound. “You didn’t know?” She chuckled softly. “Crone carob gum and mellia grass. Makes everything sweet, but after a few meals you just don’t quite care as much as you used to. Plainsmen use it to keep their livestock docile when a storm’s about to break. Some factory foremen too, I hear.”

That was why the stew had smelled off? “The secrets of a poisoner?”

“I wouldn’t know. I’m not a poisoner.” After a last dab at Kat’s cheek, Jaîna set the rag aside. “That’s about the best I can do without a needle and thread. It’s going to scar.”

“Yes, for all of a week.” Kat scowled. “You told me you were a poisoner.”

“No, I said I was convicted of poisoning.” Jaîna tucked her legs beneath her and sighed. “Lady Jalan Jovîna was afflicted by the ironclad belief that if a little bit of something was good for you, a larger bit of it was better. I prescribed pestled acri root for a vexing tooth. She took enough in one sitting to kill a horse. Against my instructions, of course, but by the time her husband had vented his spleen, the judicator didn’t see it that way.”

“So you’re innocent?”

“Careful, you’ll make me blush.” Jaîna sighed, a faraway look coming into her eyes. “My brother was right. I should have gone south months ago, joined up with Vallant.”

Another one chasing myths. Just like Skerrik, Nyssa rest him. “Why didn’t you?”

“Don’t laugh, but I thought I’d found my niche. I thought – hah! – that my skills earned me, if not parity with the firebloods, well, a little respect.” She twitched a shrug, dark eyes shadowed and bitter. “But they don’t offer respect, do they? They take what they want and give nothing you don’t steal for yourself.”

“Something like that.”

Away over on the forecastle, sailriders busied themselves with rope and pulley to bring Mornwake creaking around to a new heading. Kat shivered as wind gusted across the deck. In the time they’d been talking, blue skies had faded to ochre, the temperature plunging alongside. Between that and Vashrîq’s grim pronouncement, the stockade had more or less cleared. Even as she watched, the convicts assigned to cleaning duty hurried below. That left an older man staring sightlessly out over the starboard bow, and the semi-conscious Maxin – neither of them close enough to hear a word. Only a single custodian remained at the for’ard gate, the slump of his shoulders signifying a man barely awake, much less alert.

Kat let her head fall back against the fence. “So maybe we should take the ship. Go somewhere far, far away from here. Or at least force-land it and make a run for it.”

Jaîna laughed. “Sure. And we’ll ask the Eternity King for a royal pardon.”

“I’m serious.”

“You’re mad! Even if we weren’t locked up, you saw how trigger-happy Vashrîq is. He has his custodians, and the crew. And just assuming, who’s going to fly the ship? Even with ifrîti doing the hard work, it takes at least half a dozen trained sailriders to keep something this size on course.”

“Those are all just problems. Problems can be solved.”

“You are mad.”

“Am I?” Wincing at the protests of bruised flesh, Kat sat upright. “You heard Vashrîq. We’re already dead. What’s a few days here or there?”

Jaîna gave a vicious shake of her head. “When they’re only a few days, they matter a lot.”

“Really? What would your brother say?”

“I’m going below.” Jaîna stood, colour touching her cheeks. “If you’ve anything sensible to discuss, you can tell me there.”

She headed for the canvas awning. Above and behind, outrigger spars extended at foremast and bowsprit. Kat watched uneasily as gossamer aethersails unfurled like fields of captive stars against the gathering dusk. They hung limp, unstirred by mortal wind, but that wouldn’t last. Already she felt the pitch of the deck shifting as the Mornwake soared skyward, the indigo and magenta motes of the Deadwinds growing closer with each passing moment.

Problems were soluble, but all solutions needed a starting point. Locked doors. Armed guards. The fence. Try as she might, Kat wasn’t sure what could be done short of rushing the gate at the next opportunity.

One thing was for sure, she couldn’t sit back and do nothing. She just couldn’t.

Otherwise they won.

She turned at a diffident tap on her shoulder and found Yali, thin arms wrapped tight about her body and shivering all the while.

||Heard it got exciting up here.|| Yali broke off from signing to hug herself tight once more and look Kat up and down. ||Not as pretty as you were earlier.||

Kat blinked at the unexpected compliment. ||You’re fortunate. You only have to look at it.|| She hesitated, parsing out her next words with care so that her fingers wouldn’t trip over themselves. ||I know about Trajian.||

Yali’s cheek twitched. ||I just want to be wherever he’s not.||

||He won’t give you any more trouble.||

||We’ll see.||

The first motes of light danced across the deck. Away at the forecastle, aethersails billowed. The Mornwake shuddered and picked up speed, a notable creak to its timbers. Smaller vessels entering the Deadwinds risked capsizing or worse, but not something of the Mornwake’s bulk. Or so Kat fervently hoped.

She scratched idly at her left forearm. Bad enough that the rest of her body was a mass of bruises – she wasn’t about to tolerate an itch. She couldn’t blame Yali for not believing her. She wasn’t entirely sure why she was making promises in the first place, but if Yali was a halfway-decent lock charmer, she was worth keeping close. Maybe it was that.

||Kat…|| Yali stared, her normally flamboyant signs small and furtive, almost to the point of whispering. ||Your arm’s on fire.||

Startled, Kat glanced down to see familiar indigo flames rushing along her tattoo. She gazed dumbly for a long moment before hurriedly rolling her sleeve back down and casting surreptitious glances back and forth across the deck. The Deadwinds. Her aetherios tattoo was siphoning the souls of the Deadwinds. A dozen times faster than it did tessence. A hundred.

That changed everything.

||It’s all right,|| she said, the signs made awkward by the need to have two fingers from her left hand folded to pin the cuff of her sleeve against her palm. ||You said you were a lock charmer. Exactly how good?||

Fourteen

The enforcer yanked Kat off her feet by a handful of hair. Elbows and knees jarred in the flooded gutter, leftover rainwater a creeping cold through her threadbare clothes. She thrashed as her attacker’s weight settled on her back. Barking a stream of melodic Qersi at his fellow toughs, he wound his fingers tighter and pushed her face-down into the gutter. Icy, bittersweet water and thick black silt flooded her nose and mouth.

Her lungs, already burning with the effort of the chase, turned to fire. She scrabbled at the rough cobbles and screamed the last of her air into the murky water. Panic became desperation.

The weight vanished from her back. Gasping, spluttering, she forced herself onto one elbow and whooped down breaths. She yelped as her attacker’s body splashed into the gutter, his eyes wide to the skies and a red stain creeping across his filthy linen shirt. Footsteps echoed through the alleyway, chased along by a woman’s wild and raucous voice.

Exhausted and trembling, Kat rolled onto the cobbles and stared skyward. The sunlight streaming between Undertown’s ramshackle buildings haloed the tangled hair of a dazzlingly beautiful woman. A rakish smile added daring to otherwise demure features. A bloody dagger dangled carelessly from her left hand. Her right reached down and took Kat’s.

Going to sleep in the gutter all day, darling?

Kat opened her mouth to speak, but Azra was already gone. There was only Yali, rendered in shadow by the poor light of the Mornwake’s prison, one hand about Kat’s and the other on her shoulder as she shook her awake.

Yali blinked and pulled back into the cage’s open doorway. ||The last custodian just left.|| She leaned closer. ||What’s wrong?||

Bruises screaming, Kat rolled out of her hammock. She felt eyes on her from every corner of the prison hold. Had she been talking in her sleep again? ||A bad dream, that’s all.|| Except it hadn’t been a bad dream, had it? The very opposite. The start of better days, fleeting though they’d been. ||The lock didn’t give you any trouble?||

She shrugged. ||Why would it? I’ll get started on the others.||

Yali slipped away into the narrow corridor, knelt at the door to Jaîna’s cage and set to work with her priceless treasures: a sailmaker’s needle recovered from a crack between deck timbers earlier that day, and half a hairpin she’d somehow kept concealed throughout her incarceration.

The lock gave a soft click. Jaîna pushed the door open and slunk into the narrow corridor. “I must be mad, getting involved with this.”

Two cells down – Twin-Scar no longer having need of accommodation this side of reincarnation – Maxin pressed up against his bars, the two-day bruise across his forehead livid even in the dark. “Girl! Get me out of here!” Scowling belated realisation, he switched to slow, heavy Simah. ||Out!||

Kat caught Yali’s questioning glance and nodded. No more than three days out from Zariqaz, they were closer to busy shipping lanes with every passing hour. Taking the Mornwake meant overpowering not only Vashrîq’s custodians but also Captain Shandîr’s crew, which Jaîna’s estimate pegged at around a dozen. They needed everyone they could get.

Yali moved down the hold. Kat headed for the companionway door. “Keep an eye on the others, would you?” she asked Jaîna. “I’m going to be a little distracted for a few minutes.”

Without waiting for confirmation, she reached out to the hestic ifrît above the door.

Diving into the spirit world after so long apart ripped her breath away. Even as the wan colours of the prison hold bled into greys, a hundred voices clamoured for attention. Not the caged ifrîti of the door, not even those set to labour elsewhere across the ship, which were diffuse, calm presences in the murky landscape. They called and cried, their words maddeningly indistinct, forever on the precipice of being understood but somehow never quite there, a cacophony of want and sorrow that swept Kat up in a typhonic embrace. Upwards and upwards, spiralling into—

Gasping, she pulled free. The colourless world yielded to the mortal realm. She dropped to the deck, wrist jarring as she flung it outward for support.

Jaîna knelt beside her. “You all right?”

Kat swallowed a bitter, hot mouthful and nodded. “I can do this.” Her words were hollow even to her own ears. In all her years trespassing the spirit world, she’d never felt anything like that. So many errant souls. So much desperation. And beneath it all, the pull of the Deadwinds, determined to drag her still-living soul to Zariqaz. How did she fight that? The answer came easily enough. Because she had to. She forced confidence into her voice. “I can do this.”

Gritting her teeth, she slipped into the spirit world once more.

Even prepared for the howling, clawing voices it took all she had not to be swept away. She blotted them out as best she could and probed first the sentry crest’s watch hestic and the door’s solitary, stolid motic, experimenting with her aetherios tattoo’s design first one way and then the other, letting instinct and the anticipation of the ifrîti guide her to the proper glyphs.

As the hestic burbled contentment and slipped into slumber, Kat felt a piece of herself float away into the Deadwinds. Nothing she could identify by the echo it left behind, but some quiet, indefinable piece of who she was. As she wrestled with the intransigent motic, she became aware of a presence behind her in the swirling darkness. Not bound to the Mornwake as the ifrîti were, but dwelling in the winds beyond. It warmed like old memories of her father’s embrace but was somehow cold at the same time.

Heart leaping with recollections of her father’s stories of Deadwinds’ daemons, she turned around and found herself staring at… nothing. Just a flicker of indigo fire, blazing in the darkness. As it crackled towards her, the motic at last yielded. With a spasm of muscle as much as mind, she flung herself from the spirit world.

And found herself face-down on the deck.

“And she’s still alive,” Trajian rumbled into his beard. “You’re costing me a skrelling fortune.”

Gathering what dignity she could, Kat clambered to her feet in a circle of expectant faces. “The hestic’s sleeping. The motic’s unbolted. Maybe you should stop betting against me.” She stared around the circle. Jaîna, Yali, Maxin, Trajian, Broken-Nose – whose name transpired to be Anqo. “This everyone?”

Jaîna shot a sneering glance further down the prison hold. “The rest are too out of it. Let their appetites rule them, didn’t they? Now they’re good and sapped.”

Kat swallowed a scowl. She’d eaten as sparingly as she’d dared ever since Jaîna had warned her of the drugged food. Others hadn’t been so careful. “We’ll make it work.” She turned her attention to Maxin, who stood a little apart from the others, his arms folded and an unreadable scowl plastered across his face. “Want to go again?”

He snorted. “Reckon we’d better save it for the custodians, don’t you?”

Kat nodded. “Good enough.”

Better than expected, in fact. Maxin’s eyes held a wary respect. Custodians weren’t the only ones with a hierarchy, and between winning the fight and pulling together the desperate escape attempt, Kat had elevated herself. At the very least, Maxin understood that they needed the numbers. So did Yali, otherwise she’d never have set Trajian free – something Kat had left entirely up to her.

Turning her back on the rest of the group, she tucked her hands into her chest so only Yali could read them. ||Is Trajian going to be a problem?||

Yali’s lips thinned to a bloodless slash, but she nodded. ||I’ll be fine.||

||Time to work your magic,|| said Kat, careful to sign alongside the words.

Yali relaxed enough to offer a stagey bow and hurried to the companionway door.

“You’re sure that hestic won’t be screaming?” asked Jaîna.

Kat wasn’t at all sure. Everything was so different up in the Deadwinds. Her tattoo hummed like a thing alive, but there were so many voices – so many presences – clamouring for attention. How could she be certain of anything?

Time for a little bravado. For herself, if not the others. She drew back her left sleeve, the flames shimmering along her aetherios tattoo adding indigo to the waxy yellow light of the prison hold’s feeble lumani.

“How do you think I got into Xanathros Alabastra?” Careful to leave her recent soul-glyphs untouched, she set the remaining designs twisting and curling like snakes. “Get me to the helmic, and I’ll take the ship wherever we want to go.”

She glared defiance, aware of a fragility independent from thin rations and her growing litany of aches and pains. She’d never put her tattoo – and by extension, herself – on display before. Only her father and Azra had ever seen anything approaching the truth of it. There was a nakedness – a vulnerability – she didn’t care for at all. But secrets mattered nothing to the dead. If she wanted to stay among the living, she needed to spend them for whatever advantage they brought.

The companionway door creaked inward. The hestic remained sleeping.

“Believe me now?” asked Kat.

Trajian clapped her on the shoulder and bounded for the door, Anqo close behind.

Kat joined them at the mouth of the canvas awning. Motes of pinkish and purplish light danced across the empty stockade. Barely visible in the day, they gusted across the starboard bow and out into the cloudless night beyond the port bulwark – proof that the Mornwake had ridden the Deadwinds’ gentle clockwise vortex as far as it could, and now steered inwards to Zariqaz. They brought welcome warmth amid the otherwise bitter cold.

Trajian peered out. “Ain’t good,” he muttered, his words almost lost in the soft creak of sail and rigging. “Ain’t skrelling good at all.”

He wasn’t looking towards the for’ard gate and the lantern of a lone patrolling custodian, but out over the port side bulwark.

“What isn’t?” hissed Kat.

“Mistfall.”

Anqo clasped threaded fingers to his chest in the form of the benevolent flame.

Taking a moment to reassure herself that the sentry wasn’t looking in their direction, Kat leaned out to see for herself. In the middle distance, what should have been clear skies were suffused with billowing white, shot through with shimmering, dancing greens.

At the bottom of the companionway, Jaîna snorted. “It’s probably just cloud.”

“Then why’s it moving against the wind?”

Beyond the gate, the sentry stamped his feet and headed away towards the forecastle, where two flights of stairs led first to a narrow raised deck and the doors to the prow cabins, and then to the flat, blunted triangle of the beak head, upon which a second lonely sailrider stood watch, lantern in hand.

Kat crouched beside Trajian, her eyes on the distant veil. It was inching steadily closer. That clinched it, even more than the flickering Aurora Eternis. “It changes nothing.”

“Nothing?” said Anqo. “It’ll swallow us up, like it did Athenoch when the torch houses failed.”

“You think the watch officer doesn’t see it?” Kat retorted. “That mist bank could be fifty miles away. It’s not like there are landmarks up here to judge distance.”

Though even if it was fifty miles out, she hoped the torch houses were alight far below, their indigo flames burning the mist from the air, otherwise more settlements would suffer. The mist was hungriest at Khalad’s border, inching ever inwards with each passing year, but when the Aurora Eternis shone, it manifested further inland, swallowing farms, mines… even cities. It seldom lingered, rolling back into nothingness and leaving structures intact but emptied of the people caught in its path. For all that it was known as Mistfall, Kat’s father had likened the Veil to a closing fist, as if some malign presence desired nothing more than to reach out and claim a piece of the kingdom, if only for a few short hours.

Out on the border was another matter. There, what the Veil stole, it kept.

Kat eased out from the awning and peered aft. Once again, a bobbing lantern betrayed a patrolling custodian, though this one was all the way to the rear of the ship, tucked in the lee side of the aftercastle stairway and to all appearances sleeping upright.

The aftercastle itself comprised three enclosed levels to the forecastle’s two, lending the ship a lopsided crescent profile. The bottom level – befitting the largest – housed staterooms for Bascari family members. As none were aboard, they’d likely be empty. Officers’ cabins occupied the second, and the wheelhouse the third. The bitter cold of the Deadwinds’ altitude had convinced shipwrights to enclose the traditional afterdeck to spare the pilot freezing at his post. No lanternlight showed behind the wheelhouse’s large oval window – the better to protect the pilot’s night vision.

Kat ducked back inside and beckoned to Yali, waiting expectantly at the foot of the companionway. ||Can you spring the gates without being seen?|| She made the signs expansive, reducing the gloom’s uncertainty as best she could.

A smile shone back. ||What a question to ask.||

Yali climbed the companionway with grace that put Kat’s faltering ascent to shame and slipped out into the night, a shadow among shadows.

Anqo shook his head and eyed the foot of the companionway. “Bad luck to be out beneath the aurora.”

Stomach knotted, Kat willed the foredeck sentry not to turn around. He could hardly fail to spot Yali if he did. “Means most of the crew will be hiding inside. Easier for us to get around.”

“She’s right.” The unexpected support came from Maxin, his knuckles white as he gripped the companionway’s brass rail. “No one’s more superstitious than a sailrider. Most of them’ll be battened down below, drunk out of their wits. We move fast, we can do this.”

“And we kill anyone who gets in our way, is that it?” asked Jaîna, still standing in the hold’s doorway.

Trajian shrugged. “Them or us, isn’t it? I don’t see we’ve much choice.”

“I’m thinking we split into two groups,” said Maxin.

“Not a chance,” growled Trajian. “We stick together.”

Yali slipped the latch on the for’ard gate and offered a thumbs-up. Kat quietly nodded her approval. Skerrik would have taken twice as long to get the job done.

||Now the other. Be careful.|| She waited until Yali was heading towards the rear gate before switching her attention to the hushed argument between Trajian and Maxin.

“Think it through. It’s not enough to take the wheelhouse, not if they send a heraldic speeding to Zariqaz.” Maxin nodded at the forecastle. “They’re all up there.”

Kat swore under her breath. She’d not considered that angle. A heraldic could carry word of the hijacking to Zariqaz in a few short hours. The royal guard’s dhows were sleeker and faster than the lumbering Mornwake. They’d be run down long before they reached anywhere worth mentioning, and abandoning ship in the wilderness between cities didn’t appeal – especially with Mistfall under way. “You’re full of surprises.”

He shrugged. “Used to be a sailrider, didn’t I? Back during that nasty little trade war between Bascari and Jovîna. Boarded a Jovîna sky-barge out by Azzacrag, put the whole crew to fire and steel.” He shook his head with gusto. “Good times.”

Yali crouched at the awning entrance. ||All done.|| Her thin smile flickered only a little when her eyes touched on Trajian. ||Admit it, you’re impressed.||

Away on the foredeck, the lantern bobbed closer. Kat pulled Yali deeper into the awning’s cover. ||You know what a heraldic prism looks like?|| she asked Maxin, careful to sign the words in Simah for Yali’s benefit.

“Yeah.” He held out a hand roughly a foot above the step on which he stood. “Five-sided pyramid, this high.”

“Then that’s your job,” Kat replied. “Take Jaîna and Anqo. Keep it quiet. We’ll handle the wheelhouse. Then we go deck to deck. Make sure the ship stays in our hands.”

Trajian scowled. “Who put you in skrelling charge?”

She met his gaze unblinking. “If you think you can steer this ship without me, just say so. I’ll watch. With bated breath.”

“She did get us out of the hold, Trajian,” Jaîna murmured from below. “Now’s not the time to argue.”

Maxin nodded. “That it ain’t. Come on, Anqo. The lady wants something smashed.”

“Wait!” hissed Kat. “I need time to…”

They were already gone.

Fifteen

Cursing under her breath, Kat rounded the awning and made for the stockade’s aft gate, all the while begging Nyssa that the guard at the aftercastle wouldn’t stir from his slumbers.

With every loping step, she expected a warning cry to split the air. When nothing came, she was certain the alarm would sound as soon as she slipped through the gate. Or when she passed the second canvas awning that led down to the crew hold and gun deck for the Mornwake’s six paltry shrieker cannons. But there was only the creak and sigh of the ship, and the whisper of footsteps behind.

She was three paces from the starboard stairway and the sleeping custodian when a sailrider stepped from the shadows of the port side steps.

He stumbled backwards, eyes wide, a bobbing throat the precursor to disaster.

Trajian pounced and bore him to the ground. His meaty hands seized the man’s head in both hands and struck a dull chime against the deck. The sailrider went limp, eyes glassy and blood pooling beneath his head.

“What—?” Jolted awake, the custodian pushed away from the stairs, reaching for a sheathed dagger.

Kat drove her bunched fist deep into his belly. His shoulder struck the underside of the stairs and the dagger skittered away across the deck. She seized a double fistful of his robes and bore him backwards into the forest of motic-driven winches and belaying pins that secured the mizzenmast rigging to the starboard bulwark.

The custodian snarled, the sound made metallic by the expressionless silver mask. A jerk of his knee set Kat staggering. A punch to her ribs drove her back. Grip broken, she grabbed at the rigging for support. The custodian reached for his scimitar…

And went limp as Yali thrust the jade-pommelled dagger between his ribs.

He sagged against the bulwark with a rattling sigh, hands numbly, reflexively grasping at anything that might support rubbery legs. Yali stared down at her trembling hands, the left locked over the right about the dagger’s grips, and blood welling over both.

“Let me.” The dagger ripped free of its fleshy prison as Trajian pulled Yali aside. Seemingly without effort, he tipped the twitching custodian high over the bulwark and into the open skies.

He rounded on Yali, his expression and tone murderous. “Like I said. Them or us. Toughen up, go back to your cage, or I’ll put you over the side as well.”

Yali had eyes only for the bloody dagger in her hands.

One hand pressed to aching ribs, Kat pushed away from the rigging and stepped between them, finger extended in warning. “Leave her be.” She glanced at Yali, unsure whether to pity or resent her. “We’re all in this together.”

“Fine.” Trajian sneered and stepped away, backing down as Kat had known he would. Bullies always did. Whatever rough humour he pretended, something nasty oozed beneath the surface. Trouble for the future, but for now they were all in it together. Battered as she was – and with Yali undependable – Kat didn’t rate her chances of taking the wheelhouse without him.

||Are you good?|| she signed.

At last Yali glanced up, her shoulders shaking in a way that had nothing to do with the cold. With obvious effort, she unlocked her hands and scraped them clean on the rigging. Kat fancied she glimpsed a measure of innocence leave Yali’s eyes. She supposed that was how she herself must have looked to Azra at their initial encounter. ||My first time.||

There was no trace of the easy confidence of the girl who’d proclaimed herself “the finest lock charmer in Khalad”. Thievery and thuggery didn’t go hand in hand for everyone.

Kat glanced back along the deck. Maxin, Jaîna and Anqo had reached the forecastle hatchway. No sign of the patrolling custodian. Likely, he’d gone over the side as well. ||It gets easier.||

The wan smile returned. ||I hope not.||

“Someone’s coming,” hissed Trajian.

Kat spun about to see a dark figure silhouetted against the pale canvas of the crew hold awning. “Hide!”

She ducked behind the starboard aftercastle stairs as Yali and Trajian dragged the dead sailrider into the shelter of the port side steps. The custodian, happily oblivious, continued across the deck towards the port side stairway with a familiar unhurried gait. Delk. Hooded and masked, but no shrieker.

Kat edged between the starboard stairs and the outer bulwark, heading aft. In daylight, she’d have been exposed, but at night Delk’s mask all but destroyed any hope of peripheral vision.

He breezed past her, all the while unaware of her circling behind him.

He pulled up short at the sailrider’s pooled blood. Kat locked a forearm across his throat. “Make a sound and you’re dead.”

She groped for the dagger scabbarded at his waist.

Delk froze as she slipped the tip under the rim of his mask to prick at his throat. “You do know this is a very bad idea?”

Kat twitched the dagger’s point a hair deeper. “I said not a sound.”

Trajian peeled away from the shadowed stairs and made a rough search of Delk’s robes. A handful of dinars vanished into his pocket. The scimitar, he kept. His fist bunched the cloth at Delk’s throat. “Time to go over the side.”

“No,” snapped Kat. “Hold him.”

She pushed Delk forward into his keeping. Trajian grinned like a wolf and twisted Delk’s right arm up between his shoulder blades. “Hush now,” he murmured. “Something might get broken.”

Kat glanced back along the deck. The lookout’s lantern still bobbed atop the forecastle beak head, its bearer none the wiser as to events to his rear. The sailrider stationed on the aftercastle couldn’t see down to where they were.

She yanked Delk’s mask clear. From his voice and manner, she’d pictured a face well into middle age or perhaps beyond, the gruffness and unconcern come with long years in custodium service. Instead, his pale skin bore the creases of a man still in his late thirties, lantern-jawed and with a shock of tousled black hair above brown eyes that seemed far more alert without the mask to invite assumptions.

“Ow.” He sounded more aggrieved than afraid.

“Quiet.” Kat laid her dagger’s flat against his neck. “How many in the wheelhouse?”

Delk narrowed his left eye. “You told me to be quiet.” He hissed in pain as Trajian growled and hitched his wrist a half-inch higher. “Easy. Easy. Has he been fed? He seems short-tempered.”

“Answer the question,” snapped Kat.

Delk’s eyes met hers. Kat glared back, daring him to read intent in her expression. The corner of his mouth twitched. “Captain Shandîr and Nesca. You remember Nesca?”

“Where’s Vashrîq?”

“Down below. Snap inspection. Why do you think I’m up here?”

Kat peered into his eyes, searching for a lie. Instinct told her something was off about the whole situation, but not what. Delk could be lying, but she couldn’t see how that altered the plan. It all came down to timing. And luck, of course.

“Fine.” She stepped back and peered up the port side stairs. Like those to starboard, they curled out over the bow as they rose to meet the wheelhouse, the better not to obstruct the oval window. ||We’ll go in from both sides. Trajian and Yali to starboard, me to port.||

She signed as she spoke, and received a brief nod of confirmation from Yali.

“I really wouldn’t do that—”

Delk fell silent as Kat set the dagger at his throat. A bright bead of blood trickled away down his neck.

He scrambled to explain. “There’s a hestic above each door. No sentry crest, the prisms are hidden behind the timbers. You cross the threshold and they’ll start screaming.”

Uncertain how well Yali could lip-read in the near darkness, Kat signed a rough one-handed translation of his words, the details lost in the necessary imprecision. ||Why tell us?||

Delk jerked his head at Trajian. “Am I or am I not going in first? I don’t fancy getting caught in the crossfire. Nesca’s trigger-happy.”

So Nesca had a shrieker? Kat filed that piece of information away and reached into the spirit world. It took a solid ten-count to sift through the army of motics that kept the Mornwake a going concern, but in the corner of her mind she sensed the hestics’ shadow.

She fixed Delk with a frosty glare. “I’ll handle it.”

“And if you can’t?” asked Trajian.

“Like he said: he’s going in first.”

Leaving Delk in Trajian’s uncertain care, Kat crept low beneath the windows to the officers’ cabins and continued up to the narrow landing beside the wheelhouse hatchway. She kept her gaze studiously inboard – the last thing she needed was an attack of vertigo. Even so, her thoughts returned to the forecastle. Had Maxin succeeded? Were they all dead? The only thing Kat knew for certain was that no alarm had been raised.

Discarding the thought as unproductive, she turned her attention to the hestics above the wheelhouse hatchways. Fortunately, unravelling the appropriate glyph came easily enough. The hestics were so bored they practically screamed their desire through the spirit realm. Within moments, they were sleeping.

She gripped the brass handle and eased open the tall hatchway. She had a brief impression of a large, dark room with two brass-plated ship’s wheels – the lateral wheel to control the rudder sails and the smaller pitching wheel set within its circumference to govern the smaller dive sails rigged to the hull at stern and bow – set on a single pillar rising beneath the for’ard window. A broad, chart-strewn table stood at its centre, and quartered windows to the rear.

The opposite hatch crashed back and Delk shot into the wheelhouse, propelled by Trajian’s hidden hand. Nesca, standing a little behind the ship’s wheels, spun about. Her shrieker came clear of its holster. Delk crashed into her. The two went down in a tangle of arms and legs, the shrieker skidding under the table.

Skirting the table, Kat lunged for Captain Shandîr – in his high-collared coat he could have been no one else. Trajian reached him first.

Shandîr’s weather-worn face twisted in outrage. “What…?”

Trajian’s borrowed scimitar flashed out. Shandîr fell to the deck, gurgling and twitching.

“Trajian!” snapped Kat. “We needed him!”

Trajian spat on the deck and hauled Delk upright. “Nah. Just his glyph, right? That’s how it… Stop her!”

Nesca shoved an unresisting Yali aside from the port door and ran out into the night.

“Kiasta,” Kat swore. “We’re in it now.” She was surprised they’d made it that far.

Trajian flung Delk in Kat’s direction and bore down on Yali. “Deadweight trallock! Told you I’d throw you over the side!”

“Trajian!” Her dagger at Delk’s throat, Kat filled her voice with every scrap of authority she could muster. Halfway convincing, which was halfway better than she felt. “Help me with Shandîr or go after Nesca, but leave her alone.”

He raised the bloodied tip of the scimitar level with Yali’s face. She shrank away, throat bobbing.

“We don’t have time to quarrel,” Kat ground out. “Get Shandîr turned over.”

“Why?”

“Because like you said, I need to see his glyph.” She paused. A little flattery worked wonders with Trajian’s sort. “You’re stronger than I am.”

He grunted. “Fine.” He bared his teeth at Yali. “Not worth the skrelling effort anyway.”

Kat marched Delk over to Yali. “We don’t need trouble out of this one. See if there’s anything we can use in those chests.”

“Quicker to cut his throat,” said Trajian.

Kat sighed. “Better to keep him as a hostage, don’t you think?”

Yali prised open the first chest and brandished a short length of rope.

“That’ll do.” Kat leaned in close to Delk’s ear and forced him down. “Don’t you give me any trouble.”

He didn’t, and in moments she had him trussed hand and foot.

||Yali? I need you to keep watch. Can you do that?||

Yali glanced away. ||Yes… Of course.||

“Trajian, how are you getting on with Shandîr?”

“Ready when you are.” Trajian had not only turned Shandîr over, he’d peeled back the dead captain’s left sleeve to expose his glyph.

Kat nodded her approval. “Keep an eye on our guest, would you?”

Trajian shot her a baleful look that promised trouble to come – a bully could be pushed only so far before he snapped – but he obeyed. Kat knelt beside Shandîr’s corpse. His tattoo was a simple enough design, but without it the Mornwake’s helmic would neither accept a new course nor unbolt the ship’s twin wheels to allow manual correction of rudder and pinion sails. Nor would it relay the necessary commands to the winch motics to let out or furl sail as the course warranted. Kat herself had only the haziest idea of how to guide the ship. With the helmic under her control, however, she could just bring the Mornwake onto a new heading and let the ifrît do the rest.

Yali patted her urgently on the shoulder and pointed out through the oval window to where a foursome of sailriders hurried towards the aftercastle, lanterns aloft. Vashrîq came behind, a second custodian – Nesca, perhaps? – at his side. Trying to rush the wheelhouse. Brutally practical, especially as Nesca would have told Vashrîq just how pitiable an obstacle Yali would be in an assault. Moreover, each of the sailriders held a scimitar, and Kat’s small band had only a pair of daggers and a single sword to their name.

Or almost so.

“Trajian, if they reach the stairs, the starboard hatch is yours.” Kat glanced from Delk to Yali. ||Make sure he doesn’t cause any trouble.||

An easy request to make. Kat was increasingly aware that Delk placed high value on his skin, and the intactness thereof.

“What about the other hatch?” rumbled Trajian.

“I’ll handle it.”

Ducking under the table, Kat reclaimed Nesca’s shrieker. Its ifrît fought at first, but survival was a great motivator. On the fifth attempt, she had twisted a portion of her aetherios tattoo into something close enough to the proper glyph that she felt the prism hum its compliance.

She stepped out onto the port side landing, aimed down the sights as best she could, and squeezed the trigger.

As at Xanathros Alabastra, her aim was atrocious, but the sailriders weren’t to know that. Warned by the telltale shriek of discharge, they scattered from the lower stairway. The bolt of flame screamed past them and gouged a filthy black scorch mark across three steps. A second shot sent them scurrying for the safety of the quarterdeck’s shadow.

Pleased with herself, Kat stepped back inside. “They seem to have lost their enthusiasm.”

“For now,” said Trajian. “Let me have the shrieker. I’ll settle them.”

“It won’t work for you,” said Kat, glad it was true. “But as long as Vashrîq’s looking at us, he’s not looking for the others. We can still make this work.”

Over in the corner, Delk braced his bound hands against the deck and hitched himself into a sitting position. “I hate to be carnival rain, but Vashrîq won’t stand by and do nothing.”

Trajian rounded on him. “Shut up!”

Delk attempted a shrug. “Or what? You’ll kill me? You keep this up, you’ll be right on my heels. Surrender, and maybe this’ll work out.”

Kat snorted mirthlessly. “What? Live today and die tomorrow? What’s the point in that?”

“You’d be surprised the difference a day can make.”

Yali scowled. ||Can we throw him over the side now?||

“Nice,” said Delk. “Proper little maniac, aren’t you?”

Kat ignored him. More and more there was something off about Delk, but what?

“Arvish?” Vashrîq’s shout carried through the open hatchways. “Arvish? I take it that’s you up there? Damant said there was more to you than we thought. I hate it when that old fool’s right.”

Delk arched his eyebrows in a blatant “told you so” but kept mercifully silent. Kat peered through the oval window but made out nothing but vague shapes in the mote-strewn darkness.

“Arvish?” Vashrîq called again. “You really do want to talk to me.”

Kat crossed to the port side hatch. The details on the main deck remained hazy. Shape, but of what or who remained a mystery. “What do you want, Vashrîq?”

He stepped from shadows at the foot of the port side stairway, the hooded lantern in his upraised hand flooding the aftercastle in waxy orange light. He wore an insufferable, calculating smile in place of a mask.

Kat sheltered behind the hatchway coaming and levelled her shrieker. “That’s close enough.”

Vashrîq edged back, his empty hand raised in conciliation. “No one else has to die.”

“Funny,” Kat replied. “You don’t seem the sort to care about sending your underlings into harm’s way.”

“Ah.” Vashrîq cocked his head, goatee twisting as the smile inched wider. “I’m not. But you misunderstand.”

He set his lantern down. Others blazed to life on the main deck, revealing a semicircle of sailriders and custodians standing guard over a dozen kneeling figures, their bound hands resting on their knees. Kat’s erstwhile fellow prisoners, Jaîna, Maxin and Anqo among them.

So they’d been taken after all.

Vashrîq drew his shrieker and fired in a single smooth motion. Anqo dropped without a sound.

“You have three minutes to choose, Arvish,” shouted Vashrîq. “Then it’s the woman. Then it’ll be someone else. One way or another, this’ll be done within a half-hour. How it ends is up to you.”

Kat nearly shot him then and there. Might have done so if not for the creeping certainty that she’d as much chance of hitting one of the prisoners as she did Vashrîq. More, even. So instead she gritted her teeth and returned inside.

||You heard?|| she said softly.

Yali nodded.

Trajian gave a harsh bark of laughter. “So what? Let him kill the trallock. Let him kill them all. Doesn’t change anything. Might as well make him work for it.”

Yali glared at him in disgust.

“Right caring soul you are,” said Kat.

“Never claimed otherwise.”

She stared blankly out of the window. Doesn’t change anything. Trajian was right, but also dead wrong. Sure, in the long run they were all dead, but if she let Vashrîq murder Jaîna and the others, her finger was on the trigger alongside his. Had their positions been reversed, she doubted Vashrîq would have cared. Men like him never did.

Yali kicked Delk. ||Can we trade this one?||

Delk laughed. “You think Vashrîq gives a fig about me?”

“Two minutes, Arvish!” shouted Vashrîq.

What would Azra have done? Something clever, no doubt, but Kat wasn’t feeling clever at that moment. Tired, hungry and bruised, yes, but not clever. The more she thought about it, the deeper and more hopeless the spiral grew.

||We should give up,|| said Yali. ||What else can they do to us?||

Trajian spat. “Corpse rot to what you think!”

Kat frowned. So he did know Simah? That he refused to use it around Yali spoke volumes.

||Stuff it!|| said Yali. ||You want to be a big man, Vashrîq’s down there. Show him!||

“One minute!” Vashrîq shouted.

So easy to stand there and do nothing. They were strangers all. But Kat realised she couldn’t let even strangers die in her place – even if it only brought the clock forward a couple of days. Azra would never have made that sacrifice, and so nor could she.

With a jerk of her arm she sent the shrieker arcing out of the port side hatch and over the side.

“We’re coming down!” she called, her voice cracking.

Trajian rounded on her. “What? I’m not going anywhere!”

She met his snarl with a weary frown. “Think it through. With the others captured, there are only three of us. Vashrîq can sweep us away whenever he feels like it. I’d rather live to spit on the Golden Stair, wouldn’t you?” Or at least hope for another chance. While she lived, there was hope.

Without waiting for an answer, she left by the port side hatch, a sour taste crowding the back of her throat. She took the steps as slowly as she dared, eking out surrender in the hope it might offer a veneer of triumph. No other kind of victory was at hand. The sailriders all held swords, and each of the four custodians had a shrieker levelled at their prisoners.

She’d rolled the dice and lost. Simple as that.

A sailrider bound her hands and pushed her down between Maxin and Jaîna.

Maxin snorted. “We tried.”

Kat looked up at the wheelhouse as Trajian and Yali descended, the former like a thundercloud fit to burst and the latter with timorous dignity. “What happened?”

Jaîna scowled.

“Vashrîq was already there,” Maxin replied darkly.

“Waiting for you?”

“No. That’s the funny thing. Someone had already sent one heraldic, smashed two others.” He smiled without mirth. “Vashrîq wasn’t—”

A custodian brought his shrieker’s butt down on the back of Maxin’s head. “Quiet!”

Maxin jerked and fell silent, leaving Kat to wonder at his words. The Mornwake had a saboteur? Delk. Given his peculiar behaviour, it had to be. But why? And to what purpose?

“Get them up! Over to the port bow. Face them outward!” Vashrîq stepped behind Kat and yanked her upright. “Not you, Arvish. You’re staying with me.”

The sailriders pulled the convicts into place against the bulwark, facing the billowing wall of mist that now seemed close enough to touch. Shadows pulsed within, the heart of the cloud bleak as Kat’s own mood. The custodians hung back, an ominous line of black robes and silver masks.

Vashrîq dragged Kat to the sternmost end of that line. “Firing party, stand ready.”

“What?” An icy trickle in her heart, Kat braced her feet against the deck and fought to pull free. “No!”

Vashrîq kicked her legs away and ground the muzzle of his shrieker against the back of her head. “My mistress was very clear,” he said softly. “You’re to die a public death. The rest don’t matter, and you’ve caused enough damage already.”

“Your captain’s dead,” Kat said through gritted teeth. “I’m the only one who can pilot this ship to Zariqaz. You kill any of them and we’ll all drift around up here for ever.”

“I have the first officer safe below-decks. Your cooperation doesn’t factor into it.” Vashrîq raised his voice. “Fire on my command. And do try to make it professional.”

The custodians levelled their shriekers.

Away off the port bow, the Veil boiled apart and a vast shadow burst from its depths.

Sixteen

The battered, hull-blackened dhow burst from the mists, vapour trailing from its lateen-rigged sails. Nothing returned from beyond the Veil… but somehow this ship had.

If it were a vessel of war, it was one perennially on the losing side, its sails scorched and pocked, its once-sleek timbers scarred. Its gun ports were closed, offering no hint of a shrieker cannon’s brass barrel. A score of dark figures stood on its deck – barely half the crew common to a vessel of that size, and a fraction of that it might carry into open battle.

Silence reigned across the Mornwake, custodians, sailriders and convicts staring aghast at the impossible. Kat forgot the shrieker grinding into the back of her skull, her blood cold as she recalled childhood tales of vanished ships, crewed by hollow-souled cadavers that didn’t know how to die.

A sailrider grunted and fell to one knee, a black-fletched quarrel in his shoulder. Another quarrel thunked into the quarterdeck. Shriekers blazed as custodians made a doomed attempt to return fire, their shots fading into flaming fragments halfway across the fifty-foot gap between the two vessels.

“Man the guns!” Vashrîq bellowed, urgency shot through with fear. “Get Solda up here! We need someone at the helm!”

Three sailriders ran for the aft awning. One fell screaming, a quarrel in his back. The dhow’s oblique approach ate up the empty Cloudsea, the angle between the two vessels shallowing as the pilot brought it broadside to broadside. Still its gun ports remained closed. More quarrels swept across the bow. A lantern shattered, plunging a patch of deck into darkness. A custodian collapsed, blood pooling beneath. To Kat’s front, a convict scrambled to his feet and fled for the aftercastle. Vashrîq shot him down.

Kat gathered to spring. Better to take her chances with the hollow dead than Vashrîq’s tender mercies. She barely had one knee beneath her when he rammed the shrieker’s muzzle against her head once more.

“Don’t even think about it,” he said, the fear gone.

His composure was in short supply elsewhere. Custodians and sailriders scrambled for whatever cover they could find. The first shrieker-fire found its range, blasting splinters from the dhow’s timbers and hurling a dark figure backwards from its bulwark. But the dhow’s pilot had planned its approach well, keeping the sleeker vessel at fractionally higher altitude than the masterless Mornwake, the tyranny of geometry doubling the effectiveness of the dhow’s bulwark while leaving the carrack’s defenders clinging to ineffectual cover.

Convicts crawled into the lee of the port side bulwark. Yali lay on her side, head buried in her hands. Maxin cowered on knees and elbows, eyes glinting beneath a swollen brow as he sought opportunity in the chaos.

Only Vashrîq stood tall, contemptuous of danger. Kat wouldn’t have minded – it was as likely a way as any of ridding herself of the man – but she was right in the open along with him.

A quarrel buried itself in the deck by her right knee. “Is this really how you want to die?”

A raking blow from the shrieker’s muzzle was Vashrîq’s only reply.

The dhow’s oblique angle shallowed to nothing, the two vessels bow to bow and scarce fifteen yards apart. Close enough even in the dark for Kat to see the gouges in its hull, the ash black sloppily painted over gold and scarlet. Its figurehead – once a likeness of King Caradan Diar in stylised robes – was missing its head. The mass at the dhow’s bulwark resolved itself into individuals. No uniforms, just a motley array of skelders’ leathers and battered lamellar. All save a single pale, whitish-blue figure high on the aftercastle’s open quarterdeck, the Deadwinds plucking at jet-black hair that shone with the glimmering light of captive stars, and at the skirts of a diaphanous dress.

Kat gaped. No. It couldn’t be…

The deck jolted, accompanied by the wailing, falling-tree crackle of the Mornwake’s outrigger and pinion sails snapping against the dhow’s hull. Grapnels arced out from the dhow’s upper deck, snaring rigging and bulwark. Unseen hands pulled the lines taut.

Inch by inch, the ships drew closer.

Vashrîq glanced towards the gun deck companionway. “What’s taking those fools so long?” he growled.

As if in answer, an ear-splitting scream shuddered the deck. Flame streaked away from below the port bow and slammed into the dhow’s flank. Hull planking shattered along its starboard keel, shimmering gases wailing into the Deadwinds as a buoyancy tank ruptured. The dhow shuddered and sank to starboard, deck pitching downward towards the Mornwake.

The hulls met with a sound like a dying forest. A broken spar pinwheeled from its shattered mooring and swept a luckless convict and his erstwhile sailrider guard into Nyssa’s embrace.

Boarders swept down from the dhow’s bulwark, some on grapnel lines, others chancing the drop. A woman with unbound ash-white hair landed from a whirling corkscrew leap a half-dozen paces in front of Kat. Little of her face was visible between her broad-brimmed hat and a scarf wound about her nose and mouth. Her right hand held a long, slender sword across her shoulders, the back edge of its blade resting against the collar of her long, tattered coat. With her left, she raised a finger to caution two sailriders who closed on her, scimitars drawn.

“Are you sure you wish to go through with this?” Her clipped, guttural accent carried effortlessly over the chime of steel and spreading screams.

The nearer sailrider flung himself forward, scimitar slashing at her head.

The woman spun anticlockwise, dropping to a crouch in the same smooth movement. As the sailrider’s scimitar cut a wicked arc high about her head, the woman shrugged her sword off her shoulders and sliced at the back of his legs. Hamstrung and screaming, he toppled. A hand pressed to the crown of her hat the only concession to balance, the woman rose and stabbed down to end his screams.

She pulled the blade free.

“Next.”

No mockery. No question. Not even triumph. Just the weariness of a woman reading for the hundredth time a book she’d never much cared for in the first place.

Vashrîq growled. The pressure of his shrieker vanished from Kat’s head. She flung herself backwards and slammed into his knees. His shrieker flared, the shot snatching at the tails of the woman’s coat instead of turning her chest to fire.

Snarling, he crashed the weapon’s butt down on Kat’s head and ran for the crew hold.

Blinking to clear a ringing head, Kat stumbled to her feet. The odds against the sailriders and custodians, already steep, worsened further as the surviving convicts joined the battle. Roaring, Trajian broke from the cover of the bulwark and barged a custodian from her feet, laying about the woman with his bound hands. Maxin, one shoulder burned and bleeding from a shrieker’s graze, rammed a sailrider against the mainmast with the other.

The battle was done in all but name. Did Vashrîq really think he could escape?

No. He’d gone for the cannons.

Urging aching, weary limbs to motion, Kat ran for the crew hold.

Trusting to her grip on the rail to keep her upright, she took the companionway stairs two at a time. With the ships bound together and the dhow already part ruptured, a cannon shot was the counsel of loser’s spite. The quickest way to win a battle on the Cloudsea was to breach the enemy’s buoyancy tanks before they breached yours. But with the two ships now bound together and gravity playing no favourites, loss of buoyancy for one was death for all.

Her foot snagged two steps from the bottom. Momentum tore her hand from the rail. She tumbled the rest of the way, elbows and knees cracking against the deck.

A shrieker shot blazed out of the lumani-lit gloom and drove splinters from the wall above her head. Away amidships, beyond tightly ordered hammocks and sea chests, Vashrîq tore his gaze from Kat to vent his fury elsewhere.

“Get it loaded! Now!”

Another shot drove Kat into the questionable cover of the doorway. She glimpsed two sailriders struggling to block-and-tackle a blackened and spent shrieker prism from the cannon’s breach – they were seldom good for more than one shot. Easily a three-person job at the best of times, but Vashrîq didn’t seem interested in helping.

As his next shrieker shot drove splinters from the door frame, the prism at last swung clear. The sailriders busied themselves with another, unspoilt prism from the adjoining ready rack. Good for one shot only, but one shot might be all it took.

Kat eyeballed the distance. Only ten yards, but without a scrap of useful cover and Vashrîq trigger-happy at the other end, it was a long ten yards. She glanced up at the flickering lumani of the crew deck. One chance.

“You’ll drag us all to our deaths,” she shouted.

“I know my duty!”

Hunching as low behind the door frame’s questionable cover as she could, Kat reached out to the lumani burning above Vashrîq’s head. The spirit world rushed in. At that distance, the ifrît barely registered her presence and burbled happily away, unaware of anything more than the need to share the bounty of its light.

Kat winced as a hot, sharp sensation lanced through the spirit world’s grey and hunkered down further still. At last the ifrît sensed her. At once it took affront at her intent to douse its light, but with her tattoo racing with the power of the Deadwinds, she’d no need of the spirit’s approval nor a glyph to command it. As she had at Javar’s mansion a lifetime ago, she simply fed the lumani more power than it could hope to contain.

With a last indignant wail, it detonated.

Kat was on her feet before the last echo faded. Knees bent and head low, she plunged into the darkness.

A shot shrieked over her head and set a hammock alight, the backwash briefly framing Vashrîq’s snarling rictus and a sailrider’s startled frown. Kat veered left.

A second, stray shot lit the darkness and buried itself in the chest of a sailrider. Lowering her shoulder, Kat rammed the survivor into the cannon’s brass flank and sprang at Vashrîq, bearing him to the ground before he could loose a third.

She swatted aside his flailing hand and slammed her bound fists down into his face. Revelling in the grunt of pain, she did it again and again, not caring that he had gone still.

Lungs burning, she raised her fists for the fourth time.

A hand grabbed her shoulder. “I think he’s out of it, don’t you?”

She pulled away and stumbled to her feet. As her eyes adjusted to the gloom, she made out a rugged, clean-shaven face, its strong olive brow tanned by the elements and its aquiline nose handsome despite the encroaching jowls of middle age and the grey slivers creeping into the tight curls of his dark brown hair. For all the gentle humour in his tone, there was none in his calm, confident expression. Merely expectation. He wore a simple black tunic, kin to an overseer’s robes in its stark lines.

Kat waved her bound hands at the cannon and the sailrider cowering beside it. “He was about to…” She swayed, dizzy with too much exertion on too little food and water.

The man nodded and slit the ropes about her wrists. “I know. I’m grateful, that old hulk’s barely holding together as it is. My name’s Vallant. Bashar Vallant. Perhaps you’ve heard of me?” He paused. The smile tugging at his lips might have been self-effacing, but for the prideful undercurrent. “We’ll talk later. There’s a lot to do.”

Seventeen

The battle was over by the time Kat returned to the main deck, the dead piled up in the stockade and the handful of surviving sailriders and custodians trussed in a circle about the mainmast. Vashrîq was slumped unconscious, blood crusting his goatee. Vallant’s crew bustled back and forth as they laboured to strip the Mornwake of everything of value. One grinned and thrust an open bottle into Kat’s hand before vanishing below-decks.

Skirting the ring of captives, Kat leaned against the starboard bulwark, took a glug and almost gagged on the mouthful of rich, full-bodied red wine. Swallowing hastily, she peered again at her prize, and recognised the stamp of the Castellid winery. Countess Rashace had possessed a cellar full of such bottles, each worth five years of the wage she’d paid Kat’s father.

Kat took another glug. This one tasted sweeter.

On the foredeck, the cargo hatch was open to the brightening skies. A knot of mismatched figures worked a simple jib winch to hoist crates out of the stowage hold and aboard the dhow’s tilted deck. Nondescript skelders, all save the dhow’s helmswoman, who sat on the edge of the hatchway, kicking barefoot at the air. Seeing her for the second time, Kat realised she’d made no mistake on the first. The milky bluish-white skin. Black hair more smoke than substance, glittering with captive light.

Impossible. And yet there. Just as Kat’s father had described.

“I know that look.” Delk propped himself beside her. Kat wasn’t surprised that his hands weren’t bound, nor that he had a bottle of his own. “You’ve never seen a veilkin before?”

“How could I?” she said, deadpan. “They were all wiped out.”

“I’ll be sure to tell her.” He clinked his bottle against Kat’s. “You did a pretty good job of trying to get everyone killed, you know that?”

“Just doing what comes naturally.” Privately, Kat conceded that it would have been nice if what came naturally had hurt rather less.

“A talent’s a talent,” Delk said equably.

Vallant emerged from the cargo hold and approached the winch crew. Though distance swallowed his words, there was no concealing the briskness of his gestures, nor how those to whom he spoke stood taller and straighter after his passing. All save the veilkin. She paid him no heed at all.

“That business with the heraldics,” said Kat. “That was you, wasn’t it?”

Delk nodded. “Vallant was running behind. Zephyr’s a good navigator, but the Veil… well, things never run smoothly in there. So I sent one heraldic into the mists to find him and freed the others for good measure. Only Vashrîq took it upon himself to make an inspection. Barely got out of there with my skin intact. He’d given me enough funny looks as it was.”

“Probably starting to realise you weren’t who you said you were?”

He narrowed his eyes, a gentle smile playing at the corner of his mouth. “Who told you?”

“Among other things, you’re the only custodian on the ship I’ve never seen with a shrieker. But then it wouldn’t have worked for you, would it?”

“One worked for you.”

“Ah. But then I’m special.”

He grunted non-committally. “Call me Tatterlain. Everyone else does.”

Kat grimaced. It sounded like something from a child’s fable. “What sort of name is that?”

“My sort of name.”

“And ‘Delk’?”

“Met an accident after he transferred from Oolin mine to Tyzanta’s Central Custodium.” Tatterlain shrugged. “He’ll not be missed.”

“Is Vallant keeping the ship?”

“He says not. Vashrîq and the rest are more useful as messengers.” He spread his hands wide in proclamation. “One in the eye for Lady Mirela Bascari, and it builds the legend of the great Bashar Vallant.”

“Some legend,” said Kat. “Countess Bascari has most of Tyzanta believing he’s dead.”

“Maybe that’s why he feels the need to do it? I mean, he’s not exactly…” Tatterlain broke off and shrugged. “Maybe we’re all dead and just haven’t realised?”

“I don’t think so.” Kat nodded absently, her wits already fraying from the wine’s heady embrace. “Dead would be less annoying.”

He grinned. “No argument here.”

“Where are the other prisoners?”

“Already aboard the Chainbreaker.” He nodded at the dhow. “I’ll take you.”

He set a sauntering pace across the deck, up the hastily erected gangplank and out to the Chainbreaker’s high prow, where the surviving convicts sheltered from the wind. Kat strayed close enough to the edge for a glimpse of the distant dawn-kissed plains to set her head spinning. She pinched her eyes shut. With no other frame of reference than the two ships and the wind, it was easy to forget that they weren’t stationary. Even locked in reluctant embrace, Mornwake and Chainbreaker were still dancing across the Cloudsea, if more unsteadily than before. The Veil had retreated, but mists still lingered to the west, swallowing skies and ground alike, distant enough that Kat could put fear of them from her mind.

“Don’t fall overboard now,” rumbled Maxin. “It’d spoil the mood.”

Swallowing the last of her nausea, she risked one open eye, then the other. Maxin was stony-faced, but Jaîna grinned ear to ear, as did the other surviving convicts. Everyone had a bottle. Mirela Bascari’s stocks really were taking a hammering.

“You’ve met Vallant?” asked Jaîna, her eyes shining.

“Our paths have crossed,” Kat replied, rankled by her eagerness.

“Are you impressed?”

“I haven’t seen enough to know one way or the other. Where’s Trajian?”

“Helping them pick over the corpse.” Maxin thumbed at the Mornwake. “Always hungry, that one. Me? I just want to sleep.”

Kat couldn’t blame him. Between the beating she’d doled out their first day aboard ship and the injuries – now bound – that he’d taken in the brief boarding action, Maxin was purpled and raw where he wasn’t bandaged. But still, something cold wormed its way into her heart.

“Where’s Yali?”

Jaîna frowned. “She’s about.”

“Came through all that without a scratch, if you’re worrying,” volunteered a grey-haired woman. “I think I saw her head back aboard the Mornwake.”

“You think?” Kat shook her head to clear mounting unease.

“I can go look,” said Tatterlain.

“No, I’ll go. You watch for her here.”

Already wondering why she bothered, and with no better guide than the nebulous feeling of unease, Kat picked her way back across the gangplank, one hand raised to screen the rising sun and the half-forgotten wine bottle in the other.

She began at the Mornwake’s wheelhouse, but it was empty bar Captain Shandîr’s corpse. She found no better fortune in either the officers’ cabins or the Bascari staterooms below, both of which were being stripped of every patch of cloth, portraiture and finery that Vallant’s crew could reasonably remove. In the staterooms, two women were struggling beneath the weight of an ornate wooden lectern that could have had little value save as a trophy.

“I’m looking for a girl,” said Kat. “Small, dark, uses Simah. Have you seen her?”

The first woman shook her head. “Can’t say I have. Stand clear.”

Kat left them wrestling with their ungainly prize. Little surprise Yali had gone unremarked. The quiet always went unnoticed amid confusion, and Yali was quieter than most.

Little by little, Kat’s search led her to the stockade, as much to confirm her quarry wasn’t among the dead as anything else. She shifted course for the prison hold.

And there, sitting alone in the dark behind the bars of her cage, her knees tucked into her chest and her face hidden behind a spill of chestnut hair, was Yali.

Setting the wine bottle down at the foot of the companionway, Kat approached the cage. Still seated, Yali shuffled to turn her back. The cold in her heart crystallising to icy dread, Kat tugged at the cage door.

Locked.

A muscle twitching in her cheek, she slid to her knees and tapped Yali on the shoulder.

||Who locked the door?|| She signed as slowly as she dared, hoping Yali read them well enough with her head still turned mostly away. ||Trajian?||

Yali gave an emphatic shake of the head and stared fixedly into the corner. Hunched shoulders screamed at Kat to leave, but at the same time made the very idea impossible. And the last detail… her makeshift lock charmer’s tools on the deck at her side. She could leave at any point, if she wanted.

She’d locked herself in.

Or someone else out.

||Yali. You can tell me.|| Kat was acutely aware that it wasn’t enough to know the form of Simah if she couldn’t make it carry emotion as Yali so easily did. In Daric, she knew how to implore, to convince, to lie. Here, she was lost. ||Please?||

For a long, aching moment, Yali gave no response. Then, little by little, still facing away and fingers stuttering, she replied. ||He said it was my fault we got captured.||

||Trajian?||

A faltering nod. ||He said I owed him, and told me what I could do to clear the debt.|| She gave a racking sob, the first sound Kat recalled her making. ||When I refused, he did this.||

At last, she turned. The left side of her face, from eye to jaw, was a livid bruise.

The ice in her heart hard as stone, Kat bit the inside of her cheek to stop her feelings from leaking into the cast of her eyes and jaw, and knew she failed. There were gaps in Yali’s story, but none she couldn’t fill with the evidence of her own eyes and ears.

||Vallant’s sending this ship on its way. You can’t stay here.||

Yali regarded her with luminous eyes. ||I’m safe.||

||You’ll be safe out there.||

||Don’t make promises you can’t keep.||

Kat hesitated. How long since she’d sworn she’d not get involved? And here she was, all the same. ||I don’t. Come out. Please.||

Yali unfurled from her hunch. Her fingers scrabbled to reclaim her makeshift lock charmer’s tools. Still not meeting Kat’s gaze, she reached through the bars and sprang the lock.

Kat put her arms about Yali’s thin shoulders and received in return a vicelike embrace that took her breath away.

But for all its warmth, it couldn’t melt the icy shard in her heart.

As soon as she dared, she peeled herself away. ||Go back to the Chainbreaker. Stay close to Jaîna, and if not to her then Tatterlain – I mean Delk.|| She waved away Yali’s confusion. ||He’ll explain.||

Yali frowned. ||What about you?||

Kat offered her broadest, most reassuring smile. ||I’ve something I need to do.||

Yali’s eyes narrowed, but she climbed the companionway into the rising dawn.

Kat let her smile fade. On her way out, she reclaimed the wine bottle. She’d need it. She’d also need something else. It took all of two minutes searching the Mornwake’s tiny galley to find it.

In the short while since the Chainbreaker had emerged from the mists, Trajian had made himself known to everyone on Vallant’s crew, either by sharing a joke, helping lug stolen wares, or through simple flattery. Kat wondered if he even knew he was doing it, or if the simple act of camouflage came naturally to men like him. None of his new-found comrades were privy to the rage seething beneath her polite enquiries, and they gladly directed her to the staterooms, where he and one of Vallant’s crew were rifling through furnishings already rifled twice over.

“There you are.” She slurred her words, though in truth she was stone-cold sober. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

“Yeah?” Trajian’s brow knotted. Perhaps in thought, perhaps in suspicion. “Why’s that?”

Kat raised the wine bottle, and started, pretending to notice the crewer, who’d ceased his fruitless search and was watching her with outright amusement.

“Oh…” She fluttered her eyelashes – always a weapon in Azra’s arsenal – and flashed a sly smile. “Do you think we could have some privacy?”

The crewer glanced from Kat to Trajian and back again with rather more of a suggestive leer than anything he’d yet deployed. “Sure.”

“Thank you.”

She closed the stateroom’s double doors behind him, shutting out the clamour of the deck. She ran a fingertip along the frosted glass.

“A shame they removed the drapes,” she said, with genuine regret. “Still… we’ll make do.”

“Will we?”

All trace of suspicion had gone from Trajian’s voice, allayed at least as much by the crewer’s reaction, Kat suspected, as by her less than perfect seductress routine. Granted, after a week and a half a prisoner, battered and bruised besides, she wasn’t in any state to turn anyone’s blood to fire. But you worked with what you had, and she wasn’t exactly pushing at a locked door.

She paused, the wine bottle halfway to her lips. “I suppose that remains to be seen.”

He stepped closer, a smile of his own tugging at his lips. “How much of that have you had?”

“Just the right amount.” She held it out. “I’m happy to share.”

Trajian plucked the bottle from her hand, tilted it in toast, and took a long pull. He broke off with a grimace.

Kat forced a leaping heart to stillness and laughed. “Don’t like it?” She let a little disappointment creep into her tone. “Castellid’s too sophisticated for some.”

He stared at the bottle, cogs grinding as instinct and pride did battle behind his eyes. Pride won. “I like it just fine.” He took another long pull. “Don’t reckon we’ll have privacy for ever.”

“I know.” Kat shook her head and stared at the floor. “Tell me… did you ever meet someone and you just know – you just know – where it’s going to lead? But your instincts won’t stop screaming at you to act on that feeling, even though it’ll just bring trouble.”

“Yeah, sometimes.”

The subjects of Trajian’s friendliness tend towards bad ends. Jaîna’s words found new significance.

Kat plucked the bottle from his hand. Half full when she’d entered the room, it was almost empty, and she’d taken nothing but stage sips along the way.

“I’m done fighting it,” she breathed. “What about you?”

He frowned, a slight sheen to his eyes and his cheek twitching. “I—”

“Shhh.”

She pressed a finger to his lips and drifted deeper into the stateroom, past the bedchamber and out onto the narrow balcony at the rear.

“Better. It was much too stuffy in there.”

Treetops rushed past far below. Kat steeled herself, anticipating another bout of vertigo, but it never came. It knew better than to quarrel with her at that moment.

Trajian’s shoulder thumped against the door frame as he stumbled out to join her. “I don’t…” He blinked. “Something’s not…”

He grabbed at the balustrade with both hands, noticeably swaying.

Kat poured the last of the bottle’s contents over the side. “I know. It’s not kind, but you’re a big man and I didn’t fancy my chances dragging you out here by myself.”

Trajian collapsed, chest down against the balustrade, wheezing for breath.

Kat shrugged, her voice as cold as her heart. “And honestly, I’ve no idea about the proper proportions. I used all the crone carob and mellia grass I could find, so you’re probably already dead. I know I said you’d be asleep when I killed you. Sorry about that. Nyssa had other plans.”

“You filthy… trallock…”

With a gasping, hacking moan, Trajian lunged, hands crooked like claws.

Kat reversed the wine bottle and broke it across his head. Trajian doubled over against the balustrade, head and shoulders over the balcony’s edge. Even as he scrabbled to right himself, she slammed her shoulder into his back.

A thin scream, and he was gone.

Kat breathed deep, her heart at last beginning to thaw.

The balcony door creaked.

She spun around, jagged remnant of the wine bottle raised, and found herself face to face with the woman in the broad-brimmed hat. The scent of rose water wafted across the balcony.

Impassive grey eyes met hers and touched on the bottle’s jagged stump. The woman set a gloved hand on the sword buckled at her waist. The combination of hat and scarf concealed almost all of her face, leaving visible only hooded eyes and thin strip of dark bronze skin. Her expression was unreadable beneath her scarf. “Are you sure you wish to go through with this?”

The same phrasing she’d used as she’d boarded the Mornwake. A formal challenge? Fireblood duellists in the west of Khalad used them to absolve themselves from the consequences of drawing their swords. Definitely a threat, and a warning against resistance.

Not that Kat had any left to offer.

“No.” She tossed the bottle’s remains over the balcony and shrugged. “I’m done.”

The woman’s eyes lingered briefly on the shards at their feet. “Vallant would like to speak with you.”

Kat lost track of how long she waited alone in the captain’s cabin on the Chainbreaker. Long enough to make a thorough search of the simple furnishings and find nothing worthy of the endeavour, let alone anything that could be employed as a weapon, should she have needed one. Not that she’d any idea if she needed one. As far as she knew, the cabin door wasn’t even locked. She could leave at any time.

Probably.

The woman in the hat had said little as she’d marched Kat across the Chainbreaker’s deck, nor had Kat gleaned anything from a brief conversation observed between her and Vallant through the cabin’s glass-panelled doors.

The deck lurched and shifted. Through the stern windows, the Mornwake grew smaller in the distance, then vanished entirely. So too did the rest of the world soon after, swallowed by mist.

Kat clasped her interlinked hands to her chest in the sign of the Flame and closed her eyes. “Blessed Nyssa, watch over me.”

“You’d do better to pray to Zephyr. I imagine she’d like that.”

Vallant set the cabin door to and sat in the high-backed chair behind the battered desk. The ornate purloined lectern had been set just behind, its spread-winged eagle appearing to stare at the back of his head.

Kat scowled, embarrassed that he’d witnessed her at prayer.

He shot her a long, appraising look. Kat, who’d had her fill of long, appraising looks, settled on directness. “Am I a prisoner?”

“Did you murder Trajian? Rîma seems to think so, but I’d rather hear it from you.”

“What if I did?”

“What if you didn’t?” Vallant settled back in his chair. “And I asked first.”

“I killed him. I wouldn’t call it murder.”

He steepled his hands, and Kat had the distinct impression he was purposefully drawing out the silence.

“I’m aware of Trajian’s past, recent and otherwise, so nor would I,” he said at last. “And no, you’re not a prisoner. As it happens, I travelled a long way to find you.”

“How flattering.”

“It should be. I can’t remember the last time we came so far north.”

“All for me?”

“For the legend of the woman who raided Tyzanta’s Xanathros Alabastra and lived to tell the tale.”

Not him as well… “You shouldn’t believe everything you hear.”

He cocked his head. “Oh, I don’t. But that doesn’t mean the story doesn’t have value. The legend of the notorious Bashar Vallant swooping in to save the ruthless Katija Arvish will, I expect, be worth a very great deal.” He shrugged away the statement’s pomposity. “Whatever else you and I have done, we’ve proven that it’s possible to stand up to the firebloods, even to Alabastra. It makes folk believe that they can do the same, and belief is everything.”

Kat snorted. “So I’m not a prisoner, but you do expect me to join your cause?”

“That’s up to you. You’ve impressed Tatterlain, and your encounter with Trajian suggests a certain directness. I can use that… and your other skills. But by the time Vashrîq gives his report, it almost won’t matter whether you do or not. Damant will clamp down, but the stories will spread anyway. That’s what stories do. You and I can die today. What we’ve done will live on.”

“And if I say no?”

“I’m putting some of the others off the ship at Osios. It’s not much, but it’s as close to a free city as you’ll find these days now Qersal has fallen. You can go with them, or you can come with us to Athenoch, and we’ll take things from there.”

“Athenoch doesn’t exist,” said Kat. “The Veil swallowed it two Ages of Fire ago.”

Vallant’s gaze shifted to the billowing mist beyond the cabin windows. “It did, didn’t it? Aren’t you just a little curious?” He smiled, as if at a private joke. “Let me put it another way. How long have you been on the run?”

There was no straightforward answer. Kat had been in Tyzanta a year, but she’d been running almost since the day her father died, even if she’d not known it at the time. “Too long.”

“It changes you, doesn’t it? When you have to leave everything behind, I mean. You become a person you’d never imagined being.”

Was he speaking of her, or of himself? Now she came to think on it, for all that Vallant’s name had been conjured in Undertown by the likes of Skerrik, she knew little of his past save that he’d once been a senior overseer in the Bascari custodium. As for her? She’d just killed a man. Not to survive, but because his death had become the most natural thing in the world. The Katija whom Azra had pulled from the gutter wouldn’t have recognised her now, much less the one who’d striven so hard to be accepted by Countess Rashace’s children.

“I’m not looking for sympathy.”

“Granted. Then what are you looking for?”

What indeed? So much of Kat’s recent life had been about clearing her father’s debt. She no longer could. And nor, in her heart, would she have done so anyway. It no longer mattered. With Azra gone, she didn’t belong anywhere.

What was she looking for? “I don’t know.”

Vallant rose and extended his hand. “Then let me offer you a home while you work that out.”

Again and again she’d promised Azra that she wouldn’t let Alabastra, Countess Bascari and others like them win. Vallant was offering something more: an opportunity to make them pay.

Under the circumstances, how could she refuse? At the very least, she could stop running for a while.

“All right.” She took his hand. “For now.”

Vallant’s smile finally touched his eyes. “Welcome to the rebellion.”

Eighteen

Though its walls were as water-damaged and its stained-glass windows as faded as any room in the palace, the library always took Damant’s breath away. In design, it was akin to the interior of a torch-house minaret, with two great book-lined helical staircases chasing one another for three uninterrupted storeys of cracked, leather-bound spines as they ascended to the derelict stargazer’s platform high above.

Save for where it concerned the endless reports that by necessity flowed through the family custodium, Damant was hardly an avid reader. Nonetheless, he had long ago accepted that experience of a thing and appreciation for its value need not be at odds. Certainly, the Countess’ grandfather’s grandfather had agreed, for he couldn’t have personally read a fraction of the volumes shelved around the outer walls. Nor, so far as Damant knew, had any of his descendants, who, preferring literal wealth over figurative, had shown little interest in the library’s bounty. Seeking Yennika within had been the counsel of desperation and doomed to failure.

Against all expectations, the room wasn’t entirely empty. Tanith sat at a battered ormesta-style table opposite the doorway, a book spread before her, the pale blue and silver brocade of her silk robes perfect complement to her ringleted golden hair. She and the room were a perfect match, her with the pale – almost pallid – skin of a shut-in reclusive, and both of them fallen on hard times.

Blinking myopically, she folded the volume shut with gloved hands and shrank back into her chair’s rich cushioning. As at their first – and to date only – meeting, she looked as though she’d prefer the world to swallow her up than be noticed.

“My apologies for intruding, Mistress Floranz,” said Damant. “I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

She stared off at the metal-framed lumani stanchion at the threshold of the southern staircase. “I was done anyway.”

For all that her diction held the precision of Zariqaz – soft and diffident as Tanith herself – something growled beneath. The accent of Karanta, possibly, or maybe Tarakûn, further to the east? Though most firebloods strove to mimic the Voice’s clipped, airy mode of speech – and thus prove themselves “cultured” – tutors could only achieve so much.

“Did you find what you needed?” asked Damant.

“Not really.”

“What were you looking for?”

A frown tugged at the corner of Tanith’s mouth. “It’s a family matter. One I’d rather not discuss.”

From another fireblood, the tone would have made the words archly dismissive – a reminder that Damant had overstepped his position. Tanith sounded as though she were asking permission. The slight tremor of her brow suggested she didn’t expect him to grant it. But then Damant supposed if his immediate family had suffered as had House Floranz, he too would be inclined to timidity. Not that he had any immediate family any longer.

“My sympathies.”

Even to his own ears, he didn’t sound especially sympathetic – he didn’t often have cause to, and the trait had withered through misuse – but Tanith at last shifted her gaze to meet his.

“Keep them. I was never anything to my family, so why should they be anything to me?” Nervousness gave way to bitterness, her cut-glass Zariqaz accent crusting with eastern gravel. “My mother loved beneath her station and sent me away to spare her husband’s blushes. Had I stayed, I’d have died like my father. I’m not really a Floranz in anything but name. But to some people the name is enough.”

To his surprise, Damant felt a swell of pity. To some people, the name would always be enough. It was a rare fireblood house that hadn’t made enemies. What had Tanith expected to find in the library that would settle her “family matter”? A secret or some other leverage to settle her inheritance? Possible, but improbable. Even after its recent misfortunes, the Floranz family was a large and tangled tree with many claimants on Count Oraham’s winnowed fortune. An illegitimate daughter would need a great deal of leverage.

“My sympathies anyway. You need not share them with your family.”

At last Tanith offered something approaching a smile, if one laden with reserve. “Your turn. What brought you here? I doubt you were looking for me.”

“I’m trying to find Yennika. Salenna has called a conclave.”

“I’ve barely seen her this past week. Too busy playing at mistress of the custodium.”

She laced the words with just a hint of disgust, though Damant couldn’t be sure whether she disapproved that her friend was sullying herself with gainful employment or resented being abandoned in a strange city and a stranger house.

“She’s certainly been busy,” he replied drily.

In point of fact, Yennika had been more than busy. Were one to measure industriousness by the number of enemies made, Damant could understand how she’d lack the time to play hostess.

In the week since the Countess had appointed Yennika as head of the family custodium, Damant had entertained no fewer than four complaints from overseers who considered that their new mistress had overstepped her authority. Impossible, of course, as the authority of the custodium – and thus its overseers – flowed directly from the Bascari family in the first place. Nonetheless, it was seldom the case that firebloods troubled themselves with petty organisational matters. And yet in a few short days Yennika had not only expunged two dozen custodians from Bascari service, she’d had three more dragged into the judicator’s chamber to answer – and ultimately be convicted – for blackmail, racketeering and extortion.

Damant had given the complaints short shrift. He’d long ago marked out the now forcibly retired custodians as dead weights, shirkers and outright criminals, and would have gladly thrown them into the Gutterfields himself, had the now-absent Jorais not vetoed the possibility.

And Yennika hadn’t stopped there, as Salenna’s request for a conclave reinforced.

“She’s determined to take her duties seriously,” said Tanith. “She knows what the rest of the family think of her. I confess, I don’t really understand them. Always at each other’s throats but treading on eggshells at the same time. Take Vallant, for instance. Whenever Yennika talks about him, I can practically hear the gaps in the story screaming.”

Damant winced. “He fooled us all, me as much anyone.” Almost anyone, anyway. “Wounds like that never heal.”

“You knew him well?”

He hesitated, but an honest question demanded an honest answer. At least when levelled by a fireblood. “Bashar Vallant was the closest I’ve ever had to a son. I taught him everything I knew, gave him every opportunity. He had such aptitude, such determination and an easy manner of leadership that I… Well, I always resented it, truth be told. I’ve never worn authority as well as I’d like.”

“I’m sure that’s not true.”

“I’m too old for flattery, Miss Floranz… but I appreciate the gesture. Vallant always told me I let deference get in the way.” Damant scowled at the memory of the warning sign he’d failed to heed.

“But not him?”

“Once he set his mind to a course, nothing could stop him.” He chided himself for treading so close to forbidden ground. Tanith was easy to talk to. Too easy. Perhaps those luminous sapphire eyes were to blame? Innocence always demanded openness in return. “But that’s in the past.”

She nodded. “Yes, the past. It’s never as easy to leave behind as people…”

She fell silent at the sound of running feet and choked sobs beyond the library door. Frowning, Damant turned on his heel and strode briskly in pursuit. He reached the corridor in time to catch sight of diaphanous green skirts vanishing around the corner towards the servants’ quarters.

“You, girl! Stop!” he barked.

He rounded the corner to find Sherabi, back pressed against the wall as if she were holding it up, her head hung low and chest heaving.

“In this house, we practise decorum.”

Not entirely true, as proven by the gaudy – and no doubt expensive – banishment Mirela had commissioned a few days before to rid the estate of its supposed amashti. After hours of incense, prayerful weeping and song, peppered by the chimes of discordant brass bells, the archon and his small coven had declared the daemon banished and the estate purified once more. It might have been true. Even daemons needed peace and quiet.

When his words provoked another flood of tears, Damant strove for a kindly tone. His efforts, as ever, fell short of aspiration. Squabbles among the servants were far from uncommon, and the younger the servant, the flightier the emotions. “Whatever is the matter, girl?”

Golden curls bobbing against her shoulders, Tanith slid past him and took Sherabi’s hands. “It’s all right. Hush now.” Though her attention was seemingly on the maid, she nonetheless found a moment to shoot Damant a disappointed look. “Don’t mind him. He doesn’t know any better.”

Damant scowled, but held his tongue, in no small part because Tanith was again eyeing him like a wary beast expecting punishment – unthinkable, given their relative ranks, but even in her rare assertive moments, it seemed the skittishness was never far away – but largely because he’d come to much the same conclusion himself.

Tanith produced a handkerchief from a pocket. “Dry your eyes.”

Head still hung low, Sherabi dabbed at watery black tears, her make-up having run. Aware his limited interpersonal skills had little to offer, Damant focused on practicalities. The livid ruddy splotch on the girl’s left cheek. The streaky dark stain across her skirts, the texture too rich and thick for food or drink. Another such stain, similar in colour but smeared and broken, ran the length of Sherabi’s right forearm in fits and starts.

“What happened?” Again he strove for a kindly tone. Again, it fell short of the mark. “Is the Countess—?”

“She hit me!” Sherabi shuddered into a series of gasping, racking sobs. “She said I hadn’t knocked, but I had. I had! She called me such terrible things.”

She lapsed into silence. Damant frowned at a picture both clearer and more diffuse. He’d seen the Countess lose her temper many times over the years but never once resort to a physical attack. Such behaviour wasn’t seemly. Factor in the obvious affection she had for Sherabi, in whom she saw her daughter Tythia reborn, and the matter only became more confusing. Then again, omen rot was well known as a spur to temper.

“And you stumbled into her easel?”

Sherabi squeezed her eyes tightly shut. “I knocked a mixing pot off the dresser. I didn’t mean to, I swear.” She stared down at her dress. “It’s ruined.”

“Don’t worry about that now.” Tanith pressed a finger to Sherabi’s lips and held it there until the girl met her gaze. It occurred to Damant that the two were of an age. The difference between a fireblood upbringing – even one so hexed as Tanith’s – and a low-born cinderblood’s had never been starker. “It can be fixed. It can all be fixed. Isn’t that right, Castellan?”

Damant offered a reluctant nod. He needed to speak to the Countess about the forthcoming conclave but had no enthusiasm for interfering in more personal matters. “Clean yourself up. Someone else will take your duties for the day.”

Sherabi blinked up at him. “And tomorrow?”

Unspoken concerns danced behind her eyes. All too easy to conjure what they were. Beyond the damage done to Sherabi’s relationship with her mistress, dismissal from service meant a return to Undertown’s privations.

“I’ll talk to the Countess,” Damant replied. “I can make no promises.”

Sherabi’s miserable nod tugged on his heartstrings, but he mercilessly quashed the stirring. Giving the girl false hope helped nothing, and made him a liar into the bargain. His duty was to the Countess’ wellbeing, not her maidservant’s.

From the despairing glance Tanith shot him, she saw matters otherwise.

Gripping Sherabi’s left arm at wrist and elbow, she tugged the girl to her feet and offered a reassuring smile. “First we’ll see about making you presentable again, then you can chaperone me on a walk around the grounds. One of the custodians has taken a shine to me, and I can’t have gossip spreading, can I? It’s too splendid a day for tears, you’ll see.” Again her eyes touched on Damant, a long, slow wink robbing her next words of offence. “There’s a horrible, cold presence in here you won’t miss.”

The door to the Countess’ art room was ajar, normally a sign that visitors were welcome. Under the circumstances, Damant elected to knock.

“Yes?” A brief tremor rippled beneath the Countess’ reply, swept away by impatience. “Well, are you going to stand out there all morning?”

Steeling himself, Damant crossed the threshold. The Countess, again in painter’s smock and her grey hair gathered tight behind, stood with her back to the window, her eyes narrowed and her head back. The portrait pose, she called it – the rigid posture of certainty all firebloods were taught to master from youth. She sagged at once, her shoulders drooping and the arch stare crumbling to a grimace. “Oh. It’s you.”

“It’s me.” He stepped deeper into the room, noting the upturned mixing pot and the creeping grey-brown stain on the drop cloth. Mercifully, none of it had come close to touching the various works stacked around the walls. “Is there something you’d like to tell me?”

She snorted a sad smile. “I know that look. What can I possibly add to what you’ve already heard? I…” She stared down at her hand and flexed her withered fingers. “I don’t know what came over me. I simply… Is she all right?”

“She’s hurt more in her heart than her flesh. She’s worried you mean to dismiss her.”

“No! I can’t. I wouldn’t!” The Countess sighed. “I’ve waited so long. I won’t lose her now.”

Damant turned his attention to the half-finished portrait of Tythia, the better to hide conflicted feelings. While it was encouraging that Sherabi’s fears for her position were apparently groundless, the Countess’ obsession with reincarnation still troubled him. Obsession never ended well.

“Then you might consider an apology.”

“An apology? Why should—?” The Countess pursed her lips. “No, you’re right, of course. As always.”

“I have my moments, lady.” Damant hesitated, aware that his next words led him out onto shifting sands. “I’m afraid there’s been no word from Alabastra concerning Jorais.”

Not that he’d expected any. Alabastra was forever secretive. At best, the Countess’ son was bound by vows of temple service and bound for some distant, humbling outpost. At worst? Where Alabastra was concerned, that well went deep indeed.

The Countess stared out of the window. “Is that what you think this is? Jorais’ fate doesn’t trouble me. He chose his path. I daresay he’ll serve the family better through sacrifice than he ever did pursuing his own appetites.”

Damant let his gaze drift across the dresser, noting the small rack of talent wisp vials with their distinctive black and gold stoppers. “And Sherabi?”

The Countess folded her arms. “She startled me. I was thinking, and… Look, does this matter?”

“I’m concerned, lady. That’s all.”

“These old bones have years yet, Ihsan, have no fear.” She thumped a fist against her chest. “What do you think of the portrait?”

On another day, Damant might have challenged so obvious a change of topic, but she looked more vital, more solid than she had in days. Just a week before, her personal physician had timidly suggested she might have as little as three or four months remaining before the omen rot finally won their contest. Then again, she’d said that a year before as well, but archons and healers alike agreed that omen rot was as much a blight of the soul as it was of the body, and whatever else the Countess lacked, she’d willpower to spare. That willpower – and enough last breath to threaten bankruptcy – had kept her inheritors disappointed for months.

He elected for discretion over honesty. “It’s coming along nicely.”

Recognising the response as insufficient, he pored over Tythia’s likeness. In so doing, he realised that the woman depicted was somewhat older than when last he’d looked. Laughter lines that had barely marred her copper skin a week before now added the character of years, as did the first slivers of grey among waves of black curls gathering at her shoulders. No longer Tythia in her youth, but as she’d been at the hour of her death. The changes only served to make the painting more lifelike, almost uncomfortably so, its brushwork subtler and its colours vibrant. Her brilliant green eyes gleamed with accusation, staring out of the past to remind of his failures.

He winced away old memories. “You’ve made her older.”

“I…” A frown touched the Countess’ lips. “I wanted to see what she’d look like with passing years.”

“You have Sherabi for that.”

“Only if I live to see it.” She offered a wan smile, daring him to remind her of assertions made moments before. “This feels right in a way I can’t explain. I finally understand what it means to pour heart and soul into something.”

“The colours are remarkable.”

“I can’t take credit for that. The Kaldosi pigments Yennika found for me are truly incredible. It all just breathes through me onto the canvas.” The Countess shook her head. “Incredible that the Kaldosi never produced any art worthy of the name.”

“Indeed,” Damant said carefully. Caradan Diar’s armies had brought the northern cities of Kaldos into the broader kingdom some five hundred years before his birth. The sieges had left little intact, worthy or otherwise. Which was for the best, given the heretical practices once rife in the mountains. “I look forward to seeing it finished.”

“You mean you’ll still be here?” The Countess fixed him with a stare. “I know you’ve been enquiring about a position with the Aroth family.”

Damant grimaced, his heart sinking. So that was the cause of her bleak mood? So much for discretion, but whatever else she was, the Countess was nobody’s fool. It had been the briefest of conversations after the last conclave, initiated by Julan Aroth before he’d left for Zariqaz. The Aroths didn’t rule a city as the Bascari did, but they were a power in the capital, and even a piece of Zariqaz was worth the whole of Tyzanta.

He turned his back to conceal his expression and beyond the window caught a glimpse of Tanith and Sherabi in the stone garden, Custodian Josqa in close attendance. He was the suitor Tanith had hinted at? A shîm-head addict, and an idle one at that, was hardly a suitable companion for a fireblood, even one whose family had fallen so far.

“What can I possibly add to what you’ve already heard?”

She snorted. “Don’t think repeating my words will save you, Ihsan. Does my family appal you so very much? We both know the answer.” She softened the reprimand with a thin smile. “And we both know my mind would differ only in the detail. What did Julan offer?”

Damant took shelter in pedantry. “He made no offer.” And indeed he hadn’t. Not quite.

The Countess struck her portrait pose again, the years falling away until she was again the indomitable matriarch of a fireblood house. “Ihsan, if I have to ask again, there’ll be trouble.”

An old campaigner, he recognised a lost cause. “Castellan to his nephew’s family. His star is rising, apparently.”

“Which means you’d be at the forefront of all those nasty little intrigues as his nephew works to carve out a territory of his own. That’s not you, Ihsan. You’re too honourable for that.” She tutted and tapped her lips with a forefinger. “I also thought you weren’t the sort to give up just because the road became difficult.”

The words stung. Of course he wasn’t that sort of man, otherwise he’d have walked away from House Bascari years ago. Vallant and Tythia. It still haunted Damant that his misjudgement of one had doomed the other. Some days he could scarcely credit that the Countess could even look at him. He set his back to the portrait, unable to any longer bear its accusing stare. “I’m not, lady, but we both know my services won’t be wanted once…”

“I’m no longer here?” The Countess dipped her head, unreadable emotion chasing across her face like ripples on a shore. “When I was younger, I had such great plans for this family… but then Raith died and the Jovîna thought I’d be too weak to protect our holdings.”

It wasn’t often the Countess spoke of her late husband. Then as now, her voice cracked with the weight of emotion that had seen her order the removal of every likeness from the palace walls. Only in her private staterooms did one remain, the sole piece of him she guarded jealously and refused to share with the world. With even their children.

“You proved them wrong, lady.”

“I did.” She spoke slowly, carefully, the words coming from somewhere distant. “But I became too comfortable in the aftermath. My great battle won, I didn’t notice the decay until it was too late, and then I compounded the problem by failing to fight it. You are my castellan, Ihsan. If you won’t help me restore my house, who will?”

Suddenly weary, she took a tottering step towards a chair.

Damant hurried to helped her. “Lady, let me…”

She waved him away, the hurt in her voice a dagger in his heart. “Leave me. I’m tired. I think conclave will have to manage without me today.”

Damant hesitated, desperately sifting for the words or sentiment that would heal their rift. But such battles were never his to win. Admitting defeat, he offered a low bow. “Of course, lady.”

Nineteen

“The Countess sends her apologies,” said Damant as he took his place in the bright sunlight of the conclave circle. “She’s feeling unwell.”

At least there were no outsiders today, either in the tiered seating or on the dais itself. A strictly family affair, save for the custodians standing watch at the gate.

To Damant’s right, Salenna brushed away his words with a disinterested hand. “Mother has been unwell for at least a decade. I’m sure she’ll show her face when it suits her.”

Mirela’s granite expression remained unmoving, though as she’d taken up her mother’s habitual position opposite the statue of Nyssa Iudexas, it seemed likely his news was in fact no news to her. Yennika, standing opposite Damant, barely batted an eye. In deference to her new position, she had abandoned the bohemian coat for an overseer’s grim tunic, severe black skirt and a scabbarded dagger – though the tunic had been tailored to be more figure-hugging than was the norm, the skirt was slit higher up the leg than uniform codes decreed, and the dagger’s hilt was crusted with emeralds.

Drawing on reserves of tact already depleted, Damant focused on the tiered seating behind Mirela’s left ear. One daughter who loved money, another who loved nothing, and a niece who loved herself and herself alone. Certainly Jorais had been worse than any of them but that was barely a compliment.

“I’m to serve as her proxy,” he said evenly. “Unless you’d rather postpone, Lady Salenna?”

She scowled. “No, this won’t wait. Someone has withdrawn half the custodians from the western tollgates. There are wagons backed up halfway across Undertown and the guild masters are screaming for my head.”

Mirela arched an eyebrow. “And what a loss that would be, dear sister.”

“This isn’t funny. Most have realised it’s quicker to round up a bunch of skelders and unload in the streets than wait their turn to pass the tollgates. We’re losing a fortune.”

Which meant Salenna was losing a fortune from whatever she skimmed off the top. It was an open secret that the official tariffs, guided by a strict protocol of weights and measures, were but a starting point for whatever she instructed her excise-takers to collect. Still, Damant found the news concerning. Even with Yennika’s pruning of the custodium, there should have been plenty of bodies to attend to Tyzanta’s day-to-day business.

“I assume by ‘someone’ you mean me?” asked Yennika.

“You are head of the custodium,” Salenna replied. “If you want to keep the job, you’d better have a good explanation.”

“She has an explanation,” said Mirela. “She’s gone to war with House Jovîna.”

Damant, who’d let his thoughts wander during the opening salvos, dragged himself back into the moment. “She’s done what?”

“I just told you, she—”

Yennika folded her arms. “It’s not polite to talk about me as if I’m not here.” She offered Damant one of her saccharine smiles, her eyes shining. “I merely thought it time we reclaimed our old territory in Old Kosra. The watch house will need a little repair before it’s fully fit for purpose, but I think it will serve.”

Damant closed his eyes, assailed by visions of shrieker fire and bodies in the gutter. A densely populated district in Undertown’s western reaches, Old Kosra had been ceded to House Jovîna during settlement of the recent trade war that had brought both houses to their knees. They wouldn’t have yielded it without a fight. “And House Jovîna’s custodians?”

Yennika’s smile turned poisonous but lost none of its cheer. “Made some very unwise decisions in the face of overwhelming numbers.”

“How long ago was this?”

She twitched a lopsided shrug. “A few hours. Don’t worry, it’s done with.”

“It is not!” snapped Mirela. “Don’t you know what you’ve done? If we’re supremely fortunate, Aqladi Jovîna will be satisfied with your head and the bloodgild dinars for his dead custodians. Otherwise, it’ll be war in the streets.”

Damant tallied the numbers. House Jovîna had perhaps two or three hundred custodians in the city compared to the thousand or so who took Bascari’s dinars. Not enough to win an outright war, but every carrack, wagon and railrunner carrying Bascari cargo would need a heavy escort – one they’d be hard pressed to provide… even before Count Jovîna began hiring mercenaries from neighbouring cities. “What have you done?”

Unrepentant, Yennika jutted out her chin in a fair imitation of her aunt’s portrait pose. “I’m protecting House Bascari’s interests.”

“You’ve started a war, you little trallock!” shouted Salenna, her voice ragged. “Aqladi Jovîna will—”

“He’ll do nothing,” said Yennika, her voice cold. “He can’t afford to.”

Mirela stabbed an angry finger at her cousin. “He’s sitting on twenty years’ worth of protection levies from his stolen territories in Old Kosra, Maliqan and the rest!”

Under other circumstances, Damant might have rejoiced in the fact that, for once, he, Mirela and Salenna were aligned in common cause, but not like this.

Yennika held her pose, the smile fading. “Two weeks ago, dear Aqladi indeed had a generous war chest. Now? Now he can’t pay the custodians he already has. You see, after that nasty little spirefall two years ago, he decided it was safer to leave his wealth – much of it in antique tetrams – in Alabastra’s keeping rather than his own vaults.” Her eyes met Damant’s, not stern but playful.

An age too late, enlightenment dawned. “He lost everything?” he murmured.

“Thank you, Ihsan. At least—”

“Castellan.”

Yennika inclined her head. “Castellan. At least someone around here knows how to think. Aqladi Jovîna has been ruined thanks to Katija Arvish. He might crawl into that sordid little manse he calls a palace, but I think it’s far more likely he’ll pack his inbred family off to Nassos, where they like a good sob story.” She shrugged. “For the first time in a generation, Tyzanta belongs solely to House Bascari again. I don’t expect your thanks, cousins, but you could try not to whine about it.”

Mirela and Salenna wore markedly similar expressions, frozen between elation and outrage. Were they more offended that Yennika had taken the risk or that they hadn’t done so? Damant understood their consternation, for he’d underestimated Yennika just as badly as they. More, he’d perhaps misjudged her character. That, or her time in Zariqaz had been the making of her.

Predictably, Mirela recovered first, her having less emotion to indulge to begin with. Colour fading from her cheeks, she drew down a deep breath. “You’re certain of this?”

Yennika’s eyes flashed. “Oh yes. Aqladi’s kept it quiet for weeks, but I’ve seen the accounts.”

“How?”

“One of the senior munificents at Xanathros Alabastra has become fascinated with me.” She fluttered her eyelashes. “Need I say more?”

“I think we’d all prefer that you didn’t.” For all that Salenna strove to imitate Mirela’s demeanour, tightness at eyes and lips spoke to fury boiling beneath. “Does this mean you’ll be releasing custodians back to tollgate duty?”

Yennika gripped her skirts and bobbed a curtsey. “You may depend on it.”

Straightening, she stared over towards the gate, where a newcomer had provoked commotion among the custodians. The arrival approached the dais, a bunched scroll clasped in gloved hands.

He bowed low and offered the scroll to Mirela. “Forgive the intrusion. A heraldic from Zariqaz. The transcription, Lady Mirela.”

She took it the way one might handle a venomous snake and read silently while the custodian beat a hasty retreat. Salenna looked on, lip curled in suspicion. Without intending to, Damant made eye contact with Yennika and received the slenderest of shrugs by way of response. Mirela re-rolled the scroll, though it didn’t escape Damant’s notice that she did so tighter than before, leaving the paper twisted and crumpled.

“Well, cousin,” she said at last, malice dripping from the words. “It seems not everything you touch turns to gold. Katija Arvish never arrived at Zariqaz.”

Yennika went deathly still. “If you’ve something to say, say it.”

“Vallant attacked the Mornwake.” She glared at Damant, not wanting to pass up the opportunity to remind of his past mistakes. “He rescued the prisoners, Arvish among them. Hierarch Ossed won’t be getting his grand spectacle after all.”

Yennika’s tension bled away, her smile returning. “You can’t hold me responsible.”

“You’re the head of the custodium. A shame you were too busy playing soldier while more mundane duties went to the wall.”

The first sheen of anger coloured Yennika’s voice. “And I suppose you think that had I been there, I’d have dragged Vallant back in chains, is that it?”

“All I know is that when Alabastra want to know who let their prize prisoner escape, all fingers will point to you.” Mirela’s gaze drifted to the spot where Jorais had stood during the previous conclave. “A shame, don’t you think, sister?”

Salenna nodded sagely, her smirk as much imagined as seen. “Tragic. Would you care to bring the news to the hierarch yourself, cousin? Or would you like me to compose a suitable letter? I’d be happy to. Who knows? If it’s grovelling enough, you might escape the worst.”

Yennika lapsed into uncharacteristic, vulnerable silence. Something to savour, perhaps – certainly Mirela and Salenna were both making the most of the opportunity. But Damant couldn’t bring himself to join them. Aggravating as Yennika was, she alone had achieved something in recent days. In truth, she’d achieved more than anyone in the family had in long years. Yes, unfolding events – not least the explosion at Xanathros Alabastra – had created opportunity, but she alone had possessed the wit to exploit it. Perhaps there was hope for House Bascari.

Reaching a decision, he cleared his throat. “I recommend against precipitate action. Overseer Vashrîq may wear a custodian’s uniform, but we all know his first loyalty lies with you, Lady Mirela.”

She stiffened. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“The heraldic came to you, didn’t it? That’s a heavy expense on an overseer’s wage.” Damant shrugged, affecting a subservience he seldom felt around Mirela Bascari. “I was going to accompany the prisoner myself, but you insisted I couldn’t be spared. But then, when the time came to present Arvish to the Voice, I wouldn’t have done so in your name. Vashrîq would.”

Even as he spoke, Damant wondered how much of what he’d said was true and how much was cynical conjecture.

Mirela’s complete lack of reaction placed affairs firmly in the former camp. “What do you suggest?” she said icily.

“That we leave the blame for this matter squarely with Vallant.”

After a brief hesitation, she nodded. “Perhaps that would be for the best,” she said through gritted teeth. “If you’ll excuse me?”

She swept from the dais towards the gate, custodians scattering from her path.

Salenna fixed Yennika with a baleful stare. “I want my tollkeepers back.” Then she too departed, leaving Damant alone with a still unusually subdued Yennika.

“What we do to those we love,” she murmured. “What we wish we could do to our family.”

“I rather think Vashrîq’s going to wish that Vallant had killed him,” said Damant.

She drifted closer, brow furrowed, before breaking into that brilliant, winsome smile. For the first time, it warmed rather than mocked. “I feel like I owe you my thanks, Castellan.”

Perhaps, perhaps not. The one thing Damant was certain of following recent events was that Yennika was rather more resourceful than he’d first believed. He hoped so, for both their sakes.

“Ihsan. I’m Ihsan to my friends.”

Twenty

Kat awoke to the whispering creak of timber and the snores of berth mates. She rolled groggily out of her hammock, pulled on the sailrider’s coat Vallant had provided – her convict’s garb had similarly been replaced by a more seemly shirt and trews even before she’d eaten and drunk her fill – and sought the upper deck. Easier said than done with only a single oil lantern granting shape to her fellow sleepers. Erratic motion only made things worse. The Mornwake had been bad enough, but the Chainbreaker didn’t so much sway as shudder, its planks groaning protest the whole time.

She clambered out onto the open deck, the stuffy hold giving way to the mists pulsing and sighing beyond the bows. Untroubled by the wind that filled the Chainbreaker’s sails, they dappled the ageing dhow’s black timbers with a greenish-white glow, enough to see by – at least until they grew too dense to see anything at all. The time-lorn smell conjured girlhood memories of walking Zariqaz’s foggy streets, the warmth of her father’s hand around hers keeping the terror at bay. That had been ordinary winter mist, of course, and hid no monsters.

This? This was different.

Mistfall had taken her. She was behind the Veil. A place whence no one ever returned.

Pulse quickening, Kat gripped the companionway rail and fought temptation to curl into a ball inside her hammock and stay there until sun or stars again ruled the sky. She might even have done so but for long ago sleepless nights, terrified that the mist curling at the window might burrow inside and whisk her away.

Better to be awake if the Veil sought to claim her. Better to see it coming.

And besides, it felt like morning, though how she reached that conclusion Kat couldn’t say, for the inky greenish white swallowed all sense of place and time. There was only the Chainbreaker and the mist. There was only now.

She made her way aft along the deserted main deck, noting uneasily how the wind filling the mainsail found no purchase on the surrounding mists. There wasn’t a single ifrîti prism in sight, the ropes secured by pulleys and knots rather than the motic winches of the Mornwake. Not that she could have communicated had any been present – her tattoo had been cold and dark ever since they’d entered the Veil.

Wordless song joined the Chainbreaker’s creaks and groans, at once sweet and mournful. Unfamiliar, and yet somehow known. Like the mists, it evoked old days well worn, recalling pieces of Kat that she herself had long since forgotten.

Trying not to dwell on her father’s fables concerning siren songs, she climbed the quarterdeck steps. Zephyr – still barefoot – stood alone at the steerage column, her hands on the lateral wheel. The impossible breeze tugged at her filmy skirts and at inky black hair that glimmered with pinpricks of starlight. Like her namesake, she seemed barely tethered to the world, her tiptoed feet hardly connecting with the deck, as if she clung to the wheel not to offer guidance, but as means of anchorage.

Colouring aside – Zephyr’s unnatural bluish-white skin was many shades paler than that of even the most determined shut-in – there was a gauziness to her being, pieces forever boiling away into the wind. Those same wisps curled from the pleated dress. In fact, as Kat looked closer, she realised that Zephyr’s dress bore neither seam nor stitch. As if she wore not clothes, but their memory. Only the choker at her throat seemed real – a black ribbon fronted by a brooch showing two entwined serpents, one silver, one a brooding reddish gold.

Veilkin. Kat had heard the name a thousand times, but until that moment she’d never considered its aptness.

Kiasta.

“Unkind to stare, it is.” Zephyr’s Daric words were as musical as her song, more sigh than speech. Her offence was playful more than tart, as if Kat had made herself the butt of a joke she didn’t yet understand. “Really so interesting, am I?”

“You’re a veilkin.”

“So people tell me.”

“How can you not know what you are?”

Glassy, pupil-less white eyes shot her a long-suffering look. “A daughter of the Issnaîm, am I.” Playfulness ebbed, replaced by the weariness of one tired of the conversation. “The soul-shackled may call me whatever they wish, nasaîm, but their wishes don’t define me.”

Kat’s cheeks prickled. “Of course. I’m sorry.”

Words mattered, and names doubly so. Caught up in wonder, she’d forgotten that. Whenever her father had spoken of the veilkin – no, the Issnaîm – he’d recounted passages decrying a barbaric people, whose backward culture had been their downfall before Caradan Diar had wrought their extermination in a long ago Age of Fire. But there was nothing remotely barbaric about Zephyr. Aloof and flighty, perhaps, but that wasn’t so very different to some of the firebloods Kat had grown up alongside.

“Vallant told me your name was Zephyr. Is that his wish or yours?”

Bluish-white cheeks softened, leaving Kat with the impression she’d passed some sort of test. “His. But I don’t hate it. Ayin, better than suffering through him pronouncing my real name, it is.” Challenge and invitation sparkled beneath her words.

“Try me,” said Kat.

“Very well, listen close.” Zephyr breathed a gentle ululating sigh, kin to her song, the notes fading one into the next. “Your turn.”

Kat took a deep breath… and hesitated. Her father could never afford a tutor in Simah, so she’d struck a trade with Halim, Count Rashace’s youngest nephew. She’d helped him with his mathematics, and he’d passed on lessons from his own Simah tutor. She’d been ever so proud until a Rashace custodian had taken her to one side and explained that the sign she’d been using for sir actually meant toad. It explained peculiar looks received from adults to whom she’d proudly signed respectful greeting – and also the sly smile Halim had worn during the “lesson”. She’d been embarrassed down to her toes for days.

Nearly two decades on, Zephyr wore an expression curiously similar to Halim’s.

Kat cocked her head. “How many people fall for that?”

Zephyr broke into a playful smile. “Almost everyone. Get along fine we will, you and I.”

“So your name is Zephyr?”

She shrugged. “I don’t hate it.”

Kat elected to quit while she was, if not ahead, then at least not horrifically behind.

Still smiling, Zephyr hauled the lateral wheel through a quarter-clockwise turn, bringing the Chainbreaker onto a new heading.

Or at least what Kat assumed was a new heading. “How do you navigate in all this?”

“What I see isn’t what you see.”

“Much clearer, thanks.” She scowled away a flash of frustration. “I’m sorry I interrupted your song.”

“Did you like it?”

Was this another test? “I’m… not sure. It was beautiful, but sad.”

“A poor lament otherwise, nasaîm.”

“You were singing for the dead?”

“For the follies of the Issnaîm and the greed of Tzal.”

“Tzal?” Kat echoed the unfamiliar name, with its soft, almost silent T and sibilant Z.

“A proud god, wreathed in flame.” Zephyr’s low, hypnotic voice drove pulsing, breathy words. “Tzal yearned for the secrets of creation. Hungered for them. Pride became obsession, obsession led to war. Knelt gladly, did the Issnaîm, preferring to serve the flame over ruling the ash, but after Tzal murdered his own queen, some realised we’d all be ash in time. Brought Tzal to battle on the shores of the Black River, we did. Caged him in a silver pearl woven from his own obsessions, for only they any longer commanded him. But it’s no easy thing to cage a god. Trapped us instead, he did, ayin. Now we are all of us prisoners of his obsession.”

“But you fought. If you’re with Vallant, you’re still fighting. That counts for something.”

Zephyr gave a soft, musical snort. “The Issnaîm don’t fight. Cling to havens in the mist and call it life, we do, when at best it is survival. And every year we are fewer. Tzal didn’t win when he trapped us. He won when we accepted our defeat. That’s why I fight. Or perhaps I’ve simply traded Tzal’s obsession for Vallant’s?”

Kat sifted Zephyr’s words. “So there’s another realm out there, beyond the Veil?”

“Who knows? Stories are stories. Maybe the mist is the skin of the pearl. Maybe there’s a world of ash beyond, ruled by a mad and weeping god, or one sprung anew from the primal Dark. Or maybe a long dead child of the Issnaîm once told a tale to justify cowardice, and we clung to it and merely hoped it truth.”

Kat watched Zephyr closely, looking for a telltale that her words had been lies. All her life there had only been Khalad and the Veil. The idea that there might be something else was darkly exciting. And terrifying. Her father had claimed the veilkin worshipped daemons as gods. Presumably Tzal was one such being.

“Stop playing with our guest, Zephyr.” Vallant, once again dressed in his not-quite overseer’s uniform, made his way up the quarterdeck steps. Skirting the watch bell’s heavy wooden stanchion, he offered Kat an apologetic shrug. “I’m afraid she’s just a little bit too fond of being mysterious. I take it she’s your first…?” He mouthed the word “veilkin”.

Kat nodded.

“Mine too,” said Vallant. “I can never quite decide if I want her to be my last.”

“Ayin, it is easily accomplished.” Zephyr spoke without turning, her eyes forward. “Plenty of mountains around. Say the word, we’ll give one a hug.”

Vallant chuckled. “See what I mean?”

Zephyr smiled to herself. Kat had the sense that the verbal fencing was an old habit, offered up to put a newcomer at ease. What kind of siren would Zephyr be if she couldn’t soothe her prey?

Vallant strolled sternward. Kat followed, taking some satisfaction in the fact that the shuddering deck staggered him almost as much as it did her. She braced her palms against the stern’s thin balustrade. Below, the great fin tail of the Chainbreaker’s rudder sail shifted to starboard as Zephyr made a gentle course correction.

“Not the most graceful vessel,” she said.

“She gets by,” Vallant replied. “The perils of being purely mechanical: no ifrîti to make those small adjustments for a smoother voyage.”

“I’d wondered about that.”

“Ifrîti don’t last long in the mists. They get thinner and thinner and then they’re gone. We’ve no motics, no lumani – not even a single shrieker cannon. Even the Deadwinds are barely a breath here compared to what they are outside.”

Kat nodded. The Deadwinds were a continuous spiral, and the Veil an inconsistent cage, sometimes extending tendrils deeper into Khalad, retreating at others. It was inevitable the Deadwinds would sometimes be severed by its ingress, dooming their souls to dissipation.

“And people?” she asked, a wary eye on the mists.

“They fare a little better. A few hours. More if they’re stubborn.” Vallant set his back to the balustrade and folded his arms. “Then we just fade away, body and soul.”

So that part of the Veil’s legend was true. All those outposts and villages washed away by the mists, their buildings untouched and their inhabitants disappeared. “You know this for certain?”

His lips twisted in a brief frown. “I’ve seen it. Rîma says it’s because a body without a soul has no purpose. Very poetic. I don’t know that I agree. But it’s a mercy when it comes to disposing of the dead. They’ve no longer any will to hold themselves together.”

The two sailriders who’d died in the boarding – empty vessels both with their souls already fled – had been jettisoned over the side soon after the Chainbreaker had entered the Veil. If Vallant was right, they’d dissipated before they’d hit the ground. If there was any ground to hit within the Veil. At this point, Kat wasn’t ready to take anything for granted.

“I’m sorry about the men you lost.”

A faraway look crept into Vallant’s eyes, sorrow tempered by purpose. “They died free, for a cause they believed in. That’s more than most will ever know.”

Kat wasn’t sure how to answer. Showing empathy to a stranger had been hard enough. “So… how long before we fade away?”

Vallant offered a slow, solemn smile. “You’re quite safe. Zephyr protects us.”

“How?”

He shrugged. “Personally, I think it’s because the Veil knows better than to annoy her. You’ve seen how she can be.”

“So it’s like some kind of servant?”

“More like a pet, I think. I’ve caught her speaking to it. Never for long, and not in any language I understand, but there’s definitely a bond.” He stared up at the mainmast. “Without it, they’d have cornered me long ago.”

Kat thought back to arguing with Skerrik about whether Vallant was still alive. Turned out they were both sort of right. You couldn’t blame custodians for reporting him dead if they saw the Chainbreaker sail into the hungry Veil. “You were lucky to find her.”

“She found me. The mists parted and there she was.” He offered a wry smile. “Some days I suspect I’m every bit as much a pet to her as they.”

“And you’ve never seen another of her kind?”

“No. I don’t think they have any use for us.”

Or maybe they didn’t feel the need to be seen so long as the Veil did their bidding? If Zephyr could convince the mists to spare the Chainbreaker and her crew, were others of her kind directing them against Khalad? Kat had grown up with tales of Caradan Diar’s eternal struggle to hold the mists at bay, but she’d never considered that some outside force might be working against him. And if the Eternity King was the vessel of Nyssa’s will, that made the Issnaîm nothing less than daemons. And here was one of their number, aiding Khalad’s most notorious rebel.

She caught Vallant watching her a little too closely, and scrambled to change the subject. “If ifrîti don’t last long in the mists, how did Tatterlain’s heraldic even find you?”

“We were barely behind the Veil, which helped. Even so, there was barely a wisp of it left when it did. I suppose Nyssa chose to smile on me.” His expression hardened, earnestness grown brooding. “She’s certainly frowned enough over the years.” He broke off as the bleak peal of the watch bell split the air.

One hand still on the lateral wheel, Zephyr glanced back over her shoulder. “The mists can take us no further. You’d better wake the others.”

The Chainbreaker left the Veil far below the Deadwinds, an ungainly black swan swimming the star-strewn Cloudsea. The ragtag crew, roused from below-decks by the watch bell’s strike, ran out the mizzen sail to steal every last scrap of wind from the pre-dawn skies. No sooner had the mists boiled away from the Chainbreaker’s prow than they began to recede, the Veil retreating into the darkness as if it had never been.

Kat joined the rest of the erstwhile passengers at the bow, though in the gloom – and with their convicts’ rags replaced by skelders’ gear – it took her a moment to pick out her friends. She mulled the word over as she approached. Yes, she supposed they were her friends. A thought both discomfiting and reassuring, and she wasn’t sure which sensation she resented the most.

“Oh, hello.” Maxin hoisted an oil lantern high and offered a brute’s grin. “Thought the skrelling mists had taken you.”

Jaîna shuddered. “Don’t joke about such things.”

“Didn’t sleep much?” asked Kat.

“Not a wink.” Jaîna hugged herself tight. Dark circles beneath bloodshot eyes told a story. “Heard voices every time I closed my eyes.”

Maxin grunted. “It’s a ship. Always someone chattering somewhere.”

“Not those kinds of voices,” Jaîna snapped. “My dreams were full of black feathers.”

“I thought you said you didn’t sleep a wink?”

She glared. “You’re a horrible man.”

He shrugged, unconcerned. “So my husband tells me. Worse, we’ve been raising my sister’s girls ever since Nyssa called her, and now they’re doing the same.”

“You’ve a family?” asked Kat.

“That so surprising?” Maxin laughed. “Thought I’d seen the last of them. Now? Couple of days on a railrunner and I’ll be back in Tyzanta.”

“That’s a good idea? The custodians will be looking for you.”

“Let them. Javar will do right by me.”

Kat nodded. Must be nice to have a crime lord standing foursquare behind you. “Just keep your head down.”

“Count on it. You and all. Even if you do hit harder than a skinny trallock should.”

It had been years since Kat had considered herself to be at all waif-like, but she supposed everyone looked like a twig beside Maxin. “What about you?” she asked Jaîna.

Jaîna ran a palm across her smooth scalp. At some point in the night she’d found time and blade to scrape the stubble away. “I’m sticking around, aren’t I? Vallant says Amarid’s at Athenoch.” Her eyes shone. “I don’t think I believe it.”

Belatedly Kat remembered how Jaîna had talked about her brother going south to join up with Vallant. She fought a flicker of maudlin sentiment. Everyone had family but her. Everyone had somewhere they belonged.

She glanced at Yali, gazing in wonder at the bright lights of Osios. She tapped her on the shoulder and turned side-on to Maxin’s lantern so her signs would catch its light. ||You look better.||

And she did. Trajian’s handiwork had faded to barely a patch of mottled skin across her cheekbone. ||The woman with the hat gave me a little last breath. Jaîna mixed it with sperrinbloom to make it go further. It hurts when I smile, that’s all.||

Kat’s own aches and pains moaned resentment that there’d been no last breath for her. Then again, she’d not made much of a positive impression on Rîma. ||And the rest?||

||Didn’t think I’d sleep, but I did.|| Yali gave a small smile. Not quite the irrepressible cheer of their first meeting, but a step towards it, for which Kat was grateful. ||Are you staying with Vallant?||

||For now.||

||Then I’ll stay too.|| She glanced about, nervous of being overheard. ||What happened to him?||

||He fell overboard.|| It was true enough.

Yali tilted her head, green eyes appraising. ||An accident?||

Kat hesitated. ||No.||

Yali pinched her lips tight, the wobble faint but evident. ||Thank you.||

Slipping an arm about the girl’s shoulder, Kat drew her close and stared out at the approaching city through a murmurating flock of swallows. Notably smaller than Tyzanta, and a fraction of Zariqaz’s sprawling size, Osios had the same ramshackle character born from centuries of unrestrained expansion, its borders contained more by the limitations of its sheer-sided plateau than architectural constraint. Its central spire was more of a sunken arch, symptomatic of a partial collapse in the recent past – or perhaps harbinger of one to come.

As the Chainbreaker drifted closer, Kat glimpsed the cerulean pennants of the Hythaka family streaming from torch house minarets. The golden gleam atop the spire’s xanathros revealed itself as a vast lone statue of Nyssa Benevolas – the folk of Osios clearly favoured forgiveness over judgement. The goddess’ arms were outstretched in welcome of the new dawn – not inadvertently towards Zariqaz, which lay more or less due east along the bar-straight railrunner tracks and serpentine dust roads so well-travelled they’d worn deep into the arid landscape. These routes converged across the shanty sprawl of Osios’ Gutterfields and passed beneath the archways of a slab-sided, scaffolded fortress atop the eastern wall. A tollhouse, perched on the lucrative Zariqaz trade route like a spider on a web.

“That’s new,” said Jaîna. “Wasn’t here three years ago.”

“The Hythaka didn’t feel the traders were giving them their due.” A stranger with tanned skin joined Kat at the bow and tapped the foot of a walking cane restlessly against the deck. His slicked-back hair and thin moustache were as much a part of a fireblood’s societal armour as his languid manner and impeccably tailored gold, emerald and azure robes. “So much for Osios being a free city. There’s a little street down in the gate quarter where you could buy anything. Not for long.”

Kat nodded. Though a dozen smaller roads climbed the plateau, they were narrow and winding, thusly slow and expensive compared to the main routes now blockaded by the tollhouse. A tollhouse meant more custodians, and more custodians meant more expenses to recoup. It wouldn’t be long until every trader in Osios was paying protection levy to the Hythaka, theoretically securing the city from lawlessness and corruption but in reality simply harnessing it to a new master.

“Not much difference between my kind and theirs,” rumbled Maxin. “At least we’ve got loyalty.”

“Oh yes,” said the stranger. “Nothing says camaraderie like a smashed kneecap.”

Maxin growled and balled a fist. Kat stepped between them. “And you are?”

The stranger arched an eyebrow. “How quickly one forgets one’s comrades.”

Warned by the knowing sparkle in his voice, Kat stared closer, remapping the contours of his face to another seen in recent memory. In the end, it was the jawline that did it. It wasn’t a chin you forgot. “Tatterlain?”

He offered a shallow, approving nod.

Easy to see, in hindsight, but it was telling how much difference an altered hairline and false moustache could make. Kat could have passed him in the street and never have known. Even the fireblood sneer had seemed genuine. “This is the real you?”

“Don’t be foolish. But Count Hythaka’s youngest daughter has a thing for hard-luck cases.” Tatterlain tipped back his head and pressed the back of a hand to his brow. “Who better to take advantage than the tragically impoverished Lord Tuzen Karza of Abizond?”

“And is he?” asked Jaîna. “Impoverished, I mean?”

Tatterlain shrugged. “No idea. But Abizond is a very long way off. Who needs to complicate things with sordid truth?”

Kat glanced at Yali, wondering how much she’d taken in, but the girl’s attention was firmly on the approaching spire, now close enough to make out individual buildings among the architectural tangle. As she watched, a carrack unfurled its sails and pulled away skyward from a teeming quayside. “So you’re leaving the ship?”

“I don’t like staying in any one place too long,” Tatterlain replied airily. “There’s so much to see and to do. Secrets to uncover, notorious criminals to rescue—”

“Heiresses to defraud…”

He bowed, unoffended. “The flame of hope burns forever eternal, my dear Katija. But we shall see. I’ll certainly learn a few things of interest to Vallant, and I do like to be useful.” He stared back towards the quarterdeck. “Oh dear, stormy skies ahead.”

Kat followed his gaze abaft. Vallant and Rîma were engaged in heated discussion. Though their words didn’t carry, Vallant’s angry gestures carried meaning aplenty. Rîma endured the stream of silent invective in utter stillness, then she raised a gloved finger, cutting Vallant off mid flow, and stalked away sternward. Vallant’s scowl turned thoughtful as he realised he was being observed.

“What was all that?” asked Jaîna.

“Who can say?” Tatterlain replied. “Lately, they’ve quarrelled a lot, but alas, gossip’s beneath me.”

“Is it really?” asked Kat.

He hung his head. “What a question to ask.” He twitched a frown as Vallant left the quarterdeck, striking a clear course in their direction. “We’re in trouble now.”

In fact, Vallant wore a broad smile. “Count Tuzen,” he shouted, his words plainly for the benefit of the toiling crew. “We seem to have forgotten to fly our colours. Remind me, which house generously provided you transport?”

Guffaws of laughter swept across the deck as he drew closer, Zephyr’s musical voice dancing above it all. Catching Kat’s curious glance, Vallant lowered his voice and signed a stumbling translation for Yali. ||The Chainbreaker has a very generous flag locker. Even dangerous outcasts must stay abreast of fashion.|| He raised his voice once more. “Well, your magnificence?”

Tatterlain abandoned his slouch for a fireblood’s aristocratic posture. “Under the circumstances, I think House Bascari should have the honour!”

“Then so they shall!”

A flag bearing the Bascari crescent and hawk was dutifully fetched from below-decks, and with a rasp of halyard hoisted above the mainmast.

Under cover of the rousing cheers, Vallant drew Kat and Yali aside. He signed as he spoke, the gestures far calmer than his words as affable tone gave way to quickening fervour. ||I’m rather afraid I’ve annoyed Rîma. I want to do something about that tollhouse. She thinks I’m being reckless. I probably am, but if we let the Hythaka increase their foothold, Osios will never be rid of them.||

||Why tell us?|| asked Kat.

||Because I’m hoping you’ll help. I won’t lie. There is a risk. But it can be done.|| He met them eye to eye in turn, his words urgent, imploring. ||What do you say?||

Twenty-One

The drainage ditch scarcely lived up to its name, with its rancid, cloying silt barely covered by a thin film of stagnant water. Worse, stooped beneath the bridge’s low arch, Kat was increasingly aware that her borrowed boots were not at all as watertight as she’d hoped. Yali wore an expression of disgust little different to her own. Rîma’s mood was harder to judge. Propped against the wall, her arms folded and her head low, the brim of her hat hid all expression. Even the rat peering incuriously at Kat from a gap in the brickwork looked as though it wanted to be elsewhere.

Only Vallant seemed glad to be there, lips parted and eyes narrowed in anticipation as he peered out from the bridge’s underhang into the murky pre-dawn.

||Wait for it,|| he hissed, the accompanying signs even more stumbling than his norm.

Yali rolled her eyes. ||Wait for it, he says. Couldn’t we have waited somewhere nicer?||

||Look on the bright side,|| Kat replied. ||Anywhere will seem nicer after this.||

She kept her expression at odds with the doubt sloshing in her stomach. She’d tried to convince Yali to stay with the Chainbreaker, but Vallant had needed a lock charmer and the girl had insisted she owed him.

Beyond the archway, the air buzzed with the chatter of Undertown’s ramshackle streets waking to daily life. The slam of doors and mutter of conversation. The sonorous tolling of bells calling citizens to morning prayer in the nearby temple. And rising above it all, the clomp of hooves and the grinding rumble of steel-shod wheels.

||This is it,|| murmured Vallant.

Bracing her hand against the brickwork curve – the only thing worse than standing in the slime would be falling into it – Kat risked a glance. To the west, a horse-drawn pedlar’s wagon was plodding up the roadway from Undertown’s azasouk marketplace and through a grove of felled cypress trees. Just before the bridge, the road met the narrow north–south track that threaded the tangle of mismatched adobe houses huddled inside the city wall. Across the bridge, it vanished into the tollhouse. In an hour it would be thick with labourers, craftsmen and wagons tasked with nudging the fledgling fortress to completion. The gates were already wide open in anticipation of their arrival, watched over by a pair of bored custodians.

The wagon reached the bridge’s western approach and made a sharp turn onto the northern road. A thunderclap sounded. The wagon dipped and slewed across the approach, the remains of a front wheel throwing dust from the roadway as the driver grabbed desperately at her box seat and horses whinnied. Kat ducked back into shelter as the sentries started forward.

“Get that heap out of the way!” shouted one.

“How?” replied Jaîna, indignant. “Pick it up and move it? The wheel’s shattered!”

Vallant’s teeth gleamed in the gloom. Like Yali, Jaîna had wanted to be part of the mission, but Vallant – to Kat’s full agreement and great surprise – had decided she lacked the experience. She had been, after all, the only innocent on the Mornwake.

Mission? She shook her head in self-reproof. This was a score. If she let Vallant get in her head like that, she’d end up like Skerrik, giddy with tales of heroism and derring-do. She stared down at the murky water and tried not to think about what squelched between her toes. The glamorous life of a folk hero it was not.

“I said get it moved!” shouted the custodian. “We’ve work gangs coming through!”

“I can’t help that,” bellowed Jaîna, her voice just the right mix of frustration and indignation, a woman watching her morning unfold into disaster. Had Kat not known that one of Vallant’s crew had sawn and pegged the stolen wagon’s axle to provoke the “accident”, she’d have found the performance wholly convincing. “You want it moved? Better come and give me a hand!”

Boots scuffed the roadway. Eyes upward, Vallant unlooped his mace from his belt – a short, stubby fist of a weapon, little more than a metal ball on a short wooden haft. He held up a spread hand, folding down each finger in a silent count. On “five”, he jerked his thumb towards the bristly yellowed grass of the tollhouse slope.

Her sword once more across her shoulders, Rîma vanished in a whisper of coat tails and a waft of rose water. Yali followed, grabbing fistfuls of withered grass to aid her ascent. Then it was Kat’s turn, the unfamiliar weight of the scimitar tapping against her back as she sloshed out of the mire.

Reaching the roadway, she glanced back towards the wagon and the two custodians vainly attempting to take the strain of the missing wheel. Then she followed Yali’s beckoning hand into the dawn-cast shadows beneath the tollhouse wall and turned her attention to the sentry crest.

Her aetherios tattoo responded sluggishly, its vigour drained to nothing by long hours in the Veil and only slightly restored by a hurried application of tessence after leaving the Chainbreaker. Worse, the hestic behind the eyes of Nyssa’s graven features was a weighty and pompous sort, responding to every gentle probe with resistant self-importance. Even with one foot inside the spirit world, Kat felt her left arm trembling as the ifrît pushed back. Not suspicious enough to raise the alarm – not yet – but refusing to be sated by what little soulfire she could afford.

She played to the hestic’s vainglory, soothing and flattering. At last it gave up a little of itself, a single thread Kat followed into the heart of its being. Eyes pinched shut, she felt her tattoo reshaping, the lines itching at her skin as they wove the proper glyph.

Sleep, she breathed silently. The hestic obeyed.

She opened her eyes and answered Vallant’s enquiring scowl with a nod. “Go.”

With a last glance at the roadway – too late, the custodians almost had Jaîna’s stranded wagon clear of the bridge’s mouth – she passed inside. She ghosted to join the others beneath a statue of Nyssa Benevolas, its sandstone marred by streaky white bird droppings.

With its high walls to the west, the tollhouse courtyard still lay heavily in shadow, its square scaffolded walls casting uneven, bristling silhouettes against the smouldering amber of the rising sun. The statue guarded a six-arched bridge spanning a sunken cloister. The cloister itself formed a hollow square above the sunken roadway and railrunner tracks that passed into the city via a series of overbuilt tunnels.

At the bridge’s far end, the overseer’s tower – identified by the wide white and indigo stained-glass window on its second storey – was the only structure other than the torch house at the north-west corner not clad in planking and scaffold ropes. The low adobe buildings clustered in the tower’s shadow looked half finished, as did the two smaller towers at the south-east and south-west corners. Some twenty yards above Kat’s head, custodians made patrol of the upper wall run, treading wooden platforms where stone was yet in abeyance, but like the sentries at the gate they had the heavy, lackadaisical gait of men and women willing their shift to end.

Vallant pointed at the north-east tower. ||That’s where they’ll store the blasting prisms.||

Yali frowned. ||How do you know?||

||No lanterns means no unfortunate accidents.||

Kat followed his gaze. Alone of the buildings – unfinished or otherwise – the north-east tower sat deep in shadow, without a single lumani lantern to drive back the darkness. Though they didn’t deal in fire, as did ordinary oil lamps, lumani prisms were prone to hiccups of flame if they suffered a sharp knock, and with construction under way there’d be sharp knocks aplenty.

||Stay low.|| Vallant struck out across the bridge.

Kat half expected one of the wall-ward sentries to cry out as she crossed after him, but she made the shelter of the far statue – this one of Nyssa Iudexas with the sword of judgement planted point-down at her feet – without event. Vallant ghosted under the window of a blocky building and risked a glance over the sill. Scowling, he dropped back down. ||Barracks. Four inside. Windows to the east.||

Kat felt exposed tucked against the statue’s plinth. Maybe a half-hour before the courtyard lost its shadows to the rising sun. Maybe not even that.

Rîma crossed to the barrack wall and curled a gloved finger to summon her. When Kat joined her, Rîma set her sword down on the cobbles. Her signs had a flourishing, balletic grace. ||Is there a hestic?||

Kat double-checked before replying. ||No.||

||Can you do anything about the lumani?||

She closed her eyes. There were a pair of lumani inside, one cheery and bright, the other worn thin to the brink of dissipation. The patterns of her tattoo fell readily into shapes both would obey. ||I can set them sleeping.||

||When I signal, please do so.||

Reclaiming her sword, Rîma slunk around to the wooden door and tested the handle. Receiving a nod from Vallant, she stood and adjusted her hat.

At Vallant’s side, Yali fidgeted. ||Shouldn’t we help her?||

Vallant shook his head. ||We’d just get in her way.||

Rîma nodded. Kat set the lumani sleeping.

“Gah! Wretched things’re dead,” came a muffled voice. “Second time this week.”

Rîma slipped through the door, sword across her shoulders.

“Who’s that?” demanded a different voice. “If that’s you, Cherazi, I’m not laughing. Cherazi?”

The musical hiss of a sword being drawn was barely a whisper. “Are you sure you wish to go through with this?” Rîma purred.

A footstep. A wet ripping sound. The thud of a falling body. The sudden, unhappy crash of shattered furniture. Kat shot an urgent glance at the nearest wall-ward sentry, even though she knew that the sound, deadened as it had been, couldn’t have carried half that far.

A muffled sob. A scrape of steel on steel. A wet gurgle. And then Rîma was on the threshold once again, the door shut behind and her blood-smeared sword resting carelessly across her shoulders.

With a twirl of her wrist, she proffered an upturned palm in the Simah sign for “done”.

Vallant tapped his cheek in mirror to a bright splash of blood on Rîma’s.

Scowling, she brushed it away, stared briefly down at her hand with a look of utter ennui, and wiped her fingers clean on the lapel of her coat.

Vallant led the way across the open ground, Kat hugging the outer wall as much as the tarped construction materials allowed. Two brass facing plates gleamed dully on the tower door, one for a commonplace heavy mortice lock, the other for a lighter, slenderer key.

||Can you handle them?|| Vallant asked Yali, his eyes on a knot of custodians gathered in the doorway of the torch house.

||She’d better,|| said Rîma.

Yali offered a brilliant grin and hefted the steel ring of lock charmer’s tools Tatterlain had gifted her. ||Watch and learn.||

Both preferred instead to stand vigil in case of discovery. Kat, realising that she’d never truly seen Yali at work, paid close attention. Azra had preferred an artless sequence of trial and error, wearing down a lock through sheer pig-headedness. Skerrik had favoured a fussier approach, always working to a methodical pattern. By contrast, Yali spent as much time in contemplation of each lock as she did probing its innards. Kat supposed she herself must have looked much the same when treating with ifrîti.

One lock sprang open, then the other. Grinning ear to ear, Yali offered a florid bow. ||Fast enough for you?||

Vallant patted her on the shoulder. “Not bad.”

It spoke to his surprise that, having otherwise been so diligent about signing around Yali, he completely forgot to do so in that moment.

The lower floor of the tower held a small armoury, with crossbows and scimitars racked against the walls, alongside a handful of heavy pikes and tower shields that Kat had seldom seen wielded save at ceremonies – or on that one occasion in Zariqaz when Count Rashace had quelled a factory strike by sending redcloaks against the crowd. No shriekers, but then again, she had yet to see a Hythaka custodian with a shrieker. The family obviously either couldn’t meet the expense or wasn’t prepared to.

There were also a dozen blasting prisms in a padded crate, each the size of Kat’s forearm, wrapped in an off-white cotton bag and fitted with a length of fuse. She felt the ifrîti fizzing within as soon as she touched one. Where others were arrogant or prideful or blissfully unaware, the spirits within this prism were desperate for the spark of flame that would see them released. They hungered for death. They stank of it too – a sour aroma, like rotting rose petals and turned wine.

She snatched her hand away. What torments had the shriversmen invented to render the ifrîti so nihilistic? This wasn’t service. It was torment. ||You’re sure this will work?||

Vallant offered the solemn, confident smile she was steadily learning to hate. ||I doubt they’ve a hoard of crystal tetrams we can use. Tollhouses of this design have too much weight on a handful of central pillars. Destroy one and it gets exciting. Take out four and the whole place folds up.|| He unwrapped one of the fuses, the pitch and sulphur stink of the treated twine foul in the confined space. “About fifteen minutes. Call it ten to get them in place. Another ten to make our way out? The timing works.”

Kat scowled. She didn’t doubt the blasting prisms could do the job. They were construction-grade tools, used for digging into bedrock. “Just barely.”

He shrugged. “Rîma will show you where to set them.”

“Why?” said Rîma, frowning. “Where will you be?”

“There’ll be shipping schedules and troop manifests in the overseer’s office. Maybe even written orders from the King’s Council. I want them.”

Her expression hardened. “This isn’t what we agreed!”

“As I recall, you didn’t agree to any of it. Plans change. There’s an opportunity here.” He tapped Yali on the shoulder. ||I’ll need your help with the locks.||

||Sure.||

Kat looked from one to the other with growing unease. The last time she’d been part of a foursome, splitting up had got her captured and everyone else dead.

“You’re really going to trust me with this?” she said. “You hardly know me.”

“I trust my crew,” he replied. “Otherwise none of this works.”

Her cheeks coloured in annoyance. “What if I’m not part of your crew?”

“Then I guess we’ll find out.”

He couldn’t be that naïve. Could he? She balled a fist, struck by the sudden urge to either laugh in his face or punch it. On the other hand, time was fast running out, and arguing with Vallant would only devour more of it.

||Be careful,|| she told Yali instead.

Vallant left with Yali in tow, hugging the wall as they had on their outward journey, this time steering for the overseer’s tower.

Kat gazed down at the blasting prisms without enthusiasm. “Is he always like this?”

Rîma scowled. “He never used to be, but lately…?”

Wonderful. “You might have said something before.” Receiving no reply, Kat reached for the first charge. “Let’s get this over with.”

Laden with two charges each – a number Rîma insisted would be more than enough – they doubled back towards the bridge. The far end was already bathed in morning sunlight, Nyssa Benevolas radiant and beautiful in the dawn. Kat’s instincts screamed at her to abandon the score before it was too late… but that would have meant abandoning Yali, and she couldn’t help but wonder if that was why Vallant had divided the group as he had.

Biting back her fears, she followed Rîma down a side stair let into the bridge’s eastern pier and into the cloisters. Set back from the outer columns a series of barred storehouses boasted an impressive range of crates, sacks and other impounded goods, held ransom against payment of protection levy and import tithes. Even with the tollhouse incomplete, the Hythaka were already making their presence felt.

Descending the second stair, Kat ducked out of the sunlight to get her bearings. A hundred or so yards to the east, heavy portcullises jutted above the tollgate portals, a promise of embargoes to come if the Hythaka felt the need. A single cobbled roadway and two pairs of railrunner tracks ran arrow-straight from the bright sunshine beyond the archways and vanished into the gloom of the western tunnel. A railrunner composed of three boxy sun-bleached wooden carriages and a filthy sand-scraped engine sat dark and silent on a siding between the two tracks. And every few paces, thick fluted stone columns vanished into the gloom.

Rîma pointed, each in turn, to four columns directly beneath the courtyard perimeter. “A prism at the base of each. I’ll set the fuses when we’re done.”

All well and good so far as Kat was concerned. If Rîma was lighting the fuses, she could convince herself she wasn’t part of it. No tears for the custodians manning the tollgates, but what if a railrunner came through?

Even then, with the first charge tucked into the base of the first pillar and the coiled fuse in her hand, she hesitated.

“I can’t do this,” she murmured.

Yes you can, darling, Azra’s voice whispered from the shadows. They took everything from you. Take whatever you can from them.

Yes. Of course it was what Azra would have done. An eye for an eye. Maybe two or three eyes. Make the lesson stick. All hesitation bought was delay, and it was much too early in the day for a railrunner to rattle into the tunnel. They were too unreliable to risk travel after sundown. Anyone down here was in Hythaka’s pay. They didn’t count. Swallowing the last of her doubts, Kat played out the prism’s fuse and scuttled to the next pillar.

Rîma was waiting at the third column. “You’re too slow.”

Kat felt her cheeks warm and hoped the gloom hid her embarrassment. Had Rîma seen her hesitate? “Don’t like me much, do you?”

“A thing should be done with accomplishment, or not at all.” Rîma sheathed her sword and fished a tinderbox from her coat pocket. “I’ll see you in the cloisters.”

Kat was halfway to the stairs when the first snap-hiss of a spluttering fuse reached her ears. Struck by the desire to put as much distance between her and the blasting prisms as possible, she took the steps two at a time.

Somehow Rîma was at her side by the time she reached the cloister floor, her breathing untroubled. “Fifteen minutes. Let us hope Vallant has concluded his treasure hunt.”

As they reached the upper bridge, the stained-glass window of the overseer’s tower burst outwards. A black-robed figure plunged through the glittering shards. His body bounced once on the cobbled approach and lay still.

Kat froze. “What…?”

A hestic’s thin wail filled the air. Running feet and urgent shouts echoed across the courtyard.

Rîma pressed her back against Nyssa Iudexas’ plinth. “What has he done?”

Half a dozen custodians converged on the overseer’s tower, weapons drawn. The only good news was that all were too fixated on the spectacle of the broken window to glance back towards the bridge. Two custodians were already at the tower door. Four more advancing, one with a shrieker drawn. The kind of odds to put any self-respecting skelder to flight, but Vallant wasn’t the only one making poor choices that morning.

“What now?” asked Kat.

Rîma sighed and shrugged her sword clear. “I need room to work.”

She took off, gentle strides quickening to a run as she closed the distance to the tower. Kat drew her unfamiliar scimitar and hurried in her wake.

The rearmost custodian spun around before Kat had closed even half the distance. “Behind!”

Rîma, a few paces to Kat’s front, slowed to a walk as others turned. The shrieker-wielder brought his weapon to bear on her, the barrel’s gaping muzzle black as death and fit to swallow Kat’s whole world.

“Weapons down!”

Rîma let her sword point scrape the cobbles and picked up speed. “Are you sure you wish to go through with this?”

“Take her!”

The shrieker flared. Rîma dropped, the bolt of flame screaming over her head and spattering against a pile of construction sacking. Still on her knees, she skidded the last distance to the shrieker-wielder and cut his legs away with a backward sweep. She reached her feet before he hit the ground, her sword flashing to a parry. Twisting her new attacker’s sword towards the ground, she stamped to trap the blade and sliced open his throat. Behind her, flames raced across timber and sacking, black smoke spiralling into the cloudless dawn.

Screaming to dull her own fear, Kat hacked at the nearest custodian. His sword arced out, the shudder of their meeting jarring every bone in her forearm. Off balance, she stumbled to keep her footing, her parry barely scraping aside the custodian’s riposte. He bore down, impassive mask amplifying hollow, laboured breaths. With a cry of triumph, he swung.

Kat flung herself aside. His scimitar plucked at her coat. He shrieked as her sword sliced into his arm. The shriek became a bellow when she rammed her knee between his legs. She slammed her pommel down on his head and ran to help Rîma, who stood between three twitching, bloody bodies, sword raised at high guard as the surviving custodians closed in.

The first custodian hacked down. Rîma slipped under the blade, her backswing almost lazy in its slowness as it took the woman’s spine. Kat tackled the second as he charged at Rîma from behind. Her shoulder slammed into his ribs and crashed them both to the cobbles.

Her elbow struck stone. Her scimitar clattered from numbed fingers. The custodian was already rising, a growl of triumph echoing from beneath his mask. He sliced down.

He froze, the growl sputtering to a plaintive moan as the bloody tip of Rîma’s sword burst from his chest. Kicking his legs away, she ripped her blade free and offered her hand.

Kat took it gladly. “Where did you learn to fight like that?”

“A thing should be done with accomplishment—”

“Or not at all, I get it.”

“Then you should try it some time.”

Kat scowled and stared back across the bridge, whose far end was now thick with custodians. Behind them lurched a pair of skeletal koilos in ember-saints’ black and gold lamellar, the blades of their giant flamberges golden as dawn’s light crept across the courtyard. On her side of the bridge, the construction stockpile blazed merrily, skyward flames trailing soot against the wall and tinging the air with hot, bitter ash. Taking a long step, she reclaimed a discarded shrieker. The prism housing was cracked, the captive ifrît long since bled away.

Typical.

She let it fall. “This has been fun.”

Rîma swung her sword back across her shoulders. “Hasn’t it?”

The door to the overseer’s tower burst open. Vallant beckoned impatiently. “What are you waiting for?”

Kat gaped. Sure, there was no chance of fighting their way across the bridge, and with the blasting prisms mere minutes from detonation, escaping through the tunnels felt decidedly unwise, but to trap themselves in one of the towers? How much time had passed since they’d set the charges? Two minutes? Three?

Rîma offered a lopsided shrug. “Before he does something even more unwise.”

Vallant slammed the door behind them and set his shoulder against a cabinet. It toppled across the threshold with a deafening crash, the door popping open and spilling sheaves of paperwork across the tiles. Kat caught sight of Yali halfway down the nearer of the two helical staircases and signed a furled-fingered enquiry. The girl nodded. She was unharmed. For the moment.

Vallant rubbed his hands, a man well satisfied with his work. He peered through the window at the burning courtyard. “What were you playing at out there?”

Kat rounded on him, cheeks burning. “Us? We were following your scrag-end of a plan. What were you playing at?”

“Things got out of hand,” he replied equably.

“You don’t say.” She caught Rîma offering Vallant a similar – if fractionally more restrained – version of her own glare, and felt a measure of common ground with the swordstress. “I never should have agreed to this.”

He smiled. He actually had the affront to smile. Even Azra at her most suicidal would have taken the situation seriously. “Have a little faith. It was worth it.” Stooping, he picked up a courier’s haversack and produced a fistful of papers. “Someone got sloppy. Convoy times, supply manifests – even an assayer’s note recommending an alteration to the tithe routes. These are worth more than gold.”

“So we can die rich? If I’d wanted that, I’d have stayed inside Xanathros Alabastra.”

“Enough.” Rîma’s calm proclamation was no less an unbending command. “Are we really going to make it that easy for them?”

Vallant’s smile turned serious. ||This way.||

He took off up the stairs, leaving Kat little choice but to follow. Crossing the second-storey landing and the custodian lying crumpled in the doorway, he forged upward on tireless legs. Two more floors passed away before he paused at an ill-fitting wooden door. Mace in hand, he flung it open and ran out onto the rooftop. The rampart sentry, attention wholly given over to the commotion below, never stood a chance. Vallant’s mace struck the small of his spine with a sickening crack. A shove sent him tumbling over the edge. He didn’t even have time to scream.

Vallant gazed out across the courtyard, a goodly portion of which was now ablaze, the crackling flames driven south-east by the rising wind. “It might be I overcomplicated things with explosives. But we are where we are.”

Kat doubled over, fighting for breath. “Well done. Now we’re even more trapped.”

Rîma shut the rampart door and eyed it distastefully. “That won’t hold.”

||At least it’s a nice view,|| Yali signed, the humour not even coming close to touching her eyes.

Kat stifled a grimace. She knew the look all too well. Yali was scared out of her wits but terrified of letting it show. She’d been the same on her first score with Azra: a raid on a Jovîna tithe office. Child’s play compared to this disaster. Nyssa alone knew how Yali was keeping it together.

Skirting the silent, wheeled hulk of a crossbow-shaped torsion ballista, she joined Yali at the rampart’s eastern edge and stared towards the dawn. There was a beauty in the arid ochre expanse of the Osios flatlands, broken by greenery only where the dark ribbon of the Kemmuz River wound its way towards Zariqaz and the Silent Sea. Had Yali ever even been in the wilds beyond Tyzanta’s walls? ||Isn’t it?||

“I don’t know,” said Vallant from behind. “I prefer this one.”

The burning courtyard? Of course he did. He’d still be wearing that insufferable I-know-best expression when the prisms blew and buried them all beneath the tollhouse.

“Can’t you—” Turning, Kat caught her breath as the Chainbreaker dived gracefully out of the western skies, scattering roosting birds from the tollhouse walls. Coils of rope tumbled from the dhow’s starboard bow as she banked across the morning breeze.

Vallant glanced at Yali, making certain she was watching. ||Zephyr will slow as much as she can, but the wind’s a harsh mistress. Grab a rope, hold fast, and let the others pull you aboard.||

Just as well, as the prospect of dangling dozens upon dozens of yards high above damn-all was already churning Kat’s stomach.

Vallant met her square in the eye, solemn as ever. “Like I told you, I trust my crew.”

The Chainbreaker came in impossibly fast. Kat barely had time to worry about whether she’d fumble the grasp before her hands closed about the rough, knotted weave. She clamped her eyes shut as her arms took the strain, the wind grasping at her with cold, insistent fingers.

She didn’t breathe again until strong hands hauled her up over the Chainbreaker’s gunwale and onto the deck. Trembling with fatigue and nausea, she struck aside Vallant’s proffered hand and clambered to her feet, using first bulwark and then rigging to support jellied legs.

The tollhouse was already three hundred yards off the starboard bow and a good fifty below when the charges blew. Great roiling gouts of dust and broken stone blossomed from the tunnel mouths. The walls shuddered with a rumble like thunder on distant hills. Then slowly, majestically – just as Vallant had predicted – the entire structure folded up on itself, the towers and walls toppling inwards to smother the courtyard’s flames in fountains of greyish-black dust.

Giddy with relief, Kat joined the cheers ringing out along the Chainbreaker’s deck. Away towards the quarterdeck, Yali was practically jumping up and down in excitement. But as Vallant shook hands and shared jokes, Rîma stood unmoving by the mainmast, looking balefully on.

Twenty-Two

“I am not accustomed to being summoned, Damant.”

Ardin Javar was a bear of a man with a bushy greying beard and a permanent scowl as thunderous as his tone. Long years in the Bascari custodium had taught him how to get his own way through force of physical presence and heavy-jowled bluster; elevation to the rank of templar had only encouraged the habit. It was inevitable that he’d grown so arrogant as to remove himself from hierarchy altogether by rousing Undertown into open revolt. Whatever humility he’d earned through eventual disgrace was buried deep. His every word was uttered a fraction too loud, his every gesture designed to centre himself in the onlooker’s eye.

As a callow custodium recruit, Damant had been cowed by Javar’s boundless conviction. As a grown man, he found it tiresome. “You still came.”

Javar spread his hands to encompass the chamber’s finery. Located on the unofficial threshold between Undertown and Overspire, the Temple of Devotion was neutral territory – at least, as much as any ground in Tyzanta could be said to be neutral. Close enough to the slums for factory noise to be an ever-present growl. “I am always at the Eternity King’s service.” He lowered his voice to a bitter rumble. “Even when I wasn’t, I was.”

Across the carpeted aisle, the red-headed, pale-skinned girl folded her arms in a manner much too arch for her apparent years and shook her head despairingly. “Please, Ardin. Enough. There’s no one here to impress. We all know you entirely too well.”

She made for a striking contrast to the target of her scorn, slender as a reed and her layered, vibrant silks entirely more suitable for the venue than Javar’s battered skelder’s garb that was as much costume as uniform. Javar loved to play at being one of the people.

A serpent and a bear, called to treat at high altar.

Javar, Damant knew about as well he did anyone. Back in his glory days, the older man had introduced him to Malissa, though in hindsight he’d done neither of them a favour. That love affair, begun in passion, had imploded after two years of marriage and vying duties. Damant had never dared attempt reconciliation in the years since. Some folk were better off alone.

As for the girl? Or rather the ageless spirit peering out from that winsome face? Marida had evaded official scrutiny for at least a generation. Nyssa alone knew how Yennika had charmed the serpent from her burrow, and yet charmed her she had. All things being equal, Damant could have managed without. Glossy, black-eyed gaze aside, there was nothing about Marida to reveal the qalimîri spirit puppeteering the girl’s body, but the eyes were enough. Cold, dead and predatory.

At long last, Yennika emerged from the temple’s back rooms, skirts swishing the dust of old incense from the flagstones. Her overseer’s uniform clung like a second skin and her stride was just slow enough to remind her guests that their time was a commodity she – and she alone – would spend.

To Damant’s surprise, she wasn’t alone. Julan Aroth trailed her to the altar steps. Damant hadn’t known he’d returned to the city, and wondered why he had. Men like Aroth didn’t travel merely because they’d grown bored of their surroundings.

Slowing to a halt before the altar – and not coincidentally the open-air colonnade whose bright sunset rendered her as silhouette framed by flame-lit sky – Yennika looped her hands behind her back. “As two of Tyzanta’s most respected citizens, I thought it was well past time you and I had a face-to-face conversation.”

Javar bared a tooth. “I’ve nothing to say to this creature.”

“Good. Because I intend that you will both listen to me.” Yennika descended the altar’s steps. She halted a pace from Javar, smiled without warmth and touched her palm to his barrel chest. “This is Nyssa’s house, Ardin. Surely even an ex-templar knows a little of respect? Or is the man of principle I once admired nothing more than history?”

Javar’s glower dissolved into an unhappy frown. “He remains.”

Though Yennika was a head shorter than Javar and barely a third his mass, Damant was left in no doubt who was in control. It helped that she had a dozen custodians in the temple’s atrium, while Javar had brought only two retainers, of course. But while Javar’s pride was seldom other than obvious, to have made it so swiftly into a tool was impressive.

Allowing a flicker of genuine warmth – what an egotist like Javar might consider interest – into her smile, Yennika took a backward step to bring Marida into view. “We’re all busy with our private concerns, I know that, so I’ll keep this brief: your squabbling must cease. From now on Tyzanta must be ruled by law, and only the law – not by the favours of those who choose to sit outside it.”

Marida tilted her head. The matching wrinkle of the lip lent slyness to her words. “Your law?” She’d arrived at the meeting alone, which might have been arrogance or simply an expression of confidence in House Bascari’s protection.

Yennika’s smile broadened. “The Eternity King’s law, naturally. Which I, as custodium head to Tyzanta’s ruling family, will administer diligently. If I choose to administrate in favour of those who support me, then who would quarrel with that?”

Aroth shrugged. “The Eternity King prides himself on a lack of interference in city governance, so long as the city is governed… and pays tribute to the throne.”

“There will still be opportunities,” Yennika put in smoothly. “As people of the world, we can wink at outliers and forgive them when they occur, but there will be order in Tyzanta.”

“And if we refuse?” rumbled Javar.

Marida sighed.

Yennika didn’t seem to notice. “Let’s not dwell on unhappy hypotheticals. House Jovîna’s withdrawal has left House Bascari with more territory than it can administrate, at least in the short term. I propose that the two of you fill that void. Set the boundaries as you wish, I don’t care in the least, provided the protection levy is met.”

Silk swished as Marida folded her arms. “What if I prefer things as they are? It would be unfortunate if certain secrets came to light.”

Damant twitched. It was a rare fireblood who didn’t have secrets, either inherited or personal. Yennika, he felt sure, had more than her share, and there’d surely be weaponisable ones buried among them.

Her smile didn’t even flicker. “Then I suppose it all comes down to whether or not those secrets have any value. Or if I know more about you than you do about me. We both have reputations to protect. Don’t we, darling?”

Marida gave a slow, thoughtful nod, and it seemed to Damant that she hadn’t been making a threat at all. Rather, she’d been testing Yennika’s mettle. “I’ll consider your offer.” She looked directly at Javar. Not favourably, but it seemed Nyssa was little inclined to miracles that day. “We should discuss this.”

“Agreed,” he rumbled.

“Then I think we’re done,” said Yennika. “Let me have your answer tomorrow.”

A ten-count after the doors had closed behind them, Yennika’s shoulders sagged. “Your thoughts, Ihsan?”

“They’ll agree. They’ve no reason not to. All you’ve really asked is that they stop fighting one another. If they can’t keep their criminal interests concealed, they’d not have been in this room to start with.” Damant shrugged, though as ever in recent days he marvelled at how astutely Yennika had managed the situation. Whatever her strengths, the Countess had always been too soft, both with Undertown’s dregs and her rivals in House Jovîna. By taking a blatant stand against the latter, Yennika had sent a message to the former. Some days one didn’t have to be an accomplished puppeteer. Just knowing where the strings could be found was enough. “The delay is pride, that’s all.”

“Pride, and in Javar’s case a need to seek permission from dear cousin Salenna.” Yennika shook her head. “A crook of her finger and he’s lost, but I suppose she has her charms.”

Aroth nodded. “And in the meantime, you openly bind them both to House Bascari. For Javar, the narrative writes itself: the next stop on his journey of redemption after a tragic lapse.” He took her hand. “I can’t help but think rehabilitating the qalimîri will prove a little harder.”

He raised Yennika’s hand to his lips. She pulled it free before contact and offered an abashed but unapologetic smile. “I don’t need to rehabilitate her. I only need her to obey.”

“True.” For all that Aroth sought to stifle his disappointment, Damant caught his scowl all the same. At Yennika’s first conclave he’d assumed the two were strangers. Now, he wasn’t so sure. “Which means it pains me even more to be the bearer of bad news.”

“Oh?” said Damant.

“Not content with freeing the Arvish woman, Vallant has taken it upon himself to make mischief out at Osios. The Hythaka lost a tollhouse and, I daresay, a good deal of standing.”

A small, unbidden spark of pride warmed Damant’s soul, quenched almost immediately by sourness. No tears shed for the Hythaka, but Vallant’s every success offered reminder of the good he could have done had he remained loyal to the Bascari family.

Yennika arched an eyebrow. “Osios is a long way from Tyzanta and, as I understand it, the Voice herself decreed that Vallant be left alone.” She turned her gaze on Damant. “But for that, I know Ihsan would have put matters right long ago.”

“That may be changing.” Aroth brought his right hand up to waist level and let it drop. The gesture struck Damant as peculiar until he realised that the minister had been fixing to take Yennika’s hand a second time, only to think better of it. Offering a half-bow in its place, Aroth too retreated from the chapel.

“Well then,” murmured Yennika. “Interesting times.”

Damant awoke to an insistent knock on his chamber door. Still caught in the hazy twilight of dream, he willed the sound away. It returned more urgent than ever, Tanith’s muffled voice close behind.

“Castellan? I apologise for disturbing you, but there’s something you should see.”

Firebloods didn’t go creeping around a cinderblood’s quarters without purpose. Swallowing to moisten a sleep-dried throat, he clambered off the narrow bed, pulled on a robe and lurched to the door. Disarrayed golden ringlets and dark circles beneath Tanith’s eyes spoke to a disturbed sleep of her own. Even now, she’d had presence of mind to pull on a pair of long silk gloves, even though she’d managed to tie her bed robe slightly crooked, hitched lower on one shoulder than was entirely decent. Still she looked more put together than Damant felt.

“What is it?” he asked. “Well?”

“It’s the countess.” Glancing left and right, Tanith dropped her voice a couple of notches. “She’s in the gardens. Painting.”

“At this hour?” A cold wind scattered the last strands of sleep from behind Damant’s eyes. “You’d better show me.”

Tanith led him along the palace’s winding corridors, down through the back passageways reserved for the custodians’ movements and out onto the veranda. Hestics stirred as they passed, the brief frisson of attention raising hairs bordering the glyph tattooed at the base of Damant’s neck. A weaving path through sculpted yews and flower beds resplendent with late-flowering hydrangeas and the musical chitter of cicadas brought them to the south pergola. Obvious in hindsight. Tythia’s favourite refuge when the sun was at its brightest, the cool shadows and the soft, earthy scents a shield against the harsher world beyond.

The Countess stood at the very centre. The skeletal dome reached upward above her, the waxy ivy wreathed about the curved beams almost black beneath the stars. Her easel sat pointed towards the southern archway, her brush swirling its dance across canvas before dipping to the palette once more. She trembled with every stroke, and little wonder, for the cloudless night was cold enough to frost breath, and she wore not a stitch of clothing.

Cheeks colouring, Damant looked hastily away. “You might have told me the rest,” he hissed.

Tanith flinched and absently tugged her robe’s shoulder into place. It fell back again at once, slightly lower than before, further reducing the list of places Damant could safely put his eyes. “I didn’t think you’d believe me.”

The Countess continued painting, unconcerned by or unaware of the commotion in the doorway.

Damant bit his tongue. Honesty had a clarion all its own, and there was little point taking his embarrassment out on Tanith when more important matters lay at hand. “Who else knows?”

“Sherabi told me.” She glanced away, a blush colouring her cheeks. “And Josqa knows as well. He was… with me when Sherabi came to my chambers.”

Not the happiest of news. But Damant supposed that if he couldn’t throw enough of a scare into Josqa to have him hold his tongue, then he might as well retire.

A problem for later. But Sherabi? Better for the maidservant to handle the matter, maybe? Damant winced the idea away, recognising its cowardice. Though matters between the Countess and Sherabi had repaired themselves in recent days, he couldn’t ask the girl to tackle this – a conclusion Tanith had doubtless already reached.

“Fetch a blanket. Be quick and tell no one.”

Tanith nodded and hurried away. It was only when she’d gone that Damant realised he’d framed the request as an order. He’d never have gotten away with that with one of the Bascari, but Tanith Floranz – as he was starting to realise – was a cat of a very different stripe.

Taking a deep breath, and with his eyes fixedly firmly forward, he edged closer.

On his third step across the marble flagstones, the Countess brought her brush to rest.

“Ihsan?” She spoke without turning. In fact, Damant wasn’t at all sure how she’d seen him. “This is hardly appropriate.”

And just like that, his mouth was dry again. “On that we may safely agree, lady.”

“I w-wondered if the girl would have the courage to come out herself-f.” The tremor of chattering teeth stuttered beneath the words. “This m-makes you uncomfortable, doesn’t it-t?”

He grimaced. “More than I can say, lady.”

She snorted. “It should. We’ve all b-been too comfortable. N-Nyssa has taken note. We are to be p-punished. You’ll see.” The palette slipped from her forearm and struck the flagstones, paint spattering her bare feet. “I w-wanted to feel the light of the stars. Is that so v-very wrong?”

Damant glanced back towards the residence. Where was Tanith and that damned blanket? “Of course not, lady. But I worry about the cold.”

At last she turned to look at him, her eyes shining. “N-nonsense. My mother advised me to t-try everything once – and Nyssa knows she followed her own counsel with rapacity. I have many th-things left to try, and little time in which to do so.”

“Not so, lady,” he replied.

For want of somewhere to put his eyes, he stared at the canvas. A cityscape beneath starlight, as befitted the view. Shades of blue-black, lit by pinpricks of light. But at second glance, too many of the details were wrong, the curve of arch and buttress not that of the Overspire, but of Undertown foundations. And there were stalactites shadowed among the stars. An impossible city, buried deep.

His thoughts crawled uncomfortably back to Mirela’s insistence that an amashti had been loose in the grounds. Had she been right? Had the archon’s banishment failed? He scowled the thought away. Amashti lured victims beneath the stars with carnal promise, not the offer of artistic tutelage. Some tragedies had no need of daemons.

“K-kind Ihsan,” the Countess murmured, joy and defiance draining away. “Always so kind. But I’ll be dead s-soon enough. Tythia told me, you see. She w-whispers to me when I’m sleeping, creeping through my nightmares. She h-hates me, and who can b-blame her?”

“Lady, please…”

Running feet heralded Tanith’s return, not one but two thick blankets across her arms. Still murmuring softly to herself, the Countess offered no resistance as Damant draped them around her shoulders and led her back inside.

Sherabi waited at the veranda door, face pinched with concern. Gladly transferring the Countess to her keeping, Damant trailed behind as the small procession picked its way towards the staterooms. Tanith led from the front, guarding against the slim possibility of others from the household crossing their path.

When they at last reached the staterooms, Sherabi put her mistress to bed. Damant retreated to the art room, the lumani prism in the ceiling rose flickering to wakefulness as it recognised his arrival. It looked as though a small tornado had swept through the room, with pots of pigment and sheafs of painter’s canvas scattered across the furnishings. A free-standing lumani lamp lay shattered across the floor, its woven shade crushed and smeared with blackish-grey paint. Scattered likenesses of Tythia stared crookedly from wherever their portraits had ended up, fragments of a broken mirror rendered in oils. Damant saw nothing of the hatred the Countess had described. In all those portraits save one.

The most recent work alone had survived the maelstrom, resting on its easel before the window drapes. She looked older and sterner than ever, her hair iron grey and her features creased in an expression caught between anger and disappointment. No longer Tythia as she might have been had she lived, but a self-portrait in exquisite detail. The Countess as she’d been before the incident at Xanathros Alabastra. Before the warning flickers of instability. Only the eyes were missing, painted out with black, awaiting the brushwork that would bring them to life.

Damant wiped away an unwanted tear. Only with that perfect portrait before him did he realise just how much and how fast the Countess had declined in recent days. Even last breath couldn’t keep the ravages of omen rot at bay for ever. The disease would simply feed and feed, sapping her strength until she was gone.

But instinct told him this was too fast, too sudden.

Glass crunched under his boot. Stooping, he reclaimed the remnant of a talent wisp vial. A hurried search turned up a half-dozen others, some broken, others still intact. He slipped them all into a pocket. If the Countess had overindulged in recent days, it was just possible that the fragments of soul had muddied her wits. A period of abstinence would set matters right. He’d apologise when she was back to herself.

In the meantime, it wouldn’t hurt to have the vials double-checked. It was far from unheard of for an unscrupulous shriversman to dilute the life-giving essence, or substitute it entirely for a puff of yew smoke.

A soft knock drew Damant’s gaze to the open door. Sherabi and Tanith waited beyond. All told, it was hard to say who looked more nervous. Exhaling, he relaxed balled fists and gave as friendly a nod as he could manage. “Well?”

“She’s sleeping,” said Sherabi, her voice low and her expression downcast. “I’ll stay with her until morning.”

“Thank you,” said Damant. “Thank you both. I won’t forget this.”

Weary beyond words, he went in search of his own bed, and what little sleep the night had left to give.

Twenty-Three

The Chainbreaker spent two days after the tollhouse’s fall anchored among scrub trees on the edge of the Bascari domain, awaiting rendezvous with crew members reluctantly abandoned during their hasty departure from Osios, Jaîna among them. They returned with tales of a city thrown into anarchy and custodians struggling to pick up the pieces. What pride Kat felt at the achievement was soon crushed by Jaîna’s tales of weeping families searching for their dead among the rubble. Vallant simply greeted the news with a grim, satisfied nod and gave the order to slip anchor.

Several days of graceful southward travel followed, the Chainbreaker filling its sails with mortal wind when the fickle currents gusted favourably, and rising to tack the Deadwinds when they did not. Always they paralleled the flickering torch houses along the Great South Road, but never bringing them closer than the eastern horizon, for fear that some Bascari captain might grow curious and seek to make his name.

With little to fill her time – still trapped in a conflicted fug over events at Osios, she was no more inclined to help the Chainbreaker’s crew than they were to have an inexperienced woman snarl up their routines – Kat passed the hours either watching the plains rush by from the relative solitude of the bow, or playing hands of pentassa with Jaîna and Yali. She lost every time, lulled by Jaîna’s straight-faced bluffs or else outright cheated by Yali’s dexterous card-sharping. Of Rîma, she saw almost nothing. Zephyr was seldom other than at the helm, surrendering the wheels to Vallant only for fleeting periods of sleep. These she took, in defiance of gravity, stretched out along the watch platform atop the mainmast – a post she attained without the benefit of rigging or rope, but by simply walking dancer’s steps on the air.

Yet despite all efforts at evasion, dawn on the third day brought a Bascari carrack to the eastern horizon. The development lured a groggy Zephyr down to the helm. An ill-tempered cloud, her starlight hair in disarray and her manner brusquer even than normal, she hauled on the pitching wheel and ordered that every scrap of canvas be roused. In response, the carrack’s silhouette bloomed outriggers and fan sails, its squared-off masts now but the centrepiece in an array of canvas petals. All of it too little, too late, because an hour later, the southern horizon vanished beneath the Veil’s seething mists. Recognising defeat, the carrack’s captain furled sail and peeled away west, doubtless to tell the story of how he’d driven off the notorious Bashar Vallant.

The voyage of the mists passed without event, though as before, Kat couldn’t be certain exactly how long they remained within the Veil’s cloying timelessness.

Eventually, and at long last, the mists boiled back from the bowsprit, and what remained of the city of Athenoch unfurled through the cloud-strewn spiral of the Deadwinds.

It was like no city Kat had ever seen. In fact it was barely a city at all, being a fraction of Tyzanta’s size. More than that, it lacked the distinctive shape common to Khalad’s cities. No central spire, no Undertown spreading outward into Gutterfield shanties. Just row after row of tightly packed buildings giving way to dusty green-yellow strips of irrigated farmland and thence to gentle hills with timber and canvas windmills turning lazily upon the crests. Beyond those, the greenish-white mists of the Veil ebbed and billowed, their manner somehow watchful, envious. It reminded Kat of her father’s long-lost snow globe, though Athenoch was trapped behind mist rather than glass.

None of the buildings were taller than three storeys, save for the derelict torch houses dotted at the compass points and a tall, graceful minaret at the city’s heart. Black stone, where all else was timeworn sandstone, it loomed above the thick, winding ribbon of the river, a stranger to the neighbours it dwarfed.

Given the tower’s commanding views of the city and its surroundings, Kat had expected Zephyr to bring the Chainbreaker in to dock there. She was therefore surprised when the dhow dipped toward a ramshackle wooden pier extending from an old mansion on the river’s eastern bank. As Chainbreaker made final descent, Kat spied men and women toiling on several nearby structures, hoisting blocks and beams into place.

“What do you think of my city?” asked Vallant, arriving at her shoulder. “Our city,” he corrected at once with an almost-abashed smile.

“It needs work,” Kat replied.

“You should have seen it ten years ago. Everything was in ruins.” He nodded at the tower. “Well, everything but that. Making even this much habitable has been hard work. Restoring the rest? That’s the labour of a lifetime.”

Kat stared out to the nearest torch house, barely recognisable as such with half its minaret ripped away and the rest collapsing. “It shouldn’t be here at all.”

Vallant shook his head. “Mistfall never touches Athenoch.” He pointed north and south. “There are ruins of other torch houses out there. If you want my theory, after the Eternity King’s forces pacified Athenoch, he left it standing as a reminder of why we need him holding the Veil at bay. Or perhaps the Age of Fire caught him off-guard, and he decided it prudent to withdraw his armies in case they weren’t so righteous as he believed. Either way, he ordered the torch houses destroyed, dragged the survivors away and let the mists claim the city.”

Kat eyed the brooding hillside. If the Veil slipped its uncertain bounds, how long before Athenoch truly vanished from the world? An hour? Two? “Only they never did.”

“No, but with the Veil stretching for leagues in every direction, who’s to know it isn’t true?” Vallant folded his arms. “The Voice would have us believe that Caradan Diar is infallible. Athenoch proves he’s not. It proves he can be beaten.”

To Kat’s way of thinking, the assertion was less about logic than it was a leap of faith. “Even if that takes a lifetime?”

He shrugged. “I don’t expect I’ll live to see it, but the alternative’s to close my eyes and do nothing. I don’t have that in me. I haven’t for a long time.”

The last sails furled as Chainbreaker drew into the pier. Crewers jumped from the gunwale to secure the ship fore and aft. A small crowd gathered where the pier abutted the old temple walls. Men and women, old and young. Even a few children.

“But you were an overseer,” said Kat. “Couldn’t you have changed things from inside?”

Vallant snorted. “I was more than that, but the whole point of the system is that it can’t be changed from within. Voices come and go, fireblood houses quarrel over the rule of cities, Alabastra’s balance sheets shift from credit to debt, Ages of Fire pass, but Caradan Diar is the deathless constant sitting above it all. Nothing changes for him, just as nothing really changes for those trapped in lives of backbreaking labour and unpayable debts.” Fervency crept into his tone. “It’s worse than cruel, it’s uncaring. Even if I change things for no more than an eyeblink, it’s worth it.”

In her mind’s eye, Kat glimpsed the collapse of the tollhouse’s towers. “Tell that to the people we murdered at Osios.”

Vallant opened his mouth to reply, then pursed his lips with a grimace. “You can’t save everyone. I wish it were otherwise, but it’s not.”

“And that’s enough?”

“I have to hope so.”

A gentle shudder rippled through the deck as Chainbreaker nudged to rest against the pier’s leather-clad fenders. Amidships, two sailriders wrestled the heavy gangplank into position and a young man with russet-brown skin leapt aboard. His short, corkscrew-coiled black hair danced as he offered enthusiastic embrace to first one crewer and then the other. Others followed in his wake, the hubbub of conversation rising as friends and lovers, sons and daughters reunited.

“So instead of the Eternity King choosing who lives and dies, it’s you?” said Kat.

“Someone must.” The fervour had receded, the familiar amiable integrity now uppermost in Vallant’s expression and tone. “I don’t like it, but I’ve accepted it.”

“How very noble.”

“You’ll understand one day.”

“You’re assuming I’ll stay.”

“I’m assuming nothing. All I can do is make the offer.”

The words sounded reasonable enough, but Kat couldn’t shake the suspicion that Vallant considered it all a foregone conclusion. That in his heart – well-meaning though he otherwise might have been – he couldn’t conceive that someone might not perceive the rightness of his cause, and the necessity of the costs extracted alongside.

But when all was said and done, he had rescued her botched mutiny aboard the Mornwake from disaster. Without him, she’d have been days dead, her soul fused to her skeletal remains as a koilos, screaming all the while and never really knowing why. A little gratitude was called for.

“I appreciate all you’ve done for me.” She glanced behind to see Yali and Jaîna approaching. “But I’m not you.”

Vallant smiled. “Nor was I, once.” Waving aft, he beckoned to the man with the coiled hair, who grinned broadly and picked his way along the crowded deck. “And now, I’m sure there’s all manner of business awaiting my return, but Am—”

“Amarid!”

Jaîna shot past and enfolded the man in a rib-cracking hug. Amarid returned it rather more gently, though with no less enthusiasm, a tear glistening on his cheek as he clasped her head to his chest. “So you made it after all? Now who’s the fool, eh?”

She withdrew from his embrace, eyes half lidded but her tone no less warm than his. “Still you, brother dear.” She favoured Vallant with an appraising stare. “You might have said something.”

“And miss this?” he replied, smiling broadly. “I apologise, but people come and go so often around here. I’m not a fan of rousing hope without cause.”

Kat snorted. “Hopeless causes, on the other hand— Ow!” She glared at Yali, who’d chosen that moment to jab a bony elbow into her ribs.

||Don’t be unkind,|| she signed, offering a rare reminder that her lip-reading sometimes bridged the gap of spoken words.

||Like I was saying, Amarid will look after you.|| Vallant, signing as he went, nodded at Amarid. ||Find them rooms, make sure they have whatever they need.||

Amarid grinned and offered a half-bow. “I obey, oh fearless leader.”

Vallant attempted a frown, but couldn’t quite hide the smile creaking beneath. Before it burst entirely from concealment, he stalked away toward the quarterdeck, where Rîma – arms folded – had at last emerged from confinement.

“This ungrateful scrap of skin and bone I already know.” Amarid planted a kiss on Jaîna’s bald scalp. They were a study in contrasts; she reserved and dry, he ebullient in tone and gesture. Though she was far from skinny, she looked tiny beside her strapping brother. Offering a dazzling grin, he looked Yali up and down. ||Your… name?||

A simple enough set of signs – comprising two fingers pointing gently at Yali, then tapped first against his other fist and finally to his lips – but he performed them with halting indecision, his flickering smile confirming his awkwardness. When Yali answered in her customary quickfire manner, he looked even more downcast. She repeated the signs, spelling out the letters of her name slower and more deliberately.

||Thank you,|| said Amarid. ||My Simah… not good.||

||You’re doing fine, honest and true.|| Yali reinforced her carefully paced signs with a warm smile. ||Speak aloud if you’d rather. If I can’t follow, I’ll ask Kat.||

Grin restored, Amarid turned his attention to Kat, though he remained standing side-on to Yali, the better for her to read his lips. “That would be you?”

“That would be me.”

“The heroine of Xanathros Alabastra.”

“So I’m told.” She felt increasingly disconnected from the legend of Katija Arvish, apostate demolitionist, almost as if she were another woman. Then again, between Vallant, Castellan Damant and Nyssa alone knew how many others, a deal of effort had already been put into doing precisely that. Famous in her own lifetime, and all of it a lie spun for the benefit of others. A heroine wouldn’t have left Azra to die. “You shouldn’t believe everything you hear.”

He nodded, his cheer unshaken. “I believe almost nothing, but I’m glad Vallant managed to find you. Given how late the news arrived, I didn’t like the odds. Tatterlain cut it all a little close.”

“Tatterlain?”

“Who else? He sent a heraldic to Kenyom. Very detailed when it came to your achievements and your incarceration.” Moving with deceptive slowness, he scooped up her hand, bowed and pressed her knuckles to his lips. “But he never said you’d be beautiful.”

Jaîna rolled her eyes and slapped his shoulder. “You don’t change.”

Kat withdrew her hand. While the gesture had been a good deal less smooth than Amarid presumably believed, he’d offered it without expectation and without coded claim of ownership. It would, of course, have been a good deal more charming if she wasn’t still a straggled mess from two weeks aboard one skyship or another, or if the only nearby competition wasn’t either much younger or a blood relative, but it had been a long time since anyone had offered her even the echo of flattery, and it was nice to be charmed. Nicer still to play up to it, just a little.

“I’ll look even better after a bath.” She offered a small, courtly nod, to show him that subtler gestures often carried more weight. “Vallant did say you were to make sure we had everything we needed.”

“It’s arduous work,” Amarid said airily, “but never let it be said I shirked my duty. If you’ll follow me?”

He led them down the gangplank, along a pier already in the throes of unloading the plunder stripped from the unhappy Mornwake, and into the streets of the lost city of Athenoch.

Twenty-Four

Closer to, Athenoch bore even less resemblance to any other city. Or at least resemblance to how they were in the present. It wasn’t just the lack of vertical sprawl. Details on finial and keystone reminded Kat of those she’d seen half buried in Tyzanta’s Gutterfield catacombs, long since overbuilt and sunken beneath the weight of buildings above. Even the shapes were different, the twin spirals of Nyssa’s flame absent from column and window, at times in favour of a spread-winged bird motif and at others a star-wreathed crescent. She had seen such symbols scrawled across the pages of her father’s notebooks, but never set into stone. She couldn’t blame Yali for trailing behind at every turn, eyes wide as she took in the city’s humbled glories.

More than that, Athenoch was even more dilapidated than it had seemed from the air. Every other building lacked even part of a roof, and some were barely four contiguous walls. Those that remained wholly intact had a curiously patchwork nature, their stones a mismatch and their lintels seldom set evenly, suggesting that for every building roused to new purpose, another had been plundered. Few windows boasted intact panes, relying instead on wooden shutters to hold back dust. But the streets were clear and free of refuse where Tyzanta’s were not.

“It’ll be years before it’s all reclaimed.” Amarid led them out of a side street and into a broad plaza of low single-storey buildings. A handful of traders’ stalls sheltered beneath a row of lofty cypress. “But we’re making progress every day.”

||Have you been with Vallant long?|| asked Yali.

Amarid’s lips moved silently as he parsed her signs. “A little over ten months.”

“Ten months?” Jaîna glared at him. “You left Tyzanta two years ago!”

“I got sidetracked.”

“Uh-huh.” She narrowed her eyes, as she did a lot around her brother. “What was her name?”

Amarid walked backwards for a spell, his hands raised in defence. “Nothing like that. Well, not entirely like that. I got rousted from a railrunner a few leagues north of Zeqi and ended up tilling fields to earn a few dinars. The young widow took quite a shine to me. Only it turned out her farm had trouble with reavers in the nearby hills.”

“These are lawless times,” said Kat.

“Aren’t they? Anyway, when the Bascari refused to send custodians to settle things down, the locals took matters into their own hands. I went along.” Still walking backwards, he tugged up his shirt to reveal a long, jagged scar running from belt to lower ribs. “Could have gone better.”

Yali shot Kat an enquiring glance, the explanation too quick for her to lip-read.

||He was suckered into playing hero,|| Kat signed. ||And got gutted.||

Amarid raised an eyebrow at her translation – though at the content or the speed of the signs, Kat couldn’t say – and let his shirt drop. “Should have seen the other guy. Hit the ground with a thud like you wouldn’t believe.”

Jaîna winced. “I hope she was worth it.”

“She had her moments, not least when stitching me back together. Word got out, and Rîma found me later. You’ve met Rîma?”

“We have,” said Jaîna. “I don’t think she likes me very much.”

Kat’s ears pricked up. Apparently she wasn’t the only one to have earned Rîma’s ire.

“She takes time to warm to people,” said Amarid.

“How much time?” asked Kat.

“Two, maybe three months?” He grinned. “It’ll pass before you know.”

He drew up beside a narrow cottage, tapped on the door and glanced at Kat and Yali. “This should do you, if you don’t mind sharing? Helped put the roof on her myself a couple of months back.”

“Then it’s probably about due to collapse,” said Jaîna.

Amarid shook his head. “Family. Always a support, never a burden. Be glad I’m not asking her to stay with you.”

“I’m sure this will do fine,” said Kat. “Though there was talk of a bath?”

“The water’s running, or at least it was the last time I checked, but you’ll have to heat it over the hearth.”

Kat blinked. If ifrîti couldn’t survive passage through the mists, then of course there’d be no pyrasti to heat the water, no lumani to provide light.

Amarid tugged a coin purse from his pocket. “That should cover any food you need. I’ll stop by at dusk.” He put his arm around Jaîna’s shoulders. “Now if you’ll forgive me, I’ve two years’ worth of scolding to catch up on.”

Heating bathwater promised to be a slow process, but the hearth took a tinderbox’s flame readily enough. While Yali slipped out into the plaza in search of food, Kat took the opportunity to look around her new home.

As with the streets outside, the house was clean and – despite Jaîna’s grim prediction – in no danger of collapse. It was sparsely furnished, and nothing matched. One of the beds appeared to be a ship’s cot, while the other was similar to the one upon which Kat had slept at Tellwind Manse. As for the “bath”, it was really no more than half a barrel. No wonder Vallant had stripped the Mornwake of everything not bolted down. Whatever its past, and however self-sufficient it initially seemed, Athenoch was a scavenger city.

That the house was already furnished – much less supplied with firewood – surprised Kat at first, but she supposed that the Chainbreaker brought new faces to Athenoch all the time. Moreover, Vallant had supposedly left with the intention of seeking her specifically. That meant that the house, and everything in it, had been prepared just for her. It was the first time in a long while that anyone – Azra excepted – had given her anything without expecting something in return.

No, that wasn’t right, was it? Vallant at least hoped for something in return. It was just that his expectations were somewhat loftier than the skelders with whom Kat had lately associated. The fireblood “peers” of her youth too, come to that.

When Yali returned, she did so laden with fresh bread, cheese, a handful of apples and a small jug of watered-down wine, all of it the sweeter for the recent diet of shipboard rations. About the only thing to separate the Chainbreaker’s stew cauldron from that of the Mornwake’s stockade was the fact that it wasn’t dosed with crone carob.

They ate in companionable silence at a table in the front room, the light dappled by a mostly intact stained-glass window set into the roof’s forward slope. Yali finished first, and sat back against the wall, an indecipherable expression tugging at her cheek.

Kat set aside a half-eaten apple. ||You all right?||

Yali rocked her head side to side, the half-frown unwavering. ||Everything’s so different.||

||That’s not an answer.||

||I know.|| She folded her arms and leaned forward across the table so that her unbound chestnut hair framed her inquisitive face. Eyes locked on Kat’s, she began to sign, the slight but deliberate stillness at the close of each form lending insistence. ||Why are you helping me?||

Kat blinked. ||Pardon me?||

||You’ve looked out for me almost from the moment we met. You even—|| She broke off with a grimace, Trajian’s shadow unspoken but undeniably present. ||Why?||

Temptation arose to shrug the question away, but it deserved an honest answer. Not just for Yali, but for herself. She recalled her refusal to help the woman at Tellwind Manse; her conscious decision not to get involved with her fellow convicts aboard the Mornwake – an entirely sensible choice under the circumstances – but why that determination had eroded, and so quickly, was harder to explain. Except it wasn’t, was it? Not if she were honest.

||You looked like you needed a friend. Someone once saw that in me and saved my life. By helping you, I honoured her… and it distracted me from my own troubles.||

She broke off, wondering if Azra had felt the same all those months ago. Had she too been running from something, even if only in the corners of her own mind? In all their late nights and lazy mornings, Kat had never thought to ask, and Azra had seldom volunteered details of her own past.

||You tell it like it’s just selfishness,|| Yali replied, still scrying Kat’s eyes for truth.

She did, and somehow it felt less vulnerable to the alternative. ||Maybe it is.||

||Maybe you just want it to sound that way.||

Kat gazed into that knowing expression and recognised that her bluff had come to nothing. But instead of challenging her outright, Yali had elected to make the contest into a strange game. Childish, yes, but being childish was a freedom Kat hadn’t known in years.

||Maybe I do,|| she signed, her own expression as rigid as rising mirth allowed.

They locked gazes. Cheeks twitching, Yali clamped wobbling lips tight in a doomed attempt to contain tectonic forces. Then all at once she grinned like a palka stealing its first soul, her chest and shoulders heaving with silent laughter. She slapped the table with an open palm, setting the half-eaten apple dancing. ||You’re so full of it!||

Kat stared down at the table, an age too late to contain her own giggles. Eyes streaming, she fought for control. Glimpsing Yali’s doomed attempts at the same set her off anew. Again and again the cycle repeated itself, until she was heaving for breath and her eyes were dry of tears.

Blessed Nyssa, but it felt good to laugh.

||I was right,|| signed Yali, her hands still shaking with the aftermath of mirth. ||It’s all front.||

||Not all of it.|| She’d needed to look the part to deal with the likes of Chevlie and Marida – especially Marida. And now with Vallant too, she supposed. ||Don’t tell anyone.||

||Never. A big sister looking out for me? I kind of like it, honest and true.|| Yali sat back. ||So it wasn’t because I’m the best lock charmer you’ve ever seen?||

||No.|| Kat frowned. ||I mean, you are, but that’s not it. Why would you think that?||

||Most people only like me for what I can do for them.|| Yali’s smile faded to nothing, lips and brow pinching in stylised mimicry of someone from memory, her lyrical signs growing jagged and jerky. ||Open this. Steal that. I’m docking your cut. Don’t scowl, I’m the one doing the real work. You need me.||

Kat had endured similar experiences while on the run. For her that had been a matter of months. For Yali it had been her whole life. ||Do you have any family?||

||Don’t know. Don’t care. My mother always treated me like a broken toy. My father resented having to learn Simah so he could understand me. Not that he ever did. Not really.||

||I’m sorry.||

Even that felt trite, a search for empathy for something Kat knew she’d never really understand. Though Simah and its regional variants had been around for centuries, it hadn’t become commonplace until about three hundred years before. A crimson fever epidemic had wiped several cities off the map and left untold thousands with profound hearing loss. Simah had filled the gap for many and had never gone away. That someone could wilfully resent learning a language that allowed him to communicate with his daughter turned Kat’s stomach. Azra had never learned Simah, of course, but that was different.

Yali shrugged, her unfocused eyes far afield. ||It’s a long time ago.||

Kat leaned forward. ||So how did you learn Simah?||

Yali brightened. ||Dharin taught me. He was a pedlar living beneath the arches at Old Kosra. I’d sneak out when my parents were sleeping. He’d teach me signs, then show me magic tricks with flower petals and tarnished coins. One night he got into a fight with a custodian and I was alone again.|| She shrugged. ||It wasn’t so bad. I don’t really do people that well. They’re always saying one thing when they mean another. Locks are different. If you talk to them right, they’ll open up every time. You know what I mean. After all, you’re the same with ifrîti.||

||I suppose I am.||

||How do you do it?||

After a moment’s hesitation, Kat launched into an explanation of her aetherios tattoo, one that tested her Simah to its limits, as some of the concepts were hardly commonplace. More than that, she found herself increasingly straying into topics she’d not intended to broach, her father first of all and then, with the inevitability of sunrise, Azra.

Yali listened to it all with her head propped on her hands. It was only when Kat finally ran dry of words and stumbled to a halt – both embarrassed at having spoken about herself at such length and relieved to have finally done so – that Yali ventured a few restrained signs.

||No wonder you bit my head off back on the Mornwake.||

Kat offered an apologetic smile. ||I wasn’t at my best.|| She didn’t feel it now. Welcome though it had been to actually speak about it all, the feeling of loss was more profound than ever. ||Azra would have liked you.||

||It’s no surprise. I am adorable. Do you think you’ll stay with Vallant?||

||I don’t know.|| Certainly Kat didn’t feel like she owed the man anything, not after Osios, but she couldn’t deny the appeal of having somewhere she belonged. Azra would certainly have approved. What better way to make Damant, Alabastra – the whole rotting pile of Khalad’s great and good, all the way up to Caradan Diar himself – pay for what had happened at Xanathros Alabastra? ||Maybe. At least for now.||

||If you go, will you do me a favour?||

||If I can. What is it?||

||Take me with you.||

Kiasta. Instinct argued refusal, but instinct had lost the battle days before. If not at their first meeting, then from the moment Trajian had gone sky-swimming. ||If that’s what you want.||

||Good.|| Yali beamed. ||But that doesn’t mean I’m letting you have first crack at the bathwater.||

Twenty-Five

The bath was lukewarm and cramped, but also the first real soak Kat had managed since leaving Zariqaz a year before, and was thus luxurious beyond words. She lingered in the water as long as felt proper, and a good while longer still, letting her thoughts drift behind lidded eyes as she shed the filth of recent days. The warmth went deeper than that offered by the water. A dark, lingering silence that made no demands and offered only peace. The sensation was so alien that it took her a while to fully pin it down.

Safe. She felt safe. How long had it been?

She clambered out of the bath and dried herself off. Unable to bear the idea of returning to her borrowed, travel-stained garb so soon after getting clean, she bundled herself up as decently as the linen towels allowed and returned to the front room, there to be greeted by a stranger. Or rather, what appeared at first glance to be so.

The smile, with its peculiar mixture of fragility and bravado, could only have been Yali’s, but there was no sign of the scruffy skelder girl whose ragged ponytail had so suited her mismatched clothes. In her place stood a young woman in a silver-trimmed black silk dress – if one plainly a size or two larger than ideal – her tawny skin darkened with powder about her eyes, her chestnut hair bunned and secured with polished wooden pins.

She beamed and turned a circle. ||Do you like it?||

||Very practical,|| Kat replied drily. She’d owned two gowns of the type Yali now wore, neither of them remotely as expensive but a burden on her father’s limited income all the same. For a certainty, Yali had never possessed even one such dress.

Yali stepped aside, revealing a table now burdened with piled clothes, a selection of jewellery and an open cosmetics box. ||Amarid brought them over. They’re from the Mornwake. Lady Mirela Bascari’s, bound for her house in Zariqaz. He said we should have them as our share of the plunder.||

||I’m sure he did.|| Kat sifted the pile of silks, which ranged from eye-catching to intimate. Honour among skelders was all very well, but it was hard not to read other motives bubbling beneath. ||Quite a little nothing, that one. Not really my style.||

Yali pointed to a trunk set beside the door. ||There’s more, but these are the nice ones.||

||And there’s no point being a rebel if you can’t be glamorous?||

Yali stuck out her tongue. ||They’re celebrating tonight. For Osios.||

Kat grimaced, the last of the bath’s borrowed peace melting away. Celebrating a blow struck against the Eternity King was one thing, but what about those who’d died in the tollhouse’s collapse?

||I’ll pass.||

||No. Not allowed.||

Her grimace darkened to a glower. ||Amarid said that too, did he?||

||No. I did. Pay attention.|| Yali’s smile dissolved beneath Kat’s long-suffering look. ||I’m going. It’ll be nice to have people see me the way I want them to. And if I’m going, I’d like you to come too.||

||It’s not really my thing.||

She shrugged. ||Fine.||

Kat blinked, taken off balance by the ease of the victory. ||Really?||

||Honest and true.|| The smile returned. ||I mean, if you’re happy for people to learn about you from what Vallant tells them…?||

Ugh. Katija Arvish, apostate demolitionist, struck again, and her legend would only grow after Osios. The imposter was taking over her life. Worse was that Yali plainly thought she’d found a winning strategy. Worse still was that she was right.

||You win.|| Kat waved a frustrated hand at the purloined silks. ||But I’m not wearing any of that.||

||Stick with the towel if you like. I’m sure no one will stare.|| Yali struck something within shouting distance of a solemn expression, but her eyes shone. ||Don’t worry. I’ll look after you.||

Fires leapt as the beat of drum and skirl of pipe galloped beneath the night stars. Across the wide courtyard, broken columns and toppled walls cast hungry shadows, grasping at dancers forever out of reach. In the darkness above the drifting smoke, a timeworn statue of what Kat took to be Nyssa Benevolas spread sandstone arms in welcome. Rebel or royalist, the goddess took no sides – and here at least promised to levy no judgement for the night’s deeds.

Kat shuddered, regretting her choice of a thin shirt and a woven Phoenissan waistcoat, which, while colourful, did little to keep out the cold of a night so cloudless the Deadwinds were an indigo shimmer on the roof of the world. Only her skirt made any concession to the feminine, and even that was a bohemian ensemble of layered patchwork, and far out of place among the finery Amarid had provided. But then Azra had always insisted that one should never attend a party in clothes unsuitable for a daring escape.

Yali’s eyes shone. ||Isn’t this wonderful?||

||If you say so.||

Yali had to be freezing but gave no outward sign as she took in the dancers threading the bonfires. Kat abandoned her count at a hundred, with easily thrice that watching from the sidelines, the majority arrayed in stolen finery. She spotted Jaîna among the dancers, skirts hoisted high, head back and teeth bared in a broad smile that brought her whole face alive. Further out, where firelight turned to shadow, Vallant stood deep in conversation with three figures in heavy black robes, not severe custodian garb, but the bulkier, practical cloth of distant Qersal. Vallant himself wore a high-collared shirt and a close-fitting jacket – raiment as close to military uniform as made no difference. Of Rîma, Amarid or Zephyr, Kat caught no sign.

Yali tapped a foot in time with the dancers, her expression that of a child at a confectioner’s stall, disbelieving that something so wonderful could exist and uncertain what to sample first.

||I’m of a mind to misbehave.||

For all that her signs were addressed to Kat, her gaze was firmly on the firelight’s nearer edge, and a tousle-haired lad perhaps a year or two older than she.

Kat shook her head in amusement. After Trajian, Yali deserved to set her own rules. “Don’t make me happen to anyone.”

Yali blended a graceful pirouette into a curtsey, then struck out in the direction of her prey. Kat only hoped the lad understood Simah. Then again, some ambitions shared universal language. So it proved. Within moments of broaching the firelight, Yali had the lad by the hand and led him backwards into the circle of dancers. Clearly, subtlety was not uppermost in her mind.

Kat toyed with the notion of leaving things be, slinking back to the cottage and running another bath. After days cooped up with strangers, a bit of time and distance promised luxury unmatched even by the finest silks. Let Vallant tell what stories he liked. Stories weren’t truth, even in Khalad.

Despite her words, she’d no sense that Yali needed a protector. Fireblood or ash, you got a feel for crowds and what lurked beneath their veneer. This felt wholesome, or at least wholesome enough. It helped that there were so many children present, the youngest running underfoot hither and yon, their elders either imitating the dancers or gathered in contemplative clumps around the perimeter.

Kat had far more sympathy with the latter, though she’d once lived for those rare invitations to the Rashaces’ formal dances – even after she’d learned most such invitations were simply to create opportunity for her father and the Countess to slip away unobserved. Worth it for those fleeting moments beneath glittering chandeliers, when no one knew – or at least couldn’t tell – that she was just a cinderblood. Backdrops to her first kiss and her first broken heart. The thrill had faded with passing years, an interloper’s voyeuristic pleasure yielding to an outsider’s loneliness. Azra, she felt sure, would have hated those dances. But this? The wild celebration beneath the stars that was by its very nature a repudiation of firebloods and their brittle pursuits? She’d have strutted into the heart of things, stealing every eye and heart she could.

Lost in might-have-beens, Kat practically walked into Amarid before he gently fended her away with a hand on each of her upper arms. “Leaving so soon?”

“It’s not really my thing.”

To her surprise, he nodded, handsome features saturnine in the firelight. “Nor mine.”

Honesty, or was he just saying what he thought she wanted to hear? After all, by word and deed he’d been scarcely less obvious in his intentions than Yali had moments before. Still itching to leave, but not wanting to be seen as antisocial, she gazed back at the dancers.

“Your sister fits right in.”

“She always did come alive around people,” he replied, his voice thick with pride. “I have to fake it.”

“My father used to say that we’re all the sum of two different truths: what’s real and what we can live with.”

“A wise man.”

With anything but money. “He had his moments.”

“Mine too, when he was sober. Which wasn’t often.” He stared off into the flames. “Especially after House Jovîna broke the unions at Myra. He never knew when to back down from a fight.”

“And you?”

“I’m hit and miss, though you’d never know it the way Vallant talks about me. On his generous days – and he has plenty of those – I’m his right hand. Listen long enough and he’ll have you convinced I’m the one to tip the Eternity King from his throne.” He smiled wryly. “Nyssa help us all if that’s true. Even after nearly a year running raids, my bones still rattle like wind-blown branches every time a shrieker sounds. I’m taking the Chainbreaker up at dawn. Nothing fancy, just harassing Bascari patrols out by Javali, but it’ll be all I can do not to curl up into a ball and pinch my eyes shut.”

The confession, so at odds with appearance and assumption, went some way to thawing Kat’s attitude – not least because she recognised his footprints on the dusty road she herself reluctantly travelled. “Maybe Vallant fancies himself a hero by association. Even if he has to create those heroes.”

Amarid scowled. “When you’ve nothing, leaving it behind is easy. He lost everything for the cause. I don’t know how he keeps going.”

“How do any of us?” Kat said lightly, aware she’d touched a nerve and feeling awkward for having done so. Vallant made for an easy target, but despite his manner he wasn’t necessarily a just one.

“One day at a time,” Amarid replied, his scowl banished. “It’s why these gatherings are so important. Gives you a chance to look at the folk next to you, because they may not be there come morning. Eat, drink, dance and delight, and let tomorrow attend to itself.”

Kat nodded at Vallant, still deep in conversation with the three Qersali, the fluidic Qersi syllables little more than sounds to her. The nearest woman, broad, heavyset and a head shorter than Vallant, drew back a hood decorated with swirling leaf-patterns to reveal craggy, deep-bronze features framed by white-grey plaits. “Is that why they’re here?”

“No. That’s very much about tomorrow. Vallant’s been trying to make common cause with the Qersali for years, but the zol’tayah wouldn’t lower herself to an alliance with bandits.” Amarid gave a self-effacing shrug. “We know what we are.”

Kat looked closer as Vallant and the woman conversed in a mixture of Simah and spoken word, he with expansive, enthusiastic gestures and she with terse solidity. It was a long way to come without your liege’s blessing. “What changed her mind?”

“Nothing, even though her throne room’s little more than a gilded cage since the surrender. Hadilla represents the zol’tayah’s cousin. He’s a lot younger, very ambitious, and little more than a bandit himself. Vallant has high hopes. In fact… yes, I think we’re about to be introduced.”

A glance confirmed that the small party was making its way around the perimeter. Kat’s heart sank. “His right hand and the apostate demolitionist?”

Amarid flickered a frown and brightened with understanding. “Could be.” He held out his hand. “Unless you’d rather dance?”

“With delight to follow, is it?” she replied archly.

“Sometimes a dance is just a dance.” He conspired to innocence that may or may not have been genuine. “But it can be more than one form of escape.”

Kat still wasn’t entirely sure she believed him, but with Vallant and the Qersali now too close for her to simply walk away without causing offence, Amarid’s offer was the best she was going to get. “Fine. But you follow my lead.”

“Whatever the lady—”

She yanked him towards the fires. Threading the other dancers, she found a space close – but not too close – to the flames and wrapped the fingers of her right hand around those of his left. “Try to keep up.”

With a final backward glance at Vallant, she settled into the steps of a semi-formal dance already popular in variation about the fires. Tradition dictated that the taller partner led, but Kat let tradition go hang and dared Amarid to falter. He kept pace better than expected, an anticipated trampling of feet occurring but once in the initial moments, and never again thereafter as he found his pace.

And somewhere in the whirling music and the sweet woodsmoke, her reluctance boiled away. There was just the dance and the moment and the fire raging in her blood. The joy of being alive not for tomorrow and the days that came after, but for one wild night beneath the stars. Magic of a rare and special sort, requiring nothing more than music and a body for it to move.

Little by little Kat grew closer to Amarid – or he to her, she couldn’t be sure. The hand beneath her shoulder lowered to her waist and drew them closer still. Closeness she’d missed ever since…

Ever since…

The fires lost their warmth. The music its joy. Heart thick in her throat, Kat pulled free and stumbled away. Reaching the shelter of a ruined wall, she thrust out an arm for support and choked back a sob.

All too easy to imagine Azra’s face in the darkness. Her frown of judgement. But for what? For letting go? Or for not?

Warned by footsteps, she turned to find a chastened Amarid behind her.

“I’m sorry. What did I do?”

Kat drew a deep breath down to her toes. “You didn’t. This… wasn’t you.” She stared past him at flames that had lost their colour and hugged herself for warmth that burning cheeks couldn’t provide alone. “I’m going to go.”

“I’ll walk you.”

“I don’t need you.”

“It’s not you I’m worried about.” He shrugged. “For ages there were rumours of terrible things stalking these streets when the sun went down. All corpse rot, but if someone crosses your path with you looking like that? They’ll all come flooding back.”

“I don’t look that bad.” She’d let too much of herself show around strangers. That was bad enough.

“Maybe not.” Amarid took a half-step closer, reconsidered and withdrew. “Tell me to go and I’ll go. But you look like you need a friend. If only for a little while.”

“I—” Uncertain of her muddled emotions, Kat threw up her hands in surrender. “If that’s what you want.”

They left the courtyard and walked a while in silence, her along the haphazard stone of the river embankment and he a pace behind and to her right. Close enough for presence, but not so she felt crowded. Little by little, the last of the firelight faded, leaving only the stars, but the weight in Kat’s heart remained. Suppressed for so long, it hungered for freedom, a tangle of thoughts without beginning or end that dragged at her every step, threatening at any moment to spill out in an incoherent flood. By the time they’d drawn level with the lone black tower, she realised that the only way to be free was to give the feeling voice.

Halting, she levelled a stare at Amarid, daring him to make comment.

“Her name…” She swallowed the croak from her voice and tried again. “Her name was Azra. And I miss her.”

It all spilled out from there without rhyme or reason. How they’d met. The arguments that hadn’t mattered. The moments that had. The wicked, mocking smile Azra had offered to everyone and the secret one shared only with her. And, of course, how everything had fallen apart that disastrous night.

Kat wasn’t sure when the first tears pricked her cheeks. She was only dimly aware of Amarid putting his arms about her to banish the cold. There was only the hollow ache as truths long held close took flight, the weight of yesterday yielding to the possibility of tomorrow. The sorrow was still there. She suspected she’d never be free of it, not all the way, but it was different somehow. Not lessened, but reshaped into something she could manage.

“You do know you’re barking up the wrong tree with me?” she murmured, still in Amarid’s embrace.

“I do now. But I was right about you needing a friend. That softens the blow.”

She snorted. “I ought to push you in the river for that.”

He unwound himself and stepped away. “Please don’t. I can’t swim.”

Kat shuddered as a torrent of giggles sought escape. “That makes it all the more tempting.”

“Jaîna’s right. You are heartless.”

“She said that?” Kat supposed she couldn’t blame her. In fact, a piece of her was even a little proud. Heartless people weren’t vulnerable. At least, not in the ordinary way. Looking back, she scarcely believed how much she’d shared with Amarid, much less that she’d let him hug her. But she supposed it was easier to be open with strangers. They saw a different version of her than the one she carried around in her head. “But thank you.”

Amarid dipped his head in a lopsided bow. “When it comes to it, all we have is each other. It’s the one thing they can’t take from us.”

Kat narrowed her eyes. “That sounds like Vallant talking.”

“Is he wrong?”

“No, I suppose not.” She stared along the riverbank. Two, three minutes and she’d be back in the cottage. Back in what now passed for home. “I’ll be all right from here. Go back to the fires. Drink, dance and forget about what comes tomorrow.”

“I’ll do that,” he said, already walking backwards. “I’ll even tell Jaîna you have a heart.”

“Don’t you dare,” she replied, though the prospect didn’t trouble her as much as it should. “I’ve a reputation to think of.”

The Chainbreaker left the following dawn. Revived by her first good night’s sleep since Xanathros Alabastra, Kat watched the dhow vanish into the mists from the mooring pier, Vallant at the prow, Zephyr at the helm and Amarid by her side. Yali did not, having crawled into bed at some uncertain hour and passed the intervening time snoring like a flooded gutter – a noise all the more disconcerting given how little sound she otherwise made.

Jaîna too had come to see her brother off with an embrace and what had looked a sisterly lecture, and once the Chainbreaker’s shadow was lost to the Veil, she picked her way along the pier to greet Kat.

“I should apologise for my brother.”

“Should you?” Kat asked warily. Though fairly sure she remembered everything she’d said the previous night, sleep had further muddled an already jumbled conversation.

“He’s a rogue.” Jaîna shrugged, but there was no concealing the fondness in her eyes. “I saw you leave together, but he said you let him down gracefully.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all.”

“Then I suppose I must have done.”

“He always gave himself away too easily, that one. It leads him into trouble. Thank you for your kindness.”

I’ll even tell Jaîna you have a heart. On top of everything else, Amarid had found a way to make his parting joke true. Though it was plain that Jaîna loved her brother – no one who’d witnessed their parting embrace could have thought otherwise – Kat suspected she saw the version of him that had left home, not the man he was now. Was that true of all siblings? As an only child, she’d no way to tell.

With Vallant gone, she found herself free to roam Athenoch without the constant threat of being introduced as some kind of legend. The first morning, she accompanied Jaîna on a long, looping walk of the city’s perimeter and into the nearby hills.

Everyone she met was eager to share pieces of their stories. By the end of that first morning, Kat had been told more names than she’d any hope of remembering – a far cry from her time at Tellwind Manse, where numbers had shrouded identity. Some of Athenoch’s residents had, like her, been rescued from execution. Others Vallant had recruited directly from mining outposts and scattered villages. Even more had jumped at the opportunity for a life beyond fireblood influence, carrying their families and slim possessions through the mists for a chance at a better life. All told, about five hundred men, women and children called Athenoch home – enough for a prosperous town out beyond the veil, but a far cry from the thousands crammed behind Tyzanta’s walls.

It was also a more comfortable life than most in Tyzanta would ever know. The river provided water, and between farms and granaries out on the hills, they had stores enough. Anything they lacked, the Chainbreaker stole.

But for all the idyllic lifestyle, by the second day Kat found herself missing Tyzanta. It sat ill with her to walk beneath the sun without the Overspire to offer shade, and she felt curiously vulnerable travelling Athenoch’s wide streets without the recourse of alleyways to duck into. On these points at least, Yali agreed, claiming a city that was so open had nothing worth concealing, and therefore had nothing worth stealing. Not that Kat saw much of Yali, who was as clearly smitten as she was inept at hiding it.

Kat found the lack of ifrîti most unsettling of all. They’d been a part of her life for as long as she could remember. Not feeling them at the back of her thoughts made for a peculiar sensation – as if one of her senses no longer functioned as it should. Their absence certainly made tasks harder. No clatter wagons to carry cargo, or lumani to cast light on simple command. Keeping boilers and ovens alight required huge quantities of timber without a pyrasti to supply the flame.

But for all of that, it was a simple joy to come and go as one pleased, without worrying about drawing the attention of an overzealous custodian, or a fireblood’s scorn. On the second afternoon following the Chainbreaker’s departure, Kat found herself in Athenoch’s tiny graveyard as an old man was laid to rest, and watched from respectful distance as friends and family placed offerings of pinwheels and black candles without archons and shriversmen lurking like vultures on the periphery. She even glimpsed the bright halo of gloami-wisps flickering about the fresher graves. Anywhere else, even those thin, rapidly dissipating ifrîti – the part of the soul that lingered longest after life had gone – would have been snared and indentured as lumani for what fading moments they possessed.

Maybe Vallant had the right of it. Maybe Athenoch was a place she could call home.

The Chainbreaker returned at noon on the third day, its approach to the makeshift pier heralded by a flock of scampering children shouting its name in anticipation of treats. Jaîna arrived at the cottage soon after.

“He’s back.” She gave an excited smile. “Are you coming?”

“Why not?” Kat replied, as if she’d only then given the matter consideration, though in truth she’d some time ago resolved to greet Amarid on his return. Maybe even to thank him properly. Friends, it was becoming apparent, were hard to give up.

They were halfway to the pier when Chainbreaker tied up. Though never a beautiful ship, she was even less so that morning, with half of her mainsail torn away and a deep, ragged wound along her port side buoyancy tank. More than that, the quarterdeck rampart was blistered and burned by cannon fire.

The picture grew bleaker once Kat reached the pier’s topside. Jaîna outpaced her, threading the shuffling, downcast crew as she headed for the aftmost of the two gangplanks. Vallant emerged from the Chainbreaker’s cabin and made his way across the deck like a man lost in a dream.

“Amarid?” Jaîna picked up speed, her search increasingly frantic. “Amarid?”

Kat started after her. A hand on her shoulder brought her up short before she’d made it even a pace. Zephyr, supercilious expression in abeyance, withdrew her hand and gave a short shake of the head that set her starlit hair dancing.

Kat blinked, Zephyr’s meaning passing her by. Then she looked aft again and saw a sobbing Jaîna clasped tight in Vallant’s embrace. A heartbroken wail split the air, and the light went out of the world.

Twenty-Six

The stone skimmed across the water. Skipped once. Twice. It vanished with a liquid plop that set the midges buzzing in panic. Sat among the ruins on the western bank, her legs dangling above the gently rushing waters and her heels kicking at the embankment, Kat breathed the cool river air deep and reached for another stone among the rubble.

The hours following the Chainbreaker’s return had passed in a whirl of emotion. Loss at Amarid’s death. Anger at the convoy’s guards for bringing it about. And most of all, resentment that it even mattered. She’d known the man a handful of hours, in which he’d been angling an obvious agenda. But he’d been kind, and that kindness lingered, even with his soul in the Deadwinds.

On top of that, Kat was gnawed by her inability to express remorse for fear of sounding trite – or even worse, too sorrowful, and thus give a piece of herself away. A few mumbled words were all she’d been able to spare Jaîna. That the other woman had responded – tears still streaming – with a rib-creaking hug had only made matters worse. It demanded reciprocation, but Kat had untangled herself as soon as was polite and walked away along the riverside.

Now she just felt… empty.

Her hand brushed the tussocked grass jutting between the embankment stones and closed on a suitable stone – flat, but not too flat, and precisely the right weight. Tatterlain sat heavily beside her, hands crossed in his lap. “Now that’s a stare. Never seen a river set aflame, but there’s always a first time.”

Kat grunted and let fly. Skip. Skip. Skip. Plop.

Better.

“I didn’t see you at the pier,” she replied, eyes still on the spreading ripples.

“I don’t blame you. It was all a bit… busy.”

True. Then again, Tatterlain had a knack for coming and going without remark. His moustache and borrowed noble’s finery shed in favour of simple skelder’s robes, he was again the lantern-jawed, clean-shaven everyman she’d met aboard the Mornwake.

She stared inland, to the forest of makeshift scaffolding supporting the Chainbreaker while its buoyancy tanks were repaired. “What went wrong?”

“Depends who you ask.” Tatterlain hefted a stone and tossed it at the river. It sank with nary a skip. “Sometimes these things just go bad, you know?”

“And at others?”

“Vallant changes his mind. Swaps out a strike on a patrol for a juicier target. And sometimes that juicier target is better defended than he thought.”

Kat paused in the act of reaching for another stone. Something warm and bellicose stirred in the cockles of her heart, the heat of it trickling outward to challenge the baking sun. “He did what?”

Tatterlain snagged another stone. “Went after a supply barge bound for the garrison at Jossar. Came straight out of the sun and caught the captain napping. Only there were a pair of Bascari ships running escort. Gnats, with only one shrieker cannon apiece, but that was plenty. Zephyr rammed one head on, but the other got in a pair of good shots before we got people aboard.”

“And Amarid?”

“Died a hero, fighting redcloaks of the Royal Guard.” He let fly. Like the first, the stone vanished without ceremony. “We all die heroes out here, don’t you know?”

In other words, Amarid had died for nothing. Or had at least died because Vallant had been chasing glory. Why did it matter so much? Was it because last night she’d felt safe, and now the grave yawned wide? Was it because she’d shared a piece of her sorrow with Amarid, and that now he was gone, that masterless grief had returned thricefold?

Either way, Vallant lay at the heart of it all.

The mournful plop of a third stone drew Kat back to the riverside. “You’ve a lot to learn about skimming stones.”

“Skimming? I just like the sound they make.”

She laughed without humour. Two people engaged in what seemed the same activity but following different rules. There was a lesson in that somewhere. Walking the same path wasn’t necessarily walking together. Sometimes you were just heading in the same direction.

Tatterlain clambered to his feet and stared away towards Athenoch’s reclaimed streets. “I should go. Vallant’s called a conclave, and loves punctuality.”

“Conclaves are for custodians and firebloods. The rest of us just talk.”

“What can I say? Old habits die hard. I’m sure you’d be welcome.”

“A trophy for Vallant’s Qersali guests?” she asked bitterly. “I wouldn’t want to spoil things by punching him.”

“I don’t know. Light entertainment always smooths the edge off weightier matters.” He paused, suddenly serious. “I liked him too.”

Kat hated Tatterlain at that moment. Four simple words that conveyed loss and sympathy far better than her own mutterings earlier that day. “You should tell Jaîna.”

“I intend to. Someone needs to get that woman good and drunk, and I’m just the fellow to answer the call.”

Kat couldn’t help but smile at his pomposity. “Sounds arduous.”

“I do like to be useful.” He looped his hands behind his back and shook his head. “But first, conclave calls. You’re sure I can’t tempt you? I can take score? Hold Vallant steady?”

“Another time.”

“I shall await, breathless.”

Kat sent another two stones to watery graves, but knowingly or not Tatterlain had dispelled the riverside’s solitude. It was a refuge no more. But where to go and what to do? The cottage? Yali would likely still be sleeping, and if she wasn’t, Kat had no desire to be the bearer of bad news. And even though she was mostly certain she’d not punch Vallant, conclave held no appeal. So instead she left the cool air of the waterside behind and meandered through Athenoch’s hot, dusty streets.

Strange how the threat of the Veil had receded after only a few days. Kat had spent as many girlhood nights dreading Mistfall and its horrors as any other child. Even into adulthood, she’d felt the shiver in her bones where the mists thickened about Zariqaz’s spire and only the bright indigo fires of the torch houses offered hope. But here in the heart of Athenoch, with sunlit horizons drowning in mist, she felt no apprehension. Like a distant storm, the Veil was a problem belonging to someone else.

Perhaps a part of it was how Athenoch felt ordinary, somehow, with work songs bellowed from the Chainbreaker’s pier and from folk working to restore yet another street. The rumble of cartwheels and the snatches of conversation captured by a wind that blew freely. Even the laughter of children – sometimes cruel, sometimes innocent, as such laughter ever was – wove a notion of normality.

But as she travelled the winding streets, straying ever closer to the black tower at the city’s heart, normality receded. It wasn’t just that the buildings in its long shadow seemed different to those upon the perimeter, their archways topped by spread-winged ravens or starlit expanses crested by a single perfect circle, like to the sun save for the absence of stylised rays so common to such designs. Finding one such keystone in a pile of rubble, Kat traced the shape with her fingertips and wondered at what it was. Some artist’s fancy, no doubt, but haunting all the same.

Before she knew it, she stood before the tower’s gaping, empty doorway. Unlike the nearby buildings, its black stones had survived centuries of sandstorms and driving rain uneroded, though what windows and doors it had once possessed had long since passed into ruin. What remained was a stark column reaching towards the sun, the sightless eyes of two-score windows staring emptily across the city.

Inside, wind-blown sand had drifted into every nook, and at the corners formed treacherous, ruddy slopes taller than Kat. But the stone staircase that clung to the perimeter – a single spiral stair, rather than the helical pairings otherwise common in Khalad – looked intact enough that she chanced her vertigo’s malice to discover where it led.

After forty steps, she questioned her decision. After eighty, lungs heavy and thighs afire, she regretted it wholeheartedly. Overhead, the stone supports of a great muqarnas ceiling – its glittering honeycomb of geometric stalactites beautiful even in the dark – promised at least one floor remained intact. Had Kat’s vertigo made itself known, she’d have abandoned the climb at once, but with her eyes fixed only on the stone risings to her front, it had nothing to work with. There was certainly nothing to see to the sides. What hurried glances she took revealed only bare walls and jutting corbels to support floors long since rotted away. She knew better than to look out of the windows, whose brilliant rays provided the only illumination in the otherwise austere gloom. Glorious though the view of Athenoch surely was, her vertigo would have loved it far more than she.

By the time she reached the upper floor, she was clinging to the stone banister to support rubbery legs.

Like the entrance to the tower, the chamber in which she stood had been fashioned on a grand scale, the ceiling – again crafted in ornamental black honeycomb – reaching easily four times her height. On the perimeter, open archways stared out across the empty skies, the dusty flagstones yielding to a balcony she’d seen from the outside.

At the chamber’s heart, a vast meshwork sphere rotated excruciatingly slowly atop a stone plinth. How it did so, Kat couldn’t say, because there was no obvious connection between the two – no suggestion of some motic-driven mechanism embedded in the stone, even if a motic could somehow have survived the passage of the mists. The thief in her saw only the sphere’s value, for its every woven, curling strand was formed of pure silver or a reddish, lustrous gold.

From a distance, it looked a couple of feet across – wide enough to put her hands around. Closer to, it was easily twice that size, the strands of meshwork as thick as her fingers. At least when she looked directly at it. As she turned her head, it shrank back, as if it were suddenly further away. When she reached out to touch it, it retreated yet further, the distance between them now impossibly vast, even though neither she nor it had moved.

Vertigo rushed back, cackling gleefully. She might not have been up or down relative to the sphere, but it knew distance well enough. She snatched back her hand and clamped her eyes shut.

Too late.

Her legs folded and she hit the floor on palms and knees. A muscle in her gut pulsed. Heaving lungs sucked down air musty with old memories and yesterday’s dreams.

The Veil. The sphere smelled like the Veil.

But there was something else there too. The delicate scent of rose water.

Opening her eyes, Kat found herself staring out towards the balcony, the sphere to her back. Rîma sat silhouetted against the sky beneath the nearest archway, cross-legged, with gloved hands on her outspread knees and her hair an ice-white waterfall across her shoulders. Hat and sword lay on the same scrap of threadbare Phoenissan rug upon which she sat, their placement too even to be anything less than deliberate.

“It does that to everyone,” she said without turning.

Kat risked a sidelong glance at the sphere. It was still there, somehow within arm’s length and out of reach at the same time. “But not you?”

“I find that if I pretend it’s not there, it doesn’t trouble me. And I like the quiet.”

Taking the hint, Kat clambered to her feet. The room spun only a little. “I didn’t mean to intrude. I’ll go.”

Rîma unfolded from her sitting position and rose, the motion as graceful and inevitable as everything she did. “Stay if you wish. I… have been less than welcoming, and I apologise.”

Kat slowed, glad to have an excuse not to make the descent so soon. And Rîma was right, if she put the sphere from her thoughts – if she didn’t look at it – up stayed up and down stayed down.

It was the first time she’d seen the other woman close up without the shadow of the broad-brimmed hat and the concealment of her scarf. She was striking rather than beautiful, with lean, angular features and unlined cheeks far too young for her husky voice. Her dark bronze skin had a slight greyish sheen Kat would have associated with illness had not Rîma proven herself easily the most vital person she’d ever met. But her face was the only hint of flesh and blood on display. Everything below her jawline was concealed, either by close-fitting black linens or the heavy, long-abused coat.

Aware she was staring, Kat passed through the archway to the balcony’s edge, the dark sprawl of Athenoch’s reclaimed quarter lying far below. For a wonder, her vertigo made no complaint. It had clearly feasted well enough when she’d reached for the sphere.

“I thought you’d be at Vallant’s conclave.”

Rîma laid her palms on the sand-scoured balustrade. “I’m not good with people and inconsistent regarding surprises.” She inclined her head, giving Kat the impression that the aside was a continuation of her earlier apology, this time for coldness in the more distant past. “Conclave has too much of both. Where I come from, change isn’t really a thing.”

“And where is that?” asked Kat. “I’ve a pretty good ear for accents, but I can’t hear yours.”

Rîma raised an eyebrow a fraction of an inch. “I’ve travelled a lot over the years. I’m all smoothed away.”

She didn’t look old enough to have travelled for years, but Kat supposed some women were like that. Last breath could keep you looking younger right up to the point that your body could take no more and the years came screaming back. “You’ve been with Vallant long?”

“From the beginning. From before the beginning, I should say. Back when he was an ambitious young overseer, desperate to catch the attention of Tythia Bascari.” Rîma gave a subdued shake of her head. In matters distant from violence she spared all possible effort. “He was besotted, but I don’t think she really noticed him. Not at first.”

“I can’t imagine Vallant swooning over anyone he didn’t see in a mirror,” said Kat.

“He did, though. Even married her in the end. Or at least she married him.”

Kat blinked. “Truly? I’ve never heard that.”

“You think the Bascari wanted anyone talking about it, even before Vallant turned his back on them? These days, I’m told that even mentioning their marriage within Bascari earshot is enough to earn execution. One of their own, marrying beneath her station? Polluting the bloodline? Lineage is everything to firebloods.” Rîma’s tone, brisk and level to that point, grew dark. Her hands tightened on the balustrade. “Sadia would have been about your age had she lived. Such a lovely child.”

“I’m sorry.” The words felt flat and useless.

Rîma wagged a finger, her voice taking on a fireblood’s nasal inflections. “Beware, sons and daughters of quality, the perils of wedlock with a cinderblood.” She gave a dry snort, her voice returning to normal. “They framed Vallant for murder, so he stole a skyship and fled south. His mentor, a man named Damant, brought him to battle along the Veil’s edge. Vallant came down on the wrong side. His family did not survive.”

Kat nodded. For all that her time in Castellan Damant’s cells had been limited, it was all too easy to imagine the doggedness with which he’d have run the fugitive Vallant to ground. “And Zephyr found him.”

“She did, though it was years before I learned that part.” Rîma’s voice creaked with old sorrows. “I’d problems of my own, so I mourned and moved on. Vallant was different after. He’d always been a grain of sand blowing wherever the wind took him. Charming when he wanted to be, clever when the situation called for it… but earnest. The source of his appeal. No longer.”

“You’re close, the two of you?”

“We are. But not in the way I suspect you’re thinking.” Rîma dipped her head. “My grandfather once told me that soulmates are more complicated than poets would have you believe. Whatever its form, love binds us when all else falters. But no two loves are the same. You can hate and adore in the same breath. We’re bonded, Vallant and I.”

Kat cast her mind back to her time aboard the Chainbreaker. The quarrels she’d observed, up close and at a distance. “By hate or adoration?”

“By a dream.”

No need to ask the nature of that dream. “How long have you been doing this now?”

“A long time, but nothing ever changes.”

“You wouldn’t think it in the cities. The firebloods see him in every shadow.”

“We’ve nearly been wiped out so many times, and then some arrogant fireblood does something cruel and we get an influx of recruits.” Rîma’s voice thickened with bitterness. “Most don’t last a year. Ten months is the average. I’ve shovelled more dirt onto more graves than I ever thought possible, and we’re still hiding behind the Veil. But while Vallant keeps fighting, so will I.”

Kat stared across Athenoch, at the tiny figures pursuing love and purpose while they’d strength to do so. Before their luck ran out. Or before Vallant’s luck ran out on their behalf, as it had for Amarid. Ten months. She’d survived longer in Tyzanta’s underbelly, but perhaps that was the point. Survival wasn’t the same as living.

“Why?”

“Because when I was drowning, he gave me something to cling to.”

Their shared dream, no doubt. “He’s insufferable.”

Rîma offered a slender smile. “He’s insufferable. Infuriating. He doesn’t listen when he should, and he’s always right, even when he’s wrong. There are days – and no few of them – when I want to take him by the throat just to stop him talking.”

“And why don’t you?”

“Because just when the day is darkest, he’ll surprise you.” Her smile faded and she turned from the balcony, her cool grey eyes unblinking as they fixed on Kat’s. “You think he’s in this for glory, don’t you?”

Kat glanced away, unable to meet the stare. “He gives that impression.”

“He does this for his family. Not just Tythia and Sadia, but everyone he’s lost. Amarid and Gostha and Jilam and Telthi and…” She gave a barely-there shrug. “It’s not a short list. Vallant knows every name by heart. So do I. That’s family. They haunt you until you give them peace.”

Kat closed her eyes. Azra had been family. More than family. Her love had bound Kat together when all else had faltered.

“What if I can’t?”

Rîma’s brow tightened ever so slightly in silent question, then eased. “Try harder.”

Twenty-Seven

Kat returned to the cottage at dusk to find Yali awake, hung-over, less than communicative, but companionable enough provided she avoided the topic of the ongoing amorous entanglement – which to all evidence had ended precisely as Yali had intended, even if that intent remained a guarded secret. A name was mentioned – Qarian – but no more.

Leaving the matter be, Kat recounted her conversations with Tatterlain and Rîma over a meal of fruit and dried meat purchased with the last of Amarid’s coin purse. On reaching Rîma’s assertion about giving family peace, she faltered and closed her eyes. Feeling the soft, warm pressure of a hand around hers, she opened them again and found herself staring across the table into a solemn, empathic smile that no amount of Simah could have translated.

A knock sounded on the door. Kat found Vallant standing on the low step, his habitually earnest expression unable to disguise the weariness of a man run to the bone. “May I enter?”

“It’s your city.”

“That’s not how it works. It’s your house, for as long as you want it.”

“Or for ten months, give or take?” She felt a spark of guilt at the barb, but only a small one.

Vallant remained entirely unruffled. “Yes, I heard you’d been talking to Rîma. May I enter?” he repeated.

Kat let him pass. As she set the door to, he waved a greeting to Yali, then continued in a mix of spoken and signed speech. ||Tatterlain says you’re avoiding me.||

Kat scowled. ||Tatterlain talks too much.||

He paused, hands spread and fingers splayed as he considered his next words. ||There’s something I’d like to show you, if you’re willing.||

She narrowed her eyes. ||What sort of something?||

||It’s a short trip on the Chainbreaker, that’s all.||

||It’s skyworthy?|| asked Yali.

Vallant smiled without humour, crow’s feet gathering at his eyes. ||We’ve got good at speedy repair.|| He turned his attention back to Kat. ||If you feel you owe me anything at all, please give me this. There’ll be no custodians. No swords. Not even a harsh word.||

Had he come to her that morning, with Amarid’s death still close, Kat would have refused out of hand. But the morning was long behind, and she did owe him. Better to repay the debt.

She glanced at Yali, who nodded. ||He’s all yours. I need my beauty sleep.||

Guided by Zephyr’s deft hand, the Chainbreaker left the Veil an hour after departing Athenoch and descended towards the cluster of village lights after barely two more sailing the cool night skies. Save for a run of replaced rigging and a makeshift patch over a dorsal buoyancy tank, it wore its wounds proudly, and likely would for some time to come. Though the dhow sailed the Cloudsea well enough, it did so with the deck at a distinctly jaunty angle and a definite wallow to its movements.

“Where are we?” Kat asked Vallant as the gangway thumped into place on a pier thick with loading winches and a waiting crowd. Lumani lanterns blazed bright beneath the stars.

“Adrissa. You’ve probably not heard of it.”

“You’d probably be right.”

A riverbed paralleled the village’s single paved roadway, a serpentine trickle of water barely visible between the wide banks. Aside from the buildings in the pier’s shadow – and, of course, the gilded finery of the small Alabastran temple – most houses were gaping and worn away by wind and rain. Further out, starlight shaped a handful of crop fields, their bounty swaying gently, but a good many more dry-stone walls bordered cracked and dusty expanses. Most telling was the fact that the torch house sat cold and dark, Adrissa’s folk hoarding their precious supply of blesswood for the next Mistfall.

“Not much of a place,” said Kat.

“It was more of one before Mirela Bascari diverted the river to feed the mills at Dînos,” said Vallant, his expression uncharacteristically grim. “Now they can barely grow enough to feed themselves, and too much of that ends up going to Tyzanta as protection levy.”

Zephyr joined them at the gunwale, her feet drifting inches above the deck and her starlit hair dancing in the breeze. “How else are they to be saved from merciless brigands?”

“Quite.” Vallant struck out down the gangplank. “But not tonight. Tonight the merciless brigands do the saving.”

He’d barely both feet on the pier when a portly, bearded man in gold-trimmed black linen enfolded him in a bear hug. “Bashar! You bring gifts, of course?”

“I…” Vallant spluttered theatrically and waited until the embrace slackened. “I bring gifts.”

“Hah! I told Aesa this very morning that Nyssa had promised our fortunes would change. Said I was mad, she did.”

Vallant grinned. “You are mad, Keldi. Always have been.”

“Then it’s too late to change. You need help unloading?”

“Please. Zephyr will show you what’s what.”

Keldi turned back to the waiting crowd and clapped his hands above his head. A dozen men and women broke ranks and followed him up the gangway. Kat let them pass, then joined Vallant on the pier.

“Aesa’s his wife?”

Vallant ran a hand through his bristly curls. “The village archon. As far as she’s concerned, we’re doing Nyssa’s work.”

Kat stepped aside as the first of the villagers came thudding down the gangway, a rough sack over her shoulder. Every archon she’d ever met had been in lockstep with the firebloods, doing everything they could to squeeze coin and soul-rights from cinderbloods. Maybe it was different away from the cities. She eyed the growing procession of crates, sacks and boxes. “What did you bring?”

“Flour. Grains. Salted meat. Dried fruit,” replied Vallant. “Courtesy of the supply convoy we attacked the day before last. Better it feeds the hungry than redcloaks.”

Whooping and laughing, the villagers carted their gifts away, leaving Keldi alone with the Chainbreaker and its crew.

“You’ve saved us all,” said Keldi, ebullience fading to solemnity. “The last harvest… well, it wasn’t good. And then the Bascari took half our livestock as arrears. Custodians we could have fought, but not the redcloaks they brought up from Naza.”

“Think nothing of it.” Vallant smiled – actually properly smiled, the years and the arrogance falling away until Kat thought she glimpsed the man Rîma had spoken of so fondly. When the day is darkest, he’ll surprise you. A skelder would have kept the spoils, or else traded them in kind. Not Vallant. A fortune in food, and he gave it away. For the first time, Kat found herself warming to the man. “But we’d better be on our way.”

Keldi frowned. “You won’t stay? There must be some way we can show our gratitude.”

“You’re our first stop tonight. We’ve two more.”

“Have it your way. But we owe you for this.”

Keldi gripped Vallant’s shoulder, nodded at Kat, then shuffled away towards the stairs. A tall, thin woman in white archon’s robes joined him at the foot of the stairway. She glanced up, her hands threading together in the sign of the Flame. Then, arm in arm, they walked away into the village.

“This is what you wanted me to see?” asked Kat.

“I wanted you to know that Amarid and the others didn’t die for nothing,” murmured Vallant, the squandered years returning and his weariness alongside. “Adrissa isn’t free. Not yet. But this is a start. If those who can act don’t, a start is all it will ever be.”

Kat folded her arms. A year as a skelder was long enough to teach you when someone was manoeuvring for barter. “You’re talking about me?”

“That’s for you to decide.”

And just like that she wanted to punch him again. “You’re a hard man to like, you know that?”

“It’s been said.” Vallant set his back to Adrissa and stared up at the Chainbreaker’s unhappy flank. “Two days, and we’ll have the worst of this smoothed away and be ready to do more. With Qersal pacified, the Eternity King’s withdrawing three of his legions. They’ll have to take the Copper Road through Elchîna. Do you know it?”

Kat shook her head. Everyone knew about the Copper Road, its flagstones still stained from Caradan Diar’s last great campaign in the east four hundred years before, but the rest of the Qersali frontier was a mystery to her. During her life in Zariqaz it had seemed such a long way off – a place where soldiers went to die and victories were won.

“It’s a gorge on the edge of Bascari territory,” Vallant went on. “There’s a river, the road and a pair of villages that sprung up around the torch houses that keep the road navigable. The mist swept down from the Zaruan Mountains fifty years ago and never went back.”

Kat shuddered. “No shortage of places like that.”

“No, but this one’s different. If we destroy the torch houses, the mists will rush back in. At best, the marching legions will be swallowed up. At worst, they’ll be trapped until the torch houses can be repaired.” Fervour returned to his voice, quiet, terse and utterly unshakeable. “As long as I’ve been doing this, the problem hasn’t been House Bascari’s custodians, though they’re bad enough. It’s that whenever a fireblood gets out of their depth, they run screaming to Zariqaz asking for redcloaks. I’m talking about ten thousand of the Eternity King’s elite guard taken off the board. Think of the difference that might make to the balance of power. After everything you’ve seen, don’t you want to be part of that? Don’t you want to make a difference?”

Kat glared at him. So that was it. This whole trip had been an exercise in winning her over. “You want to go up against three legions with this junk heap and, what, fifty swords?”

“A dozen. The whole point is to not turn this into a straight-up fight.”

“You’re insane.”

“The world’s insane. Madness is the only acceptable response.” He sighed. “I can do this without your help. But every instinct I have is screaming at me that having you along will save lives. I can’t say it plainer.”

“I’m not a child,” growled Kat. “You can’t shame me into doing what you want.”

“Then what do you want?”

When it came down to it there was only one answer, wasn’t there? To turn back the clock and make it so that Azra had never died at Xanathros Alabastra. And as that was impossible, hurting the Bascari was reward in and of itself. But a fireblood house was a faceless entity. It didn’t feel pain, not in the usual sense. Its fall, when it came, wouldn’t apportion the same bitter joy as seeing Azra’s killer dead. But Azra had died of misfortune or even carelessness, hadn’t she? And then only because Kat had been delayed by…

The assassin with the blonde hair and the coachman’s coat. Who’d killed Skerrik and Darravon. Who’d by the evidence of Kat’s own eyes still been at large on Tyzanta’s dockside even as she’d been shipped out for execution. Who’d been part of the disaster that had taken Azra’s life. Had maybe even been its instigator. Rîma was right. Family haunted you until you gave them peace. Kat couldn’t bring Azra back, but she could make the assassin pay.

“There’s someone I want found.”

Twenty-Eight

Hood in place, Damant passed through the silvered gates of the Thornless Rose’s audience chamber. Sparing barely a glance at the hulking guards, he approached the circle of daylight and the velvet chaise where Marida sat, legs tucked beneath, looking for all the world like a coiled snake waiting to spring. The body her qalimîri spirit wore was half his size and barely a third his age, but he felt tiny in her presence.

She rose in a shimmer of silks and a spill of auburn hair, her smile full of promise and her glossy black eyes watchful, calculating. Her perfumed scent of honeysuckle and jasmine reminded of youthful indiscretion. “Leave us.”

Behind Damant, Magali stiffened. “Mistress?”

“Our guest appreciates privacy.” Marida’s gaze found Damant’s despite the hood’s shadows and sent a chill racing up his spine. “To say nothing of trust.”

Magali pursed wrinkled lips, nodded and withdrew, a click of her fingers drawing the guards with her. The silk-draped throne room suddenly felt twice as dangerous. Many tales warned how private moments with Marida ended. Some salacious. Some murderous. Most a little of both. He drew back his hood.

Marida crossed to a glass and gilt table set at the foot of the throne’s dais. “You’ll take wine.”

Damant joined her at the table. “Thank you.”

The polite response, even if the words hadn’t been a question.

She busied herself with bottle and a pair of Hethsemi crystal goblets. “This isn’t your first visit to my establishment, though you’ve been absent a long time.”

Again, not a question. “We were all young once.”

A thin, serpent’s smile. “And will be again, so Nyssa promises. But for those who can’t bear to wait for reincarnation, there’s the Thornless Rose. I’m sure I can find something beneath my roof to ease those wrinkles away.” She held out a goblet, the wine dark within. “A castellan’s salary – to say nothing of his favour – buys a great deal more than a custodian throwing dinars about to impress his friends.”

Damant took a sip of wine to hide an embarrassed grimace. Smooth and rich, with a hint of spice. A better vintage than that served at the palace, and far beyond anything he’d sampled while trailing behind then-Templar Javar like an eager puppy. “I’m not here for that.”

“Then what?” Marida twisted her lips. Not quite a scowl, though one waited just out of sight. “Another demand from the upstart Yennika, I suppose?”

“A personal favour.”

The not-scowl became an amused smile. “Those can be expensive.”

Damant hated that it was necessary at all. “Then I suppose I’ll have to owe you a favour in return.”

“Really?” Marida swirled her goblet and took a sip. “And what could possibly drive you to such delicious, desperate measures?”

He reached into his pocket for the bundle of vials taken from the Countess’ chambers – each one secure in its own loop on the fabric belt – and laid them on the table. “Tell me about them.”

She regarded him for a long moment, her black, abyssal eyes boring into his to read intent upon his naked soul. Then she shrugged, set her goblet aside and lifted the bundle with distaste between finger and thumb.

“Talent wisp vials. Still sealed. They bear Sassarin’s mark, but that’s hardly a surprise. He’s had a stranglehold on Tyzanta’s wisp trade for years now.” White teeth flashed behind ruby lips. “At least for unremarkable fare. Satisfied?”

“I can see all that for myself,” said Damant. “Tell me something I can’t see.”

“Oh, we are masterful today.” Marida’s eyes flashed. “So that’s what Malissa saw in you.”

“Can you help or not?” he growled, in no mood to discuss his estranged wife.

“And that impatience of yours is why she left you.” Despite her prim words, Marida didn’t seem at all offended. In fact she was enjoying herself entirely too much for Damant’s liking. “Why don’t you ask Sassarin? He’ll be much more impressed by your temper than I am.”

“I might, if I could trust what he had to say.”

“So you trust me?”

“You’ve no reason to lie.” Whereas if there were something amiss about the vials – if the wisps within were stronger than was safe, as the Countess’ recent behaviour suggested – Sassarin would be lucky to escape with his life. Especially if it wasn’t a simple error on his part, but rather a deliberate commission from someone who wanted the head of the Bascari family removed.

The notes of Marida’s laughter danced like the waters of a mountain stream. “Don’t you listen to the hierarch’s sermons? My whole existence is a lie. What’s one more untruth?” When Damant didn’t respond, she sighed. “I recommend you wait somewhere else. Magali will—”

“I’d rather stay.”

She shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

She closed her eyes and touched the smooth glass of the first vial to her lacquered lips. The shadows lengthened, the lanterns at the perimeter and the light from the window no less bright, but somehow further away.

“An artist,” she murmured, discarding the first vial and pressing a second to her lips. “Yalîm Myzenta? So that’s where his soul ended up.”

Damant stumbled back as the darkness deepened, a musky lavender scent swamping the perfumed notes of honeysuckle and jasmine. His throat thickened. His head swam. He barely felt the goblet fall from his hands, or his knees hit the carpet. There was only the darkness and a shape blacker still, indistinct and writhing about Marida’s shoulders like an inky halo, shot through with glimmering starlight, its eyes blazing with indigo flame.

Uncoiling from Marida’s motionless form, it reached for Damant with a crooked hand.

He yelped and shied away. Too late. Cold, immovable fingers closed about his wrist, holding him fast. A ragged scream welled up in his throat.

“Damant?” said Marida.

He blinked. Normality rushed back, the shadows fading before the dominance of light. Marida had a slender hand about his wrist, her black eyes shining. “I do like to see a big, strong man on his knees. You might come to like it down there.”

Still trembling, Damant pulled free. Stumbling to his feet, he wiped an unsteady hand across a clammy brow. “Blessed Nyssa, what was that?”

“The world beneath the world. My world. I did warn you.” She shrugged, unrepentant, and gestured at the vials, now rebundled and laid upon the table once more. “They’re exactly as they appear. If anything, the wisps are a little on the weaker side. Sassarin stretching his profits, though don’t ask me to testify. Contrary to what you may have heard, there is some honour among skelders.”

“I’m sure.” Damant shook his head, desperate to clear recent suffocating memories. It didn’t help. Whenever he closed his eyes, indigo flames waited in the darkness. “Are you?”

Marida stiffened. “It might help if you told me what you’re seeking.”

Giving what she asked would be akin to breaking a confidence, but she’d likely work it out before long – assuming she hadn’t already. And he needed answers. Or at least something that might lead to answers. He took a deep breath. “This can go no further.”

Marida folded her arms. “Mine is a house of discretion.”

“The Countess isn’t herself. I thought – I hoped – that it was a simple wisp poisoning.”

“That’s not a kind thing to hope for.”

“Poisoning I could have stopped. Now?” He sighed. “Now I have nothing.”

Marida pursed her lips. Damant might even have taken her expression for sympathy, but for the after-image of her darker self lurking at the edges of his sight. “Omen rot isn’t a kind death. Sooner or later it eats everything, body and soul.”

He grimaced. Living with that truth day by day did nothing to diminish its horror. “I know. But inheritors get impatient.”

“You feared that someone in the family was pushing her into Nyssa’s embrace by having some long-dead dauber fight for what’s left of her body?” Marida licked her lower lip, savouring the words. “I sympathise, but these vials are so thin they barely carry any of Myzenta’s talent, let alone his personality. Someone with Elinor’s pig-headedness would have nothing to fear, omen rot or no omen rot.”

Damant’s ears pricked up at the casual use of the Countess’ given name. Marida caught his eye and shook her head. “As I said, this is a house of discretion. What will you do now?”

“I don’t know.”

“May I offer some advice?”

“What will it cost me?”

She paused. “Sometimes you just have to let people go.”

“The Countess told me the same thing.” Not in so many words, of course, but the sense of it had been there. You should learn to tolerate one of the others, and soon. But it wasn’t that simple, was it? His duty remained. If there was even the possibility that someone had engineered the Countess’ decline, it fell to him to root it out. And of course, the possibility remained that Marida was lying.

Marida stooped, shook her head at the wine stain on the carpet and restored Damant’s goblet to the table. “So it was she who sent you into Yennika’s shadow?”

Damant narrowed his eyes. “Yennika has done more to restore the family’s fortunes – to restore Tyzanta – in a few short weeks than her cousins ever have.”

“Yes, what a time to be alive. House Bascari resurgent, House Jovîna banished beyond the walls, and the custodium an ever-growing army. And all of it thanks to dear darling Yennika. She’s done well for herself.”

“You don’t like her very much, do you?”

“This is—”

Damant grunted. “Yes, of course. A house of discretion.” As with Marida’s earlier allusion to the Countess, there was no way to know if she was a keeper of Yennika’s secrets or simply meant to appear so in order to satisfy reputation. Either way, there was nothing more to be learned and he’d already been away from the palace too long. He gathered the vials and thrust them back into his pocket. “Either way, I owe you a favour.”

Marida eased herself onto the chaise’s velvet cushions. “Consider today proof of my willingness to cooperate. One can never have too many allies.”

Twenty-Nine

Damant arrived back at the palace well before noon, enough time to look in on the Countess. Or, more accurately, look in on Sherabi. She assured him her mistress had indeed spent the morning sleeping, urged along by a curative draught from a physician who’d shared Damant’s view that enforced rest would do the Countess little in the way of harm, and might ameliorate recent behaviour.

Rather less satisfying was his brief round of the estate sentries. One sentry in particular, Josqa, who should have been on watch at the torch house, was nowhere to be found.

“He’s in his bunk,” explained Sinair, Josqa’s watch partner or who should have been Josqa’s watch partner. “Completely wasted. Barely kept his eyes open yesterday morning. Thought I’d have to drag him around on patrol, and it’s not the first time. He’s been getting worse all week. Guess someone’s wearing him out.” She kept a studiously neutral expression, indulging in the grand custodium tradition of gossiping about one’s peers without losing deniability.

However much Damant privately agreed, it wouldn’t have done to say so. “Tell him to report to me when he’s fit enough to do so. And not to wait too long.”

Sinair frowned, genuine concern creeping into her voice. “You don’t think he’s back on the isshîm?”

“Let’s hope not.” Certainly Josqa had possessed neither greyish pallor nor slurred vision when Damant had none too gently warned him against chattering about the Countess’ sky-clad painting, but that was hardly proof. “Tell him what I said.”

Leaving Sinair behind, Damant returned to the main residence, his route taking him past the library. Argumentative voices drifted into the otherwise empty passageway, scarcely muffled by the thick door.

“You need to calm down.” Yennika’s authoritative yet languid diction was unmistakable.

“Calm down? That’s easy for you to say.” By contrast, Tanith’s voice was almost unrecognisable, her thick eastern accent brittle and taut. “You don’t have to live like this!”

Damant slowed as he approached the door. Custodian’s instincts and castellan’s discretion fought for dominance, the former eager to eavesdrop and the latter desperate to end the argument before a servant happened by.

“I know it’s been difficult,” said Yennika. “You have to trust me.”

“You said you’d help me!”

“I am helping you, but it takes…” Yennika broke off as Damant rapped on the door. “Yes?”

Taking a deep breath, Damant entered the library to find the two women frozen in place, as the guilty so often were. Tanith’s eyes were red-rimmed, her face blotchy. Yennika was every inch the composed fireblood, eyes clear and her expression radiating sympathy.

“I’m sorry, Mistress Yennika, but you’ll be late for conclave,” Damant said blithely, offering both the possibility that perhaps their quarrel hadn’t been overheard. “I hope I’m not interrupting.”

Tanith snorted, the angry rasp in her throat a far cry from the cultured, measured young woman who’d impressed him with solicitude shown variously to Sherabi and the Countess. “Don’t worry. You can’t interrupt something that isn’t being said!”

Brushing away tears with a gloved hand, she stalked down the corridor, a thundercloud in blue silks. Damant watched her go, lip twisting as he sought the proper words too late.

“How much of that did you hear, Ihsan?” asked Yennika, her eyes on the pyrasti in the crackling hearth.

Again custodian’s instincts fought castellan’s duty. This time the castellan won. “Enough to know she’s upset.”

The corner of Yennika’s mouth twitched. “And you’d like to know why?”

Yes, but it would hardly be proper to say so. “Only if you think I should.”

“Tanith’s inheritance… weighs on her. She’s impatient for resolution.”

He glanced down at the uneven pile of books on the table opposite where Tanith had lately stood – most of them lying open. A family who’d scarcely acknowledged her. Had she been searching for legal precedent? Some other form of leverage? “Illegitimacy always presents challenges.”

Yennika nodded, her eyes still on the fire. “Firebloods and cinderbloods are the same, and yet we’re not. It makes things complicated.”

Damant scowled. “If Tanith shares blood, she’s family. It’s that simple.”

“Ihsan, darling.” Yennika laughed under her breath and at last met his gaze. “I wouldn’t expect you to get it – after all, you’re a cinderblood yourself – but thank you for trying.”

She was right, he didn’t understand. After his recent re-evaluation of Yennika, Damant found it oddly disappointing to learn that she was as elitist as any of her kind. People were people, and it was only the accident of wealth and status that changed things. “Can you help her?”

She offered a slow, steady nod. “I think so, but it requires resources, and time. Tanith has little of the former, and no patience for the latter. I can’t blame her. Plenty would kill her for what she is.”

Many a troubled inheritance was smoothed over by an “accident”. After all, wasn’t that the reason he’d met with Marida that morning? Now that Damant came to think of it, he couldn’t recall having seen Tanith leave the palace grounds since she’d arrived. Its decaying walls had become her refuge. “That’s why you’re working so hard to restore law to the city? So Tanith might be safe beyond the palace?”

Yennika beamed. “Oh, Ihsan, do you really think me so selfless? What a long way we’ve come.” She shook her head. “I’m restoring Tyzanta to order because someone should. It was a great city once. It will be again.”

“And Tanith?”

“Will understand. If she’s truly a fireblood. We accept our responsibilities.” Her smile vanished. “Well, most of us.”

“In that vein, you should probably know that she’s become,” he grimaced, wondering at the quirk of nature that prevented him from being direct, “friendly with one of the estate custodians.”

“Really?” Yennika’s eyes twinkled with enjoyment at his discomfort. “How friendly?”

“About as much as it’s possible to be.”

Yennika shrugged. “Good for her.”

“It doesn’t worry you?”

“What are her family going to do? Disown her again? Kill her twice? Let Tanith enjoy life while she’s young. It may not be seemly, but as long as they’re discreet, where’s the harm?”

“Josqa uses isshîm. He’s on his last warning for it.”

“Then I’m surprised he has anything like the energy to be as friendly as you suggest. Maybe Tanith will give him incentive to address that. You needn’t worry about her developing an addiction. I sometimes think she’s more allergy than woman – you’ve seen how pale she is – and very meticulous about such things.” Yennika drew closer, running the tip of her tongue across her lower lip as she considered. “Ihsan… you’re not jealous?”

He scowled, appalled. “Of course not,” he said stiffly. “I’m concerned for her best interests, nothing more.”

Yennika beamed. “Darling, you really must cultivate a sense of humour. If you’re not careful, you’ll end up just like cousin Mirela. I assume she’ll be attending conclave?”

Damant grunted, glad to be set free. “Yes, I’m afraid both Mirela and Salenna have indicated that they’ll be attending, though I doubt they’ll contribute anything other than confusion.”

“What a terrible thing to say of my dear, dear cousins.” Yennika’s tone was far from serious, and she softened the words further with a broad smile. “Unfortunately, even that’s generous.”

How like she was to her aunt in that moment. Wry, determined and uncaring of being outspoken. Damant wondered if that similarity was the reason the two had hated each other so long. “Would you mind if I see you there? I need to check on a few things.”

Yennika nodded and headed towards the door. “I’d take my time if I were you. Mirela is bound to have prepared a list of petty complaints. Spare yourself that.”

“Yes, mistress.”

But she was already gone, and Damant was alone in the library. He made to follow, but couldn’t quite bring himself to leave Tanith’s abandoned books in such a state. Crossing to the table, he closed each in turn. They weren’t, as he’d first supposed, collections of essays on custodium judgements or fireblood genealogies, but volumes concerned with altogether more abstruse and fanciful subjects.

The Language of the Veil. Journeys with the Issnaîm. Reflections on the Ruins at Zarnac. Learned men and women trying to make sense of what little the extinct veilkin had left behind. Traditions of Shriving and Treatises on the Soul-Glyph promised to be a little more practical.

And then there was The Three-Faced Goddess – a single black-bound tome with no authorial attribution, and whose edges looked distinctly charred. Damant doubted Hierarch Ossed would have been pleased to see it. The title alone promised heresy – for Nyssa plainly had only the two aspects – and he allowed himself the fanciful notion that the charring dated it back to at least the previous Age of Fire. He couldn’t imagine how it had found its way into the library to begin with. It was the kind of crackpot diatribe he’d seen too often in the grasp of madmen chasing legends of the Obsidium Cult. Such curiosity had ended badly for Terrion Arvish, let alone those fallen foul of Alabastra’s archons.

Perhaps Josqa wasn’t the biggest threat to Tanith’s reputation after all. If nothing else, she seemed less skittish of late, which could only be to the good.

But one thing was clear. However much her lineage weighed her down, she’d plainly not investigated it that morning. He formed the books into a small, tidy pile and left the library.

“I’m afraid the Voice is rapidly losing confidence in House Bascari.”

For all the regret in Julan Aroth’s words, Damant read little in his tone. A distance cultivated to separate himself from consequence. As an outsider to Tyzanta, and only an occasional ally to Yennika Bascari, he’d all the distance he might need… providing he wasn’t seen to become too involved. Indeed, even now he stood a full step back from the conclave circle, making it clear that he had no part in what passed within.

“Those provisions were meant to supply the returning legions,” Aroth continued, urbane outrage rumbling in every word. “Now they’ll feed Vallant’s ragtags. Worse, it’s given him yet another victory. Not bad for a dead man.”

He glared across the circle at Mirela, who was again in her mother’s customary position, and who had been responsible for the premature declaration of Vallant’s death some months earlier.

“In my sister’s defence,” said Salenna, “had Vallant simply attacked the decoy convoy as he was supposed to, her optimistic appraisal would have become fact.”

Damant privately allowed that Salenna’s generosity was twofold. Once for defending her sister, and second for suggesting that the custodians concealed within the decoy convoy’s clatter wagons would have shredded Vallant’s attack. But as with all might-have-beens, the second point scarcely mattered, as Vallant had passed up the decoy. As to the first? Salenna seldom showed up to conclaves – much less spoke in anyone’s defence other than her own – which meant there was mischief afoot. It didn’t take a genius to know what. Both sisters had possessed eyes only for Yennika from the moment they’d joined the circle. Even their relative positioning – each a little to one side of being directly opposite – suggested an ambush.

“But he didn’t, did he?” said Aroth, plainly unmoved.

Salenna threw Yennika a sidelong glance. “He must have been warned. So many fledglings have joined the custodium’s ranks lately. We shouldn’t be surprised to find a songbird or two among them.”

“Yes, cousin,” said Mirela. “I rather think you owe the minister an apology.”

The circle fell silent save for the distant rumble of Tyzanta’s factories, familial hostility crackling in the balmy morning air. Shoulders squared, Yennika glanced from Mirela to Salenna and finally to Aroth, her gaze steady and her expression unrepentant.

“I apologise unreservedly, minister, for my family’s oversights.” She offered Mirela a sweet, insincere smile. “My dear cousin’s insistence on reinforcing failure at every turn not least among them.”

“How dare you!” spat Mirela. “As head of the custodium, this disaster is your responsibility.”

Damant cleared his throat. “Yennika wasn’t in Tyzanta when this operation was planned. In fact, I believe you and Jorais jointly set it in motion.”

A second silence reigned, one made colder by the mention of the absent brother whose fate was even now a mystery. In that moment, he might have been in a penitent’s cell, copying contracts by lumen light, or his charred bones and captive spirit could equally have been watching over some holy site as a koilos.

“Thank you, Ihsan,” Yennika murmured, then she raised her voice. “No member of my custodium betrayed your snare, Mirela. They didn’t need to. Vallant’s been unpredictable for years, but you still insist on pretending he can be controlled. If that were true, none of this would be necessary.”

“There’s a clear pattern to his recent activities,” said Mirela. “The raid on Osios confirms it. He’s moving west.”

Salenna shrugged. “Then he becomes the Hythaka’s problem, not ours.”

Aroth rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “I doubt the Voice will see it that way.”

“And even if she did, the Kemmuz Valley feeds half of Tyzanta,” said Mirela. “If Vallant provokes an uprising there, we’ll have one in the city within a month.”

Typical of Mirela that she wasn’t concerned about the starvation that would birth such an uprising, but Damant had few illusions remaining when it came to the Countess’ daughters.

Yennika sighed. “He doesn’t care about territory. He can’t hold it, for one thing. He doesn’t have the numbers.”

Mirela folded her arms. “You know how the protection levy grows thinner and thinner the further you go along the Great South Road. How many patrols we lose thanks either to Vallant or his imitators. We can’t risk that happening in the west as well. Which is why I’m giving orders that the bulk of our garrisons on the Copper Road be redeployed along the Kemmuz.”

Yennika glared at her. “So I’m only the head of the custodium when you need someone to blame, is that it?”

Mirela met Yennika’s stare with one of her own. “I’m tired of being lectured by a dilettante who believes herself an expert on matters she knows nothing about.”

“I’ve at least studied the reports on Vallant’s activities. Have you?”

Mirela stepped closer, her expression a rictus of hatred. “Take my advice, my dear. Wind in your pretty little neck before someone hacks it off.”

Yennika paled, but held her ground. “You’re threatening me?” She gestured at the statue of Nyssa Iudexas. “Here?”

Mirela’s voice lost none of its venom. “Don’t be dramatic.”

Yennika narrowed her eyes to slits.

Aroth coughed. “I’m sure the Voice has no preference in this matter. But I do wonder at the wisdom of leaving the Copper Road unprotected.”

“It’s hardly that,” said Salenna. “In a few days it will be thick with the Eternity King’s legions. I trust, sister, that the garrisons remain sufficiently manned to extract the necessary tolls?”

Mirela dipped her head. “Of course, sister. After all, life must go on.”

“Then you have my full support.”

And with that, Damant realised, the matter was effectively settled. Even if Yennika forced the matter to a vote, she couldn’t prevail with her cousins allied against her. If Mirela’s gamble succeeded, she’d bask in whatever favour the Voice granted. If it failed, Yennika, as head of the custodium, would take the blame. “Perhaps we should consult the Countess?”

“Mother is sleeping,” said Mirela. “Though none of us may like it, I’m afraid we’ll have to grow accustomed to making decisions without her.”

Damant bit his tongue as the conclave circle broke apart, and lamented the fate that had left the Countess such poisonous offspring. If only one of them had been poisoning her. It would have been a pleasure to bring them to account.

Soon only Yennika remained in the circle, her eyes downcast. “Mirela’s wrong, Ihsan. All she’s doing is thinning our forces. If Vallant does strike along the Kemmuz Valley, so what? There’s always a harvest surplus elsewhere. It will cost us a slice of Salenna’s profits, but we’ll survive that. If something goes wrong on the Copper Road with the Eternity King’s legions on the march…? One of us is sure to be summoned to Zariqaz, and I daresay we won’t return.” She took a deep breath and drew back her shoulders, the determination Damant was learning to appreciate – even admire – returning to the cast of her brow. “Aunt Elinor placed me in command of the custodium. The decision is mine, not Mirela’s.”

“You’re going to countermand her orders? That could be dangerous.” Wind in your pretty little neck before someone hacks it off. “She might not stop at words.”

“I don’t care.” Was that a tremor in Yennika’s voice? If it was, she didn’t let it hold her back. “It’s my duty to do what I think best. Send out the heraldics. Let Vallant venture along the Copper Road at his own risk.”

Thirty

Tatterlain stared out of the hostelry door and into the greying orange skies. His borrowed features – a false moustache, sculpted cheekbones and brows heavier than his norm, all of them imperceptible as fakes even up close – were pinched in concern. Vallant might have worn the burdens of leadership lightly, but his lieutenants were another matter. “Where is she?”

Kat swirled her cheap wooden goblet as his words faded into the swell of conversation and the bitter dirge of miners’ songs. Pulpy flecks danced on the surface of the unremarkable wine. “Unremarkable” was a good fit not only for the Wanderer’s Rest, but also for Zoyen writ large. Its storm-scraped buildings were more-or-less habitable, the lumani lanterns lining its portion of the Copper Road were generally functional and its inhabitants almost – but not quite – friendly. Grubby bands of miners, travellers and traders formed little islands beneath the crooked beams with nary a word exchanged between the groups. The hostelry’s keeper had barely grunted when she’d handed over her dinars, his eyes lingering just long enough to spark the possibility of recognition. Fortunately, if word of Katija Arvish had made it so far east, neither verbal description nor scrawled likeness had travelled with it.

“She’ll be here.”

“I know she’ll be here.” Tatterlain tucked his drooping sleeve back into place. Like the rest of them, he wore a stolen custodian’s uniform, mask hitched to his belt, the cloth artfully stitched so as not to show wounds taken by former owners. “I want to know why she isn’t.”

Across the table from Kat, Yali rolled her eyes, tilted her left hand’s bunched knuckles towards the bowed lath ceiling and tapped an upturned thumb twice against her temple. Jaîna curled her lip in what once would have been a smile, while Vathi – an unshaven and habitually morose dark-featured man of late middle age – simply offered a minute shrug. In the five days Kat had known him – four days aboard the Chainbreaker and one bumping around in the back of an ill-maintained clatter wagon travelling south from Azarin – he’d seldom been given to anything else.

“At least it’s not raining,” said Kat. Nothing turned a Khalad night to ice faster.

“It’s coming.” Vathi made the grim pronouncement with all the certainty of Nyssa Iudexas passing judgement on a wayward soul. “The air pressure’s fallen and you can hear how the wind’s turning.”

“Wonderful,” said Tatterlain. “Just wonderful.”

Kat shook her head. Did the man ever stop worrying? He’d kept it hidden better while masquerading as Delk aboard the Mornwake. “That’s good. It’ll cut visibility down to nothing and keep the custodians under cover.”

“True.” He didn’t look any happier. “Where is she?”

Enough was enough. Kat scraped her chair back. “I’ll take a look. Anyone coming?”

Jaîna gave a taut nod and rose. Vathi unfolded from his chair and tugged his uniform back into shape.

||Not me.|| Yali tapped the rim of her goblet. ||I’m having another of… whatever this is.||

Tatterlain stared down at the table. “Be back before the lumani wake and curfew begins. We’ve a schedule to keep.”

Kat nodded. It wasn’t much of a schedule, simply a rendezvous with the Chainbreaker between nightfall and midnight on the mountainside north of Zoyen. Half an hour by clatter wagon. At least three on foot. Missing that rendezvous meant a long and dangerous trek through the Zaruan foothills, likely with some very unhappy folk hard on their heels. It made for motivation aplenty.

Tugging her knee-length tunic into place, she made a last watchful sweep. At least a score of maskless custodians in plain sight, far too many for a backwater like Zoyen, but almost none paid her any attention beyond dull, inebriated curiosity. Only a thin, brown-haired man whose black tunic had a high overseer’s silver threading showed any real interest, but even then Kat read no suspicion, only curiosity of a personal sort.

“Who’s he?” she murmured, careful not to move her lips.

“Abîna, town commandant.” Vathi removed a talent wisp vial from his pocket – one of a handful he’d bought in Azarin – tapped it against the table and held it to the light. “Ambitious. Dumb as corpse rot. I think he likes you.”

“Me and every woman in this room.”

He leered. “Doesn’t make me wrong.”

Sighing inwardly, Kat returned Abîna’s smile and threaded the tables to the outer doors.

Her bare arms puckered to gooseflesh as soon as she stepped outside. Too cold too fast – even for the extremes of central Khalad. Vathi was right, a rare rainstorm was likely in the offing. Maybe even the start of the Mistrali, the seasonal rains that upended Khalad’s arid climate for a handful of windswept and sodden weeks, though it was still a little too early in the year for that.

Kat couldn’t imagine lasting out the rainy season in so threadbare a place as Zoyen. At least in the cities, bridges, abutments and verandas meant there was always shelter for a skelder about her business. The biggest worry was rain prising apart cracked mortar, adding spirefall rubble – and not a few bodies – to the deluge. Zoyen’s low, strung-out buildings wouldn’t offer that kind of excitement once the rains came, but nor would they provide any haven save retreating indoors. Between their decidedly ramshackle nature and the ridged, undulating slag fields to the south, she suspected the Zoyen of the present was not the original, but a replacement for one drowned in a past Age of Fire. And there’d certainly be rain aplenty, given the crooked snow-capped mountains looming to east and west. The entire town, such as it was, clung to perhaps a mile of almost level ground between ravines and jagged, pine-bristled slopes.

The hostelry’s narrow steps offered a fine view of what few amenities lurked within Zoyen’s crumbling mud-brick wall. The Copper Road itself was arrow straight and broader than most of the dwellings, easily wide enough for twenty soldiers to march in step. A scattering of red-tiled adobe cottages clung to either side, the streets crammed between rust-coloured flagstones and mountain precipice. To the east, low humpbacked silhouettes of granaries loomed against the mountains. To the west a railrunner station – little more than a sagging wooden platform and an equally superannuated master’s station on an abandoned line – lay in the torch house’s shadow. Save for the gaudy, spiralling towers of the Alabastran temple at the town’s heart, the two-storey tollhouse at the south gate was the only building not thick with cracks and broken plaster – the one to the north was barely a ruin.

And of course there was always the mist. It writhed upon the mountainside, rivulets of greenish-white vapour crawling and coiling ever downwards through outcrop, spur and the withered moss-root pine trees, only to hiss to nothing when the torch house’s indigo flames grew too much to bear.

Douse the flames and Zoyen would be gone within the hour, or so Vallant had said.

But only if Rîma showed up with the blasting prisms.

Kat fidgeted, unable to get her borrowed uniform sitting right. Two days among the Deadwinds had left her tattoo buzzing. The sensation of power, of possibility, itched like hot wires beneath her skin, the urge to scratch, to move – to do anything – irresistible.

She clamped her right hand about her left wrist as Jaîna and Vathi made a leisurely descent. “Where do we start?”

Vathi shrugged as she’d known he would, while Jaîna had eyes only for a troop of horsemen idling on the Copper Road. Riders of the Royal Vanguard, resplendent in black robes and scarlet cloaks and their tall spears held skyward. Comrades of the men who’d murdered Amarid.

Sidestepping out of a hostelry patron’s path, Kat turned about and looped her arm through Jaîna’s. Her back to the riders, she leaned in close. “Lose the stare. Most folk avert their gaze from redcloaks. They don’t plot where to put the knife.”

Jaîna’s lips thinned to a slash, but she nodded. Little by little, her expression returned to something approaching normality, yet she remained far from the easy-going, unburdened soul who’d offered friendship on the Mornwake. Kat understood all too well that it was easier to behold one’s own death than live with a loved one’s passing, but that hadn’t stopped her trying to convince Vallant that Jaîna should stay in Athenoch. Mumbling about motivation, he’d brushed her concerns aside and avoided her for the rest of the afternoon.

“We don’t want to get noticed, remember?” murmured Kat.

“I can’t help how I feel.”

“You’ll have to, or you’ll get us all killed. Maybe you should wait at the rendezvous. We can handle this.”

“No. I need to make them pay.” Jaîna drew in a rattling breath, a little tension finally clearing from her expression. “But I hear you. I won’t be a liability.”

It would have to do. Yali would have handled it differently, Kat felt sure. A hug, a smile, a sharing of sympathy. Azra would have cowed Jaîna with a threat or a jibe. There was no shame in taking the middle path so long as it got the job done. Assuming it had.

She held onto Jaîna a heartbeat longer, then stepped away. Vathi offered an approving nod and jerked his head at the ruined north gate. Where Rîma should have been at least an hour before.

Aiming for a stride neither too hurried nor too slow – one of the many lessons learned in the last year was that custodians looked for little details out of the ordinary – Kat set off. Not up the Copper Road itself, but through the souk that ran parallel through Zoyen’s threadbare centre.

Dusk’s approach and the coming curfew had emptied most of the stalls, but there were still browsers threading to and fro through air thick with spices and spilled ale, hoping to barter with a trader more interested in extra dinars than lugging wares back to the stores. Children darted about, lurking at the edges of stalls in the hope that a moment’s lax vigilance might offer up some purloinable titbit.

Even here, there were too many custodians for Kat’s liking. Patrols of twos and threes, their androgynous silver vahla masks always alert, even if the man or woman behind was not. When combined with the number of redcloaks haggling for liquor or sweetmeats to revive flagging spirits after a long march, they far outnumbered the populace. She made certain to keep her eyes low and her steps untroubled, and even lingered at a stall to make a purchase of dates and bread, all to feed the illusion of a woman going about her lawful business.

All things considered, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d genuinely been that woman.

“Skelder! Skelder!”

Kat jumped at the stallholder’s shout – one directed at her entirely too often that past year. She fought for calm as a barefoot young boy threaded his panicked way through the crowd, a loaf of bread clutched to his chest. Eyes darting behind at a pursuer thrice his height and four times his age, he ran full tilt into Kat and rebounded with enough force to plant his backside firmly on the dust-strewn cobbles.

His grubby, terrified face told a pleading tale all its own.

Vathi grunted. “You’ve caught a tiddler.”

“You little rat! Get back here!” The stallholder was still a dozen paces away. Not close enough to see his quarry. Not yet.

Kat grabbed the boy’s collar and dragged him upright. Offering the slightest wink, she jerked her head towards a stack of empty crates and let him go. He took off at once, just as the stallholder shoved his way into sight.

“Where’d he go?”

Kat jerked a thumb southwards, a good quarter-turn from where the boy was hidden and rolled her eyes in insincere empathy. The moment of danger. Any one of a dozen onlookers could offer contradiction, betraying both her lies and the boy’s hiding place. But there were no custodians in sight, and it seemed no one else wanted to get involved. The stallholder nodded his thanks and waded off on his new course.

“You trying to get us caught, skirl?” grumbled Vathi.

The boy slunk out of cover and headed westwards towards the Copper Road, prize clasped to his chest. A brief glance of suspicious gratitude and he was gone. Kat continued northwards and tried not to think about what would happen to him once the torch house was gone and the mists descended. He’d likely be dead within the month anyway. The gutter was a cruel landlord.

With the bulk of the souk to her rear, a bright indigo flame flickered on the horizon, vivid against greying orange skies and the streaks of soot-coloured clouds. Telvamir’s torch house, some twelve miles distant. And along the Copper Road between, billeted in roadside bivouacs while their officers claimed more comfortable quarters in Telvamir, ten thousand legion redcloaks. Strung out on a mountain pass preserved from the mists by the ridge line of the upper Zaruan to the east and the indigo flames forever burning in the towns to the north and south. Remove one such flame, and most of the redcloaks might reach shelter before the Veil swallowed the Copper Road. Remove both, and they’d have nowhere to escape.

“How do you suppose…” Jaîna glanced around, remembering just in time that Vallant’s name was a dangerous word to throw around even when no one seemed to be listening. “How do you suppose they’re getting on?”

“Probably dead by now,” said Vathi, deadpan.

Jaîna shot him a scowl. “That’s not funny.”

He offered a low, laborious shrug, weighed down by the burden of unappreciated wit. “Never said it was.”

Kat stifled a wry smile. She was reasonably sure Vathi’s morose outlook was as much an act as any of Tatterlain’s guises. For better or worse, there was no way to know how Vallant’s half of the plan was going until – if – Telvamir’s torch house went dark.

Leaving the souk behind, she struck out into the sparse crowds heading for the northern tollhouse, close enough now to make out the limp pennants twitching in the veering wind.

“I still don’t understand why here,” she murmured. “There are a dozen towns like this along the Copper Road, and most of them easier to reach.”

Vathi shrugged, the heave of his shoulders almost disguising his careful appraisal of a passer-by. “That famine three years back? We risked a lot to keep Zoyen fed. Lost a good woman doing it. But when some of ours needed shelter, the town council handed them over to the Bascari without blinking. Old debts.”

Kat stifled a scowl, her left wrist grinding as her right hand grew involuntarily tighter. Vallant was settling a score? Easy to believe. Grudges burned bright beneath his smiling eyes. “And everyone else in Zoyen pays the price?”

Even with the town emptying in advance of the night’s curfew, there’d still be a few hundred folk remaining who weren’t custodians or redcloaks, but farmers, traders, innkeepers or simply people with nowhere else to go. Families.

Vathi gave another shrug. “That’s how the world works. It’s how war works. Leaders lead and followers die. Collaborators die.”

“It’s not fair.”

The words fell ashen on Kat’s tongue. Fair was for children and tale-weavers. It made no accounting for those forced into the gutter, pressed into work gangs or bled dry by tithes. But what was the alternative? Even if they weren’t marching to war any longer, ten thousand redcloaks would kill more people in a year than lived in Zoyen and Telvamir combined, out of drunkenness, desire or simple callous abandon. Arrogance and privilege made for a toxic brew, especially when dealing with folk who had neither, and the Eternity King’s soldiers were untouchable. It was all subjective morality, like stealing from folk who had almost nothing because you had nothing at all. Vallant and his followers were at war, and in war folk were either friends or enemies. Zoyen had chosen its side.

“Perhaps you should head to the rendezvous and leave us to handle this,” hissed Jaîna, her voice hard.

Kat met her gaze. “I know why I’m here. Do you?”

“I’m here for my brother.”

And that was the whole problem, wasn’t it? Jaîna wasn’t part of the expedition because she believed in the cause, or because she wanted to rid Khalad of its oppressors. She just wanted blood to wash away the pain of Amarid’s death. Kat opened her mouth to point that out and closed it without a word. Hypocrisy only went so far. Jaîna was here to avenge Amarid. She was there to earn information to help settle the scales of Azra’s death. They were both as bad as each other. Killing strangers to avenge the dead.

“There she is,” murmured Vathi.

It took Kat a moment to pick out Rîma’s wagon from among those dotted on the roadway leading down from the tollhouse gate, which looked very much like it hadn’t closed in years. Not a clatter wagon, but a horse-drawn dray – as were all those that carried blesswood to the torch house pyres. Kat’s father had claimed it was simple tradition. She suspected it was more to do with the fact that horses were expensive to stable and feed. Alabastra did so love to flaunt the wealth it extracted from the common citizenry. Rîma, readily identifiable by her broad-brimmed hat and long coat, sat high on the driver’s box seat, reins hanging loosely from her hands while she conversed with the overseer standing on the cobbles below her. Two more custodians blocked the dray’s path, neither with weapons drawn but both with hands on shriekers.

Vathi turned about, his back to Rîma – or more precisely, her interrogator – and his expression even more morose than normal. “I don’t like this.”

Jaîna moved to stand side-on, her eyes studiously anywhere but on Rîma. “Think they suspect something?”

The overseer took a step towards the dray’s rear, fingers brushing the white and gold silk of the wagon’s low awning. Rîma extended a hand and shouted something, her words lost to the rising wind and the chatter of the crowd. The overseer halted, his expression unreadable behind his silver mask, but the set of his shoulders betrayed an affronted and impatient man.

“They won’t need to if they start digging around and find the blasting prisms,” said Kat. The perfumed timber would hide the prisms’ rotted roses and sour wine smell – alongside the general untouchability of Alabastra’s business, the reason why Rîma had gone to the trouble of hijacking the wagon in the first place – but that wouldn’t help if the custodians started pulling the baulks aside.

“It won’t get that far.” Vathi’s mood darkened from morose to downright miserable. “She’ll kill them first. That sword of hers is hidden behind the box seat.”

Kat glanced again at the wagon and saw that somewhere along the line Rîma had looped the reins about the box seat’s narrow rail. Even as her left hand gesticulated for the overseer’s attention, her right crept down towards the shadow between the box seat and the cargo bed. Kat had seen enough of Rîma in action to believe her capable of handling her immediate opponents, but there were easily another dozen custodians and as many redcloaks within sight… and scores more across the town. Even assuming they all somehow survived the coming moments, they could wave farewell to the blasting prisms. Which meant their mission was over before it had truly begun.

Jaîna pursed her lips. “We have to do something.”

“Like what?” asked Kat. “Ask them nicely not to search our friend’s dray, because there really, really isn’t anything they need worry about, honest to Nyssa?”

Jaîna’s hand fell to her scimitar. “I’ll distract them.”

The bleak gleam in her eye left Kat in no doubt as to the kind of distraction Jaîna meant: a hue and cry that ended with her dead and Zoyen buzzing with the kind of watchfulness they didn’t need.

Vathi laid a heavy hand on Jaîna’s shoulder. “That won’t help.”

Kat let her gaze drift across the clatter wagons assembled on the Copper Road, some outward bound and looking for clearance, others manoeuvring for space in the covered wayport tucked beneath Zoyen’s crumbling outer wall. “Leave it to me.”

Ignoring Vathi’s perplexed glare, she strode briskly along the right-hand side of the roadway, drawing ever closer to the tollhouse but careful never to glance at Rîma’s blockaded wagon. She nudged her aetherios tattoo to life as she closed the distance, taking stock of the tiny consciousnesses of nearby ifrîti. The lumani still slumbering in their glass lanterns above the roadway and on the porches of the tiny dwellings. The black, aching horror of a koilos somewhere within the tollhouse. The motics of the gate mechanisms. A clutch of heraldics atop the tollhouse’s crumbling watchtower, and… Yes, there it was. The helmic of the nearest clatter wagon, a snub-nosed and gaudily painted contraption whose master had descended to the roadway to argue with a custodian. The gleam of dinars told the story of a bribe changing hands.

Perfect.

Giving wide berth to a disinterested redcloak, Kat ducked into a side street and then into a refuse-strewn alleyway running parallel to the Copper Road, her sudden arrival sending a pair of rats skittering away up a broken downpipe. Trying to shake the idea that every custodian and redcloak she’d passed was watching her, she pressed her back against the wall. The darkness of the spirit world rushed in as she reached out to the clatter wagon’s helmic.

The ifrît was still within her range of influence, but only just. Even with her veins buzzing with stolen Deadwinds’ soulfire, Kat barely found purchase on the fussy spirit, which seemed more intent on examining the inverted shadow she cast in the spirit world than heeding her entreaties.

Her breath frosting in the spirit world’s clammy darkness, her restless imagination conjured Rîma’s fingers closing around the grips of her sword. The spray of blood. A custodian’s cry of alarm and the abyssal scream of the tollhouse koilos lurching to wakefulness. Kat’s blood rushed cold in premonition.

And at last, the helmic truly noticed her. Or rather, the shimmering spoor of her fear. It feasted on the sensation like a vulture at a sky burial, gulping down the glut of emotion. As the spirit world’s dark grew colder, Kat teased the strands of her tattoo into shape. At once, the helmic went rigid, aware too late of the pieces of itself given away. Allowing herself a grin of satisfaction, she jolted the ifrît into motion. She pulled free of the spirit world’s inky veil and leaned heavily against the alley wall as colour returned to her vision.

Cries of alarm split the evening air. The scraping rumble as steel-shod wheels sought purchase on stone. And last of all the ear-splitting crash of a collision close by, the hollow bang punctuated by the sharper, musical notes of breaking glass.

Gathering herself, Kat retraced her steps to the Copper Road, where commotion reigned.

The gaudy clatter wagon lay on its side, its cab buried in the cargo bed of a neighbour, a rear wheel spinning uselessly in mid-air. Its cargo – bolts of bright silks wound about wooden spindles – lay scattered and unfurled across the dusty flagstones. As for the neighbour, its awning hung loose over ruined crates and pooled amid rich rivulets of burgundy wine and glinting fragments of broken bottles.

Even as Kat left the side street, the quarrel between the wagons’ masters blossomed from raised voices to a thrown punch. Two custodians were down already, caught in the runaway wagon’s path. The blockade in front of Rîma’s dray dissolved as others ran to quell the confrontation. His stoop-shouldered posture betraying resigned frustration, the overseer stepped back from Rîma’s dray and waved her onward.

Picking up her pace as the dray rumbled past, Kat grabbed the running board’s stanchion and hauled herself up onto the box seat beside Rîma. “You were popular. Do we have a problem?”

“Overseer wanted some blesswood for his own use,” Rîma replied, her husky voice full of disdain. “Wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

Kat snorted. Alabastra took a dim view of illicit blesswood trades, but with dinars to be made from selling everything from baulks to splinters to ash to people terrified of Mistfall, there’d always be those willing to take the risk. “Should have sold him some.”

“I would, but you never know how deep a custodian will dig once you let them loose.” Rîma flicked the reins. “Back there. Your work?”

Kat nodded, uncertain if the words had held praise or criticism. “It was that or let Jaîna start slashing She was a little too keen on the idea.”

“Vallant should never have let her come.”

Kat glanced behind. Vathi and Jaîna were shadowing the dray from the opposite side of the road. “You’re not the first to think it, but she’s here now.”

“Aren’t we all,” said Rîma, her unblinking gaze drifting to a column of redcloaks marching down the opposite side of the Copper Road. “Let’s hope we can make it count for something.”

In the middle distance, the indigo flames of Zoyen’s torch house blazed in welcome.

Thirty-One

The torch house was a small fortress, if one worn and battered. A motic-driven door twice Kat’s height with a smaller wicket gate set into its timbers marked the only passage through a mud-brick wall some twelve or so feet high. Scarred wooden hoardings atop the parapet spoke to the not-so-distant past when the town had stood on the Qersali frontier. Such tales had been the stuff of bedside stories during Kat’s childhood. Determined settlers striking east from Khalad to bring order to the despotic eastern lands, with all the suffering and heroism that entailed. It remained a source of shame that she’d never thought to question them until she’d found herself on the ever-growing roster of those who’d earned the Eternity King’s ire – or at least the ire of those who wielded his power as their own.

In any case, the masked custodian standing watch beneath the cloud of drifting ash and sparking cinders did not match the legend of those illustrious times. Though he pulled to something approaching attention, even that small movement screamed reluctance. Not a man prepared to lay down his life and soul to defend against Qersali raiders come howling out of the night, but one lost in anticipation of watch’s end.

Kat shortened her pace to match the slowing dray and laid a hand on the pommel of her scimitar to better sell the illusion of vigilance. The silvered features of her vahla mask concealed the worst of her misgivings. There were still so many ways it could all go horrifically wrong, especially with a pair of koilos ember-saints standing mute sentry in alcoves to either side of the gate, bare-headed but clad in black lamellar and flowing sable robes. The harrowing shadow of their spiritual presence set Kat’s teeth screaming.

The sentry straightened. “Approach and state your business!”

Sighing, Tatterlain clambered down from his perch on the box seat as Rîma brought the dray to a rumbling halt on uneven cobbles. “Give it a rest, would you?” He gestured at the dray’s distinctive white and gold awning. “Maybe take an educated guess?”

As Tatterlain ambled towards the sentry, Kat spared a glance for Yali, a pace to her left. The girl stood stock still, as immobile as the sleeping koilos, with only the wind-blown twitch of her borrowed custodian’s tunic to indicate she wasn’t carved from stone. She’d trembled as she’d pulled the mask into place. With one sense already denied her, the limited vision permitted by the mask’s slitted eyes must have felt doubly a prison. She was the only one of the ersatz escort without a scimitar, on the principle that she didn’t know how to use one. Instead, she had a small, straight dagger buckled at her waist.

Rîma sat atop the dray, reins in hand. The motionlessness of anticipation, rather than fearful self-restraint. Beyond the restless, blinkered horse, Vathi and Jaîna stood silently, Kat and Yali’s mirror. The dutiful escort, awaiting orders.

Resting her right hand on the dray’s wheel, Kat probed the gateway ifrîti. No fewer than three hestics lurked in sentry crests atop the arch. One was so faded as to scarcely be worthy of note. Another was a seething mass of watchful malevolence, eager to send an intruder’s blood to fire. The third’s essence bled seamlessly into that of the slumbering koilos. The motics responsible for the gate’s mechanisms were quieter, duller spirits, untroubled by her soulfire caress. And then there was the tangled rage of the sentry’s shrieker – all knotted frustration hot enough to sear flesh.

She took a deep breath and slipped halfway into the spirit world, reality hazing and blurring until voices were distant and muddled and only the steel rim of the wheel beneath her fingers held any meaning. Her forearm itched as her tattoo flowed into new forms.

The sentry shook his head. “Delivery came in just this morning. Silo’s full.” His words were muffled and distorted by the boundary between living realm and spirit world. Whispered through three walls, or from underwater.

Tatterlain shrugged. “I don’t know about that. Just have my orders, see?” Reaching into his tunic, he produced a sheaf of documents painstakingly drawn up during the Chainbreaker’s outward voyage from Athenoch. It had surprised Kat not one whit that he possessed not only a wide variety of handwriting styles and signatures, but also an impressive array of stamps and seals otherwise the property of various fireblood houses and Alabastra itself. “Maybe someone’s worried the redcloaks might ‘requisition’ your stores?”

In truth, the dray had been bound for a torch house just outside the village of Traza before Rîma had hijacked it and pressed it to Vallant’s cause. But it would be hours yet before anyone put two and two together.

The sentry took the papers and glanced over his shoulder. “That lot treat everything as theirs by right. By the authority of the Eternity King, you know?”

“I do, I do.” Tatterlain’s tone was a pitch-perfect woebegone match. “Who do you think this escort’s for? The Qersali?”

“Maybe. That lot in Rail Town might be desperate enough to try anything.” The sentry grunted, folded the papers and held them out. “Something’s got the castellan worried, otherwise why double the tollhouse garrisons? Your lot got current glyphs?”

“I guess we’ll see.”

Offering the sentry a close-fisted salute, Tatterlain turned his back and strolled back towards the dray. He tilted his head in question. Kat offered a slight nod, releasing her grip on the wheel as she left the spirit world behind and the hestics sleeping.

The sentry held an upraised palm level with the motic prism set into the archway beside the wicket gate. With a dull, grinding rumble, the great slab of a door sank away into its housing beneath the roadway. The sentry pressed himself against the inner wall to allow dray and escort to pass.

Tatterlain swung up onto the dray’s box seat. “See?” he murmured. “Told you it’d be fine.”

“Only because Kat did the hard part,” said Rîma. “Or could you have silenced the hestic?”

He sighed. “Will I ever be appreciated before Nyssa calls me?”

Kat eyed the sentry. His back was still to the roadway, but words carried. “Shut up, unless you want Nyssa to take us all.”

Tatterlain lapsed into wounded silence. Kat tapped Yali on the elbow and followed the dray, careful to keep as far from the koilos as she could. She’d not been so close to one since Xanathros Alabastra, and couldn’t shake the fact that they were watching her – that they knew she’d destroyed so many of their kind.

With the sun already deep behind the western mountains, shadows clung to the courtyard’s every stone. What few lumani dotted the inner walls and low buildings had yet to awaken, their prisms cold and clear on iron stanchions. There was little enough to see: a trio of squat buildings to serve respectively as living quarters, wood silo and provisions store, a handful of bowed wooden lean-tos attached to the same, one of which offered a low stone trough and cramped stabling, while another provided shelter for a rusting clatter wagon.

The minaret dominated what little space remained. Thirty feet wide at its base and tapering gently to its flame platform some hundred and fifty feet above Kat’s head, it had been constructed with all the diligence and artistry the rest of the torch house so plainly lacked. Masons had shaped the pale grey blocks with such skill that the joins were all but seamless. Bas-reliefs told tales from past Ages of Fire, the haloed brow of Caradan Diar ever in evidence as he laid the first stone of Zariqaz’s foundation, accepted a crown from Nyssa Benevolas or drove savages into the desert with Nyssa Iudexas at his side. Flickering shadows cast by indigo fires far above brought the scenes to vibrant life, waking the past in a way that Kat’s father had never quite achieved with his frescos.

It was beauty ill-served by successive generations, who, set the challenge of raising a fortification on uneven terrain, had used the lower slopes of the minaret as foundation upon which to build the northern wall. And who had widened the doorway – to aid transfer of blesswood between the outer store and the minaret – with rather more enthusiasm than skill, leaving ragged stone and uneven mortar framing the enlarged opening.

But most important, the narrow courtyard was otherwise empty.

“Are we clear?” asked Vathi.

Jaîna took a long step into the courtyard and glanced at the mud-brick rampart. “We’re clear.”

The sentry started forward, his tone crowding with suspicion. “Clear? What do you—?”

Without appearing to look, Vathi batted the sentry’s flailing hands aside, grabbed the back of his cowl and slammed him face-first into the gateway wall. He dropped without a sound, buckled mask falling free.

“Sorry, friend,” said Vathi, not sounding at all regretful. “Looks like you walked into something.”

Yali ripped her custodian’s mask clear. Eyes wide and cheeks pale, she flung a hand against the wall and sucked down a deep breath.

||You all right?|| signed Kat. She removed her own mask, partly in solidarity, mostly because it was starting to smell like the last meal she’d eaten.

Yali nodded. ||I will be.||

Rîma jumped gracefully from the dray. “Is he out of it?”

“Oh yes.” Vathi prodded the custodian with his foot and patted the pocket in which he’d stashed his talent wisps. “Can’t go wrong with a prize brawler’s wisp. Timing’s everything.”

She pointed at the small room let into the wall’s inner face. “Get him out of sight and take his place. If trouble comes up that road, I want to know.”

“Moment.” With a grunt of effort, Vathi hoisted the sentry upright by wrist and scruff of neck and planted the unconscious man’s palm against the motic prism. He dragged the sentry across the threshold as the gate grumbled into motion.

“Useful hand,” said Jaîna as the gate thumped shut. “Maybe we should take it with us.”

“He’s a bit heavy for that,” said Tatterlain.

She shrugged. “Never said we needed the rest of him.”

Kat approached Vathi and unbuckled the sentry’s shrieker belt. Even distant from the spirit world, she felt the fury of the weapon’s captive ifrît. The shrieker she’d commandeered in Xanathros Alabastra had been the same. Were they all so angry? Pushing the thought aside, she buckled the belt around her waist, the shrieker resting against her right hip, opposite the scimitar on her left.

Tatterlain eyed her with concern. “One shot and you’ll wake everyone for streets around.”

“It’s not active.” Faced with the prospect of more hestics to soothe deeper into the torch house, the last thing Kat wanted to do was waste time and soulfire on bending a shrieker to her will. Not that there seemed any danger of the latter – her blood was still buzzing.

“Then why take it?”

“Because they won’t know it’s not active.”

Tatterlain covered his mask with a single meaty hand, doubly concealing what Kat suspected was a crestfallen expression. “Ah. I promise I am awake, whatever the evidence to the contrary.”

“Enough,” said Rîma. “Let’s get this place locked down before they realise something’s wrong. You and Vathi can help me check the outbuildings. Might as well put that talent wisp of his to use before it fades. Kat? You and Yali make a start on the minaret.”

Kat stifled a wince. Violence didn’t exactly come naturally to Yali. “There’s supposed to be, what, an eight-person garrison here?”

Rîma nodded. “Twelve-hour shift. The other sleeps in the town. Changeover at midday and midnight.”

Kat nodded at the doorway through which Vathi had dumped the sentry’s body. “So that’s seven left. If it’s anything like the one in Old Kosra, there’ll be at least three keeping the flames fed. Probably more. Anyone else is either asleep or drunk. I could use you.”

Jaîna rolled her eyes. “Afraid you can’t get the job done?”

Tatterlain shrugged. “We’ve come too far to take chances.”

“Agreed.” Rîma tugged her sword from behind the dray’s box seat. “No more delays.”

||You want to stay with the cart?|| Kat asked Yali, as Tatterlain and Jaîna headed for the nearest building.

||No.|| Her expression warned that she’d understood plenty of what had been said, and what hadn’t.

“Fair enough,” murmured Rîma, before switching to a mix of signs and speech. ||Stay close.||

She took the stairs to the minaret’s door two at a time, sword trailing low behind.

Thirty-Two

A sentry crest glinted above the minaret door, but its hestic was a shiftless, skittish thing, easily distracted with soothing murmurs while Kat wove her tattoo in a glyph capable of setting it sleeping. The door was another matter. The motic prism was cold and dark, leaving only a single lock that Yali teased open in short order.

She grinned as the door swung open. ||Barely worth the effort.||

Rîma ghosted inside, her white hair wispy tendrils in the gloom. Passing up the stairway that curled around the minaret’s inner wall, she prowled through the open double doors to their right. Inside, a custodian – outer tunic discarded and working in a grubby vest and trousers – busied himself with the rope-and-pulley lifting platform at the centre of the room. Rîma picked her way through the squared-off piles of blesswood and pounced. Grabbing the custodian by his shoulder, she spun him around and pressed him up against the creaking lift, gloved hand over his mouth and sword blade at his throat.

“Not a sound,” she hissed. “How many others?”

She slipped her hand from his mouth.

“T—” he began, too loudly.

Rîma clapped her hand back over his mouth. Scarlet shimmered where her sword’s edge kissed his neck’s fleshy folds. His eyes went wider and whiter than before.

“Try again,” she murmured. “How many?”

Again she slid her hand away. This time the custodian spoke in a hoarse, almost inaudible whisper. “Two. Third floor up. What—?”

Rîma slid the sword away and then brought it back, quick as a whip, and crashed the hilt against his temple. Lowering him to the ground with an ease that belied her slender frame, she nodded at a coiled rope sitting atop a blesswood stack. “Bind him.”

Kat set about hog-tying the custodian’s wrists and ankles. “Not going to slit his throat?”

Rîma eased her sword back across her shoulders. “This was made for better.”

Yali tapped Kat on the shoulder and passed her a pair of filthy rags. Kat signed her thanks, then stuffed one rag in the custodian’s mouth and tied the other tight across it.

“It’ll all be the same in an hour,” she said bitterly, wondering all the while why she cared. “That’s the point, isn’t it?”

Rîma shrugged. “He might survive the explosion. I prefer not to bring more death into the world until I must.”

“And the Veil?”

She tilted her head. As ever, her lower face was hidden by her scarf, but Kat was certain she was smiling. “That’s the question, isn’t it? Who knows what really happens there?”

Without waiting for a response, she retraced her steps towards the stairs, the tails of her battered coat dancing at her heels. Kat patted the unconscious custodian on the head and clambered upright.

||What was all that about?|| asked Yali.

||I’ll tell you later,|| signed Kat.

Although quite what she’d say, she wasn’t sure. More and more Kat had the feeling that Rîma not only didn’t quite perceive the same world but didn’t quite walk it either. Leaving aside the woman’s frankly frightening competence in matters of violence, there was something priestly about her manner – or what Kat had always assumed a priestly aspect before she’d grown old enough to recognise Alabastra’s hypocrisy. It was unsettling, reassuring… even seductive. Certainty always was. Kat missed having certainty in her life.

The minaret’s stairs proved every bit as creaky as they appeared, the patchwork and mismatched timbers as much evidence of “improvements” as necessary repairs. Fortunately, by the time they reached the second floor, the throaty crackle of the fire platform had grown loud enough to drown out any telltales.

Under its cover, they made it to the third floor without event, Rîma once more in the lead and Yali slinking along at the rear. With only a thin wooden rail between her and a forty-foot plunge to the minaret’s lower floor, Kat’s vertigo cackled with anticipation. She kept her eyes fixed firmly ahead as she climbed, the stairs winding about the rooms at the centre like a constrictor’s coils.

A glance through a crack in the door revealed that the third-floor room had been pressed to a small makeshift barracks, the space between the plaster walls and timber uprights dominated by two lumpen beds and a sturdy table whose peeling polish had long since abandoned the battle against water damage. At the very centre, a pair of creaking ropes passed through eyelets in the large floor and ceiling trapdoors, hinged to permit the lifting platform’s upward journey to the minaret’s summit. At the table, two custodians played cards over a stack of grubby dinars – neither of them armed, though a weapons belt bearing shrieker and scimitar hung from a nail in an overhanging beam, and a second unsheathed sword lay upon one of the beds.

Matters were complicated by the fact that one custodian was sitting facing the door. With the greying light of pre-dusk flooding through the open shutters of the paneless window, there were no shadows to speak of in which to hide.

Kat slipped the shrieker from its holster and nodded at Rîma. “On three… Two… One…”

Rîma slammed the sole of her boot against the door. Kat darted through as it thumped open, shrieker levelled at the custodians. A chair crashed back onto the floor, its occupant lunging for the hanging weapons belt.

“Don’t!” snapped Kat.

The woman froze, hand inches from the holstered shrieker, then eased it upward.

“Good,” said Kat, trying to hide her relief. “Back away.”

The woman complied, her face twisted in frustration more than fear.

Kat twitched the shrieker’s barrel to cover the man until he too raised his hands. “My friend here doesn’t like killing people – even custodians – unless she has to. Don’t give her a reason.”

Their nascent resistance gone, the custodians succumbed to being bound and gagged without further quarrel, though the woman’s eyes burned like coals the entire time. Between the second length of rope Yali had thoughtfully brought from the storeroom and strips of torn bedsheet, there was plenty to get the job done.

||That wasn’t so hard.|| Yali edged toward the doorway. ||Want me to find…?|| Her hands darted through the signs for “endless” and “chatter” – her private shorthand for Tatterlain.

||Be careful,|| Kat replied.

Yali beamed and picked her way over a hog-tied custodian. ||Always.||

Shadows loomed on the narrow landing and surged into the room with scimitars drawn, scarlet cloaks spreading like wings behind.

“Yali!”

Kat’s cry was pure reflex, unabated by the knowledge that it would go unheard. But her expression carried all the warning her voice did not. Yali spun around, the motion painfully slow. Steel gleamed as a scimitar flashed out at head height. Kat cast the useless shrieker aside and flung herself forward, fumbling for her own sword.

Rîma got there first. Her shove sent Yali stumbling clear. The redcloak’s scimitar thudded into a wooden pillar. A kick to his thigh sent him stumbling back, and then Rîma had her long, slender sword held at guard.

“Are you sure you wish—”

The redcloak’s roar of bravado swallowed Rîma’s ritual challenge. His sword flashed a low feint, only to whirl up in a dizzying slice at her head. Kat saw only the blur of steel, but Rîma parried with her habitual fluid efficiency. She struck the blade down, stamped on its flat and ran the redcloak through.

She shrugged the blade free from its prison of gasping, mewling flesh. “So impatient.”

Rîma stepped back as the rearmost redcloak advanced, her short, vicious sweeps more efficient, more controlled than her late comrade’s. Rîma ducked the first and parried the second with a scraping flourish.

The third redcloak flung himself at Kat.

Her parry owed more to luck than skill, the flash of steel inches from her face a reminder that long ago duelling with the Rashace children beneath the mansion’s tiled portico was no preparation for facing a trained killer. The rasp of tearing silk and the red-hot slash of pain across her forearm from a second mediocre parry reinforced the lesson.

Already breathing hard, Kat threw everything she had into her paltry defence. Her back jarred against a wooden post. She flinched and flung herself low, diving beneath the scimitar’s murderous sweep. Her assailant bore down, eyes hard beneath his skullcap’s steel circlet, his lips frozen in a contemptuous snarl as he jabbed and thrust, testing her pitiful defences.

She scrambled away, scimitar no longer even really a sword, merely something heavy and solid enough to fend off the redcloak’s blows. A prybar would have served as well. And as poorly.

The redcloak’s flurry of hacking blows drove Kat to her knees. The scimitar, held crosswise above her head, bucked in her hands. Once. Twice. Three times. The fourth blow ripped the battered sword away. It spun across the floorboards, out of reach. She scrabbled for it anyway, silently beseeching Nyssa to intervene in what had always been an uneven fight.

The redcloak towered overhead. Snarling, he hacked down.

Yali broke a chair across his shoulders. Shattered spars clacked against pillars and floor and the redcloak’s sword went wide. Overcome by her own desperate momentum, Yali slammed shoulder-first into the wall. The redcloak grunted in pain and braced a forearm against the window casing. Kat staggered upright and drove a fist into his inner elbow. In the same moment, Yali darted forward and heaved his right foot off the floor.

The redcloak’s eyes widened as his balance shifted beyond the point of no return. Scimitar abandoned, he grabbed at one of the wooden shutters. It tore free of its bracket with a screech of unhappy timber, and he was gone.

No scream. No cry. Just a dull thump barely audible over the crackle of the torch house’s flame.

A quick glance confirming that the wound on her arm was nothing more than a bloody graze – this time – Kat blinked sweat from her eyes. The third redcloak – who wore the gold-trimmed robes and gemmed gorget of a captain – lay in a bloody heap by the trapdoor.

Rîma watched impassively from across the room. She hadn’t even the decency to be breathing hard.

“If we survive this, you’re… teaching me how to use a sword,” gasped Kat.

Rîma inclined her head in a shallow nod, another hidden smile tantalising beneath her scarf.

Yali clambered awkwardly to her feet. ||Where did they even come from?||

A search of the floor above – the last full room before the scaffolded fire platform at the summit – offered up the answer. It too had been converted into a living space, with silk drapes to hide the walls. A desk set against a broad window overlooked the cinder-strewn streets surrounding the northern tollhouse and, a quarter of a mile further down the mountainside, the railrunner station.

Rîma set aside her sword and rifled through the desk. “A letter from Tyzanta, signed by Yennika Bascari,” she said, her voice uncharacteristically grim. “Warning of a possible attack on Zoyen. By Vallant.”

Kat signed a translation for Yali. ||They knew we were coming?||

“If they knew, we’d never have made it through the gates.” Rîma let the papers fall. “The Bascari can’t issue orders to redcloaks, they can only make suggestions, but I expect the local custodium had the same warning. Someone took the matter seriously enough to set up a watch post here. A captain to keep vigil and two redcloaks to serve as runners.”

Rîma’s explanation made sense of events – not least the gate sentry’s glance over his shoulder while grousing with Tatterlain about redcloaks.

||She’s going to be missed,|| said Yali.

“She is,” said Rîma. “We’ll just have to hope she wasn’t due to report in any time.” She broke off and ghosted towards the stairs, sword once more in hand.

Tatterlain edged into the room wearing the expression of a man perennially beset. ||Which one of you threw a redcloak at me? It’s getting so a man can’t take an evening stroll.||

A pressure in Kat’s chest eased. She shared a brief grin with Yali. ||Call it a joint effort. Sorry.||

“How are things outside?” asked Rîma.

Tatterlain rubbed his hands together. ||Four custodians awaiting the favour of Nyssa Iudexas and all’s right with the world. Here?|| His woebegone expression returned as Rîma offered a terse summary of her findings. ||We’d better hurry. Jaîna’s started on the blasting prisms, but we can always go faster.||

Rîma and Yali started down the stairs. Kat stared out of the window, one last long look at a town waiting to die. “You sure we’ve enough prisms to do the job?”

Tatterlain patted the wall. “These places are old stone, not like those new-fangled tollhouses. Blessed by Nyssa herself, if you believe that – not sure I do, but that doesn’t stop it being true. Two prisms should do it. Four makes it certain. We’ve got eight. Should be a memorable show.”

Kat gave a slow nod, her gaze drifting south from the railrunner station to the agglomeration of wreckage, discarded timber and tarpaulins that blocked the rails heading south. A few minutes, maybe half an hour, and they’d be done with Zoyen. She’d have earned the information she needed to avenge Azra. “Don’t tell Rîma. She thinks the custodians we’ve tied up have a chance at survival.”

“She’ll probably insist on dragging them clear. Wears ruthlessness and mercy like mismatched shoes, that one.”

Kat grunted non-committally, though it was as fair a description of Rîma as any. As she dredged for a more meaningful reply, her eyes made new sense of the obstruction on the distant rails. It was a railrunner engine – if an old and battered one – at the head of a train of some seven or eight rotting and pitted carriages. The timbers and tarpaulins she’d first taken as refuse instead formed a web of makeshift structures and moth-eaten awnings. A little longer, and she saw people too – some moving, most simply staying under cover as best they could as the skies darkened.

Kiasta.

“There’s a railrunner down there. I thought the line was closed?”

Tatterlain joined her at the window. “That heap? It’s why the line’s closed. Been there months. Refugees from the Qersali border. They’d hoped to get deeper into Khalad but the Bascari refused permission. Didn’t want the burden of mouths to feed, so they blocked the line.” He shrugged. “You know how it goes.”

Kat abandoned her attempt at tallying the refugees. “How many?”

“Three or four hundred. You can cram a lot of bodies into a carriage if you’re not particular. Especially when there’s plenty of children.”

Rail Town. She knew now what the sentry had meant. A life as bad as any in Tyzanta’s Gutterfields. “Why didn’t they move into Zoyen or continue on?”

“See the fence?” said Tatterlain. “A volley from a handful of shriekers takes the fight out of anyone brave enough to climb it. As for moving on? That gate south of the station’s as heavy as anything you’ll get in a tollhouse. On foot, it’s a long, treacherous walk to Azarin, with no prospect of welcome. They’ve no homes to go back to, even if the redcloaks hadn’t made a ruin of the borderlands. Zoyen’s council feeds them, when they remember. Plenty of provisioners’ wagons rolling south these past few months, and there’s always something falling off the backs of those.”

Kat nodded. Hope kept folk moving. Hopelessness held them back. “Did Vallant know?”

Tatterlain hesitated, his lip twisting as he reached for an answer. “We can’t help everyone.”

“That’s not what I asked,” growled Kat, her temper rising. “Vallant sent us here to wipe Zoyen off the map. Did he know they were here?”

“What do you want me to say? It’s war, Kat.”

“I can’t believe this!” She thought back to the fires of Athenoch and Vallant’s courting of Qersali emissaries. “Do his allies know he’s prepared to sacrifice their countrymen?”

“Different clans. He’s dealing with the Yezim. Those folks down there are Armadi. Qersal isn’t a monolith. If the Eternity King hadn’t sent his legions east, they’d still be fighting each other.”

“They don’t care so we shouldn’t?”

“I didn’t say that!” Tatterlain’s expression darkened, then he was back on balance, as urbane as ever. “If it helps, it gets easier. This life… you get used to making sacrifices.”

“I don’t want it to get easier,” snapped Kat. She couldn’t even say where the certainty had come from. But like so many simple truths, there was no ignoring it once out in the open. “And I’d almost convinced myself that what we’re doing here is worth it.”

And it wasn’t, not now. The scales had shifted, weighted down by men, women and children driven from their homes by redcloak spears, starved by fireblood callousness and now condemned to death by Vallant for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Typical Khalad. A place for everyone, until there wasn’t.

“I can’t do this,” she murmured. It was one thing to sacrifice a collaborator town to Vallant’s war, but the people on the railrunner had no choice. “I won’t do this.”

“It’s as good as done,” said Tatterlain.

Kat glared. “Not if I disperse the ifrîti in the blasting prisms.”

“You can do that?”

No. Or at least, she wasn’t sure – not without provoking the detonation she meant to prevent – but Tatterlain didn’t need to know that. “Good luck bringing this place down with pickaxes and bad language.”

“You—” Breaking off, he patted a bunched fist against his chest and regathered himself before proceeding in leaden, level tones. “You do that and every riot those redcloaks put down, every strike they break at a fireblood’s request, every body they leave broken in the dust? That’s on you. Because you could have stopped them, and you didn’t.”

Kat bunched her fists and fought the urge to swing at him. “This is what Vallant wanted, isn’t it? My hands as bloody as his. Because then I have to stick with him. Because otherwise people have died for nothing.” Rîma, Zephyr, Tatterlain – everyone who’d beaten the ten-month average and survived years in Vallant’s orbit – none of them seemed to like him very much, whereas Jaîna, Amarid and other fresh recruits were dazzled by his legend. But they stayed with him all the same. Was this why? “No wonder you spend so much time pretending to be someone you’re not!”

“Fair. Unkind, but fair.” His own temper in retreat, Tatterlain offered a smile that might have been disarming at another moment. “But honestly? I don’t think Vallant’s capable of that kind of duplicity. He just sees what has to be done, and does it. That’s why he scares the Bascari.”

Kat’s ears pricked up at those last words, or rather the manner in which they’d been spoken. “You don’t want to do this either, do you?”

“There’s no choice, not if we’re to take those legions off the board.”

“What if…” She paused, an idea gathering pace. It was audacious, possibly suicidal, though that hardly counted as a negative in that moment. And Azra would have done it, if only to tell the tale afterwards. Azra would have found a way. How could Kat do any less? “How long before curfew?”

He frowned, thrown by her change of tack. “I don’t know. An hour?”

“Good. Because there’s something we’re going to do before we leave.”

Tatterlain’s eyes narrowed. “I’m troubled by your use of the word ‘we’ in that sentence. What if I say no?”

Kat leaned closer and gave him the full benefit of her icy stare. “Don’t.”

Thirty-Three

The Wanderer’s Rest had thinned a little in the intervening hour, but patrons aplenty remained beneath its bowing roof. Few hailed from civilian life, the miners and farmers having retreated north to homesteads in what they weren’t to know was now safer territory. The profusion of redcloaks Kat took as proof that the legion vanguard now had Zoyen firmly in its grip – not necessarily to the delight of the hostelry’s keeper, who beheld the raucous soldiery with watchful eyes while anxiously polishing a tankard already thrice polished. The heady scent of illicit isshîm mingling with travellers’ sweat offered reminder that redcloaks didn’t consider themselves bound by Khalad’s laws. A fact not lost on the serving girls, who navigated the crowded tables more smilingly – and more swiftly – than any Kat had seen.

“He still here?” murmured Tatterlain. He’d his back to her at an adjoining table, the better to watch the main door. He wore his hood low to hide his borrowed face. Kat’s pooled across her shoulders. A trap was nothing without bait.

“He is.” She took a sip of wine and favoured Commandant Abîna, now sitting alone three tables over, with a charming smile. She held his gaze, then twisted her lips to a rueful moue she wasn’t feeling and stared down at the table. “Every time I look in his direction, he’s already looking in mine. Ready?”

“No.” Tatterlain paused. “But let’s do it anyway. Room Four?”

“Room Four.”

He downed his goblet, stood, swayed – belched loudly enough to draw every eye – headed for the door with what Kat hoped was an exaggeratedly unsteady gait. The man took the principles of hiding in plain sight to another level.

She gave it a ten-count, spared a surreptitious, but not too surreptitious, glance at Abîna – yes, still looking – then threaded her way through the carousing redcloaks. Halfway to the commandant’s table, she let her smile blossom, filling it with every scrap of confidence she felt, and a goodly amount that she didn’t. Up close, he was younger than she’d expected, perhaps a year or two her junior, which guaranteed his rank had been some sponsor’s gift. A handsome enough face, with well-defined cheekbones and a firm brow. But something about Abîna’s dark eyes offered warning. Perhaps of a rotten soul. Perhaps of a merely insecure one. She could work with either.

He rose and offered a short bow of greeting. Kat eased a hint of playfulness into her smile and a touch of Skerrik’s northland burr into her accent. “Ye’ve been watching me all evening.”

Abîna offered a flash of perfect teeth. Irresistible, no doubt, to a receptive audience. “It’s a small garrison. I know every face… but I don’t know yours.”

She fixed her smile in place and reminded herself that there’d been no hint of suspicion in the words. Just the first step in the dance. She hoped it was the first step in the dance. “I’m passin’ through to Telvamir. A new posting, but I don’t have tae be there until tomorrow.” Resting a palm against his chest, she leaned in close, almost cheek to cheek, her lips brushing his ear. “That is, if ye’ve interest in more than watching?”

Abîna’s breath faltered as his brain caught up with the fact that she’d skipped at least three steps in the dance. Its slight quickening thereafter confirmed his happiness at the development. Kat held the pose a little longer so as to not let him see the relief plastered across her face. For all that Azra had so often claimed otherwise, such easy marks were few and far between.

At last she pulled away. With a final tantalising glance, she left the table and headed for the stairs. A backward glance as she reached the top confirmed that Abîna was following through the crowd. Treating herself to her first genuine smile since she’d returned to the Wanderer’s Rest, she padded to Room Four and slipped the key into the lock.

Leaving the door ajar, she passed the threadbare window drapes and dimmed the oil lantern on the bedside table. She kept her back to the door as Abîna entered, shielding the bedside table’s other burden from his sight. The door closed with a soft click.

“I hope the custodium can manage without you,” she whispered.

“I have to make my rounds at midnight,” he replied. “I’m all yours until then.”

“Good.” Closing her fingers around the shrieker’s grips, Kat turned and levelled the muzzle at Abîna’s chest. “Not a sound. Even I can’t miss at this range.”

He froze, disbelief hardening to outrage. But he held his tongue. The shrieker’s ifrît crackled in the back of Kat’s thoughts, urging her to offer release. After the close call with the redcloaks, she’d concluded that she needed any advantage, and had spent five priceless minutes wrestling her tattoo into a configuration the ifrît would respect. She dared not shoot the thing in a hostelry full of redcloaks, but Abîna didn’t know that. The gloom did little to hide his soured pride.

His shoulders shifted. His left foot inched backwards in preparation for a doomed pounce.

Tatterlain stepped from the shadows beside the narrow wardrobe and brought his dagger’s hilt down hard behind Abîna’s ear. Eyes glazing over, the commandant collapsed into his waiting arms.

“Women are such deceivers,” murmured Tatterlain, lowering Abîna to the floor.

Kat rolled her eyes and set the shrieker aside in favour of stripping the unconscious commandant of his distinctive tunic. “Harsh words from a man wearing someone else’s face.”

“It’s my face,” he replied archly. “I just happen to have another beneath it.”

“Doesn’t really change my point, does it?”

He grinned. “Well, when you put it like that…”

Getting Abîna out of his uniform was the labour of moments. Getting Tatterlain into it took even less time. While Kat bound and gagged the unwilling donor, Tatterlain turned up the oil lamp and examined himself in the small cracked mirror above the bedside table.

He dusted himself down. “High Overseer Tuzen Karza at your service.”

Kat favoured him with a glare. “Isn’t that the same name you used in Osios?”

“What if it is? Tuzen is a very nuanced character. I’ve been working on him for years.”

“Really?”

Tatterlain leaned forward, eyes shining. “Maybe I just like the name. It sounds dignified. Dignity’s important.”

“Said the man adding a fake name to a fake face.”

“Where else could dignity be more important?” he said airily. “Some of us have reputations to protect.”

“How lovely for you,” she replied acidly.

“And on that topic…” He took a long step over Abîna’s unconscious body and reached for the satchel at the wardrobe’s foot. “I have a surprise for you.”

Kat eyed him warily. “What sort of surprise?”

“It occurs to me that with Zoyen so full of redcloaks, a high overseer’s authority – even one as unimpeachable as the noble Tuzen Karza’s – might prove insufficient. What we really need is a member of the Bascari family.”

He was bothering with this now? With time ticking away towards curfew and the redcloak captain likely to be missed at any moment? To say nothing of the fact that Jaîna or Rîma might light the fuses ahead of schedule. Jaîna in particular had argued against Kat’s plan, while Yali’s objections had been rooted solely in having been left behind. “Is that so?” she replied sourly. “I’ll pop out and get one.”

“No need,” Tatterlain replied. “Have you ever met Yennika Bascari?”

She frowned. “No. Jorais Bascari visited the Rashaces from time to time – he liked to go carousing with the countess’ eldest son – but I never met him.”

“Is that so?” He didn’t seem that interested. “Yennika wears her hair shorter than you these days, but you’re close enough to pass muster.”

Kat blinked. “What? Wait. I’m not masquerading as a fireblood!” It was one thing to tag along while Tatterlain sweet-talked his way through a custodian cordon, but to take an active part in proceedings was something else. “I’m not going to fool anyone.”

“On the contrary, the terror of having the head of family custodium make an unannounced inspection—”

Better and better. “She’s the head of the custodium?”

“Only in Tyzanta.” Tatterlain held out a soothing hand. “Here she’s a name and maybe a description. And as I said, there really is a resemblance.”

“How do you know that?”

He sniffed. “Tuzen Karza knows everybody. More than that, discretion demands silence.”

“It sounds like Tuzen Karza’s a rake,” Kat muttered.

“I didn’t catch that.”

“I’m wearing custodian uniform,” she said, loud enough for him to hear. “It’s not exactly the stuff of fireblood fashion.”

Tatterlain upended the satchel, tipping a silk blouse and a bundled scarlet cloak onto the bed. “It’s incredible what folk will leave on washing lines in a backwater like this.” He unfolded the cloak so that its gold trim shimmered in the lamplight. The one lately worn by the redcloak captain in the torch house. “Remember this? Swap the blouse for your undertunic, making sure it shows at collar and cuffs. Word has it that Yennika’s grown fond of uniforms since taking over the custodium. No one will bat an eye at her playing dress-up as a redcloak.”

Kat sighed and took the cloak. “You’re not going to let this go, are you?”

“Leave the talking to me. Just remain imperious and berate me if things are moving too slowly.”

“I’ll certainly do that.” She sucked in a deep breath. “Fine. Outside while I change.”

Tatterlain arched his eyebrows. “And leave you alone with the lecherous commandant?”

“He’s unconscious. Care to join him?”

“I’ll wait outside.”

Tatterlain twitched the curtains aside and clambered out into the alley. Kat changed as quickly as the room’s confines allowed, taking care to arrange the cloak heavily across her left shoulder and the gold clasp high on her right collarbone, as was sometimes the fashion among firebloods. A glance in the mirror confirmed that Tatterlain might not be entirely wrong about her passing muster – assuming she really did look a little like the distant Yennika Bascari.

Time to channel Azra as never before.

Halfway to the railrunner, the clouds burst. Vathi – no doubt warm and dry beneath the torch house’s gateway – had been right. The Mistrali had come early in all their sodden glory. The rains hammered down with pent-up resentment after arid months held at bay. The northerly wind drove spray from overflowing gutters and rattled the thin wooden chimes that kept soul-hungry amashti from lurking at the windows.

Kat splashed behind Tatterlain through the emptying streets, offering silent prayer to Nyssa that her boots would keep the worst of the water at bay. The Copper Road had become practically a muddy river, eddying and bubbling around uneven flagstones. Worse, there was no cover at all to be had on the roadway itself, and by the time she reached the steep stairway on the far side, she was drenched to the bone and shivering uncontrollably.

“I can’t see a thing in this muck!” She had to shout to even hear herself over the hammering rain.

“Just a little further,” said Tatterlain.

How he sounded so disgustingly cheerful, Kat couldn’t imagine, but she sloshed on behind, heading westward. Or at least what she hoped was westward. Standing atop the torch house minaret, she’d memorised the route, but the howling rains had changed everything. Fortunately, Tatterlain’s sense of direction proved better than hers, and eventually the slats of the railrunner’s cordon fence loomed. A good twelve feet high and hammered together from a mix of sleepers, planed timber and scrap wood, it gave the impression it had been assembled from whatever had lain to hand, which it probably had.

“I’m not climbing that,” said Kat.

“Of course not,” Tatterlain replied. “Most unbecoming for a fireblood of your rank. We’ll make our way around to the gate.”

The rains eased to a moody drizzle. The ramshackle fence ended as it met the track’s gravel bed, giving way to a much older – and much more solid – bar-and-chain steel gate that closed off the northbound rails. On the far side, a heavy wooden door offered pedestrian access through the renewed run of fencing. A few dozen yards beyond, the railrunner’s engine loomed through the rain, its patchwork town a series of uneven shadows against brooding clouds.

The gate’s checkpoint was a half-collapsed watchtower to the south of the old station building. Its better years lay long in the past, evidenced by a hole in the tiled roof. Four custodians, all armed with shriekers and scimitars, stood shivering around a fire pit at the tower’s centre.

The nearest glanced up from rubbing his hands over the sputtering flames. “Hey! Who’s that?”

Tatterlain straightened, his easy joviality gone cold and hard as the Mistrali rain. “Who’s that?” he mimicked in a stern, bitter voice. A handful of determined strides closed the distance. “That’s how you offer challenge? Are standards so low this far from Tyzanta?”

The custodian flinched. “I—”

“Don’t interrupt me, little man,” snapped Tatterlain. “Bad enough that Commandant Abîna claims to have more pressing duties than welcoming Lady Yennika to his town. And that no escort was waiting for us at the tollhouse.”

Kat felt eyes boring into her as the besieged custodians shifted their unhappy attention from Tatterlain to her. She struck as querulous a pose as ice-cold, clingy silks allowed, and levelled a stare every bit as frozen. One by one, the custodians glanced away. Bewildered and broken by Tatterlain’s verbal assault, they’d no courage left for suspicion. Which was just as well, because if Tatterlain’s information was correct, easily a score of custodians patrolled the fenced-in railrunner, with at least twice as many others barracked in the station building to the north. Four-to-two odds would steepen very, very quickly.

“Laxity!” growled Tatterlain. “Laxity everywhere.”

The custodian, his expression lost behind his silvered vahla mask but his body language very much that of a man who’d rather be anywhere other than where he stood, glanced lucklessly at his comrades for support. “I don’t understand.”

“Plainly,” said Tatterlain. “Open the gates.”

Again the custodian sought support from his fellows and found none. “But our orders—”

Tatterlain leaned closer until his mask was eye to eye with that of his victim. “Oh, so you do understand the concept of orders? That makes you better than your absent commandant at least. Open. The. Gates.”

“I can’t do that, not without Commandant Abîna’s authorisation. I—”

Kat cleared her throat. “What’s your name, custodian?”

“Haram, ma’am. Abel Haram.”

With supreme effort, Kat suppressed a flinch. No room now for second guesses. It was brazen things out or it was nothing. She stepped closer, careful to keep her footing on ground made treacherous by the rain. “Well, Custodian Haram, by tomorrow morning, Commandant Abîna will be fortunate to retain any connection to the custodium, let alone any authority within it.” She let the words linger a moment before continuing, reflecting that they wouldn’t even be a lie once the torch house fell. “Do you wish to join him? I’m told companionship is a comfort… even in the Gutterfields.”

Haram hung his head. If he’d any lingering doubts concerning identity, he kept them to himself. “No, ma’am.”

A rush of elation drove back the cold. “Then I believe High Overseer Karza gave you an order. That railrunner’s been a blight on this town for too long. I want it gone. Commandant Abîna believes solving the problem beneath him, so I’m solving it for him. Is that clear?”

“Yes, ma’am… Only, it’s been months since the through gate was opened. The ifrît’s bound to have dissipated by now.”

“Then get a shriversman down here to replace the prism. You have until I return.”

Haram hesitated, duty’s echo granting courage for one final challenge. “You’re not going in there? It’s not safe.”

Kat eased back the folds of her waterlogged cloak to reveal her holstered shrieker. “Nor am I. Will there be any more questions? Good. Haram? You have your instructions.” She scowled her disgust. “If you’re fortunate, I’ll forget we ever met tonight.”

Last resistance gone, Haram fled away north towards the station. A second custodian wordlessly accompanied Kat and Tatterlain to the pedestrian gate, raised the heavy wooden bar and swung open the door.

With a last scathing glower at the custodian, Tatterlain passed into the muddy scrubland. Kat kept pace, expecting a bellowed challenge to ring out at every moment. But either Haram and his colleagues were every bit as convinced as they appeared, or Nyssa had chosen to extend some long-overdue divine largesse.

Drizzle gave way to a steady, sapping rain. Kat barely noticed. “Was that too much?”

Tatterlain’s soft chuckle vanished into the rain. “Not a bit. A pleasure watching you work.”

“It was pure Azra, through and through.” Kat tried unsuccessfully to conjure her face in the rain. How long before all of their shared memories were echoes? “Still keeping me alive, even now.”

“I wish I’d met her.”

“She’d have hated you. Wasn’t much of one for sharing the spotlight.”

“I like her more already.”

Kat swallowed to clear a grief-thickened throat and stared up at the railrunner. A caress from her tattoo’s soulfire sought hale ifrîti. The motics that shunted the engine about sidings and stations – avoiding the need to wake the boiler and steam pistons that drove the six-foot spoked wheels – had long since passed into Nyssa’s care, as had those that governed the emergency brakes. Hopefully it wouldn’t matter. The helmic was sleepy but vigorous enough, as was the pyrasti that heated the steam.

“Kat?” murmured Tatterlain. “We’ve got company.”

She followed his gaze towards the leading carriage. Sullen, bedraggled figures in mismatched tatters of fur, wool and silk lined the first of the makeshift shelters, grizzled grey heads and lined faces as common as smoother, younger skin and darker hair. There were at least fifty adults in sight already, and moment by moment more joined the line. A handful of children hung back, hiding beneath awnings and bowed sheets. Kat saw no weapons to speak of. Folded arms and pinched, angry faces made it clear none would be needed if things went badly.

“You don’t belong here, fireblood.” The speaker, a greying matronly woman twice Kat’s age halted a dozen paces away, arms folded: a silk-clad boulder of flesh and blood, and every bit as immovable. Her Daric words were every bit as solid, despite the fluidity of her Qersi accent. Though worn and filthy, her sleeves bore the rich, curling leaf-shape embroidery favoured by Qersali of rank and status. “And if you’ve come taking more of our children, I hope you brought more than him to do it.”

Kat saw no child more than maybe six or seven years old, and no adult younger than twenty. Imagination conjured a hundred terrible fates. She pushed them from her thoughts. “Who’s in charge here? Who speaks for your people?”

“You can talk to me.” Behind the woman, the line edged forward as the Qersali realised there was no force of shrieker-armed custodians lurking in the rain. “You’d better say something I like.”

Kat glanced at Tatterlain. He shrugged. “You started this.”

Fine lot of good that would do him if things turned nasty. “In a few minutes, they’re going to open the gate,” said Kat, and hoped it was true. “Get your people aboard the railrunner and get them out of here.”

The woman beetled her brows. “Why should I believe anything you say?” She sounded tired. Tired and angry and spent in a way that Kat couldn’t even begin to imagine.

“You’ll just have to trust me.”

The woman snorted. “The last person came here asking for my trust took my grandnephew and fifty others his age. To work in the mines, they said. To earn money to keep us fed, they said. That was ten weeks back. I’ve not seen Alram or any of the rest since, and the only food we get is what the little ones steal, or what kind souls throw over the fence. You want us to go die in some other place? I’d rather stay. I’ve buried friends along that rise. At least we’ll walk to Nyssa arm in arm.”

The line edged closer. Kat fought temptation to reach for the shrieker hidden beneath her cloak. “Listen to me. I’m not a fireblood, I’m a fugitive, and in an hour’s time the Veil is going to flood down the mountainside and swallow this whole town. The only way you survive is if you get everyone aboard the railrunner and get moving.”

That caught the crowd’s attention, even if their spokeswoman’s expression didn’t so much as flicker. “Why should we believe you?”

“Because we’re with Bashar Vallant,” said Tatterlain.

Hushed conversation rippled through the crowd. It left the spokeswoman untouched. “Can you prove it?”

Kat threw her hands up to the sky. “Of course. I have in my pocket a letter signed by the man himself, gold lettering and everything. I’d show it to you, but wouldn’t you know, it’s turned to mush in the rain?”

Tatterlain’s shoulders drooped. He regarded her balefully through the eye slits of his mask. “Next time, I’ll do the talking.”

“Happily,” Kat replied, before fixing the spokeswoman with a stare. “Look, believe me or don’t. It won’t change what comes next. I’m trying to help you.”

A small boy broke from the cover of the crowd and tugged insistently at the spokeswoman’s robes. At last taking her eyes off Kat, she stooped and briefly spoke to him in hushed tones before straightening once more.

“My grandson says you helped him today.”

The boy from the souk? That had been him? Build a wall, patrol it with armed custodians and it’d still never be enough to stop hungry children. “He’s a bright lad,” Kat said. “But I could only help him because he trusted me. Will his grandmother trust me enough to help her?”

The spokeswoman’s chin sank to her chest, the first doubt cracking through her expression’s stony facade. “Our driver was the first one they took. No one else has the proper glyphs to wake the ifrîti.”

Kat exhaled as the wind picked up, lashing rain across a body she was certain would never feel dry again. But she grinned all the same. “Don’t worry, I can help you with that.”

Thirty-Four

The rain had returned full force by the time Kat reached the torch house gate. But despite being chilled to the bone, her soul burned bright. Part of it she recognised as the borrowed vigour from the Deadwinds, whose bounty had scarcely dimmed during her negotiations with Zoyen’s ifrîti, but the better part was owed to something both simpler and more profound: the joy at having done the right thing.

Vathi stood hunched in the archway behind the open wicket gate, his woebegone features a fit match for the weather. He looked her bedraggled mishmash of custodian uniform and redcloak finery up and down without enthusiasm. “Been shopping?”

He stepped aside and Kat squelched gratefully into the archway’s cover. “Tatterlain’s idea.”

“Let me guess: he’s found a nice warm fire to curl up beside?”

“He stayed with the railrunner.”

She’d left him propped against the pyrasti’s firebox, rubbing his hands with far more enthusiasm than she’d have credited and promising that he could handle things from there – which was true enough, as she’d instructed the railrunner’s surviving ifrîti to follow his instructions. His, and those of the Qersali spokeswoman, Erisi. Kat had been tempted to stay, but she knew her own heart well enough to recognise she’d have spent every moment staring uncertainly up at the torch house, wondering if the railrunner would get up enough steam to move before the Veil came rushing to claim the town.

“Any trouble here?”

“Not yet.” Vathi folded his arms and stared morosely down the approach road. “But it’s coming, you mark my words.”

Kat saw nothing mustering in the rain-lashed streets. Everything beyond the first junction was a hazy, murky mystery. Still, if Nyssa was with them, the weather would douse the ardour of even the most determined custodian.

Kat passed into the courtyard, then climbed the treacherous steps into the minaret. After an unsteady ascent, she found Rîma, Jaîna and Yali sheltering on the fire platform, distant enough from the crackling flames for comfort but well within the arc of the soot-scoured dome of the brass roof to cheat the worst of the rain. Legs throbbing with the effort of the climb, she let the warmth of the jasmine-and-juniper smoke drive out the cold. As close to Nyssa’s embrace as she’d come that side of the spirit world.

Yali practically hopped foot to foot with excitement. ||How did it go?||

||Better than it should.|| Kat blinked, her numbed fingers stumbling over the signs. ||Are the prisms in place?||

||They’re on the floor below. Fifteen minutes of fuse.||

Enough time to get clear and away north along the Copper Road. ||Tatterlain thinks they should have pressure in another half-hour.||

“He’s wrong.” Jaîna stared out into the rain, her thin arms folded tight across her chest and her face pinched. “It can take an afternoon for a railrunner to start steaming. We can’t wait.”

Kat signed a translation for Yali and wondered if Jaîna had deliberately kept her back to the girl. A week earlier, such deliberate discourtesy would have been unthinkable. But mired in resentment and private grief, Jaîna was increasingly a stranger.

||It’ll work. The pyrasti…|| Unable to remember the gesture for pyrasti, Kat blurred together those for jolly, flame and ifrît, earning a grin from Yali, whose rising, rippled fingers taught a lesson of the missing sign. ||… was bright and eager enough. But if you want to go now, I’ll handle things here.||

||We’ll stay.|| Save for her fluid, lyrical signing, Rîma too stood motionless, staring out into the rain. But where Jaîna’s stillness was that of an animal caught between fight and flight, Rîma gave the impression of a woman watching and waiting, her composure simply thus because she saw no need for anything else. ||We started this together. We finish it together. The Chainbreaker will struggle to find mooring in all this, so whatever happens, our rendezvous will have to wait.||

“Fine.” Jaîna stared down at her hands. Perhaps recognising her earlier rudeness, she began to sign. ||We give it half an hour. Yali, will you help me check the fuses?||

She retreated down the stairs. Yali shrugged, twisted her lips in thought, and followed. As she passed Kat, she tapped the middle and forefingers of her left hand twice against her lips, then briefly bunched her fingers before spreading them wide. Then she too was nothing more than footsteps on the stairs.

“I didn’t see that,” said Rîma. “What did she say?”

“That she likes my outfit,” Kat replied, though the precise combination of signs suggested a more tongue-in-cheek appraisal. “I preferred it when it was dry.”

Rîma abandoned her vigil at the platform’s edge, the ever-present scent of rose water joining the burning blesswood as she drew closer. “Do you truly think they’ll be ready?”

Kat hesitated, but she’d no experience to work with, only Tatterlain’s appraisal. “I hope so.”

The brim of Rîma’s hat dipped. “We’ll give them all the time we can.”

She turned side-on to Kat, again staring out into the rain, this time towards where the stranded railrunner lay hidden from sight. Neither spoke, the wordless companionship reminiscent of sunless mornings spent staring across Tyzanta’s Undertown from the narrow balcony of Azra’s garret, drained by quarrel or passion until all that remained was to simply be. But where time spent in Azra’s company always fizzed with the potential of misrule, Rîma remained a steadying presence, as comforting as the torch house’s perfumed cinders.

“Why did you support me?” Kat asked at last. When Rîma offered no response, she pressed on, feeling more exposed with every word. “Vathi couldn’t have cared one way or the other. Tatterlain only came around to the idea when you spoke up. Jaîna’s a heartbeat from throttling me even now. A word from you changed everything. Why offer it?”

What little of Rîma’s face showed between hat and scarf offered no clue to her mood. “Why not?”

A spark of annoyance burned away lingering awkwardness. “That’s no answer.”

“But it is.” Her guttural words danced with mirth. “Not the one you expected or wanted, perhaps, but an answer it remains.”

A fat water droplet tore free of the dome’s overhang and spattered at Kat’s feet. “Don’t mock me.”

Rîma twitched a shoulder in a lopsided shrug. “I wasn’t. This world conditions us to explain even the smallest act of charity. We offer kindness because someone deserves it, or because to do otherwise would be unseemly, or unfair. Imagine needing to justify doing the right thing.” Cool grey eyes awash with indecipherable sentiment, she brushed Kat’s cheek with the back of a gloved hand. “Perhaps ‘why not?’ should be the only acceptable answer.”

Surprised by the affectionate gesture, Kat held her breath, uncertain what was being asked or offered – much less how she felt about those possibilities – but Rîma’s tone was more surprising still. It shared the sorrowful sentiment of Vathi’s utterances, but deeper, darker, its contours inked in heartache and shadow; a landscape rendered in artist’s oils compared to a child’s fingertip daubings. It belied the smooth skin around Rîma’s pale grey eyes, her dancer’s poise, her vigour. It spoke of long years behind and more loss than Kat could readily reckon.

“How old are you?” she breathed, wincing inwardly at the words’ potential for offence.

Rîma’s lips twisted beneath her scarf, leaving the suggestion of a rueful smile in the folds of silk. “Old enough to know that it takes more than a sword to change the world. Young enough to need the reminder.”

The rain cleared, the torch house flames guttering as the Mistrali wind’s invisible fingers lost their grip. Zoyen’s landmarks emerged out of the thinning deluge: the Copper Road, the Alabastran temple, the squat, dark shape of the inert railrunner. And away to the south, the bright indigo flames of Telvamir’s torch house against moody skies.

Kat grabbed at one of the ornate brass uprights as vertigo made its shimmering, dizzying return. Through slitted eyes, she saw ant-like figures moving on the torch house road, scarlet cloaks bright in the dimming grey. Her stomach ceased its somersaults and clenched tight.

“All the same, it looks like we’re going to need those swords.” She pinched her eyes shut. It helped with the vertigo, but not the rest. “Go. I’ll catch up.”

A whisper of movement, and Rîma was gone.

Kat took the stairs as fast as she dared. Yali met her at the courtyard door, eyes wide. ||What’s happening?||

||We’ve got company,|| signed Kat. ||Be ready to fight.||

Yali nodded and slipped her dagger from her belt. The point wavered back and forth in her unsteady hand. Passing by the blesswood dray upon which they’d arrived and the torch house’s rusting clatter wagon, Kat headed for the gateway.

Rîma and Jaîna were already there, backs against the main gate and swords in hand. Vathi stood in the open wicket gate, a stolid watchman holding vigil.

“Nine of them,” he murmured. “How do you want to play this?”

||Let them pass inside, then we take them.|| Rîma augmented her signs with broad gestures describing her plan. ||We don’t need spectacle drawing more trouble.||

He slipped a vial from his pocket and palmed the cork. A sharp breath and the wisp was gone. “Can’t hurt to have an edge.”

Kat nodded. Four-to-nine odds wasn’t ideal – especially given Yali’s reticence in matters of violence – but with surprise on their side? Rîma could probably take five by herself.

“More prize brawler?”

Vathi nodded. “Iron Malka. Saw her fight, years back. A real killer.”

Kat crept up the stairs to the rampart and tucked low beneath the parapet. She glanced down at the road. The short column of four custodians and four redcloaks marched on the gateway, a silver-threaded overseer at their head. The snap of their stride belied the treacherous conditions. While the custodians’ silvered masks hid their thoughts completely, the redcloaks wore stony, watchful expressions, their vicious hook-tipped spears braced against the road.

“Approach and state your business!” bellowed Vathi.

The overseer raised a clenched fist. The column halted. She stepped closer to the gate, standing directly between the two koilos alcoves. “Where’s Narval? It’s his watch.”

Hairs prickled on the back of Kat’s neck. She closed her hand about her holstered shrieker. Even at that distance, she felt the echo of at least four others beyond the gate. Poor odds for a shootout.

“Took a funny turn, didn’t he?” Vathi grunted with just the right amount of amused disdain. “You want the truth, I reckon he’d been drinking. The commandant relieved him, and I get a double shift.”

The overseer snorted. “Abîna would know all about drinking on duty. I suppose you’re another of his favourites? You heroes of Azcadîr stick together, don’t you?”

Kat gripped the butt of her shrieker tighter. For all the mildness of the words, a hook gleamed behind the bait. The overseer wasn’t yet certain something was amiss, or there’d have been no bait at all, but a year with Azra had taught her to listen to more than the words.

She peered down through the murder hole grille above the gateway. Vathi was just a dark shape on the cobbles beneath. No way to warn him.

“Couldn’t say about that,” he said, passing up the hook in favour of bluff unconcern. “I just go where I’m sent. And I take my watch seriously, even on a double shift. So I ask again: what’s your business?”

“I want to speak with Captain Goldira. Her report’s late, and there’s too much going on in this town tonight that I don’t—”

A bright, fiery flash of detonation flickered on the southern horizon, a thunderclap rumble hard on its heels. Choking black smoke drowned the indigo flames of Telvamir’s torch house.

No sooner had the flames died than a wall of undulating mist boiled down from the mountainside. It swallowed up smoke and ruins alike and swept into the town like storm-driven waves crashing onto the shores of the Silent Sea. Vallant had estimated Telvamir’s demise as taking most of an hour. The pent-up Veil had other plans.

Gasps rang out across the roadway, redcloaks and custodians alike staring southwards and pointing in alarm. The overseer drew her shrieker and levelled it at Vathi. “Stand aside. Now.”

All pretence of friendliness had flown. Her voice held only death.

Shadows shifted beneath the gateway as Vathi raised a conciliatory hand. “Whatever you want.”

He flung himself at the wicket gate, fingers clawing for the edge. The overseer’s shrieker flared. Vathi cried out and collapsed in the gateway, dying flames flickering across his shoulder.

So much for surprise.

Kat sent a shot blazing into the overseer’s escort. She caught a brief glimpse of a redcloak falling backwards into the roadway, lamellar armour ablaze, then dived low as return fire blasted the parapet’s outer edge to stinging dust.

“Take them!” howled the overseer. “I want one alive for answers!”

Unseen feet thundered on the road. Kat made to rise, only to drop face-first to the grille as a shrieker shot blazed past her shoulder. On the roadway below, the first redcloak flung the wicket gate back on its hinges and charged, spear levelled.

A flash of steel drove the hooked tip aside. Rîma spun along the spear shaft’s length. She slammed her elbow into the unarmoured nape of the redcloak’s neck, driving him through the arch and onto Yali’s dagger, then whirled away behind the wall as another shrieker shot set the air ablaze.

The main gate rumbled into life at the overseer’s unseen command, sinking into the roadway. Still ajar, the wicket gate splintered from its hinges and crashed to the ground.

Kat poked the muzzle of her shrieker over the rampart and set a pair of shots hammering down onto the roadway. Yali’s boots bit into ridged cobbles as she dragged a moaning Vathi, his shoulder still smouldering, past the broken-down clatter wagon and towards the wood silo.

A mournful, brittle scream split the air and echoed on through the spirit world.

Kat scrambled to her feet and stared down at the roadway. Transfixed by the sight of the gilded, charred koilos jerking free of its alcove, she hardly noticed the shrieker shot wail past her head. The creature stepped heavily from the alcove, black robes spilling from its bejewelled yoke-like collar and its trailing flamberge scraping on cobbles. The overseer closed her fist about the soul-glyph etched on her palm and strode towards the second alcove.

“No!”

The overseer dived for the cover of the archway as Kat’s panicked shot scattered fire across the cobbles. Her next exploded in the second koilos’ motionless chest, flinging fragments of gilded bone across the road. As she lined up a third shot – this time at the sleeping koilos’ frozen grin – a bolt of flame tugged at her cloak. Instinct drove her into a low dive towards the rampart stairs. The air screamed with a fresh volley that blasted the remnants of the mud-brick parapet apart. She jarred elbow and shoulder on the rain-slicked stone, skinned a knee scrambling to her feet, then half jumped, half fell from the wall.

Warned by the clash of steel, she spun about to face the gateway. Rîma backed across the courtyard, hat gone and sword blurring to block the wicked downward hack of a koilos’ flamberge. Her knees buckled. Her right foot slid backwards, the toe of her sole seeking leverage as the heavy flamberge forced her own straight blade inexorably down towards her brow.

Kat raised her shrieker.

“Don’t!” The overseer stood amid the bodies beneath the archway, her own shrieker levelled.

A moment of hesitation and Kat was lost. A custodian and the surviving redcloak rushed forward and seized her arms. As they forced her to the ground, Rîma stumbled away, white hair plastered to her head and shoulders. Her sword whirled circles through the rain, raising sparks where the blade struck gilding and scattering splinters of charred bone where it did not. The koilos gave no sign of feeling, nor caring.

“Call it off!” Kat shouted. Rough hands forced her down into muddy water.

“And spoil its fun?” the overseer replied.

Across the courtyard, the wood silo’s heavy door bucked and shuddered beneath custodians’ boots. Too easy to picture Yali sitting with her back wedged against the door, eyes pinched tight and trembling, praying for help that wasn’t coming.

Where was Jaîna?

Kat shifted her weight and braced a palm against the cobbles. The thump of a boot on her shoulders forced her down, gasping and spluttering.

Her heart a dull, heavy mass, she watched, helpless, as the koilos unleashed a flurry of arcing blows. Somehow Rîma met each with her own blurring sword, but the cost of her efforts screamed in swaying shoulders and stumbling feet. A belated sidestep left severed strands of white hair dancing in the rain.

Kat stepped as deep into the spirit world as she dared and scrambled for purchase on the ifrîti in the custodians’ shriekers. To disperse them. Numb them. Anything. Her tattoo, yet flush with the Deadwinds’ bounty, eagerly sent forth tongues of invisible soulfire. They brushed the corner of what might have been the koilos’ warding glyph, but a task delicate at the best of times became impossible in the face of her rising panic.

A lazy swipe of the koilos’ fist slammed Rîma into the minaret wall. She dropped to hands and knees. Her sword fell from gloved hands.

Heart racing, Kat cast about with soulfire for something, anything she could co-opt. She felt nothing through the smothering black loathing emanating from the koilos.

A lump formed in her throat. There had to be something.

The koilos stepped over Rîma’s sword. Palms against the minaret for support, she reached her feet and stared up into its gilded death’s head, eyes bright.

“I forgive you.” She spoke as if to an equal, not a wizened and fire-blackened puppet of gilded bone.

“No!” Kat screamed.

The great ripple-bladed flamberge hacked down and Rîma collapsed like a broken doll.

Thirty-Five

Kat drowned in black, empty despair that sought nothing but nothingness itself. The same crushing, smothering loss had claimed her in the flight through Xanathros Alabastra. Then, it had come to naught for want of fuel. Now, it drank deep of the Deadwinds’ stolen soulfire and woke to fury. The pressure about her left arm vanished as indigo fire burned through the spirit world’s barriers. A custodian screamed.

She fell into darkness as the flames rose, plunging deeper and deeper into the spirit world, the living realm intruding only as flashes of searing light and muffled screams – brief pressures beneath her senses that faded as soon as acknowledged. And yet as she fought for breath that wouldn’t come, she felt a piece of herself watching from far away. Cold, flint-dark and uncaring, it wore her face, her father’s, Azra’s, then the impassive stare of Nyssa Benevolas, hair writhing like indigo flame.

The darkness shook. The spirit world boiled away in lavender-scented smoke, yielding to ice-cold rain and brooding clouds. Kat sat bolt upright and gulped down a burning, racking breath.

Yali was kneeling at her side, hair plastered to her scalp and her hands stuttering a series of breathy, relieved signs. ||Thank Nyssa. I thought you were dead.||

Kat blinked and stared around a corpse-strewn courtyard. Every redcloak and custodian in sight lay dead, their raiment ragged and torn, their blood rain-diluted among the cobbles. She stumbled to her feet and turned around, almost jumping out of her skin in the process. The koilos stood behind her, silent and unmoving.

||It’s all right,|| signed Yali, her eyes flickering to the creature. ||It just… stopped, honest and true.||

The bloody flamberge hung lazily from the koilos’ right hand, the tip of the blade resting on the ground. Its left arm ended in a blackened stump halfway above the elbow, and its ribcage gaped behind a fire-charred hole in its robes.

Kat drew back her sleeve, the sights and sounds of the spirit world taking on new significance. Her aetherios tattoo was cold and dark, its fires barely a flicker. Two separate glyphs, their thready grey lines a mesh of intricate, swirling spirals, overlaid her copper skin. She traced each in turn with a fingertip. One to ward, the other to control.

She’d done this?

Impossible.

She stared up into the koilos’ sightless eyes, emotions so tangled as to defy unravelling.

||We have to go,|| said Yali, her eyes darting to the gate. ||One of the custodians ran. More will come.||

Kat nodded absently. “Where…” Overcome by a wave of exhaustion, she swallowed. ||Where’s Jaîna?||

||I haven’t seen her since the fight started. Vathi’s in the wood silo. He’s in a bad way.||

||And Rîma?||

Urging leaden legs to motion, Kat staggered across the courtyard to where Rîma had fallen.

She lay, eyes closed, in a crumpled heap against the minaret’s base, right arm half hacked away, left leg twisted beneath her and a splintered rib jutting through her torn coat. Motionless save for the stuttering rise and fall of her chest. How she still clung to life, Kat couldn’t begin to imagine, though that thin purchase was surely eking out its end. So weary was Kat from whatever had happened with the koilos – so heartsick at Rîma’s fate – that it took her several long moments to realise what was wrong with the scene.

Or rather, what was missing.

There was no blood.

Uncertainty buzzing in her gut, she knelt and peered at Rîma’s wounds. Leathery grey-bronze skin, far older and more weathered than that of her face, edged ragged cuts in shrunken, desiccated flesh the colour of aged teak. Where blood should have flowed there was only rain-eddied greyish dust – where there was anything at all. In a daze, Kat traced torn linens hanging limp from Rîma’s broken arm. Linens normally concealed by the battered traveller’s coat. She’d seen similar before. Not least on the koilos looming motionless above the slaughter.

A gloved hand closed like a vice around Kat’s wrist.

“It’s not… polite to stare,” murmured Rîma, her eyes still closed and her voice tight with pain.

“R-Rîma?” Kat stuttered, shock sabotaging her attempts at coherence. “What…?”

“Get me to… Vallant. He knows. He… knows…”

Rîma’s hand went slack. With a soft, breathy sigh, she lapsed into silence.

||She’s still alive?|| asked Yali, wide-eyed and pale. ||What is she?||

Kat breathed deep, a dry, musty scent rising beneath the rose water Rîma habitually wore. I’ve travelled a lot over the years, Rîma had said. I’m all smoothed away. That wasn’t the half of it.

But right now, it didn’t matter.

||Look!|| Yali pointed over the western wall to a patch of paler, lighter cloud rising into the brooding skies. No. Not cloud. Steam. The railrunner.

At least something was going to plan.

||Any sign of Jaîna?|| asked Kat, galvanised by the sight.

Yali shook her head. ||She probably ran for it when the fight started. I almost did.||

But she hadn’t, even terrified. She wasn’t quite the same girl Kat had met on the Mornwake. Kat glanced at the dray, its draught horse waiting nonchalantly in the rain as it had throughout the fight. It, at least, had apparently seen worse. ||If Vathi can move, get him aboard that.||

Yali nodded and started towards the wood silo.

“This is going to hurt,” Kat warned Rîma.

Receiving no reply, she folded Rîma’s ravaged arm across her chest as delicately as she could, gathered her up beneath knees and shoulders and carried her towards the dray. The other woman was lighter than she appeared, but still Kat winced with empathic pain at every faltering step. Reaching the dray, she laid Rîma down in the hollow of blesswood timber that had recently concealed the blasting prisms. Then she went back to reclaim Rîma’s sword. As she laid it beside her, gloved fingers twitched closed about the grips.

Yali arrived and helped Vathi – his left shoulder and upper arm a mess of charred cloth and lurid burned skin – up onto the box seat.

“Told you this would all end in tears,” he murmured, and sank against the backrest, injured arm clutched tight.

Kat shoved Yali up beside him and tossed her the reins. ||Get to the railrunner. Don’t wait for anything.||

||What about you?||

She glanced up at the minaret, its summit wreathed in indigo flame and wind-blown cinders. ||I’m going to finish what we started.||

She froze, struck by sudden realisation. Of course Jaîna hadn’t run. Not a bit of it. How long since the fight had begun? Five minutes? Ten? Kat didn’t know, and suddenly minutes counted as never before.

Gritting her teeth, she slapped the draught horse’s haunch. “Go!”

It started towards the open gate, picking up speed as a tight-lipped Yali gave a reluctant flick of the reins. As they passed beneath the archway, Kat ran for the minaret door.

She hit the stairs blind, eyes pinched shut to hold her vertigo at bay. Navigating by an elbow braced against the wall, she took the steps three at a time, stubbing toes every other stride. She reached the fourth floor breathless, lungs burning and legs rubbery, but the door to the redcloaks’ makeshift quarters had as much chance of stopping her as she had a runaway steed. It crashed back beneath her shoulder and she half ran, half fell into the room.

“Kat?” Jaîna paused in the act of bearing down on her, scimitar drawn. “You’re alive?”

“We all are,” gasped Kat. “No thanks to you.”

Jaîna’s eyes hardened. “The mission came first.”

Behind her, a trail of blackened fuse reached across the far wall, the smoulder of its running flame chasing along the floorboards. Nine tenths of the pitch-soaked jute was already ash. What remained curled across the floor to the stack of prisms set against the opposite wall beside the redcloak captain’s desk. Even with her tattoo drained to dregs, Kat felt the waves of yearning coming off the ifrîti. The desire for death. The room stank of sulphur and sour wine.

She raised her hands to show that they were empty. “Yali needs time to get the others to the railrunner.”

“It’s too late.”

“It’s not. We can always relight the fuse. We just need to give it more time.”

“There is no more time!”

“Do you really want to die for this?”

A cold, wild light settled in Jaîna’s green eyes. “Amarid would have done it.”

Hearing those words, Kat knew there could be no reasoning with her. Damn Vallant for letting Jaîna be part of this while still broken by grief. She sidestepped towards the prisms. Jaîna mirrored the movement. The scimitar jerked up in warning.

“Leave, Kat. Let me do what has to be done.”

The dull orange of the lit fuse crackled around the final curve.

“You saw what happened when Telvamir’s torch house fell. Amarid died to help folk like those on the railrunner. You’re going to kill them. Will you tell him that when your souls meet in the Stars Below?”

Jaîna’s brow flickered with uncertainty. Not much, barely a crease of skin, but Kat had been waiting for it. She flung herself across the room, hands closing around Jaîna’s and twisting the scimitar aside. Her shoulder took the other woman in the chest and slammed her against the low desk. Keening with rage, Jaîna ripped free a hand and pummelled Kat’s head.

With both her hands vying for control of the scimitar, Kat seized the least worst of the available options. Gritting her teeth, she rammed her head forward. The world rushed red with a hollow thud. Jaîna dropped limply to the floor, lifeless fingers slipping from the sword’s grips.

Spots dancing behind her eyes, Kat brought the scimitar down to sever the fuse and swept the glowing end to the room’s far side. Then, breathing hard, her throbbing head giddy with relief, she collapsed against the window, the stinging rain sweeter than the softest fragrance.

She lost track of how long she stood slumped against the narrow sill, staring out across the rain-lashed town, looking for the railrunner’s thin column of steam.

Had it already departed? That would make the headbutt as unnecessary as it had been painful. Or perhaps the custodians at the station had finally tumbled to the deception and ended the plan at sword point. Or maybe the engine’s neglected boiler had simply given up under the pressure, the precious steam hissing away to nothing.

Then the rain shifted and she glimpsed the railrunner, its funnel belching as it rumbled north. She heard the shrill call of its whistle through the storm – and impossibly, what she took for Tatterlain’s booming laughter – then the curtain of rain descended anew and it was lost to sight.

“Are they gone?”

She turned from the window to find Jaîna hunched on the floor, staring sightlessly at nothing at all as she smoothed her hands across her shaved pate. “They’re gone,” she replied, though she’d no way of knowing whether Yali had reached the railrunner. Some things you just had to take on faith, and hope Nyssa was generous.

“You should go too. Let me finish this.”

The madness had gone from Jaîna’s voice and posture. Now she just looked as weary as Kat felt. No longer a zealot with a mission, she was the spent, sorrowful woman who’d lost a brother without even a body to mourn. A woman who’d sought to be Kat’s friend from the first and now needed a friend of her own.

Not long before, Kat wouldn’t have known what to do about that. Now the choice before her was no choice at all: it was simply a matter of considering what Azra would have done.

Minus the mockery, of course.

Dredging up the last of her strength, she pushed away from the window and held out her hand. “We’ll do it together. I’m not Vallant; I don’t leave people behind.”

Jaîna regarded the hand as if it were a serpent waiting to strike. Then, with a small, rueful smile, she took it.

Kat sighed, a weight vanishing from her shoulders. “How much time left on the fuse?”

“Maybe a minute… I think.”

She re-examined their options and found them as thin at second glance as at first. But perhaps there was a possibility. “Then I hope you can run.”

It took the last scraps of Kat’s hoarded soulfire to twist her faded tattoo into a glyph the clatter wagon’s helmic would accept. Even then, with her thoughts still red and pounding from the headbutt, she wasn’t certain how convincing the design actually was. She had the distinct impression that the ifrît was so bored of being shackled to the rusted supply wagon that it cut her all the slack the rules of spirit-binding allowed in order to slide the lock bolts clear, freeing both guidance and running wheels.

She had scarcely familiarised herself with the array of levers set beneath the heavy guidance wheel when Jaîna ran full tilt out of the minaret and practically flung herself at the cab’s open door.

“It’s burning! Go!”

Kat thrust the accelerator lever forward. With a grinding moan of ill-maintained gears, the clatter wagon jerked to life, picking up speed as it crossed the courtyard. It reached walking pace as they passed the still-motionless koilos and accelerated to a gentle run as it bore down on the gateway. From there, with the sloping road in its favour, it hurtled on.

The cab jolted as a custodian’s body thumped under the nearside wheel. The guidance wheel bucking in her hands, Kat hauled hard to the left, fighting to keep the wagon on course. The front left corner of the cab crashed into the gateway’s arch with a deafening bang.

Jaîna yelped and shuffled along the wooden bench seat as the door beside her tore away in a shower of splintered wood and broken glass. Otherwise unscathed, the clatter wagon scraped along the wall, skidded over the torch house’s threshold and hurtled down the approach road.

“I thought you knew how to drive this thing!” shouted Jaîna.

“Feel free to get out and walk.”

Zoyen’s squat, dour buildings rushed past on both sides. Gritting her teeth, Kat tightened her grip on the guidance wheel. The lumani at last sparked to life along the roadway, announcing a curfew made pointless by the storm, but did little more than transform the rainswept grey blur to a rainswept yellowish-brown blur.

Kat barely saw the approaching column of redcloaks until they scattered out of her path. One flung himself aside too slowly and vanished behind with a thud and a thin cry scarcely audible above the wagon’s juddering cacophony.

“Think they were going up to the torch house?” asked Jaîna.

“They’re too late.”

Even as she spoke, Kat doubted. How long since Jaîna had set the fuse? Surely the prisms should have gone up by now?

A shrieker shot blazed from an alleyway, blasting a section of the wagon’s cargo bed to scrap. Kat yanked on the wheel, sending the wagon fishtailing into a pair of luckless souk stalls. With a tortured scream, the clatter wagon slewed to a standstill on the Copper Road, the tower of the tollhouse gate looming through the rain.

With a deafening roar, a vast section of the minaret’s northern face blew outwards, falling as rubble across the neighbouring streets. Orange flames rose to contest indigo above. For one breath, two, the fire platform held level as stones crumbled away. Then slowly, majestically, the upper third of the minaret slid away and crashed groundwards.

And on the mountainside above, the opaque expanse of the Veil rushed down through the black pines. Remorseless. Unstoppable. Hungry.

Kat slammed the accelerator forward. The clatter wagon sprang to unsteady life, the going easier on the Copper Road’s smooth flagstones than the town’s uneven cobbles.

It would never have worked at Zoyen’s south tollhouse, where a tall, imposing gate of steel and timber blocked the roadway, but at the north – where the sagging gate hadn’t moved in a generation, and simple timber barricades and levelled shriekers were all that kept traffic under control – they had a chance.

The whole of their attention given over to the baleful descent of the Veil, the custodians at the tollhouse didn’t react to the clatter wagon until it was almost to the archway. A shrieker shot buckled the cab window frame and sent sparks rushing across the dashboard. Then the flimsy wooden barricade was matchwood beneath the wagon’s wheels and the tollhouse a dark shape behind, framed by the writhing mist devouring the low mud-brick streets.

“Blessed Nyssa, I don’t believe it!” Jaîna sank back against the cab’s angular bench seat, her triumphant cheer deafening in the confined space. Kat couldn’t help but smile.

At least, until she looked again at the road ahead.

North of Zoyen, the Copper Road rounded the shoulder of the mountain and descended towards Azarin. Once past that ridge line, they were home free, the Veil’s mists channelled safely into the low-lying Elchîna Ravine – if they travelled even that far. But the ridge was two miles distant, and the mountainside in between already drowning in mist.

The cheer died on Jaîna’s lips. “Can we make it?”

Kat winced. “It’s not like we can go back.”

The sweeping westward curve of the road placed Zoyen level with the cab’s missing door. Already the walls were awash in mist, the town falling dark as the lumani hissed away to nothing.

There were no screams. It might have been better if there had been. But there was only silence, as if Zoyen and everyone in it had already passed into history. Kat was glad when the road veered north through the pines, hiding the mist-shrouded walls from sight.

The ridge line was still a mile distant when the first mist trickled down through the trees on the eastern side of the road.

Jaîna went rigid against the bench, her eyes wide. “Kat…”

“You think I don’t see it?”

Kat hauled the clatter wagon over to the western edge of the Copper Road, away from mist already waist deep where the flagstones met the trees. They picked up speed as the incline steepened. She could smell the Veil now, the haunt of old, sorrowful memories and spent yesterdays. Seductive. Reassuring. Numbing.

She twisted the guidance wheel again. The wagon’s left-side wheels lurched up onto the coping stones at the road’s extent. Beyond lay only the sheer drop onto the gorse-stubbled slopes of the lower mountainside.

The first skeins of mist plucked at the cab.

Kat clung to the wheel and tried to blot it from her mind. What had become familiar and harmless in Athenoch’s safe haven now felt anything but.

A quarter of a mile to the ridge line.

The clatter wagon’s wheels skipped over the coping stones’ outer edge as the road curved lazily eastward to meet it. For a heartbeat, its left-hand running wheels touched nothing but air. Frantic, Kat nudged the guidance wheel further clockwise. With a jolt, the clatter wagon rejoined the road.

“Faster, you worthless glint!” she shouted at the helmic’s dashboard prism. “Come on!”

Ahead, the ruddy flagstones of the Copper Road vanished beneath a pall of writhing mist.

“Kat…” Jaîna pinched her eyes shut. “I’m sorry for everything.”

A wave of white swept out of the trees. The helmic faded with a thin hiss, its prism turning cracked and dark as the mists devoured it. With its death, the clatter wagon’s lock bolts snapped shut. The guidance wheel froze in place. With a shriek of metal on metal, the running wheels followed suit just as the road veered sharply east. Momentum did the rest.

The Veil swallowed the clatter wagon in the same instant it left the road. Kat never even felt the impact that swept her into the black.

Thirty-Six

“Kat?” The voice came from far away, distorted by distance. “Kat!”

Gummed thoughts coalesced. Darkness receded as insistent hands shook an already formless dream to fragments.

“Wake up!” pleaded the voice. “Please.”

Kat creaked her eyes open and immediately wished she hadn’t. No horizon, because there was no sky. Precious little else, save the thorny scrabble of hillside on which she lay, face-down. There was only a seething sea of greenish white, pulsing gently as if lit from within. The soft, mournful scent of spent yesterdays haunted every breath.

The Veil. She was behind the Veil.

Trembling, she braced a hand in the dirt. Bruised flesh screaming for attention, she hoisted herself painfully onto one elbow and spat away a mouthful of bitter sandy soil. Shaking fingers brushed the warm, sticky mass on her brow. Just blood-matted hair and pulpy, bruised flesh, thank Nyssa. And yet somehow all of it felt distant. Something happening to someone else.

Jaîna’s hand found hers and hoisted her the rest of the way to her feet. “You’re alive,” she breathed, the sound just as distorted face to face as it had through dream, dampened by the mist. She swallowed, her voice fading. “I thought you were…”

Kat made silent inventory of her aches and pains. Crusted blood tugged at her skin when she flexed her right arm. Her left ankle howled at her first attempt to put weight on it, then settled to an uneasy low-grade moan of detente on the second. Her ribs creaked with every breath.

She spotted a dark, ridged shape through the drifting mist, its wooden panels splintered and its metal frame twisted. The clatter wagon. Had she jumped out or been thrown clear? Her memory was an empty, sucking void where the information should have been. Either way, she’d been lucky. Save for being trapped behind the Veil, of course. But as her actions had delivered that same fate to thousands more, she found she couldn’t muster more than a sliver of resentment.

“I don’t think being dead hurts this much.” Even her voice didn’t sound right. As though pieces of it – pieces of her – were missing. The colours were wrong too, but in a way that defied ready description. It was all less solid somehow, as if the mists leached away vibrancy from skin and cloth. “How long was I out?”

Jaîna wiped her forehead with the back of her hand. The left sleeve of her custodian’s tunic was torn to ribbons, the arm beneath dark with blood. “I… I don’t know. I jumped clear of the wagon, but after that…” She blinked, lips working silently. “We’re going to die, aren’t we?”

“Do you want to?”

“No!” She furrowed her brow, eyes distant, confused. “I did want to, didn’t I? I can feel that. But I can’t remember why.”

Kat regarded her carefully, an icy chill creeping into the pit of her stomach. A head wound might have explained Jaîna’s confusion, but none was in evidence. In fact, to all appearances, she’d survived the crash in better condition than Kat herself.

We just fade away, body and soul, Vallant had said of those who became lost in the Veil. At the time, Kat had taken it as bleak poetry, but if Jaîna had forgotten Amarid – if that piece of her had already flown – what else had she lost?

What had Kat herself lost, for that matter?

Love binds us when all else falters. At that moment, she needed binding more than ever. Throat tight, she hurriedly recounted a roster of names and faces –if not ones she loved, then at least those that had become the pillars of her life. Yali, Azra, Jaîna, Rîma, Terrion, Amarid, Skerrik, Tatterlain. Faster and faster, as if speed of recollection could compensate for even the possibility of absence, panic accelerating alongside. All seemed present and correct, which might have been reassuring but for the knowledge that a failing memory was its own best camouflage.

She swallowed hard and clenched her fists. Dwelling on that contradiction offered only paralysis and terror. If she gave in to either, it was over. Better to cling to certainties and offer some to Jaîna, even the painful ones.

She took a deep breath. The ageless longing of the Veil crept deeper into her lungs. “Amarid. It was because of Amarid.”

“Amarid?” Jaîna replied, voice and expression blank.

“Your brother,” Kat said softly, but in her aching heart already knew the words were wasted.

Jaîna’s lips formed words that never came. She screwed her eyes tight. “I don’t… What are we going to do?”

“We keep moving,” said Kat, speaking loudly to drown out thoughts she dared not heed. She pointed uphill. “We came down that slope, right? So we head in the opposite direction and we don’t stop. The mists can’t last for ever.”

Jaîna stared at her, lips twisted in scepticism.

Kat tried again. More than anything, she needed Jaîna to believe. That way, she might even believe herself. “Vallant survived the mists,” she said, her voice firmer. “So can we.”

But Vallant had survived only because Zephyr had happened upon him. They could hardly hope for the same good fortune. But a measure of determination returned to Jaîna’s expression and a little colour to her washed-out face. “Then what are we waiting for?”

They struck out downhill, the unhappy wreckage of the clatter wagon soon left behind. Little by little, the incline – the only landmark to speak of in the unnatural billowing clouds – shallowed and then flattened out altogether, the crunch of sand underfoot whispering away to soft, feathering footfalls.

Still Kat limped on, threading pine trees from whose black needles the mist hung like drifting spiderweb, splashing through shallow streams whose waters made no sound. She held true her course as best she could, reckoning the distance travelled against that which lay ahead. Though there was no way to know how far the Veil had spread after the torch houses had fallen, it stood to reason that there had to be an outer edge to the mists, and in turn that every step brought them closer to safety.

As her count reached two thousand – somewhere in the region of a mile by her reckoning – the trees fell behind. She glanced back at Jaîna. The other woman was thirty paces away, barely visible through the Veil and walking with a dazed and listless stride.

Heart sinking, Kat retraced her steps and took Jaîna by her uninjured right arm. “Hold it together. We have to keep going.”

Jaîna snatched her arm free, her features tightened in annoyance. “I know that…” Her tongue stumbled, her frown deepening as she sought a word out of reach.

“Kat,” Kat murmured. “My name’s Kat.”

“I know that too,” snapped Jaîna. “I know that,” she repeated softly.

They set off again, this time side by side, Kat’s eyes as often on her deteriorating companion as on their bleak surroundings.

“Yali, Azra, Jaîna, Rîma, Terrion, Amarid.” She muttered the roster of names under her breath and was glad to discover them all still present and correct. Whatever hold the mists had on Jaîna, she herself was resisting.

After another five hundred strides or thereabouts – despite her best efforts, Kat found it increasingly difficult to keep the tally – a deep, deafening cry reverberated through the mists. Half-screech, half-groan, it set every last one of Kat’s nerves screaming.

She froze, casting about for a sign of movement. “What was that?”

Jaîna pointed. “There!”

In the skies off to their left, a vast winged shadow muddied the mists. At least Kat assumed it to be vast, for the last of the trees had vanished into the Veil, leaving nothing for ready comparison. The shadow bled through the mists towards them, emerald light glinting where its eyes should have been, the edges of its bird-like form twisting and eddying like breeze-rippled smoke.

Kat cast around for somewhere to hide. Finding nothing more than the mists themselves, she dropped to a crouch, half expecting to have to drag Jaîna with her. But however vague and dissociated the other woman had become, some sense of self-preservation remained. She squatted beside Kat, lips a thin, terrified slash.

The shadow swooped in a lazy, tightening circle. Its formless beak parted, sending a second shrieking caw screaming through the mists. Then, wings back, it dived into the roiling greenish white like a kingfisher sighting prey. Drawing level with Kat and somehow below, it vanished from sight.

Kat stared unblinking at where she’d seen it last, desperate for it not to reappear but determined that it wouldn’t catch her unawares if it did. “Blessed Nyssa. It’s hunting.”

Jaîna grimaced. “Hunting us?”

“I hope not.”

Still crouching, they scoured the mists for any sign of the creature, the seconds and minutes creeping by unremarked in a world where now only heartbeats and Jaîna’s low, shallow breaths measured time. As the moments eked past, Kat grew increasing anxious. Whatever the shadow had been, it was by no means the only danger in the Veil. There was another, more insidious peril.

“Yali, Azra, Jaîna, Rîma, Terrion.”

Was a name missing from the list? She muttered it again, just to be certain.

“Yali, Azra, Jaîna, Rîma.”

Yes, a name was missing, Kat was certain of that. But only one.

She glanced at Jaîna, and received a suspicious stare in return. “We can’t stay here.”

Kat nodded, her eyes still on where she’d last seen the shadow. “No, we can’t.”

They started out again, one foot in front of the other through mists that no longer held so much as a rocky spur or dried-up stream bed to break the monotony.

The more Kat travelled, the less of her seemed to be doing the walking. Though she told herself that it was simply exhaustion from the chaos at Zoyen – her domination of the koilos not least – the words rang hollow.

But what she found most concerning of all was how unconcerning it all was. With every breath, every step, a numbing serenity crept ever outwards through her limbs. Not cold, for in the mists there was neither heat nor light as she knew them. For months she’d lived on the razor’s edge of fight-or-flight, but in the mists of the Veil she found only peace. Or almost so. Even as her breathing slowed and her footsteps stumbled, a small piece of the woman she’d been beyond the Veil raged behind a wall of smothering white, unremarked by the greater self.

She ran the roster of names again. “Yali, Azra, Jaîna.”

All there.

Good. There was still hope.

She turned back to tell Jaîna and saw nothing but mist.

“Jaîna?” Her hiss barely carried. Some half-buried foreboding warned her not to make too much noise, but unable to remember why, she raised her voice. “Jaîna!”

Still nothing.

In desperation, she spun about, and in the process lost what little bearing she had. All was featureless greenish white, and it didn’t matter… even if a small, distant part of her insisted that it did.

She turned another full circle. A third. At the close of the fourth, she steadied herself against growing dizziness and wondered what had possessed her to even begin such behaviour.

Then the mist shifted. She glimpsed a black custodian’s tunic with a shredded sleeve, a flash of bloodied dark brown skin in the mist’s cloying white. A body prone among the drifting skeins.

“Jaîna!”

She skidded to her knees on ground now completely lacking in texture and all save the memory of resistance. Jaîna herself was little more than mist below the waist, her physical being bleeding away, dark whorls through greenish white. Her right hand was solid enough, though. Kat clasped it tight.

“Jaîna?” she gabbled. “You have to listen to me. Focus on my voice.”

Jaîna’s eyelids flickered open. She gazed skyward with empty eyes, a faint, complacent smile on her lips. “I know you, don’t I?”

“We’re almost there,” stammered Kat, though she’d no way of knowing if it was true. Truth counted for little in that moment.

“It’s all right. I’m not afraid.” Jaîna sighed. Her eyes fell closed. “Thank you for trying.”

Kat squeezed her hand tight, as if her grip alone could hold back the Veil’s hunger. “No, you…”

Jaîna’s hand bled away through hers as wisps of fading colour, insubstantial as her final breath. Before that breath dispersed, the rest of her had followed.

“No…” Kat clasped her hands together and choked back a sob.

She stared at the soft vapour streaming from her interwoven fingers, the bronze of her skin paling first to grey and then to white on the unseen currents of the Veil.

It was taking her too.

She had to get out.

She stumbled to her feet, frantically trying to determine her previous direction of travel. Even then, a piece of her yearned to let go, to yield to the mist. The remainder dug deep for the name that had been her talisman since she’d woken behind the Veil.

“Yali.”

Determination crystallising around the word, she set out at a lurching, uneven jog. Direction no longer concerned her; it only mattered that she fought.

On she forged, until her thighs burned and her twisted ankle screamed. When she could run no more, she walked. When her shuddering legs could no longer support her, she crawled on hands and knees.

She knew she left pieces of herself behind, though she could no longer begin to know what they were. She no longer cared. She clung to Yali’s name. The one piece that the Veil would not take.

“Yali!”

She collapsed, last strength spent. Insidious mist flooded her lungs, soothing, numbing, comforting. She watched her outstretched fingers turn to smoke and felt nothing. They no longer belonged to her. Nothing belonged to her any longer. She was the mist, and the mist was her.

A shadow darkened the vapour and resolved to solidity. Not some supernatural spirit-bird, but a rangy young woman with tawny-brown skin, her green eyes welling with concern and a haversack thumping against her shoulder.

||Hold on. Don’t go!||

“Yali?” What was left of Kat blinked, certain she was delirious. “I called to you…”

Yali – or at least the delusion of Yali – stared at her with brimming eyes. ||I don’t understand.||

“I called to you,” gasped Kat. “And you found me.”

||Not me,|| Yali replied in stumbling signs. She jerked a thumb back over her shoulder. ||I’m just a passenger.||

With her last strength, Kat craned her neck and stared past Yali’s shoulder. To a pale, whitish-blue figure in a diaphanous dress, her unbound starlit black hair an inky stain across the Veil.

Thirty-Seven

Kat awoke, knees curled tight to her chest, beside a low, crackling fire – yellow-orange rather than blesswood indigo – more weary than she’d been her entire life. For a long moment she lay motionless, thoughts sluggish as she took stock of her parts and pieces. Incredibly, she was whole, the extremities lost to the Veil restored by means she couldn’t conjure. She might have thought it a dream but for the greenish white of the Veil billowing around her. But now it felt different. Distant. Just as it had at Athenoch, and aboard the Chainbreaker.

“Yali, Azra, Jaîna, Rîma, Terrion, Amarid, Skerrik, Tatterlain,” she murmured. The list hadn’t been complete before, had it? She wasn’t sure how she knew, only that she did.

“Excuse me?”

Zephyr drifted a pace or two beyond the small fire – and an even foot above it – glossy white eyes gleaming with what looked suspiciously like amusement. More than ever, she belonged in that other-worldly place, her body translucent to the point of formlessness and her extremities little more than wisping essence. Kat’s tired eyes found little distinction between the Issnaîm woman, her diaphanous dress and the clinging mists. Yali lay curled up further clockwise, dead to the world and snoring softly.

Kat propped herself into a seated position. “It’s nothing. Something I tried to focus on. It didn’t work.”

A ghost of a smile touched Zephyr’s lips. “It kept you together. Been here three days, you have.”

“Three days?” Kat racked her memory and found only fog-strewn hours.

“Be not afeared. Time and thought are fluid in the mist.”

“How far behind the Veil are we?” asked Kat.

“As things are reckoned outside? Two miles north of Zoyen. Perhaps a mile beyond the new boundary.”

Kat shook her head, awash in bitterness. In other words, more or less where the clatter wagon had left the road. “I walked for three days and got nowhere?”

“Chances are you were walking in circles. Lost all hope of finding you, had I.” Zephyr nodded at the sleeping Yali, still snoring fit to wake the dead. “Searching a very long time, we were, but she wouldn’t rest.”

A winged, green-eyed shadow clawed its way to the surface of Kat’s thoughts. She cast about, but saw nothing but mist. “Are you sure it’s safe? I saw something. A darkness in the mist. Hunting.”

Zephyr shimmered softly, her brow furrowing. “We’ll have to take the chance. Yali is exhausted, she is. And you need to rest too. How do you feel?”

Joints creaking, Kat propped one knee upright and tucked the other in under herself. If even that brief exertion was anything to go by, Zephyr was right about taking things slow. Something tapped against her chest. Her questing hand found a brooch showing a silver serpent entwined around one of brooding reddish gold, hung about her neck by a length of black ribbon. “Like someone worked me over with carpenters’ mallets.” And that was before she tallied injuries taken in the clatter wagon’s last moments. “I’ll live. Unless you know different.”

Zephyr drifted closer across Yali’s sleeping form. “Depends, it does. Are you afflicted with an overwhelming urge to eat people?”

“No more than usual,” replied Kat, unsure whether or not to take her seriously. “Actually, I’m not hungry at all. After three days I should be starving.”

“Takes different from different, the Veil does. Your hunger and memory, our…” Zephyr waved a hand, uncharacteristically flustered, “akîa.”

Kat frowned. “I don’t know that word.”

“Comes from here, it does.” Zephyr touched a vaporous hand to her chest and then to her brow. “And here. Stops you fighting when you should flee, and keeps you rooted when fighting is survival. Conscience, courage, dignity and pride, it is. Makes us more than animals, and less than gods.”

Even in weariness, Kat caught the hint of something tantalising. “I thought the Issnaîm were safe in the Veil?”

Zephyr gave a musical snort. “A swimmer can still drown in a river, can’t she? Too long in the Veil erodes us. Peels away all illusions of akîa and leaves us a nasty little bag of appetites. Freedom and shacklement all at once.” Her breathing quickened, white eyes shining as the words spilled out. “Deeper in, you’ll hear the lost ones weeping their red ecstasy. Think only of satiation they do, and care not how they find it.”

Kat shuddered, her own hunger further in abeyance as she thought about Jaîna. Jaîna and the thousands their actions had doomed to nothingness. “How do you stop it taking you?”

Yali let out a great rippling snore and turned over, pulling her cloak tighter about her thin shoulders.

“Afeared I’ll devour you?” Zephyr extended a wispy finger, pointing at the brooch hanging around Kat’s neck. The same brooch she had previously worn as a choker. “The metal pushes back the Veil. Unmakes its embrace if brought close. Gives a strong soul chance to pull itself back together.”

Just touching the brooch with bare skin made Kat feel instantly more solid, more there. Its pitted, age-worn metals were a perfect match for the baffling, dizzying sphere in Athenoch’s black tower.

“The silver I know,” she said, tracing the serpents’ swirls. “But the red gold? What is that?”

“Astoricum. Your scholars…” the emphasis was slight but derogatory, “call it oreikhalkos. Rare beyond words, it is, and often mistaken for simple alloy.”

Kat racked her brains, certain she’d seen something similar before fate had swept her into Vallant’s orbit. There. Ardin Javar’s communion ring. The token that had set everything in motion. Nyssa had a peculiar sense of humour.

“This how you keep the Chainbreaker safe in the mists?”

Zephyr smiled. “Disappointed, you are? Hoping it was all veilkin magic?”

As ever, the word veilkin offered a trap. “Isn’t it? Your people made this, didn’t they? And the tower at Athenoch?”

“The brooch is an heirloom. Other families have similar, passed down through the generations. The tower, I think, is older still. Neither are of the Issnaîm. We weave starlight and shadow. Metal and stone don’t interest us.”

Kat held up the brooch. “But you’re happy to use them?”

Zephyr’s shoulders rippled like wind-blown cloud. “Our villages are scattered far across the sheltered spaces of the Veil, and the mists ever-changing. We need not understand something to make it useful.”

Kat turned the brooch over in her hands. Such a tiny thing, and yet it had the power to overturn a fundamental truth about Khalad. The Veil could be fought without blesswood and prayers and torch houses. “If the Issnaîm didn’t make them, who did?”

“Perhaps you simply forgot, nasaîm. Your kind forgets so much.”

Kat thought back to her father working in Zariqaz’s Great Library, surrounded by withered tomes, complaining about the information they didn’t contain just as much as he celebrated that which they did.

“May I have it back?” Zephyr ran her pale bluish tongue across teeth that struck Kat as being ever so slightly more pointed than she remembered. “You’re as together as you’ll likely get, and starting to feel a little restless am I.”

Tone added urgency. Not fear, not exactly, but anticipation. Maybe even excitement. Kat noted the red sheen to Zephyr’s glossy white eyes and recalled how she’d spoken of the loss of akîa as freedom as much as curse. Hunger was temptation as much as hollowing.

She quickly unlooped the brooch’s ribbon from about her neck. Zephyr hesitated only a moment before snatching it away and setting it in place once more as a choker about her neck. She’d no need to tie off the ribbon, which simply blurred away into her being. We weave starlight and shadow indeed.

As the twin serpents of the cameo settled into place, a measure of solidity returned to Zephyr’s body, the translucence hardening little by little to opacity and the wisping edges of her being finding new definition. Though she remained a creature that belonged within the mists, she no longer belonged to them. The suddenness of the transformation reaffirmed the difference between the Issnaîm and the common folk of Khalad, as did the fact that while the brooch’s mere proximity was enough to stop ordinary people succumbing to the mists, Zephyr’s centre – her akîa – soon unravelled if it were not in direct contact with her being.

A passing imitation of a cinderblood woman once more, she lowered herself to the ground, aloft in the mists no more. She gathered her skirts and settled beside the fire. To Kat’s relief, her teeth had lost their unsettling sharpness, and the red sheen had faded from her eyes.

“What did you mean by me being as together as I’ll likely get?” asked Kat.

“We all leave things behind in the mist.”

She scowled. She certainly felt all there, but there was no way to actually know. “Did Vallant send you to find me?”

Zephyr’s smile faded. “His rebel majesty, Bashar Vallant, declared you and Jaîna both to be heroes of the cause, he did. Also insisted he couldn’t spare any to the seeking of you.” She shrugged, the ink stain of her hair rippling. “Always practical, he is. Lost is lost.”

Jaîna’s last moments flashing before her eyes, Kat scowled. “What changed his mind?”

“Who’s saying he did?”

She spread her hands wide. Her arms felt heavy as lead. “You’re here.”

Zephyr’s eyes flashed. “A free agent, I am, whatever Vallant believes. Come and go as I please.”

“Then what changed your mind?”

Zephyr nodded at the sleeping Yali. “Told me the what and why of your doings. Tears hot with hurt and burning within. Ayin, all wasted on Vallant. Reasonable and conciliatory but not a twitch of compromise. Forbade us to go, he did. Forbade me, even… so BAM!” She smacked a fist into her palm. “Struck him cold, she did.”

Kat blinked and stared at Yali. “She did?”

Zephyr’s nose twitched above a contented smile. “One punch. Quite the sight.”

Kat tried to picture the moment, but even imagination had its limits. “You might have brought the ship.”

“The Chainbreaker didn’t get away from Telvamir clean. Between that and the Mistrali, she’s been holed up in a safe port at Mezzerin ever since.”

Which meant Vallant and everyone else aboard was trapped outside Athenoch until Zephyr returned. No wonder he’d tried to stop her. “What about Rîma?” Tatterlain, she’d no doubt, would stroll out from a collapsing building without a scratch. “Is she…?” She left the thought unspoken, overcome by a rush of weariness and sorrow.

“In a bad way, she is, but last breath will mend her.”

Kat exhaled her relief, but that same breath brought a brooding thought to the surface. One rooted in the memory of desiccated, shrunken skin and black linen bindings. Of rose water worn to hide the stench of carefully preserved decay. “She’s a koilos, isn’t she?”

“Is she?”

It wasn’t so much Zephyr’s words that put Kat on guard as her expression, which was once again the mask of disappointment she’d worn at their first meeting. There, Kat had provoked it through use of the word “veilkin”. Here…?

“I’ve seen her,” she said. “What she really is.”

“No, nasaîm, you saw something and your little waholi mind raced to judgement.”

Kat wasn’t sure what waholi meant, but decided it wasn’t flattering. Rîma’s youthful face, her easy vigour – not least her ability to actually speak – made her as unlike to a koilos as much as her other facets made her distinct from Kat herself. “So what is she?”

“Ask her yourself, says I. Not my secret to tell.”

Kat nodded slowly. Even what little she already knew would be valuable to Alabastra’s shriversmen and soulbinders – more so even than the secret of astoricum – for it was clear that Rîma existed outside of what was deemed possible in matters of semblance and soul. Enough, perhaps, to settle the inherited debts of an artist’s daughter. A few weeks before, Kat might even have considered it. Azra would have immediately sought a way to leverage the knowledge.

“Can’t you tell me anything at all?”

Zephyr shrugged, her shoulders eddying and rippling. “It is a foolish speck of sand who claims to know the desert, but even that speck can accept that she does not know the desert. Older and deeper than you might think, is Khalad.”

Kat gazed into the fire, feeling foolish. Living in Zariqaz, she’d considered herself knowledgeable about the world, fed by scraps from her father’s research and the cast-offs from the firebloods in whose circles she passed. Her father’s death had ripped away what she’d believed the truth of Khalad and her place in it, only for Azra to show her another aspect. Why should she be surprised to discover that there was yet more to learn, hidden by mist or obscured by the simple bigotry of folk who considered themselves masters of the world for no other reason than because to do so was to make that mastery true, at least in the eyes of some, at least for a time.

The makers of Athenoch’s tower. The artificers who worked with astoricum. The veilkin, who were not really veilkin at all. Rîma. All offered glimpses of something Kat had never thought to look for, much less seen.

“Then tell me something of the desert that I don’t see,” she said softly. “If not of Rîma, then of yourself or your people.”

Zephyr regarded her coolly. “And what would you have me tell?”

“Whatever you’d like.”

“And if I don’t feel like telling of myself?”

“Then at least tell me why you came to save me.”

Zephyr prodded Yali with a foot and received a honking, stuttering snore for her trouble. “This one’s idea. Told you that, I did.”

“You didn’t have to agree,” said Kat. “You could at least tell me why.”

Zephyr stared down at her threaded fingers. “Because you risked everything for people you didn’t know. Twenty years back, Vallant would have done the same. Ah, but the princess awakens. Perhaps now we can get moving.”

Yali swung her legs about, yawned and peered suspiciously first at Kat, then at Zephyr. ||My ears are burning. Has someone been talking about me?||

Kat clambered to her feet. Sore muscles protested, but went no further than that. She was as whole as she’d ever been. ||Zephyr says you floored Vallant.||

Yali winced. ||Is it bad that I sort of enjoyed it?||

||Not from where I’m standing.|| She thought of the home Yali had found at Athenoch, and the confidence she’d found from belonging. Things by her actions she risked losing. ||But if he holds a grudge, you’ll be on the run again.||

||I didn’t really think about that.|| Yali struck a defiant pose, unblinking, contriving to look both older and younger than before. ||Sometimes it’s the big sister who needs help, even if she’ll never admit it.||

Flexible though it was, even Simah didn’t have signs to cover all eventualities. So instead, Kat hugged Yali until the cold of the mists was only a memory.

Thirty-Eight

“While information is still hard to come by, our worst fears are confirmed.” Damant kept his face expressionless. One crack, one flare of emotion, and who knew what would come screaming out? Bad enough that the brooding dusk skies conspired to give Nyssa Iudexas’ statue a disappointed glower. “Telvamir and Zoyen are gone. Their section of the Copper Road is gone. The mists have taken everything.”

Bad enough that the Veil had made gains on a scale not seen for six generations, when the city of Drasra had fallen to the mists. Worse that those gains had come about through mortal malice rather than freak occurrence. Damant couldn’t shift an abiding personal guilt. Yes, he’d relayed Yennika’s warnings of a possible attack and stiffened the Copper Road garrisons as much as time – and the gaps in Mirela’s orders – had allowed, but still his conscience screamed.

“How many did we lose?” asked Julan Aroth, urbanity for once absent.

Damant strove to reduce numbers to mere facts – rather than faces – and by the slight tremor of anger in his voice knew he failed. “Of General Drafa’s three legions, perhaps two hundred redcloaks made it to the custodium at Azarin or the watch posts further south on the Copper Road. More may yet remain in the wilds, but to all intents and purposes Drafa’s command is gone. Ten thousand soldiers. Gone.”

“The soldiers don’t concern me,” said Salenna, her eyes hooded.

“They should.” Elegant as ever in a gown of Sumarand samite, Mirela stood tall and straight-backed opposite Nyssa Iudexas. She’d been born for moments such as this. The quiet dignity that made mock of disaster. The ironclad confidence that this storm would pass. “Or do you believe their deaths won’t concern the Eternity King?”

“The Eternity King mourns all loss of life,” intoned Hierarch Ossed, whose surprise attendance to conclave only underlined the matter’s seriousness.

Mirela raised a perfect eyebrow. “But some more than others?”

“Naturally,” Aroth replied drily.

Damant cleared his throat. “As to custodian losses—”

“I don’t care about those either,” snapped Salenna. “I want to know how many innocents Vallant killed.”

“As do I,” Yennika put in softly. “I warned you this might happen.”

Damant fidgeted. Strange to hear sentiment of concern from a woman in as near to custodian uniform as made no difference. Stranger still to hear it from Salenna Bascari, who seldom showed concern for anyone other than herself. Though that wasn’t the true reason for his discomfort. “I have no information on that.”

Salenna’s expression darkened further. “Because you didn’t think to ask, or because no one else thought to check?”

“Both, lady.” Damant’s grimace tugged at his scar. He was glad that the Countess was sleeping in her chambers, too weak to attend conclave. “I can make enquiries.”

“Do so.” She stared at her feet, anger abating to a weariness that Damant felt all too keenly himself. “Our greed was complicit in their deaths. We should at least know their names.”

He nodded, chastened and surprised. A sign Yennika’s influence was spreading, or at least that her diligent example had taken root. Perhaps there was hope for the Bascari after all. Not that he’d any right to judge, because he’d dismissed the citizens of Zoyen and Telvamir as instinctively as Mirela. The shame fed his ill-temper. “Of course.”

“Thank you, Ihsan.” Yennika folded her arms, her words directed at him though her eyes never left Mirela.

“The victims are in Nyssa’s keeping now,” intoned Ossed, his white and gold robes shimmering as he extended his hands to the silent statue of Nyssa Iudexas. “By the Stars Below, we should concern ourselves with the architects of this horror.”

Aroth steepled his fingers and tapped them against his lips. “This was Vallant’s work?”

Damant clenched his fists. “For obvious reasons, eyewitnesses are scarce, but there was a possible sighting of him in Telvamir. As for Zoyen… Commandant Abîna barely escaped the mists. He’s always had a knack for saving his own skin. He claims an explosion destroyed the torch house. Moreover, that a woman led the effort. Apparently she tied him up and left him for dead. Other reports corroborate the possibility.”

“Do we have a name?” asked Yennika.

“None worth anything. Apparently she claimed to be you, lady.”

Mirela arched an eyebrow. “Have we any reason to believe my beloved cousin wasn’t responsible? Forgive me, my dear, but you’d hardly be the first woman to craft a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Damant’s temper, already straining at its leash for his own failures, gathered apace. “Three custodians escaped Zoyen on a railrunner,” he bit out. “Apparently they were taken hostage by Qersali migrants before being cut loose west of Azarin. They gave very detailed descriptions of the imposter. She was not Lady Yennika. I suspect they’re talking about our old friend Katija Arvish.”

Salenna stiffened, her expression unreadable. Ossed glowered, a thundercloud in shimmering silk. Aroth rubbed his chin thoughtfully and shared a brief glance with Yennika.

Yennika pursed her lips. “Well done, cousin. When I arrived in Tyzanta, this Arvish was a simple – if ambitious – thief. Now she’s destroying torch houses for Vallant. How proud you must be. After all, your man Vashrîq as good as delivered her into his hands.”

Mirela’s patrician composure tightened. “I want Commandant Abîna sent to Zariqaz. I’m sure the Voice will want an explanation for his failures and I see no reason why Abîna shouldn’t give it in person.”

“There’s no need for anyone to go to Zariqaz,” said Aroth. “The Voice is coming here.”

Mirela baulked, her shocked rictus a good match for Salenna’s – and, Damant suspected, his own. “What?”

Yennika appeared unfazed. “Apparently the Voice wishes to give Vallant her personal attention.”

“Her patience is, alas, not all that it could be,” said Aroth. “The impulsivity of youth.”

Mirela’s throat bobbed. “Then she’ll save Abîna a long journey. Generous of her.”

“Another overseer sacrificed to your mistakes?” Yennika snorted. “Or did you think we’d not notice that Overseer Vashrîq is remarkable by his absence after letting Arvish escape? Your husband must be relieved.”

“My mistakes?” Mirela took a step across the circle. “If I hadn’t withdrawn our garrisons from the Copper Road, Vallant’s body count would have been far higher.”

Damant felt his temper slip and let it run free, his words filling with angry resentment. Mirela had never shown any interest in custodian business beyond the profit it could bring her. She didn’t understand that instinct and routine were as important as discipline. For all that Yennika had worked to undo her orders, there simply hadn’t been time to do so except in the smallest part. “Or it might have been nothing at all! Those custodians you reassigned knew the region and its people. They’d have recognised that Vallant, Arvish and the others didn’t fit. We could have avoided all of this.”

Mirela met his words with an icy stare. “You clearly have strong feelings on events. I’m sure the Voice will give them due consideration.”

“I…” Damant straightened his shoulders. A cinderblood castellan couldn’t gainsay a fireblood. But with the heat of burning bridges licking at his spine and the Countess’ wits adrift on apothecary’s dreams, what else was there to do but go forward, and hope the fires ahead were less fierce than those behind? Besides, he owed it to the dead. “I welcome the opportunity.”

Mirela regarded him in frosty silence, her cheek twitching. Her victims seldom faced her threats head-on. Damant felt a swell of satisfaction. There was freedom in that moment, even if it likely meant his death.

“Oh, leave Ihsan alone, cousin.” Yennika rolled her eyes. “He deserves better.”

Mirela raised her hands aloft, speaking to the empty audience seating, doubtless in rehearsal in case the Voice assembled the city’s firebloods to hear her judgement on recent events. “This family deserves better. Tyzanta deserves better.” She glared at Yennika. “You claim order as your guiding light, but you’ve brought only chaos. You invited war with the Jovîna—”

“I humbled the Jovîna. Someone had to.”

“You are a disease, cousin! You—”

“Oh shut up!” Salenna bore down on Mirela. “We made a decision to line our own pockets, and now people are dead! Ten thousand souls, swept into the Veil. Don’t you care about that?”

Mirela blanched. “Sister—”

“I never should have listened to you!” Salenna halted, finger extended barely a hand’s breadth from Mirela’s nose. A full head shorter than her sister, she compensated through sheer fury. “I welcome the Voice’s arrival. I, for one, do not intend to hold anything back.”

Her long black skirt swishing against the dais, Yennika drew up behind Salenna and set a perfectly manicured hand on her shoulder. “Nor do I.” Her gaze – not accidentally, Damant suspected – touched upon the spot where Jorais had left the conclave hall, never to be seen again. “Ever since Uncle Raith passed into Nyssa’s keeping, this hall has seen too much posturing and heard too many lies. It’s time that ended.”

Mirela stumbled back a step. Teeth bared, she stabbed a finger at Yennika. “You’d know all about lies, cousin. You may have swept your past behind the drapes, but I haven’t forgotten it. And you, sister? You’re worse. After all, that spiteful little slattern doesn’t know any better.” Both snarl and finger returned to Yennika. “You won’t do to me what was done to Jorais. I’ll see you dead first!”

She stalked from the conclave hall, all but trampling the custodians who scrambled from her path.

As the door slammed shut, Salenna shrank inwards and bowed her head. Yennika put an arm about her trembling shoulders and kissed her hair. “I’m proud of you, cousin.”

Salenna nodded and drew herself upright. Damant turned away, leery of intruding on a private moment between his betters, and lost himself in tangled thoughts. With the Voice due in Tyzanta, there was no longer any concealing the rift in the Bascari family. All considered, it was probably for the best. He only hoped the Countess clung to life long enough to see it resolved.

Aroth cleared his throat. “Well, that appears to be that. Perhaps you’ll join me for a meal, eminence? We should discuss your coming elevation to the Qabirarchi Council before the Voice arrives, don’t you think? Good day, Castellan.”

Minister and hierarch departed. A last, haunted look about the chamber, and Salenna followed.

“Well, that was interesting,” said Yennika, her arms folded and a lopsided smile haunting her lips.

“Surprising, I’d have said.”

“Salenna, you mean?”

Damant passed up a dozen tactful replies. Tact was too often an excuse for untruth, and whatever the immediate future brought, Yennika had earned his truth – his trust. “I never suspected she’d a conscience, much less courage.”

“Ah.” Yennika touched her fingertips to his chest. Just enough pressure to leave a memory, and then gone. Her smile – one of equals, more than mistress and servant – lingered. “Always alert for conniving wiles, is that it? You think darling Salenna insincere in her motives?”

“Frankly, yes.”

“Of course you do, Ihsan. Whatever your compensations, you’re still a cinderblood brute, and one shouldn’t expect too much of you.” The dazzling smile spoke to a role being played, and thus robbed the words of offence. “We’ve talked a little, she and I. Perhaps it helped.” She shrugged, her smile fading. “And in the end, I don’t know that matters. There’s no saving Mirela now, even if I wanted to.”

Thirty-Nine

As evening slid into night, Damant strove to bring peace to his restless soul. A brief hour of penance at the Central Custodium tallying the Copper Road’s civilian dead had offered little solace, nor had authorising the armed escort that would summon Commandant Abîna to the Voice’s judgement improved his mood.

In all his years of service, Damant had never seen the Voice. Her predecessor, yes, but then only from a distance. The prospect of being called to her presence set a shiver in his spine. The Voice spoke for the Eternity King. In a way, she was the Eternity King. How could he stand before her and claim to have given his all when Caradan Diar daily gave everything, and had done across long Ages of Fire?

But on the wearying return walk through Overspire streets battening down in preparation for the Mistrali, Damant recognised a hidden facet to his unease. He’d ever been a practical man – it was one of the reasons Malissa had left him, in fact, though she’d called it cynicism – and readily accepted events that lay beyond his influence.

The tragedy along the Copper Road, the Voice’s judgement – even the prospect of the Countess drawing closer to Nyssa’s keeping – these were all such matters. The Countess, particularly, for Marida’s confirmation that the wisp essence was unsullied had forced him to accept that her decline was simply a facet of omen rot’s spread. He hated it with a fervour that woke him before dawn, but what could he do to alter events? Sometimes you just have to let people go. Marida had been right. Cinderblood or fireblood. Innocent or guilty. Some folk had destinies beyond a mere castellan’s ability to alter.

But no matter how rationally Damant examined events, unease refused to abate. It lingered through a thin meal of figs and spiced bread taken in his private quarters, an exacting inspection of the sentries at the palace gates, and a long, looping walk about the estate perimeter that took him past the sprawling lodge that was home to Mirela’s family, and whose banquet hall offered an unparalleled view of the main residence she’d always hoped to claim. The feeling grew that he’d borne witness to something and missed its significance. A custodian’s worst nightmare.

As he reached the estate’s northern boundary, and the railings that separated Salenna’s overlook cottage from the bricked-up, decaying ruins of the Overspire’s cliff face, Damant came to a decision. He had to discuss the business with someone else, if only to hear his own thoughts spoken aloud.

He stared up into the night sky. Would the Countess be awake? She kept increasingly erratic hours of late, rising from bed only when she felt fit to do so – although to his grateful knowledge there’d been no more sky-clad painting expeditions. It was worth the attempt. Decision made, he took the rightmost fork through the sand garden and struck out for the welcoming lumani lights of the main house.

The teeth-jarring wail of a disturbed hestic split the air.

A second joined it.

A third.

Damant spun about, seeking the source. The gate and torch house were too distant, the wind in the wrong direction for the sound to carry from the main palace or the conclave hall…

There. The overlook cottage.

He set off at a run as the hestic fell silent, his shortcut through the stones scattering the sand garden’s serenity. Vaulting the low wall at the cottage’s boundary, he cut through the overgrown thorns – though Salenna spared no effort regarding her own appearance, that of her garden was another matter – and reached the main path just as two breathless custodians ran up from the garden’s lattice gate.

“Give me that.” Damant snatched the shrieker from the nearest, the warm hum beneath his hand reassuring as the ifrît recognised his soul-glyph.

He stared at the silent cottage, its front door wide open and light spilling onto the front step. He pointed in turn at the now shrieker-less custodian and his companion. “Back to the palace. Tell them what’s happening. You, around the back. Eyes open and head down.”

Fingers tight on the shrieker’s grips, Damant approached the front door, skin crawling at the prospect of eyes watching from within. Though luxurious by the standards of Undertown, the overlook cottage was modest in size, with barely a half dozen rooms spread across its two floors. Plenty of space for a woman without a family. Easy enough to search, not like the lodge or – Nyssa preserve him – the palace itself.

Clinging to what little shadow the light from the open door permitted, he climbed the stone steps. Something crunched under his boot. What had once been a hand burst into ash, brief pinkish embers flaring against grey. The rest of the body lay in the hollow between stairway and wall, a lifeless, charred mass with its remaining arm held high in a vain attempt to ward off the hestic’s fury. A dagger lay on scorched grass, dulled and warped by the heat.

A second corpse – this one a woman’s, or at least so Damant judged from what remained – lay on the threshold between portico and hallway. Its grey ashes were scattered across the foot of the stairs, one leg and most of the torso intact, the remains of the right arm still crackling with indigo flame hot enough to blacken the expensive Phoenissan carpet. The lumani in the hallway’s unprepossessing chandelier flickered and sparked, its humours upset by the hestics’ dying wails.

Suppressing a shudder – for all that the soul-glyph at the base of his neck offered protection against the estate’s hestics, the fear remained that one might retain malice and free will enough to ignore it – Damant picked his way over the corpse. Shrieker levelled, he made a brief, efficient sweep of both hallway and drawing room. A glimpse through the kitchen door confirmed that the custodian had made entry unopposed, so Damant eased his way up the stairs, ears straining for some hint of movement above.

“Lady Salenna? It’s Castellan Damant.”

Side-on, he eased upward another two steps. Darkness pooled at the stairway head, the lumani spent or silenced. Another crumpled body waited in the shadows. Not seared ash, but white-haired flesh and blood. Salyai, Salenna’s housewarden of many years’ standing, would keep no more of her secrets.

“Nyssa receive you in favour, old man,” murmured Damant. Salyai had been of a rare sort, uncomplaining and loyal to a fault. Rarer still now. His blood-soaked shirt and slashed neck left no doubt as to how he’d died.

Ahead, the study door lay ajar.

Shifting his grip on his shrieker, Damant eased inside. Starlight from the open balcony doors offered up enough illumination to show that danger had been and gone. Like so much in his recent life, there was nothing more to be done.

The custodian’s call jarred him from reverie. “Castellan?”

“Up here.”

Footsteps tracked up the stairs. “Looks like the hestics scared the others off.”

Vision blurring and blood thundering with failed duty, Damant flung the custodian against the wall, forearm across his throat. Eyes went wide behind the mask.

“You think that, do you? Take a look.”

Snarling frustration, he let the gasping custodian drop and stepped aside.

Salenna Bascari lay in an armchair, her eyes glassy and sightless. The remains of a broken wine bottle and the contents of her desk – a thousand squares of stiff paper, ordinarily arranged by transactions due and levies paid – lay strewn across a growing crimson stain. A ragged wound at Salenna’s neck told how she’d died. The shrieker in her hand – a smaller, more compact design than that used by the custodium – and the crusted scorch mark on the door frame spoke of resistance. Open balcony doors – the drapes twitching in the night breeze – warned of an escaped killer.

The custodian went rigid. “Castellan, I—”

“Quiet!” There it was again. A sound barely heard, stolen by the gusting wind, but unmistakable as a shrieker’s telltale report.

Stepping past Salenna’s body, Damant strode onto the balcony. Beyond the dome of the conclave hall, a pinprick of hot flame gouted from the direction of the palace.

It wasn’t over.

“There’s a heraldic at the gatehouse. Send a message to the Central Custodium. I want everybody with a pulse on these grounds inside five minutes. Go!”

The custodian took off at a run.

Damant peered over the balcony. Only a two-storey drop, but the slope of the gardens made it a generous two storeys. A twisted ankle, a broken leg. Either would make him useless. Salenna’s killer would have to wait. He retraced his steps down the stairs, anger settling to cold fury as he sifted the possibilities. Vallant, proving once again that no act was too desperate? Had Aqladi Jovîna scraped together his last dinars to avenge his lost grip on Tyzanta? Either was possible, but motive mattered little in the moment. Only the survival of those Damant held dear.

By the time he left the cottage, the custodian was a shadow sprinting for the main gate. A decision remained. The main residence or the lodge? Damant was moving before he’d given the matter full thought. He told himself his decision was rooted in practicality. That the lodge was closer to the gate, and thus Mirela and her family could expect reinforcement sooner. But as he lumbered down the crazed pathway, he allowed that allegiance past and present called him to the residence. The Countess and Yennika. Were his life forfeit that night, he’d have it count for something. With Mirela, it would count for nothing at all.

Growling frustration, he dredged up what reserves he could, and ran faster.

Slow. He was too slow. Too old.

A shrieker flared to his fore. A shadow screamed and collapsed into a crocus bed. Sinair ran out of the darkness, her custodian’s mask gone and vapour rising from her shrieker’s muzzle.

“Castellan!” she said, breathless. “The survivors are retreating. We’ll have them trapped against the cliff face.”

Screams and running shadows to the south bore out her assertion.

The knotted pressure in Damant’s chest eased.

He didn’t trust it.

He kicked the assassin’s corpse over. Steel blades gleamed on a half-glove’s black palm. Climbing claws. “That’s how they got in. Is the Countess safe? Where’s Josqa?”

“Never showed up for watch. Overseer Kharith took a squad inside when the first hestic—”

Damant was already in motion, lungs burning and leaden legs burdened by lost youth. He took the front steps three at a time. Riding breathless momentum, he rammed the heavy door open and stumbled into an entrance hall thick with bodies.

Overseer Kharith’s squad hadn’t made it past the great double-spiralled stairway. Kharith herself lay huddled beside the remains of an ormesta table, black-fletched crossbow quarrels bristling from her back. A second masked custodian lay slumped over a banister, a third in a bloody pool at its foot. A fourth sat slumped against a wall, his left arm half hacked away. A half-dozen dead assassins amid the bloody wreckage – some in shrieker-scorched garb, others bearing ragged sword wounds – told of a good account given. It counted for something. Not enough. There shouldn’t have been bodies at all, not ones able to bleed. The hestics at the residence might have screamed, but they’d done little else.

“Castellan!”

Sinair’s impact drove the breath from Damant’s body, her dive crashing them both to the bloodstained carpet in a tangle of arms and legs. A crossbow bolt hissed over Damant’s head and thumped into the wood-panelled wall.

Still sprawled full length, he brought his shrieker to bear. His shot went wide, the angry flame blasting banister to matchwood. Sinair’s didn’t. Flames rushed across the assassin’s chest. She plunged over the broken banister and struck the hallway floor with a sickening thud.

Damant clambered upright and offered Sinair a gruff nod of thanks. No fool like an old fool, rushing in like that.

A scream of pained defiance burst from the direction of the library. Too young for the Countess.

Yennika.

Fledgling caution set to flight, Damant ran headlong towards the sound.

“Find the Countess!” he bellowed over his shoulder.

Another assassin lay dying in the library doorway, blood bubbling at his lips and the distinctive emerald hilt of Yennika’s dagger protruding from his chest. Yennika herself stood at the library’s centre, stock still, head back and a straight-bladed dagger at her throat. Catching sight of Damant, her captor – a hard-faced young woman with her blonde hair in tight braids and her powder-darkened eye sockets blacker than night – jerked Yennika’s head further back. Blood trickled along the dagger blade’s inner edge.

“Careful.” Her guttural sing-song voice rippled with amusement. “Wouldn’t want any accidents, would we?”

Damant froze, his shrieker half raised and his brow tightening in recognition. He knew the woman, though they’d never met. The hair. The heavy-handed make-up. The gold-trimmed coachman’s coat. The fluid arrogance most of all. The woman Katija Arvish claimed had been present at Xanathros Alabastra.

“Release her,” he said, voice flat with false impassivity.

The assassin’s eyes widened in caricature of a woman receiving heart-warming news. “Oh, how touching. She does have a friend.” Eyes on Damant’s, she brought her lips level with Yennika’s ear. Her voice hardened. “Tell your friend to let me go, and maybe you’ll live through this.”

The sculpted grips of Damant’s shrieker dug into his fingers, sweat pooling between folds of skin. “If she dies, you die.”

“I don’t like that answer,” said the assassin. “Tell him to get out of my way, lady. Do it now.”

Yennika’s voice shook, her pinched eyes on the brink of tears she was too proud to shed. “Ihsan? Listen to me very carefully. Y-you’re not only my sworn castellan. You’re my f-friend. I need you to…” She swallowed, a single tear trickling across her cheek. Her words returned, hard as tempered steel. “I need you to shoot this trallock in the face.”

The assassin’s smile turned to horror. She shoved Yennika clear, her left hand reaching towards the studded chandelier. Damant yelped as the library blazed brilliant white, the wispy scream of a dying lumani lost in a flurry of hidden footfalls. A window shattered somewhere to his left, a cold rush of night air gusting in as the library’s warmth fled.

He cuffed at his eyes, willing the splotchy blue-black shapes to coalesce into something he could use. “Yennika? Lady?”

“I’m… I’m fine, Ihsan.”

After-images at last fading into the light of the surviving lumani, Damant saw her half sitting, half collapsed against an armchair, cheeks a glistening webwork of run mascara and fingers brushing at the blood trickling along her neck.

She rose, crossed to the doorway on tottering legs and knelt beside the dying assassin. She closed her fingers around the gemmed dagger and ripped it free. The man’s eyes bulged, a rasping, gasping scream sending a welter of blood spilling across his lips. Then, expression hardening to a calculating scowl, Yennika rammed the dagger home anew, the blade angled beneath his breastbone. The assassin’s wail shuddered to a sucking sigh, then to nothing at all as the light left his eyes.

She stood, her face without expression. “I’m better now.”

Damant permitted himself the tiniest sliver of relief. “Can you…?”

The word “walk” died on his lips as her eyes rolled back in a dead faint.

He caught her as she fell and manhandled her into an armchair. With no idea how many more footpads might be roaming the residence, he could hardly leave her alone, but nor could he stand idly by while the Countess and the rest of the family were endangered.

Footsteps sounded in the hallway. He pressed up against the wall adjoining the door, shrieker ready in his hand.

Sinair slunk into the room, vigilance shifting to open-handed greeting as Damant stepped into the open.

“Well?” he demanded, breath tight in his throat.

“The Countess is secure. Most of the servants fled, but her maidservant had the sense to barricade the bedroom door.” Sinair grunted with amusement. “Nearly took my head off with a poker.”

It seemed Sherabi had kept her head better than trained custodians. Maybe the Countess wasn’t so far wrong in believing her Tythia reborn. “And the rest?”

“The reinforcements are scouring the grounds now.” She kicked the assassin’s bloody corpse. “Looks like these huthari never got near the lodge, but Lady Salenna—”

Damant gritted his teeth, failure bitter on his tongue. “I know about Salenna.”

“What about Salenna?” asked Yennika, clinging to the armrest of her chair.

He hesitated, but what else was there to say? “They murdered her.”

Yennika touched her eyes closed. “Poor darling, and she’d just escaped her sister’s shadow.” Her voice thickened with disgust. “I fainted, didn’t I? Like some vapid heiress in a terrible play.”

Damant glanced at the corpse in the doorway. “You’ve no reason to be ashamed.” Not like the castellan who should have kept her family safe. “The Countess is secure. Mirela and her family as well by now. It’s over.”

“What about Tanith?” Yennika leapt to her feet, expression crammed with urgency. “Has anyone seen her since this started? Ihsan?”

Damant swore under his breath. Somehow Tanith had slipped his mind, and with the vexed and bloody question of the Floranz inheritance hanging over her head, she made for as likely a reason for the night’s attack as any. “Sinair, you’re Lady Yennika’s shadow until I say otherwise.”

Leaving her salute unacknowledged, he strode from the library, the lumani waking to life as he headed for the guest quarters directly below the Countess’ chambers. Yennika’s apartments to the left, Tanith’s much smaller rooms to the right. Damant’s by now hypervigilant gaze found no hint that the assassins had made it so far into the residence, but the night had taught too harsh a lesson in the perils of indolence for him to draw comfort.

He rapped on the door to Tanith’s chambers. “Mistress Floranz?”

No reply. Putting his ear to the door, he caught a soft, wheezing sob somewhere beyond. “Mistress Floranz?”

He tried the handle. Locked. Not by a motic, but a simple mortice key.

He set the muzzle of his shrieker against the lock and angled it sharply towards the floor. The door crashed open in a blaze of smoke-wreathed flame and he strode inside, unstoppable as Nyssa’s judgement.

The sitting room was empty, the bedroom was not.

The bed was a bloodstained ruin. Josqa, naked to the waist and livid with slashes across his arms and belly, somehow contrived to look peaceful amid the tangled sheets, as if he’d slipped away in his sleep. Tanith knelt doubled over on the bed, framed against the ruin of a broken window. Her head hung to her chest and she squeezed one of Josqa’s limp, lifeless hands in both of hers. The trailing ends of her tangled golden curls were lank and bloodstained, as were the sleeves of her dress.

“They were going to kill me,” she breathed, her chest heaving in a silent sob. She brushed a tender hand across Josqa’s brow and left a bloody trail behind. “They were going to kill me, and he fought them off.”

She closed her eyes, a snivelling, racking sob blossoming to a full-throated wail.

Forty

The architect of the Qallista Street warehouse had been a devout woman. The statues of Nyssa Iudexas and her saintly templars jutting from the building’s lintels owed their form to that faith, and to the warning they offered opportunistic skelders. Alas for the long-dead architect, Tyzanta’s upward sprawl had long ago left Qallista Street behind. No longer a gleaming example of commerce, it was just another collection of weather-worn and crumbling walls clinging to the spire’s outer face. A refuge for those it had once scorned.

“It’s a very long way down.” Damant shifted his feet on broken tiles made slippery by the downpour. The Mistrali had reached Tyzanta a little after dawn, and was now determined to make up for lost time. “You should give me something I can use.”

“I can’t!” Livisca twisted to and fro. His boots scraped at the roof’s flooded gutter. Not the wisest idea when Damant’s grip on his scruffy collar was his only defence against a seven-storey drop into the grey morning. “She’ll know! She’ll kill me!”

“About that…” Damant spat away a mouthful of rainwater and reeled Livisca eye to eye on aching arms. “What do you think I’m going to do if you don’t talk?”

“You don’t know her,” Livisca babbled, blood from a split lip mingling with the rain as it trickled through his stubble. “Looks like a scrap of nothing, but she’s strong. Fast, too. When she came calling the first time, Bresca told her to sling her hook – didn’t want trouble with the Bascari. Ranni found him in the street next morning, skin grey as dust. Wasn’t a mark on him.”

“I bet.”

“She’s a daemon!”

Damant snorted. The Qallista Spirehawks had a fearsome reputation in Undertown – one that had kept a dozen streets in their thrall – but deep down, skelders were all the same. Superstitious, cowardly, and too stupid to grab at driftwood when drowning.

He offered a wolfish smile. “Say that she is, and she does find out you’ve talked, and you and she then have a difficult conversation. That means I didn’t open my hands…” He slackened his grip just a little. Eyes wide, Livisca scrabbled at his wrists. “… and you didn’t end up as alley meat. Your choice.” Arms shaking with effort and the grey interminability of a sleepless night, he rocked Livisca out over the precipice.

He’d left the estate long before the bodies had cooled, the handful of custodians he could fully trust instructed to protect the surviving Bascari with their own lives. Without survivors to question, he’d needed outside help to make sense of the disaster, and had also known precisely where to find it.

Unsurprisingly, word of the attack had reached the Thornless Rose before Damant. Less expected had been Marida’s unhesitating cooperation, though as ever she’d left him with the distinct impression she’d known what he’d sought before he even opened his mouth. Livisca had approached her a few days before, seeking to barter antique tetrams for more readily accessible currency. She hadn’t said how many – it was doubtless more than the pair she’d handed over for inspection – but it hardly mattered. Not when the two she’d given Damant bore the indelible thorn-wreath seal of House Jovîna.

Thoughts black with suspicions of Jovîna involvement, Damant’s first instinct had been to march on Qallista Street with a small army of custodians at his back. Practicality had won out. Pulling custodians away from the estate was out of the question, and if the Jovîna were the Spirehawks’ paymasters, there was no telling what was coming next. More than that, Qallista Street lay in the heart of Ardin Javar’s territory, and that left the prickly ex-templar’s pride to consider.

Fortunately, Javar had proven resentfully accommodating, but accommodating nonetheless. Damant suspected he’d not wanted to risk appearing a junior partner in the new paradigm of Tyzanta’s alliance. Thus the army that had rushed the Qallista Street warehouse had not been one of custodians, but skelders. Their numbers already denuded from their nocturnal activities, and the few survivors exhausted by their flight from the Overspire, the Spirehawks had put up the briefest of resistance. It was one of the reasons Damant had brought Livisca out onto the roof. The inner rooms of the skelder nest stank of blood and fear.

As the Spirehawks’ leader – recently promoted or otherwise – Livisca had the answers Damant needed. But with his sodden arms trembling with weariness, his thoughts gummed by lack of sleep and his conscience screaming at his recent failures, all Damant wanted to do was let him drop.

“Have it your way,” he growled.

“No!” shouted Livisca.

“Then tell me her name!”

“I don’t know it,” he gasped, glancing down through the grey. “But I know who she’s working for.”

“She’s working for the Jovîna.”

Livisca’s desperate expression turned sly. “That’s what I thought. But she isn’t.”

“Then who?” demanded Damant.

“Let me up and I’ll tell you.”

Grunting with effort, Damant hauled Livisca clear and flung him across the roof. The skelder missed his footing and howled as his knee cracked against tile.

He hugged it close to his chest as Damant approached, teeth gritted against the pain. “The first time she showed, Bresca had me follow her. Skrelling trallock never even saw me. Thought we’d be heading gatewards, or up to the Aqladi house on Silver Street, but no. Just kept climbing the Spire, shadow to shadow.”

“Where did she go?”

Livisca flashed a bloody grin. “Climbed the Bascari estate fence, didn’t she? You think this was the Jovîna? Should be looking much closer to home.”

Livisca offered one last piece of information, one that burst the floodgates holding back the worst of Damant’s rage. Giving voice to a wordless, angry cry, he balled a fist and punched Livisca in the face. A tooth skittered across tile and was lost to the gutter. The skelder sprawled, wits gone.

Breathing hard, Damant faced the rooftop access door and the two men who’d borne witness. Swathed in a heavy fur cloak and arms folded in silent judgement, Ardin Javar looked twice the bear, if one recently given to swimming in a river. His lieutenant, a squat, balding man with a bloody cudgel, offered a crooked grin.

“You have what you sought?” asked Javar.

Damant nodded, wearier than ever. “I do.” And he did, however much he hated it.

“Would you like Maxin to throw him off the roof?”

The lieutenant’s grin widened. Damant grunted. So that was the face to go with a name seen in reports. One of Katija Arvish’s fellow escapees. Not that the Mornwake concerned him now.

“No. The Voice will need to hear his testimony. Keep him somewhere safe. No one from the custodium sees him. Understand?”

Javar nodded. Ex-templar, ex-custodian, of course he understood. “Very much so.”

A mournful, brooding atmosphere lingered in the palace grounds, but there were glints of hope amid the gloom. Every custodian Damant passed on his long, lonely walk from the palace gate stiffened at his approach, contriving to display pride they couldn’t have been feeling. His failure was their failure, whether they’d been present during the Spirehawks’ attack or not. A black day for the custodium, but they’d move forward once the perpetrator was brought to account. And the perpetrator would be punished. Too many had died for it to be otherwise.

Damant’s route to the residence took him through the sand garden. Tanith sat silently on the cast-iron bench beneath the stone gazebo, her eyes closed, her hands folded in her lap and her shoulders shrunken beneath a heavy cloak. Sherabi stood at the gazebo’s edge, claiming what cover she could without crowding her companion. Two custodians stood further out, rain streaming from their cloaks and hoods as they held vigil.

Sherabi flinched as Damant approached. He stifled a sigh. It seemed she’d never lose her wariness of him. “How is the Countess?” he asked.

“Sh-she’s well,” she replied. “Better than for days, in fact. She was asking after you.”

“I had business. I’ll be sure to see her later.” Though what he would say was another matter.

“She said you’d say that. We had a long conversation about her daughter while she ate breakfast.”

Damant swallowed a scowl, knowing Sherabi would assume it was meant for her. “Which one?”

“Lady Tythia.”

The shadow in Sherabi’s eyes told him everything. “So she told you?”

She hesitated. “She did, sir. It was after Overseer Sinair told her about Lady Salenna. She sat up in bed, nodded to herself and then… I didn’t know what to say. I mean, if I were Tythia, I wouldn’t remember anything of being her, would I?”

Overseer Sinair? Yennika’s work, no doubt. “You’d have to ask an archon.”

“I should be glad, shouldn’t I?” She stared down at her hands, her fingers working nervously against one another. “But I’d prefer she remain happy while she can. She’s sleeping now.”

“And Mistress Floranz?”

Sherabi glanced towards the bench. “She hasn’t spoken. At least, not to me. I wanted to be here in case… well, in case she changed her mind.”

“You’ve done well, girl. I won’t forget it.”

She bowed her head to hide a smile of pure pleasure. Damant made his way to the cast-iron bench and its lone occupant.

“Mistress Floranz?”

Tanith gave no sign of having heard. She could have been carved from stone.

Damant’s sense of failure crashed back. Tanith had come to Tyzanta seeking protection. Instead, she’d nearly perished as the result of Bascari intrigues. But for Josqa’s selflessness, she would have.

“I…” Treacherous words fled. Consolation was not one of Damant’s talents – indeed, the previous night he’d parcelled Tanith into Yennika’s care as soon as decency permitted – but he felt the need to offer something. “I promise you those responsible will be brought to justice.”

“They won’t,” Tanith said softly, the words somehow more promise than complaint, her certainty colder than the rain. “If I know anything, it’s that.”

Damant had no idea if her bond to Josqa had been love, companionship or merely youthful delight. He didn’t have it in him to ask. “If it helps, you weren’t the target,” he said stiffly. “On my life, you will remain safe here.”

Tanith nodded absently. Ever more aware of his own uselessness – and worse, that he was putting off a hated but necessary conversation – Damant continued on to the residence.

After a couple of false starts, he found Yennika in the library, seated on one of the sagging sofas beside the fire. The Spirehawk’s corpse had long since been removed from the doorway and the hearth’s pyrasti crackled away in its bed, filling the room with amber warmth and the comforting bitterness of coal smoke. Like Damant, she still wore the same clothes as she had the previous night, bloodstains and all. Like Tanith, she was present in body only, her thoughts far afield.

She blinked, her eyes snapping into focus. “Ah, Ihsan. A productive morning?”

“Yes, lady.” Damant sat opposite. Better to start with the details. “Twelve custodians are dead. As many again are injured. Most of the servants had gone home before it started and the rest had the good sense to stay under cover.”

“I’ve already heard this from Overseer Sinair. Tell me something I don’t yet know.”

The crystal shell of the antique tetram glittered in the firelight as Damant laid in on the table between them. “The assassins were members of the Qallista Street Spirehawks.”

“That’s a Jovîna imprint.” She sighed. “I love to dance, Ihsan, but not now. Not like this. Just tell me.”

“Mirela.”

She froze as her brain changed gears. “Mirela?” Her eyes narrowed. “That’s not funny.”

“The woman who held you at knifepoint was her go-between. She was also present at Xanathros Alabastra the night of Katija Arvish’s attempted robbery. Nothing easier than for her to walk away with some Jovîna tetrams. How was anyone to know anything had survived?”

Yennika propped her elbows on her knees, her chin on her palms and stared at the tetram like a woman waking from a dream. “This is too much, Ihsan. You think Mirela was behind Xanathros Alabastra?”

“Arvish insisted something had gone wrong. It’s starting to look like it went precisely how someone else intended. We never did discover who was to have fenced the tetrams for her. It might be she was set up from the first.”

“But why?”

“You said it yourself. It ruined Aqladi Jovîna and his family, leaving the Bascari with the opportunity to seize control of this city.”

“Mirela was furious when I acted on Jovîna’s weakness.”

“Because you stole her opportunity.”

Yennika dipped her head further, her palms pressed to her temples. “You can’t prove any of this.”

“About Xanathros Alabastra? Maybe if I had Katija Arvish, but we know what happened to her, don’t we? Conveniently vanished from one of your cousin’s skyships.”

“So now Mirela’s in league with Vallant too? Ihsan, this is mad.”

“I didn’t say that. And I can’t prove Mirela had anything to do with Xanathros Alabastra, but I have Livisca, the head of the Spirehawks. He saw Mirela’s go-between – the woman who commissioned him with stolen tetrams – enter the lodge. The same lodge the Spirehawks left untouched. That’s enough.” He spoke louder, faster, lack of sleep and frustration assailing the boundaries of discretion. “Livisca’s terrified of her, but he’s angry too. She supplied glyph patterns for the estate hestics, only they didn’t work so well at Salenna’s cottage. Something moved up the timetable. There wasn’t an opportunity to provide accurate copies of the other glyphs, so Livisca was given fakes.”

Yennika stared at the crystal tetram anew, her brows and cheeks making the slow creep from shock to certainty. “Zoyen. That or the Voice’s imminent arrival.”

Damant breathed deep, glad she finally saw it. “Again, you said it yourself. As soon as Salenna sided with you, Mirela was trapped.”

“What do you want from me?”

“Authorisation to arrest Mirela and search the lodge.”

“I didn’t want this, Ihsan. I thought coming home could be a fresh start.” Yennika closed her eyes, suddenly looking as tired as Damant felt. “I idolised my cousins once, did you know that? No, of course, you weren’t really around back then.”

“The count stationed me at Gazran,” Damant replied bitterly. “I spent five years chasing raiders amid the ashes of the Zaruan Mountains.” His punishment for Vallant’s betrayal and everything that had followed, Tythia and Sadia’s deaths chief among those events. “I heard nothing of Tyzanta business until he died and your aunt brought me home.”

Yennika shook her head. “Then you weren’t here when my father got himself killed in that idiot duel with Faraq Jovîna. When he was gone, my mother just… drifted away on talent wisps.” She snorted. “I didn’t know anything about anything. But it didn’t matter, because I had my wonderful, sophisticated cousins. I trailed around after them like a puppy and did everything they did. Everything. In the gutter, behind the veils of the Thornless Rose and in places far worse. Jorais and Mirela cheered me on every step of the way.”

Rising, she turned away and stared into the fire. No longer self-assured, she was younger, vulnerable. “There are months of my life lost behind clouds of isshîm. I remember the laughter. There was always laughter. Only somewhere along the line I stopped being part of the audience and became part of the show. But my worst mistake was not learning to hide my excesses, not like Jorais learned to hide his. When Uncle Raith found out he buried me in Zariqaz where I wouldn’t be an embarrassment. And do you know what the really, tooth-grindingly stupid thing about this is?”

Damant didn’t, and in truth didn’t want to hear any more. It wasn’t his place to bear witness to a fireblood’s shame – one he had no doubt Jorais and Mirela had crafted with the express purpose of disgracing a would-be challenger to their own ambitions – nor was it Yennika’s to reveal it in the first place. But the time for protests lay long in the past. Only a friend’s duty remained. “Tell me.”

“For my first few years in Zariqaz, I fantasised about returning home in triumph and making Jorais and Mirela suffer for what they’d made of me.” She snorted. “Ridiculous, elaborate plans – honestly, you’d laugh to hear them. But little by little, I realised that the only way to put the past behind me was to make something of myself. Now? Jorais and Salenna are gone, and Mirela…” She took a deep breath and stood taller, the vulnerable young woman of yesterday banished to the past. “You have your authorisation, Ihsan. Find me the truth of this.”

Damant returned to the Central Custodium as dusk fell, the better for a full meal and a few hours’ sleep. Other activities taken between had offered fulfilment, but little happiness. Yennika met him at the cell door, a hooded and masked custodian at her side. Her eyes betrayed her mood to be a close match for Damant’s own.

“Is it done?” she asked.

“No,” Damant replied. “She’s sleeping again.”

Whatever window of attention the Countess any longer had the strength to offer had closed long before Damant had climbed the stairs to her room, with no reward but an abashed, apologetic smile from Sherabi.

“I suppose it can’t be helped,” said Yennika. “Let’s get this over with.”

She turned the key, opened the door and passed inside. Damant felt the hestic’s curiosity and made a mental note to have a second sentry crest installed. This particular cell was deeper than the rest – one advantage of Tyzanta’s constant growth was that there was never a shortage of oubliettes into which to hurl the deserving – but they’d come too far to take chances. The custodian remained in the doorway, arms folded and unmoving.

Mirela made no move to rise from the thin metal bed. “So my dear cousin shows herself at last.” She turned her sneer on Damant. “And her little marionette too. Does my mother know about this outrage?”

Yennika suppressed a flinch. “I came to see you out of courtesy, and because we are family, despite everything. You will face the Voice’s judgement when she arrives.”

“I welcome it,” Mirela spat. “You’ve no proof.”

“This afternoon, Castellan Damant recovered a fortune in antique tetrams from your home. Tetrams thought destroyed at Xanathros Alabastra. Tetrams matching the ones given in payment to the assassins who killed Salenna and who tried to kill me.”

Mirela’s defiance bled away, leaving her furtive and haggard. “Impossible. He’s lying.”

Temper flaring, Damant stepped forward. “I—”

Yennika set the back of her hand against his chest. Just a touch. A reminder. “That’s the best you have? You’ll need something better for your trial. Perhaps it would be kinder to confess and save your family’s reputation.”

“You think I’ll meekly sit here while you destroy me?” hissed Mirela. “You may have stolen the custodium, but I have supporters. They’ll not let me rot.”

“They may not find you,” said Damant, all qualms about taking satisfaction from her fate well and truly spent. “Kharam the Apostate was the last occupant of this cell. He was raving even to the day he died that the Obsidium Cult would rescue him. They never did.”

Yennika beamed, though this particular smile didn’t touch her eyes. “But in the unlikely possibility that darling Ihsan is wrong, I’ve gone to the trouble of finding you a particularly dedicated guardian all of your own. Tireless. Loyal. Incorruptible.”

Beckoned, the custodian strode into the cell. Something struck Damant as off about his movements, though he couldn’t quite place why.

“Give me your mask.”

Yennika held out her hand. The custodian inclined his head, then reached up with gloved hands. The silver mask slid free, the androgynous vahla spirit face replaced by the gilded, grave-linen-swathed skull of a koilos.

Damant grimaced. Mirela gagged and shrank as deep into the cell’s corner as she could. “Get that thing away from me!”

“But I’m told that family can be quite the comfort.” Yennika frowned in mock puzzlement and brushed the koilos’ cheek with the back of her hand. “Or don’t you recognise your brother Jorais?”

Forty-One

The Chainbreaker climbed westward from Mezzerin, rising above the plump Mistrali clouds as gossamer aethersails swelled with the Deadwinds’ mote-heavy breath. Leaning against the prow bulwark, her eyes level with the figurehead’s faceless stump, Kat felt the change in the air; the warm, soothing prickle as soulfire raced along her tattoo, indigo flames rippling and dancing against the night.

Beside her, a grinning Yali turned a pirouette and extended her hand towards an indigo mote. It flickered away on the Deadwinds, out of reach.

||Would you want someone to torment your soul like that?|| asked Kat.

Yali shrugged. ||Maybe they like playing? I would, honest and true.|| She nodded at Kat’s arm, ||What does that feel like?||

||I don’t know that I have the words,|| Kat replied, her signs slowing as she considered. ||There’s weight. And pressure. Like thoughts, but not like thoughts. Presence, I suppose.||

She felt it as she spoke, a pressure among the Deadwinds. The weight of untold ifrîti watching her, curious more than malicious, but brooding too.

||So it doesn’t hurt?||

||If anything, it’s comforting.|| Kat raised her left hand and willed her aetherios tattoo into new, flowing forms, causing the gentle flames to ripple back and forth. The pressure in the Deadwinds changed in a way she couldn’t identify. More alert, certainly, but something else beyond that. ||It’s freedom.||

More, she was starting to realise it was power. The dregs she’d wielded all her life were nothing to what the Deadwinds offered.

Yali’s fingers twitched to the first forms of a sign, but never quite committed. Rare indecision.

||Out with it,|| said Kat.

Yali twisted her lips. ||I keep forgetting that you’re always watching. Most people don’t.||

||And you’re changing the subject.||

||The koilos. What did you do?||

Kat hesitated. She’d asked herself the question many times since Zephyr had led her from the Veil. ||Something inside me broke. And then… it was like there was someone there with me. Helping me.||

Her breathing quickened as she reached into the darkness for answers, afraid of what she might discover, but eager too. She stared at the specks of soul drifting along the Chainbreaker’s deck, each of them an ifrît returning to Khalad’s heart and Nyssa’s judgement. Maybe they wanted more than to play. Maybe they wanted to help. Or maybe Nyssa had chosen to help. She’d seen the goddess, hadn’t she?

||It was terrifying and intoxicating and… I don’t know. Kiasta, that makes no sense at all.||

||Not everything needs to,|| Yali replied. ||You saved Rîma. That’s enough.||

||Did I?|| Kat replied bitterly. She’d seen nothing of Rîma since boarding the Chainbreaker, though according to Tatterlain, Vallant had given up his cabin for her convalescence. Kat supposed she could have asked Vallant directly, but she’d not yet determined how to have that conversation without screaming at him. ||I don’t even know what she is.||

Yali gave a lopsided shrug. ||I know that I like her.||

Kat snorted to herself. Yali lived in a simpler world because she didn’t allow complication to paralyse her. Youth was part of it, but so was a vestige of innocence that neither her Undertown upbringing nor recent events had beaten out of her. The rarest of blooms.

“It’s a large ship, but not so large that it’s not obvious when someone’s avoiding you.” Vallant joined Kat at the bulwark, clean-shaven and disgustingly cheerful despite the lurid purple bruise about his left eye. Nodding at Yali, he switched to a mix of Daric and Simah. ||Would you excuse us?||

She glanced at Kat. ||Should I?||

||I promise not to throw him overboard,|| Kat replied.

Yali made her way aft, playing her one-sided game with the bobbing ifrîti as she went.

Vallant leaned back on the bulwark’s rail. “Do you want to throw me overboard?”

“I’m considering it.”

“Is the condemned man at least entitled to know why?”

She glared at him. “You know why.”

“I made a choice. Your life against the lives of everyone on board. It was the right call, and I’d do it again.”

“This isn’t about me.” Kat knew the words for a lie even as she spoke. It was at least partly about her, but the admission made her feel small, unworthy. “It’s about the Qersali refugees. The townsfolk. Jaîna most of all.”

Aware she was shouting – and worse, that those shouts had drawn curious glances from further along the deck – she stepped back and lowered her voice. “She shouldn’t have been there.”

“She wanted to go,” Vallant replied equably. “I’d no right to stop her.”

“You mean you didn’t care if she sacrificed herself for your cause.”

“Put yourself in my position. Wouldn’t you rather send someone willing?”

“She was grieving,” Kat snapped. “She wasn’t in any condition to make that choice.”

“I don’t force people to fight, but I’ll always offer them a way to make it count. Sometimes defiance is all we have.”

Suddenly Kat was back in Xanathros Alabastra, Azra’s hand in hers and her heart thick with desperation. I don’t want them to win. But was Vallant even winning? She balled a fist. “You think I don’t know that?”

Vallant’s eyes touched briefly on her curled fingers. He folded his arms. “What do you want from me, Kat? If it’s my thanks, you have them. Tatterlain and Vathi are still speaking to me, even if you’re not. Rîma too, when she’s able. The plan went to smoke and you rescued it.”

“They exaggerate.”

“Several hundred Qersali now safely on the road to Laqosi would say otherwise.”

She’d seen the tail end of the column as it had left Mezzerin. She hoped Erisi and her people found a better welcome at their destination. “I’m surprised you didn’t try to recruit them.”

“We’ll be back that way before long.” He shrugged. “I imagine a few will show interest.”

Did nothing get through to the man? That damned shield of earnestness deflected everything. Kat gritted her teeth. “Would you have abandoned Rîma?”

“It would have been like cutting a piece of myself away, but I’d have done it. I’m more grateful than I can say that you brought her back to me. But this is war, Kat. I can’t choose who lives and who dies. I can only make those deaths count.”

“And what are they counting for? Twenty years you’ve been flailing around out here and you’re no closer to overthrowing the Bascari, let alone the Eternity King. What does victory look like? Do you even know? Or do you just want a Copper Road of your own? A bloody trail across the sands that no one can ignore?” She paused, flushed with anger. “Maybe you’re part of the problem. Did you ever consider that?”

“Every day. And then I remember that guilt is a luxury. It means I have a choice. That’s why I can’t stop.” He stepped closer, eyes burning and his voice hard. “I can’t face Nyssa knowing that I didn’t do everything in my power.”

Kat thought back to her first conversation with Zephyr and her claims that Vallant was trapped inside his own obsessions just as surely as the Issnaîm had sought to trap Tzal within his. “Zephyr spoke of a land beyond the Veil. Maybe it’s better to flee than to fight.”

Vallant offered a wry smile. “Zephyr has many stories, and she’s never presented a sliver of proof. A dream of a paradise remains a dream. I have to put my trust in waking worth.”

He turned around, hands on the bulwark’s rail, and stared out into the mote-strewn night. “I’m more sorry than I can say about Jaîna. Sorrier still that you had to feel her slip away. No one should ever have to…” He hung his head, genuine sorrow breaking through his earnest facade. He tapped his black eye. “If a matching pair will settle things between us, then swing away. But I have to walk this path until I no longer need to, or I no longer can. I hope for the former, but I’m resigned to the latter.”

Kat’s knuckles creaked as she relaxed her fist. Flattening Vallant would only entrench him. “I’m not.”

“Khalad is poorer for it.”

She snorted. Earnestness hadn’t worked, nor guilt, so now it was flattery. “I helped you at Zoyen.” And would likely be forevermore haunted by her victims. “I expect you to keep our bargain.”

“Tatterlain has already made enquiries by heraldic. It may take a few days, but we’ll find the woman you seek.”

The Chainbreaker put into Athenoch the following morning, their inbound voyage around three days shorter than their outbound one – a discrepancy Zephyr shrugged away with the now-familiar refrain of We all leave things behind in the mists. It didn’t leave Kat any clearer as to whether they’d abandoned time, distance or some other, even more disturbing option. She’d no chance to have Zephyr explain further, because the Chainbreaker departed almost at once with Tatterlain among the passengers.

Kat spent the next two days talking with Yali or roaming the hills around Athenoch, restless and frustrated. Fortunately, Vallant knew better than to come near, though on the first day she spied him out working the fields, and on the second hauling stone blocks as part of a labour chain restoring one of the city’s humbled buildings. Of the Mistrali, there was no sign. Another thing left behind in the mists, presumably.

As for Yali, she vanished in search of Qarian almost as soon as the Chainbreaker had tied up at the pier. Kat was content to let her pursue love’s young dream in whatever variation she chose. Yali’s prolonged absences from their simple cottage allowed for privacy and contemplation. But there was also a deeper reason. One that would wait a while yet.

On the third day, she was halfway around her now-familiar loop beneath the pines of the western hills when she encountered a familiar figure beneath the trees, the tails of her patchwork coat brushing at the sun-bleached grass. For once, Rîma wore neither hat nor scarf, leaving her features unclouded and her white hair twitching on the breeze. Everything below her face was swathed in the familiar black linens, and the ever-present sword sat sheathed against her back. For a woman literally in pieces days before, she looked better than she’d any right to. In fact, she looked as though nothing had ever happened to her.

“It is said that those who walk alone do so to outpace their own thoughts,” said Rîma.

Kat halted and folded her arms, a mock scowl concealing her sudden joy. “It is? By whom?”

“By me, just now. Weren’t you listening?”

Rîma’s unsteady approach along the rutted path revealed the extent of her injuries where her appearance had not, the fluid grace that was so much part of her being nowhere to be seen. Kat embraced her, and at once wished that she had not. Once in contact, it was impossible to forget the withered and shrunken flesh hidden beneath the bindings. The seemingly dead flesh of a woman ordinarily more vital than Kat herself. A rush of shame accompanied the realisation, and a flash of unintended rigidity that she could no more resist than she could will her heart to stillness.

“It’s all right, Kat,” said Rîma. “I understand. More than that, I owe you an explanation.”

Kat stepped away. “You owe me nothing.”

“You saved my life. An explanation is nothing beside that, so long as you promise it will remain between us.” Rîma stared up through the trees, at the lazy orb of the sun crawling through the sky. “But it’s too wonderful a day to offer it in the shade, do you not agree?”

They set off along the path, leaving the knot of black pines behind, Kat careful to match Rîma’s pace. For a time, Rîma said nothing, and Kat wondered if she’d changed her mind about explaining herself. But as they turned a corner above a gently burbling stream, she at last broke the silence.

“Before there was Khalad, there was something else. You know this. A hundred petty kingdoms, swallowed up by Caradan Diar’s wars of unification.”

Kat nodded. Such was the basis of scripture, and the Eternity King’s legend. “When I was a girl, my tutor knew all the names and in which Age of Fire they fell.”

“Those kingdoms rose out of the ruins of something else. However, they weren’t really ruins at all, not in the sense the histories tell. They were simply places we’d abandoned.” Rîma stared up at the sky. “I was brought into this world one hundred and ten thousand, four hundred and sixty-three years ago, and even then we were sliding into decay.”

Kat stumbled to a halt, her boots scuffing wisps of dust from the path. “Did you say a hundred thousand?” A thousand fireblood lifetimes. More, for those who toiled beneath them. “That’s impossible.”

“For you. But we are not you. Nyssa brought us forth from the same flame, but she did not make us the same. She was a kinder goddess then, and sought to spare us the burden of death. Age humbled us, but it couldn’t kill us. As the need for sustenance faded with passing years, we simply shrouded our bodies and hid our faces behind golden masks.” Rîma flexed a gloved hand and stared at the fingers as though they didn’t truly belong to her. “Infirmity we staved off through alchemical and aethereal means.”

“But your face…”

“My one conceit. I am just petty enough to need to see myself in the mirror. The woman I remember being.” She shrugged. “And I could hardly walk among you otherwise.”

Kat shook her head, wrestling with Rîma’s words. “I’ve never even heard of something like this.”

“You’ve seen it, even if you didn’t recognise what you saw. Your cities are built upon the bones of places we left behind.” Rîma spread a hand so that her fingers encompassed her impossibly youthful features. “The masks your custodians wear are kin to ours, if in silver rather than gold. The process of fashioning a koilos owes everything to our techniques for staving off eternity. There are fragments of our language scattered throughout yours. You may not be of our flesh, but you are our children, just the same.”

She set off again, stones crunching beneath her halting tread.

Thoughts fogged by impossible notions rendered as inevitable fact, Kat hastened to keep pace. “Can you even die?”

“Oh yes, though as so little of me functions the way it once did, I’m far less fragile than your kind. It’s hard to bleed out when you’ve no blood. But without last breath I heal slowly, when I do so at all. In places I’m as much steel pins and leather bindings as I am original flesh. Some repairs I’ve made myself, others are Vallant’s work.” Rîma cocked her head and offered a slight smile. “Don’t look so appalled. We’re all of us restless souls dancing in meat-sack marionettes. My strings are closer to the surface, that’s all.”

Kat winced. Had her thoughts really been so obvious? “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean any offence.”

“None was taken. I’m glad you didn’t scream and run away.”

“That would be rude.”

“Yes, but understandable. You really did save my life.”

Older and deeper than you might think, is Khalad. Zephyr had the right of it. Just how much had been forgotten, or hidden? There was comfort to be found in the fact that Nyssa had given life to Rîma’s folk. But it left one question unanswered.

“What happened to your people?” Kat asked.

“As your kind rose to prominence, we retreated below ground and let drifting sands bury all trace of our remaining cities. We’d no use of crops any longer, so it cost nothing to seal ourselves away from the sun and the rain. I was barely your age when it began, born into one of the last generations before eternity finally wore us down.”

Kat frowned. “You said old age couldn’t kill you.”

“It had no need. Each passing year saw fewer and fewer children born in the Hidden Cities, until there were none at all. We stopped looking forward. Remembrance swallowed the present, and the past grew fat feasting on the future. We measured time by ritual and judged worth by adherence to tradition. A ceremony for every occasion, and all of it empty. We made a curse of Nyssa’s gift and ourselves the cogs in a purposeless machine. She abandoned us soon after.”

Kat shuddered, the sun’s warmth suddenly far away. “It sounds horrible.”

“There’s a joy to belonging. For most, it was worth any compromise.”

“But not you.”

“I once told you that love binds us when all else falters. It binds my people no longer. I left when my grandfather no longer remembered my name, just my title. When entire streets became tombs for living corpses who stirred only at the strike of bells calling them to worship at a flameless altar, or to feasts where nothing but the memory of food was ever served. I stole my grandfather’s sword, and I left. I can never return.”

“Can you be sure there’s anything to return to?”

Rîma closed her eyes, a tremor creeping into her voice. “Those same bells chime for me even now. I feel them in the pit of my heart. I think we all do.”

“We?”

“I’m not the only one who fled the Hidden Cities, though we are few. Most keep to themselves. A few linger among your kind as qalimîri.”

Marida. Had the patron of the Thornless Rose once been like Rîma?

“And Vallant?”

“I wandered a long time before we crossed paths. He gave me a reason to fight when I needed it most.”

“Because Khalad is becoming the same as the Hidden Cities?” Kat guessed.

Rîma’s approving nod provoked a flush of pride. “Indeed. Your lives are short enough as they are. They should count for something.”

“Azra always said that you had to find your place in Khalad, otherwise someone would find it for you.” Kat waited for the rush of guilt and loss that came from remembrance. It arrived on cue, but as mere smouldering embers rather than the roaring flame of days and weeks past. A burden that had nearly crushed her was growing lighter. She hated that it was so. “Too many settle for what is found for them.”

“You sound like Vallant.”

Kat scowled. “We’re nothing alike.”

“Give it time.” Rîma gazed at her, looking as though she wanted to say something more. But when she finally spoke, she left Kat with the lingering suspicion that the words were not the ones she’d originally intended. “I never thanked you for retrieving my sword, did I?”

“I don’t know why I did. It just seemed like the right thing to do.”

“I thank you anyway.” Rîma’s voice danced with amusement.

“That challenge of yours. The whole ‘Are you sure you wish to go through with this?’ Why do you offer it?”

“I told you before, you’re all children to me. Shadflies dancing above deep waters and ignorant of the danger swimming beneath.” She smiled wanly. “If I’m to kill children, offering them chance to reconsider is the very least I can do.”

When Kat returned to the cottage a little before noon, she was surprised to find Yali and Vallant deep in conversation at the kitchen table. She’d little desire to speak to Vallant, but Yali was smiling, and so Kat resolved to be personable as she joined them at the table.

||I hear you’ve been talking to Rîma.|| As ever, Vallant’s signing was workmanlike and unsteady, the furrow of his brow speaking to the effort of translation.

||Apparently I remind her of you,|| Kat replied.

||That’s a terrible thing to say.||

||Yes.||

So much for being personable. Vallant still wore his earnest expression, but Kat was starting to suspect it concealed more than it revealed.

For her part, Yali regarded them both warily. ||If you’re going to fight, I think I’d like to leave.||

||One of Tatterlain’s messengers arrived on the Chainbreaker this morning. I have the information you requested.|| Vallant put the slightest emphasis on the word. ||Are you sure you want it?||

Kat frowned. ||Why wouldn’t I?||

||I know you think I don’t listen, but I do. I’ve been thinking about how I got here, and where you’re going. Do you know why I do all this?||

She hesitated, but the truth was plain enough, even if she didn’t care for his methods. ||To change things.||

||That’s what I tell myself, but Tythia was always the better part of me. She showed me that something could be done to set things right. Had she lived…?|| Vallant went still mid sign, his eyes no longer on Kat but on something lost deep in the past. ||Had she never crossed my path…?||

Yali laid a hand on his arm, his sleeve bunching beneath her fingers. He nodded his thanks and forged on.

||I like to think Countess Bascari didn’t know Tythia and Sadia were with me when she gave the order to bring us down, but I’ve always been too generous. Tythia died when our barque crashed. Sadia just faded away in my arms. Nothing but that damnable mist. Sometimes, when we make passage of the Veil, I hear her voice.||

A pit opened up in Kat’s heart. Feeling Jaîna slip through her fingers had been bad enough. She couldn’t imagine losing a daughter, much less under such horrific circumstances. Her heart ached with pity. Realising it was exactly what Vallant wanted, she smothered it.

||Why are you telling me this?|| she said, ignoring Yali’s disapproving look.

||Back on the ship, I told you that I have to make all the deaths count for something, but the truth is I’d do this for Tythia and Sadia alone. I don’t know any other way to be.||

And there it was, a confession of sorts that Bashar Vallant, hero of the downtrodden, wasn’t their hero at all, but a man unable to let go of vengeance. Love binds us when all else falters, Rîma had said. It bound Vallant tightest of all.

||That’s the difference between us,|| Kat replied. ||I’m not looking to avenge myself on a nation. Just one person.||

Vallant smiled without humour. ||That’s how it begins.|| Sighing, he pushed back his chair and rose. ||The woman you seek is still at large in Tyzanta’s Undertown.||

||Tatterlain’s certain?||

||I imagine so. Blondes have never been common in central Khalad, and your description was somewhat lurid. Apparently she’s implicated in some Bascari scandal. Barîq has all the details. He’ll meet you at the Chainbreaker.||

He left the cottage without a backward glance, leaving Kat and Yali staring at each other across the table.

||So,|| said Yali, her eyes agleam. ||When do we leave?||

Kat winced. For all that she’d known this moment was coming, she’d found no easy way to prepare for it. ||We don’t.||

Yali narrowed her eyes. ||What? You need me. Even if this woman doesn’t give you any trouble, you’re still wanted by the custodium.|| Her signs broke apart in wild gesticulations without ready translation. ||Sisters stick together, remember?||

||I’m going there to kill someone. Not to survive, not out of some idealistic notion of freedom, or to save someone else, but because I need to give Azra peace.|| Kat’s throat tightened. ||Even if I survive the attempt, it’ll leave my soul stained. Nyssa won’t look kindly on that, and I don’t want you sharing the burden.||

Yali’s chair crashed back as she leapt to her feet, her face contorted in hurt and anger. The first tears welled in red-rimmed eyes. ||That’s my choice, not yours!||

Slowly, carefully, Kat rose, saddened at how quickly this had spun out of control, but accepting that it was perhaps for the best. ||Not this time.||

She pulled the front door ajar. The blue brilliance of morning had faded to grey.

||You promised you’d take me with you if you left, remember that?|| Yali pinched trembling lips tight. ||We were sat right here. Did I dream that?||

||I’m not leaving. I’m just… going away for a while. I’m sorry.||

Before Kat could change her mind, she stepped out into the grey afternoon.

Forty-Two

For the second time in recent memory, Damant woke to an insistent knock on his chamber door. He threw aside the covers, sleep scattering before dreadful possibilities. Mirela might have been locked away – her husband and children virtually prisoners themselves in the estate lodge – but the Spirehawks weren’t the only gang in Tyzanta eager for opportunity, and coin made even cowards brave.

He tugged on a robe and pulled open the door. Sinair froze in the act of knocking a second time.

“What is it?” he asked gruffly.

She stared at her feet. “There’s been an accident.”

Cold foreboding rushed through Damant’s veins. “The Countess?”

“Not exactly.”

He followed Sinair through the servants’ passageways and out into the cold grey dawn. Mistrali rains pattered against flagstones and rooftops with the waning enthusiasm of a storm almost spent. A shimmering green haze against brooding clouds warned of the Aurora Eternis gathering to mischief. Damant barely noticed the cold. He’d eyes only for the motionless, huddled body halfway between the shattered third-storey window and the rose garden’s path, her ivory blouse and diaphanous green skirts already sodden. Rain-diluted blood trickled into the shallow stone gutter.

Boots crunching on broken glass, Damant dismissed the custodians standing vigil and knelt. Sherabi would no longer tend the Countess’ needs, nor serve as comfort in the slow days of omen rot decline.

“Nyssa receive you with favour,” he murmured, and clambered to his feet, looking again at his surroundings. His heart sank another notch. “An accident, you said?”

“That’s what I told the others,” said Sinair. “I don’t know if the story will take.”

Damant nodded, proud that she’d recognised the truth, but heartsick she’d had need. Sherabi had landed too far from the window for it to be a simple fall. She’d been pushed, and with some force. The list of suspects was unhappily short. The broken window belonged to the Countess’ workroom.

“I tried to speak with her before waking you. She wouldn’t let me into her quarters.” Sinair’s lip twisted in bitter mirth. “Called me terrible things through the door. I won’t repeat them.”

Damant closed his eyes. “And Lady Yennika?”

“Left early for Xanathros Alabastra. I’d have sent a runner, but with the Voice due I assumed she’d prefer to remain undisturbed. Was I wrong?”

Damant stared bleakly down at Sherabi’s body. “No, you did right. Send someone for a shriversman to perform the odysseri rites. Tell him to let her spirit pass. If she has debts, House Bascari will pay them.” Not an option Sherabi’s family would have. Honest shriversmen would respect the request, but finding an honest shriversman was a luxury few cinderbloods could afford. “I’ll have someone inform her kin.”

“Sir.” Sinair’s brow furrowed. “What about the countess?”

He stared up at the broken window and glimpsed a shadow beyond the jagged glass. “I’ll talk to her.”

The door to the Countess’ chambers was locked, but Damant possessed an impressive array of keys and little patience for protocol that morning.

“Lady?” he called softly as he set the outer door to. “It’s Ihsan.”

He headed deeper. He made no attempt to wave the lumani into life. In the dark, he could pretend none of it was real. Light brought truth, and truth would wait – if only a little while. There was no question of the Countess facing a judicator’s court. Not over a cinderblood’s death. But a higher authority remained. Damant hoped that Nyssa would understand that the omen rot was responsible. The one saving grace was that Tanith had been moved into Jorais’ old east wing quarters after Mirela’s attack, so she at least would be spared this fresh horror until morning.

He found the Countess in her workroom, a night robe wrapped tight about her thin shoulders and her grey hair in rare disarray. The remnants of the broken portraits had been tidied away, leaving only the most recent – likely her final – work alone on its easel in the centre of the room. What Damant had taken for a hateful expression before now seemed more like fear – no longer Tythia at all, but a mirror of the Countess, the burdens of years laid out in every wrinkle and crow’s foot.

In the portrait’s welling, pleading eyes, Damant saw his own guilt reflected. He’d avoided these rooms – avoided even speaking to her. Too jealous of unsullied memories. Too determined to remember her as she’d been. He’d left Sherabi to bear a duty that should have been his, and now Sherabi was dead.

“What do you want, Damant?” The Countess’ voice was a thin, bitter rasp. It had been years since she’d addressed him by anything other than his given name.

“To talk. That’s all.”

He edged closer. New details took shape in the gloom. The blood on the Countess’ fingernails. That her eyes were pinched shut as if in great pain.

“I take it the skirl’s dead?” She lingered on every word, savouring their flavour.

Damant’s gut twisted. Sherabi had only ever cared for the Countess. Terrified, she’d faced down a Spirehawk with only a poker for a weapon. “Why did you do it?”

Closer to the window now, he eyeballed the distances. He wouldn’t have credited the Countess with the strength to hurl Sherabi so far, but he supposed anger lent a body strength and the ravages of omen rot lent anger like nothing else.

“You’re standing too close,” sneered the Countess, “but then you always have. To catch a whiff of scent. A chance touch. Maybe more than that. What will it take for you to leave me alone? A kiss?” She tugged at her silk belt, her voice growing harsher. “Or maybe you didn’t see your fill that night beneath the stars?”

“Lady, no!”

Reeling with hurt, Damant grabbed her hand before she could loosen her robe. With an ear-splitting shriek, she raked at his eyes with the other. He staggered into the easel, sending the portrait crashing to the floor.

Heart pounding, he spun about, expecting another attack. But the Countess was slumped against the wall, her head in her hands and tears streaming down her cheeks.

“Help me, Ihsan,” she said, her words thick with heartache. “Please.”

The Mistrali hammered on Xanathros Alabastra with force enough to leave tarpaulins ripping and tearing about the fire-blasted upper reaches. Scaffolding creaked in the high winds, a tangle of bent poles and broken boards at the north-west corner testament to partial collapse. A double line of redcloaks barred Damant’s passage at the main door – others patrolled the gardens like the ghosts of bloodstains past – forcing him to wait, dripping wet and with uncertain temper, while Yennika was found.

“Ihsan, you’re late.” Her tone suggested concern. Her expression did not. Conclave promised to be especially fraught. “The Voice could finish communing with the Eternity King at any time.”

Damant threw a glance at the nearest redcloak. “We must talk. In private.”

Yennika’s scowl deepened. “Very well.” She stalked across the tiles and hauled open a door to a steep double-spiralled stairway. “In here.”

Damant had seldom descended those stairs. They led into the depths of the xanathros – perhaps even beyond the base of Tyzanta’s spire – to the Abidtzal prayer chambers, where the penitent, through prayer, sought the mercy of Nyssa Benevolas. The desperate even offered up fragments of their souls in atonement for their sins, as scripture promised that annulling mortal transgression before being called to Nyssa’s judgement speeded the cycle of rebirth.

The Abidtzal chambers – known colloquially as “abyssal chambers”, for they were as famously dank and lightless as the Outer Dark of myth – were necessarily deep to increase the chance that the prayers of the wretched might pass beneath the world to Nyssa’s Obsidium Palace in the Stars Below, whence the goddess might hear and perhaps be moved to send fire to burn the sin away. Penitents went mad for want of that flame. Some recovered. Others simply vanished gibbering into the darkness, fleeing the kindness of a sword.

Damant had little idea how deep the stairs went, and less if such plenary absolution worked, but it certainly kept dinars flowing into Alabastra’s coffers. Not the happiest of locations, but at least the thick walls offered privacy.

Yennika listened in silence as he recounted the morning’s events, her expression growing ever more grim. “What did the physician say?”

“Talyanni claims she’s never seen someone deteriorate so fast. She says…” Damant swallowed to clear a tight throat. “She says it’s a matter of days.”

“Poor Sherabi,” murmured Yennika. “And poor Aunt Elinor too. Thank you for your discretion, Ihsan.”

“It’s my duty,” he replied stiffly.

“We both know it’s more than that.” She fixed him with a businesslike stare. “Are you fit to fulfil your other responsibilities?”

One in particular. “Now more than ever. Is Mirela to contest the accusations?”

“The Voice might decide to speak with her. Otherwise she can rot in that cell for all I care.” Yennika shrugged, a hint of malice breaking through into her smile. “She deserves more time with her brother, don’t you think?”

Damant stifled a disgusted scowl. He understood the fitting irony to having Mirela guarded by the skeletal remnant of the brother whose incompetence had facilitated her crimes. His heart, caring little for intellect’s whimsy, found it abhorrent. But it wasn’t for him to judge Yennika’s decision. “Let’s get this over with.”

Footsteps echoing between the flame-graven pillars, they made the long walk to the altar. Silence was alien to Xanathros Alabastra, where at any time of day hundreds of citizens came to borrow money from the temple’s munificents, plead extension on old debts or simply offer worship to Nyssa. That morning, the only occupants were members of the Voice’s personal guard and those few members of Tyzanta’s citizenry she’d called to conclave.

She’d arrived the previous afternoon. Five vast black-hulled dhows escorting a gilded galleon whose aethersails glittered like dragonfly wings. Two thousand redcloaks and two hundred koilos, as well as an army of scribes, sailriders, handmaidens, courtiers, trumpeters, chefs and food tasters. Most were still aboard ship at Fasra Quay, all save the redcloaks, who if not standing sentry at the xanathros perimeter lined the altar approach in silent serried ranks.

As to the conclave attendees, some were inevitable by their presence. Hierarch Zaran Ossed in full ceremonial robes, his beard trimmed and oiled into some semblance of presentability. Julan Aroth, neat and urbane as ever. A pair of cinderblood merchants, notable by their finery not being quite so fine as they perhaps thought, and a knot of templars dispatched from neighbouring cities to represent the Hythaka, Menaqi and Jovîna families. The Voice herself remained out of sight behind the lacquer-work altar screen.

“Ah, Castellan.” Aroth broke off from his conversation and offered a shallow nod of greeting. “My condolences for the recent tragedies. Elinor is fortunate to have your services.”

He knew? Already? Belatedly Damant realised that Aroth was speaking of the events surrounding Salenna’s death. Typical fireblood double-talk. Tragedies were senseless, whereas that had been a calculated matter. “Thank you, Minister.”

Julan never had the opportunity to respond, because it was then that Isdihar Diar, Voice of the Eternity King, emerged from behind the altar screen and descended the carpeted stairs to the chancel floor.

She was held to be the nine hundred and fifty-second Voice, though the number was symbolic more than accurate, as no one save the Eternity King knew how many generations of his family had passed since his ascension to the throne immortal during the first Age of Fire. She carried herself with the unshakeable confidence of one born to privilege, and was arrayed in impossible wealth. If her gold and sable robes were worth more than the finest palace in Tyzanta, then the tall ruby-set crown, which went some way to compensating for less than impressive height – without it, she was barely five feet tall – could have purchased entire cities.

As for the young woman herself – despite having not yet reached her fifteenth year, no one in their right mind would have dared called Isdihar Diar a girl – a fortune in cosmetics elevated the simply mortal to the startlingly divine. Metallic powder burnished bronze skin to a rich lustre. Tentacular black lines curled outward from shadowed eyes to encompass cheek and temple, adding weight to an already penetrating stare. Jet-black hair braided and beaded so that it fell bar-straight to the small of her back completed an aspect no less a mask than those worn by custodians, designed to deflect the onlooker’s attention from the face behind. Scrub away the make-up, unbind the hair, trade the finery for common silks, and Damant could have passed Isdihar Diar in the streets and not known her. But with it all in place, even in illustrious company that included Hierarch Ossed in his full panoply, she shone like the sun.

“In the name of Caradan Diar, the Eternity King, we call this conclave to order.” She delivered the ceremonial words in a flat, even tone, leavened by just a hint of her deceased father’s northland burr. Another might have trembled with the insincere arrogance of youth, but Isdihar Diar had little reason for insecurity. She was the Voice of the Eternity King, and if her word was not final, then she’d two thousand spears ready to make it so. “Let Nyssa judge our words and our deeds.”

This last she leavened with a slight smile, the mask of state cracking to acknowledge pomposity. Whatever the Voice’s burdens, they had not yet made her old.

Damant took up position between Yennika and Aroth as the circle formed. Strange to hold conclave without a statue of Nyssa to bear word to Zariqaz, but such things were unnecessary in the Voice’s presence. Everything she saw and heard was known to the Eternity King at the moment of its happening.

Isdihar began a slow, regal walk about the circle’s inner face. “We regret that tragedy and failure brings us to Tyzanta. Just as my ancestral sire holds the Veil at bay through tireless force of will, it falls to the rest of us to maintain order through vigilance. It demands sacrifice, even cruelty. But Khalad is like this glorious xanathros. If even a single arch fails, it will bring ruin on us all. Too many arches are crumbling after events on the Copper Road. There is uproar all across the south-east. People who thought Vallant a myth now wield his name as a talisman, and in Qersal the zol’tayah asks why she should bow the knee to Zariqaz when Khalad’s own people do not. This state of affairs cannot continue.” She halted before Ossed, who lowered his eyes rather than meet her gaze, and cast a lingering glance around the circle. “But first, we understand that House Bascari seeks a petition.”

Yennika pursed her lips, regained her composure and stepped forward. “We do, majesty, though it might be more proper to say that I bring the petition on behalf of my Aunt Elinor, who is sadly too unwell to attend.”

“Lady Yennika.” Isdihar inclined her head, the slight smile returning. “You would appear to have outgrown your reputation.”

“Thank you, majesty.” Yennika bowed. “You spoke of order. It shames me that there are those of my family who have undermined that order for their own ambition. Everyone here already knows the role my cousin Jorais played in the slighting of this very building, but his sin was merely laxness. Not a week ago, Mirela conspired to the murder of her sister, my own dear cousin Salenna, as well as myself and Countess Elinor. In one stroke she meant both to erase the error of judgement that left the Copper Road vulnerable and to remove all obstacles to the family title.”

“You offer troubling accusations… if true,” said Isdihar. “We assume there is proof?”

“My – I mean to say Countess Elinor’s – castellan has been most thorough. May he be permitted to speak?”

“Naturally.”

“Then I present Castellan Ihsan Damant.”

Damant took a deep breath and stepped into the circle. “Majesty, I…”

The statement he’d prepared faded to ash on his tongue as he met the Voice’s gaze. He fought to still a trembling leg and realised that the handmaidens who’d laboured so with brush and ink to prepare their mistress for conclave had wasted their time. Those eyes needed neither beauty nor the threat of massed spears to intimidate.

Something unutterably old and calculating lurked in the darkness behind Isdihar’s pupils, the weight of aeons distilled into that unblinking stare. He’d only ever felt so insignificant in Marida’s presence, and even then an order of magnitude separated the two. If he’d doubted the bond between the Eternity King and his Voice, he no longer did so.

“It’s all right, Castellan.” Her voice lost a little of its pomposity, the northland burr taking hold as she shifted from the regal plural that indicated she was speaking for both herself and the Eternity King, to the personal, singular form. “Fear no truth in my sight. Speak, and my sire will hear you.”

Somehow Damant found the strength to tear his gaze from hers and focus on Ossed, standing opposite in the circle. A bearded smirk betrayed that the hierarch knew exactly what had just befallen. A flash of anger helped Damant find his voice.

“Majesty, the facts are simple enough…”

He launched into his statement, careful always to keep his gaze anywhere but on Isdihar’s, detailing Livisca’s confession, the Jovîna tetrams and the threats Mirela had made at conclave.

“We find this most troubling,” said Isdihar. “Has she confessed?”

“She has not, majesty.”

“Then you have little proof and much conjecture.”

Those were more than enough to execute a cinderblood, but standards were different where firebloods were concerned. “Yes, majesty.”

Aroth cleared his throat. “I was present at the conclave meeting the castellan describes, as was Hierarch Ossed. If anything, he understates Mirela Bascari’s vitriol. Would you not agree, Zaran?”

Ossed scowled, but nodded. “I must concur.”

“Furthermore,” Aroth continued, “I’ve no hesitation in saying that Castellan Damant is the most honest and diligent of men. If he believes Mirela’s guilt, I believe it.”

Isdihar walked the circle until she was face to face with Aroth. He too was careful not to meet her gaze. “And you believe your judgement supersedes ours, Minister?”

“No.” Irritation crept into his voice. “And you know that’s not how I meant it. I’m merely offering my opinion.”

She retraced her steps to Damant. “A strange castellan you are, to accuse one of your family. Cinderbloods have died for less.”

“I do not do so lightly.”

“Then it is your belief that Mirela Bascari is guilty, without doubt or favour?”

“It is.”

She addressed the circle, her voice once more cloaked in ritual and authority. “Does anyone here disagree?” No one did, or at least no one was prepared to give the matter voice. The Jovîna templar, in particular, wore an expression of scarcely contained rage. “Then in the name of order, it is our will that Mirela Bascari be brought to Zariqaz and receive our justice upon the Golden Stair.”

His ordeal ended, Damant returned to his place in the circle, desperate to mop his brow but too proud to do so.

“Lady Yennika,” said Isdihar. “Our understanding is that Countess Elinor will soon be called to Nyssa’s judgement.”

The corner of Yennika’s lips twitched, the brush of her hand almost swift enough to sweep aside a tear without notice. “I fear so.”

Isdihar inclined her head. “Then it is our decree that the titles and responsibilities of House Bascari pass to you and your heirs, irrespective of inheritance or will.”

“Mirela has a husband. Children.”

“We understand the family have holdings in the west, near Kezedi. It would be better if they shepherded those. Minister Aroth, you will undertake the arrangements?”

“With the greatest pleasure, majesty.”

Damant concealed a grimace. For all the fine words, it was a sentence of exile, and exile bred resentment. Mirela’s husband had never shown much ambition, but who could say what desire the children would inherit? A problem for the future. A problem for Damant’s successor, most likely.

Isdihar turned to Yennika. “I trust this is acceptable?”

“I…” Yennika stumbled, speechless. “Thank you, majesty. I shan’t let you down.”

“No, you won’t.” Her smile wasn’t quite malicious, but nor was it wholly friendly. “And now perhaps we may turn to the reason for our presence. Bashar Vallant is a distraction Khalad can no longer afford. Some in this room have indulged him. Others have dismissed him. The time has come to bring him to his knees.”

Yennika shot a sly glance across the circle at Aroth. “Actually, majesty, the matter is already in hand, I’m just waiting for a few more pieces to fall into place.”

By the time Damant returned to the estate, the indigo fires of the scattered torch houses were burning bright in defiance of the mists. The malaise borne by every averted gaze and furtive whisper owed debts elsewhere. Word of Sherabi’s death had spread.

Sinair met him on the conclave hall path, her silvered mask now bearing the overseer’s inverted crimson triangle. “She’s asking for you.”

Damant wished he’d a mask of his own to hide his jumble of loss, frustration and guilt. “How are things here?”

Sinair twitched a shoulder. “I’m sure you’ve seen. Sherabi was popular. Pretty little skirls like her always are for as long as the heart matches the face. Between that and Lady Salenna, the Veil taking the Copper Road and that old nonsense of an amashti loose in the grounds? Well, some good news wouldn’t go amiss right now.”

Damant grunted. He’d forgotten about Mirela’s claims of a prowling daemon. Had she been plotting Salenna’s death even then, only for Yennika’s arrival to throw a spanner into the gears? With Jorais destroyed by his failure to protect Xanathros Alabastra, Salenna would otherwise have been the only obstacle. “This family is cursed, sure enough, but by ambition, not daemons. I’ll order an extra ration of blesswood be sent to the fires. That might settle a few nerves.”

“Yes, sir. As to the good news?”

“Lady Yennika seems to think we’ll have it in the form of Vallant’s head.” Though how that was to be done, he still wasn’t sure. He and most of the conclave had been dismissed so that Yennika and Aroth could continue their discussion with the Voice. “Let’s hope she’s right.”

Leaving Sinair to mull the news, Damant headed for the Countess’ rooms. Heartened at assurances that no one had entered or left since the physician had departed, he knocked on the bedchamber door. “Lady. It’s Ihsan.”

“Please enter.”

The Countess at least looked more like herself. She sat up in bed, her hair in some semblance of order and her eyes alert for all that her face was furrowed with unspoken pain.

Damant stood at the end of the bed. Before, he’d have sat at her bedside, but her spiteful words of the morning still echoed. “How are you feeling, lady?”

She grimaced, perhaps recognising the reason for his distance. “Almost like myself.” Her voice became more breath than whisper. “I’ve done such terrible things, Ihsan. Blessed Nyssa…”

The choked sob broke Damant’s resolve. Crossing to the bed, he took her hand in his and steeled himself for another round of the morning’s accusations. Instead, the Countess shuddered and sank back against the headrest.

“I killed her. I killed her,” she murmured. “Just like I did before. That’s why Nyssa sent her back to me, isn’t it? It’s why she set this darkness inside me.”

Her words propelled Damant two decades into the past. The shudder of the Triumphant’s deck as shrieker cannons fired their final volley. Vallant’s barque plunging into the Veil, its ballast tanks ruptured beyond recovery and its sails ablaze. Tythia had remained on the deck to the last, arms around her half-blood daughter, a last defiant stare offered to her killer as the mists swallowed her.

He’d never forget it. His ship. His fault.

He squeezed the Countess’ hand tight. “I gave the order. I killed them, not you.”

She gave a wheezing, mirthless laugh. “And who sent you? I never should have agreed to any of it, but the Voice insisted. I thought if Vallant was disgraced, Tythia might come to her senses. And then Raith died.” She stared up at the portrait above her bed. Count Raith Bascari in his younger days. Lean, handsome and arrogant. “No order without chaos. And order is everything.”

He frowned. The shared guilt was nothing new. It was part of their bond, deeper than mistress and servant. But the rest? Fragments of a puzzle whose outline he barely glimpsed. Maybe it wasn’t a puzzle at all, but delusion let loose. And he’d news to deliver.

“Mirela is to go to Zariqaz.”

The Countess sighed. “I failed her too, didn’t I?”

Damant heard no remorse. “She failed herself.”

She pulled her hand free. “You should go. I can feel the darkness in my soul oozing free again, and there’s no telling what it might do.”

“Omen rot is just a disease, lady.”

“It’s penance, and I’m tired of fighting.” She gazed at him, lucid and imploring. “Lock the door and let no one in. I won’t hurt anyone else.”

“But lady… you must be fed.”

“No. I’m tired, Ihsan.” She closed her eyes. “Let the darkness die with me.”

Her breathing slowed and steadied to that of a body lost to sleep. Tears welling in his eyes, Damant stumbled to his feet and left the room.

Forty-Three

The tiny garret was exactly as Kat remembered. The window that leaked whenever the rain blew in from the north. The rocking chair with the spar missing from its backrest. The lone shelf with its row of spine-battered books. The faded rug that disguised sunken and squealing floorboards. The smell of cedar wood shavings to keep moths at bay. All the same. All somehow different, as if Azra’s death had robbed her home of more than its mistress. Kat supposed they’d both changed, she and the room; both moved on in a world bereft of a shared centre.

Or almost so in her case.

The door creaked. Kat spun around, dagger a silvered gleam.

Maxin halted on the threshold, hands deep in his pockets. “That little thing supposed to impress me?” he rumbled.

“Not really.” Kat sheathed her blade. “I can always beat you down again.”

He folded his arms, brow furrowing all the way back to his pate. “You got lucky.”

“Then I’ll get lucky again.”

At last Maxin’s growl became a rumbling laugh. He punched Kat’s upper arm in what he probably supposed was a playful manner. “How have you been, you trallock?”

“Busy.”

“So I hear. You’re on half the bounty boards in Undertown. Right next to Vallant.” He looked her up and down. “Not a bad likeness.”

Kat supposed she should have expected the development. Bloodgild of fifty gold tetrams was a vanishingly small amount next to the two thousands Vallant had earned, but it would keep a family fed and lodged for years. Fortunately, the warrant posters hadn’t reached as far as Evrios, where she’d traded the Chainbreaker for a railrunner, and she’d already resolved to keep her appearance under wraps in Tyzanta itself, where she’d enemies enough, custodium reward or no. A hooded cloak was a skelder’s best friend.

But she’d friends in Tyzanta too, and just enough knowledge of Javar’s business interests – legitimate or otherwise – to know how to make contact with the one she sought.

“You still with Vallant?” asked Maxin.

“That’s complicated. Your runner told you who I’m looking for?”

Maxin grunted. “You and half the city. She’s been on a spree of late. Hasn’t exactly kept a low profile since Salenna Bascari’s murder. Plenty of sightings, despite a bloodgild that puts yours to shame.”

“She was at Xanathros Alabastra the night…” Kat swallowed, unable to speak the words she’d meant to. “I owe her three deaths.”

“You’re not alone.” Maxin shook his head ruefully. “Javar was soft on Salenna Bascari. He’s taking it hard. Mirela’s been sent to Zariqaz, but it’s not enough for him.”

Sent to Zariqaz, just as Kat herself had once been. There was justice in that. “So why doesn’t he do something?”

“Pride. Doesn’t want to lose face in front of Marida. Nor Yennika Bascari, for that matter. They might have carved up the city, but it’s only a matter of time before someone starts shoving, you know?”

Kat blinked. “They’ve done what?”

“Called a truce. Can’t deny it’s bringing in the dinars. Streets are quieter than ever. Even the Voice is impressed, so Javar said.”

This was getting better and better. “The Voice is here?”

“Was. She stared down the firebloods for an afternoon, then hurried back to the comforts of Zariqaz.”

Good. Tyzanta was dangerous enough without suspicious redcloaks swarming about. But still, Marida and Javar working as one, and with the Bascari no less? “How does your boss find being back under a Bascari thumb?”

He scowled, a man revisiting a sore and oft-travelled subject. “Hates it. We all do. We’ve lost too many to Bascari ‘justice’ over the years. But as long as Marida’s playing along, he has to do the same. Can’t fight a war on two fronts.”

“Takes all I have to fight on one. I guess Marida has the same problem?”

Maxin snorted. “Her? No way. That cold-eyed qalimîri’s just biding her time. Say this alliance lasts five years, ten, fifty… It’s an eye-blink to her. She can wait for us all to rot and go back to business as usual.”

“Maybe Javar should give her a reason to change her mind.”

“No one gives anything away around here.”

Kat winced. “So you won’t help me?”

Maxin folded his arms. “Depends what you need.”

“Tessence, for a start.” Her tattoo had remained inert since leaving the Veil. Practicalities aside, its stillness was increasingly uncomfortable. “As much as you can get me.”

“Sure. Sassarin needs leaning on anyway. Hasn’t been paying his cut. What else?”

“I need her found.”

“Any muscle?”

Tempting, but there was no way to know if she could trust anyone Maxin brought in. “No. I’ll handle it.”

He glanced about at the garret. “You holing up here?”

“For now.”

“No promises, but I’ll do what I can.”

A little of Kat’s tension bled away. She’d hoped, but there’d been no guarantee how the meeting would go. “Thank you.”

He shrugged. “Skelders stick together. Tyzanta might have changed, but that hasn’t. I’ll be back at dusk.”

Dusk came and went without sign of Maxin. However, he did send a runner – a raggle-taggle young girl with uneven make-up and a crooked grin – bearing two vials of tessence and an apology for the delay. The tessence’s soulfire was a thin echo of the Deadwinds, but it roused Kat’s aetherios tattoo to a degree of life, and offered a measure of comfort to her increasingly restless soul.

Maxin finally returned a little before midnight. “Ezri find you?”

“She did.”

He grunted. “Never can tell. That niece of mine’s flighty, but she’s got promise.”

Kat abandoned the attempt to conjure a similarity between the slight, gangling Ezri and her heavyset uncle. “What do you have for me?”

“I put out the word with a handful of skelders I trust. She showed up in old Jothari’s yard about a half-hour back. No telling how long she’ll be there.”

Jothari had been a more or less reputable builder until Alabastra had grown weary of tolerating his debts. His yard was fifteen minutes’ walk away on the edge of the Salathzi district.

Kat grabbed her cloak and sword belt from the bed. “I owe you one.”

“We’ll call it square for me picking that fight on the Mornwake.” He offered a rueful grin. “Sure you don’t want company? She’s bound to have friends.”

“I can handle it. Go home, Maxin. Be with your family.”

Leaving the crumbling townhouse behind, Kat set out, mindful to keep her distance from other denizens of the steeply sloping streets of the lower spire. So deep into Undertown one could never be too careful – especially when one’s head was worthy fifty tetrams. Even so, she more than once grew wary of a possible tail. Each time she made a detour, or doubled back through the poorly lit alleys and Underways just enough to throw them off, but still she couldn’t shake the sense of being watched.

Then again, that same feeling had been with her from the moment she’d left the Chainbreaker behind. After the tranquil security of Athenoch, everywhere felt like dangerous ground.

At last she drew up opposite a wooden gateway twice her height, its once-blue hoardings cracked and peeling. No hestic on the gate, but she reluctantly discounted it as a going proposition – there could have been anyone waiting behind it.

Crossing the road, she dipped into an alleyway and scrambled onto a lean-to roof. From there an uneven, nail-biting ascent via capped smokestacks and the sills of bricked-up windows brought her to the second floor of a ruined building. Then an unsteady climb up the cracked brickwork of a collapsed furnace chimney – a thirty-five-degree ascent over a rushing sluice overflow that set her vertigo cackling – led her through a hole in the wall of a derelict warehouse along the western wall of Jothari’s yard.

And all of it without collapsing from dizziness or throwing up.

Azra would have been proud.

She crossed to the remnant of a window and peered down at the courtyard through the cracks between the planks. “Maxin was right about friends,” she murmured.

There were at least three watchers among the scaffolding that held the ramshackle buildings upright. It might even have been more – between ever-present vertigo, the pitiful illumination of a single lumani lantern and the buttresses casting star-shadows from higher up the spire, nothing was certain. There were also the hulking, tarpaulin-covered shadows to consider. Kat counted seven in plain sight, and perhaps another two in silhouette beyond the light. A small army could have hidden beneath those, though given the bulging, uneven shapes, that seemed unlikely.

“What are you, I wonder?”

A newcomer emerged from one of the smaller buildings at the courtyard perimeter and strode purposefully towards a two-storey office nestled against the spire. Even in the thin light, the coachman’s coat made it likely. The braided blonde hair made it inevitable. The assassin from Xanathros Alabastra.

“Oh, hello there…”

Kat left the window and picked her way through the maze of ruined rooms, paralleling the assassin’s course across the courtyard. Keeping track was easy enough – only every other window was boarded up, and most of those that were had at best two or three ill-fitting planks to block the view. She passed by a rotting cabinet and descended a winding staircase to a warehouse floor full of neatly palleted bricks. Beyond the outer door, the assassin vanished into the office.

The edge of the nearest tarpaulin was propped open as a makeshift tent, offering a means of crossing the courtyard unobserved. When no movement showed within, Kat darted across the open ground and slipped inside. No army, small or otherwise, awaited. Instead, the tarpaulin housed a truncated six-wheeled railrunner engine of a design she’d never seen before, evidenced by the bulbous, bottle kiln-like chamber set behind the driver’s cab. Pressure-wheeled hatches and grates studded its length. The fuel store to the kiln’s rear was in the process of being dismantled, its steel frame distended into a jagged cradle shape. She was in a breaker’s yard, old machinery being pulled apart for reuse.

Leaving the doomed railrunner behind, she slunk towards the office door. Figures at the window sent her scrambling for cover behind a stack of timber. Lit by the office lumani, the assassin’s identity was all but confirmed. The other was a woman in the same nondescript skelder’s garb as the courtyard’s watchers.

That woman moved towards the office door. Kat traded her position behind the timber for one in the lee of the office’s north-western corner. The woman crunched past, oblivious to her presence in the shadows.

A glance at the window confirmed the assassin was still inside. At Xanathros Alabastra, surprise had made all the difference. This time, Kat wanted it on her side. There was a second door on the office’s western wall, a few paces away. If she got it open, she might take the assassin unawares.

Making certain that the patrolling watcher had moved away, she crept towards the side door. A sentry crest stared down from on high, dark prismatic eyes gleaming within Nyssa’s beatific face. Thankful for Maxin’s gift of tessence, Kat stepped into the spirit world and made contact with the ifrît.

The hestic was a vigorous spirit, curious rather than belligerent. It drank down her offering of soulfire, each gulp revealing another strand of its commanding glyph. Impatient, Kat pushed harder, giving more of herself to speed the bargain along. The hestic burbled happily and acquiesced. She willed the last of the swirling, intricate design into place and prepared to break contact.

Only to suddenly become aware of another presence.

Not an ifrît. It was too warm, too vibrant, too aware for that. Distant, but near. In plain sight, and yet somehow behind her, its breath warm upon the back of her neck and its hands on her shoulders. Heart thumping, she spun around. Still the presence was behind her, its thin chuckle dancing through the smothering darkness.

I can see you, it murmured. She murmured, her eastern accent syrupy and mocking.

The assassin.

Gagging on the spirit world’s cloying lavender, Kat collapsed on hands and knees beside the door. The last of the darkness boiled away, leaving the fleeting impression of a smile she couldn’t possibly have seen. She felt the ripple as the assassin nudged the hestic fully awake.

The ifrît, quietly content moments before, screamed.

Alarmed cries pierced Kat’s grogginess, the bitter realisation of lost opportunity close behind. No time to wonder at the impossibility of what had just happened. Pushing up and away from the wall, she stumbled to her feet and raced for the warehouse.

A watcher blocked her path. “Over here!” he bellowed.

Kat feinted right and ducked left. The watcher grabbed her upper arm and spun her about. Her back jarred against a stack of bricks. She clung to the spike of pain, turned it to strength and rammed a fist into his gut. As he doubled over, gasping for breath, she snatched a brick from the pallet and broke it over his head. She was moving before he hit the ground.

She took the sagging stairs two at a time, urged on by the shouts rising behind her.

“Idiots!” The assassin’s voice rang clear across the night, cutting through the hestic’s alarm. “I want her!”

On the first landing, Kat’s right foot skidded in a puddle and shot away. The rotten banister crumbled beneath her desperate grab. She skinned her knee on the rubble-strewn screed and kept climbing. The thunder of boots on wooden steps warned of gaining pursuit. Her pursuers were too close, and too many. She needed a way to slow them down or cut the odds.

She knew she had both at the top of the stairs.

The cabinet was more rot than timber, the varnish blackened from years of neglect. Even then, emptied of contents and purpose, and fully half of its left-hand side puffing into dust as she scrabbled for a handhold, it took a series of painful shoulder-jolts to get it moving.

The footsteps drew closer. The watchers turned the last corner on the stairs.

Kat rammed her shoulder against the cabinet.

“Come on, you skrelling heap,” she hissed through the sweet, musty scent of mould. “Just… move!”

Convinced by threat or the weight of her shoulder, the cabinet lurched. Then, with surprising grace, it tipped.

The first watcher stood frozen in place, eyes wide with horror as the cabinet plunged towards her. She vanished beneath the mass of rotten wood, her scream cut off by the booming crunch of tortured wood. The ancient steps, having tolerated much over the run of a long and productive life, had finally decided to take no more. With a mournful yawn, they gave way entirely. Steps, watchers and the remnants of the cabinet plummeted to the stairs below with a sickening crash, repeated at once as the sudden impact caused those too to give way – a pattern repeated twice over before the echoes stopped.

Hugging the courtyard facing wall to avoid the worst of the collapsed roof, Kat started through the maze of rooms towards the warehouse’s far end and her makeshift bridge. A glance out of the naked window revealed a black figure scaling the warehouse wall. Coat tails and braids rippling behind, the assassin climbed from window ledge to drainpipe to cracked brickwork with prodigious speed, her gloved hands finding handholds without effort or delay.

“Kiasta,” breathed Kat, and sprinted for the end of the room.

She was still three paces away when the boards of the last window along exploded inwards as the assassin swung into the room. She released the window head and landed, legs splayed and the fingertips of her left hand briefly touching the ground for balance, between Kat and her escape.

Forty-Four

The assassin straightened and flicked her head, restoring braids dislodged by the climb to rest across her shoulders. She made no move to draw the scimitar buckled at her waist.

“She knew you’d come back.” Disgust rippled beneath the guttural words. The resentment of a woman who’d lost a wager. “Not your stupidest choice. That was coming here alone.”

Kat was tempted to agree. “I was raised to be punctual.”

The assassin narrowed her eyes, the disgust now very much meant for Kat. “Oh, I know all about how you were raised, little qori.”

She, the assassin had said. Maybe Maxin had it wrong: Marida wasn’t waiting out the current truce, she was its architect. Murdering Salenna Bascari had wounded Javar. Framing Mirela made the surviving firebloods reliant on her cooperation. And then there was the business of the office’s hestic to consider. No one had ever intruded on Kat’s communing with an ifrît, but if anyone were capable of such a thing, it would be someone tutored by a qalimîri. And Marida knew Kat’s past. She knew everyone’s past.

And she’d known everything necessary to sabotage the raid on Xanathros Alabastra.

“Impressive trick with the hestic. Want to tell me how you did that?”

The assassin cocked her head, offering the lazy, mocking smile Kat remembered all too well. “Be a good girl and come quietly. She’s eager to see you again.”

Kat drew her scimitar. She’d never had chance to learn from Rîma. Too late for that now. Too late for a lot of things. “I’ve not been a good girl in years.”

She lunged. The assassin darted back from the blade. The half-remembered forms of portico duelling had barely helped Kat in the confines of Zoyen’s torch house, but in the wide-open space of the derelict warehouse they at last found rhythm.

Darting left, she slashed at the assassin’s head. The steel scrape of the parry still echoing beneath the time-worn rafters, Kat twisted her blade and cut back. The hiss of torn fabric and the woman’s grunt of pain sounded as one. She stumbled away, free hand clapped to her collarbone.

Kat’s satisfaction darkened to grim delight. Whatever the assassin’s skills, the sword wasn’t her weapon. Maybe she didn’t need Rîma’s tutelage to win this fight. Maybe all she needed was a little of her confidence. Maybe even just a few of her words.

She struck a smile. “Are you sure you wish to go through with this?”

The assassin threw herself forward. Kat twisted, and the first blow whistled past her left shoulder. The second she barely deflected with a blind parry. The other woman was faster than she remembered, and stronger than her slight frame implied. But Kat was taller, and in the reach that offered found her advantage.

She stumbled back as the assassin swung again, the force of the blow wasted on empty air. That sliver of distance bought precious fractions of a second to respond not out of instinct, but with calculation.

The assassin’s blows grew hesitant as Kat punished each with a riposte. The languid ridicule of the young woman’s manner fell away as her breathing quickened. The smile slid into a snarl. Her blue eyes turned mirthless and hard. “You’re only winning because I’m not supposed to kill you!”

Kat lashed out, driving her back a step. Truth, or bravado? Hard to tell, but she was increasingly aware that for all her apparent advantage she’d yet to land a second blow. The assassin might have been tiring, but Kat was fading just as fast, worn thin by her antics getting into Jothari’s yard and her attempts to flee it. And there was nothing to say that even at that moment, survivors of the stairway collapse or others from the courtyard weren’t making their way through the building. Time was as much her enemy as the assassin.

She had to find the strength to end it, and fast.

Then she remembered how Azra had died, and finding the strength was no problem at all.

Driven on by loss gone unsettled too long, her back-swinging parry became a rising diagonal slice that tore a ragged line from the assassin’s chin to her brow.

The assassin screamed and staggered backwards. The sword fell from her hand and clanged on the screed floor. Triumph on her lips, Kat threw herself forward one last time.

And froze.

There was no blood. Indigo fire oozed from the gap between torn skin and the ruin of the assassin’s nose, bright almost to magenta at the edges and dark as sin when it touched her eyes. It hissed and flickered, cold and shadowless, welling under her brow and what remained of her nostrils, the soulfire of the Deadwinds set loose from living flesh. The assassin’s whole being shimmered, overlaid by the spirit world’s shadows.

Kat shook uncontrollably as a cold, primal horror crawled free from the dark spaces of her mind. Kin to the vertigo that had bedevilled so much of her life, but older. Older by far. She wanted to run, or failing that to scream, but her body betrayed her, transfixed.

“W-what are you?” she stammered.

The assassin wiped at her face. Indigo flame dripped from her fingers and spattered across the floor. She no longer seemed hurt, just angry. “Our father’s greatest work.”

Our father’s…?

Still grappling with those words, Kat barely saw the assassin pounce. A vicelike grip closed around her right wrist, another about her throat. They drove her backwards against the wall, spilling spores and dust from the rotting plasterwork.

The hand about her wrist jerked. A sharp, rotten snap, and the world drowned in red.

And screaming. Her screaming.

“Oh, be quiet.” The red receded. The flame-haunted ruin of the assassin’s face filled Kat’s vision. “I’m not meant to kill you, and I won’t.”

She released Kat’s right wrist and tore back her left sleeve. Eyes lidded against the pain, Kat lashed out with her right hand. Or tried to. It was too heavy and red raw, and her arm didn’t bend where it should.

The soulfire of her aetherios tattoo parted as gloved fingers clamped tight about her left forearm. “Pitiful,” breathed the assassin, the languid humour returning to her voice. “But it’ll do.”

She closed her eyes. The throb of Kat’s arm gave way beneath a haze of light-headedness, as if she and the world were growing ever more distant, her above, it below. The pain receded into weariness, cold yet mottled by strange contentment.

“Get… off…” she croaked.

The flames about her tattoo darkened. The assassin’s wound re-knitted, flesh and skin flowing back together, sealing away the livid, leaping indigo of her “blood”. Only a scar in the make-up remained, pale skin showing through a crack in the black powder.

“Hush,” she breathed, more solid as the spirit world’s shadows withdrew. “Just a little more.”

Contentment became a tug, a sensation not unlike an ifrît’s curiosity but a hundred times more insistent. A piece of Kat drifted away, gone before she even fully acknowledged the loss. Her tattoo felt cold and dark, her left arm as leaden as her shattered right.

The assassin was draining her, using her like a vial of last breath.

Galvanised by the realisation, Kat rammed her knee forward. It jarred against bone. The assassin yelped. Her grip slackened.

With a last, groaning effort, Kat tore free. She toppled almost at once, her broken wrist grinding as her shoulder hit the floor. Worse than the pain was the sapping emptiness in her bones, a weariness like none she’d ever known. Somehow she blotted out the pain and stumbled for the nearest doorway. No plan. Just a desperate need to escape. A mouse scurrying from a hawk and in its plight running further from safety.

The collapsed chimney – her way out – was in the other direction.

“You’re still running, qori?” called the assassin. “You really think that will work?”

Kat staggered across the threshold. Cradling her broken wrist to her chest, she pressed up against the wall. It was easier to think, somehow, if she couldn’t see the assassin. Instinct told her to play for time. “Do you really think… you’re my sister?” She gulped down a ragged breath. “I don’t have… a sister.”

She risked a glance through the doorway. The assassin stood in the centre of the room she’d just left, arms folded and looking every inch like an ordinary young woman.

What in Nyssa’s name was she?

“I’m not surprised he never talked about me,” said the assassin, her words laced with bitterness. “Not pure enough to be a Rashace. Not loved enough to be an Arvish.”

“I don’t believe you,” said Kat.

But too much tallied to dismiss the possibility outright. Both of Kat’s parents had shared her bronze skin and dark hair, but Countess Rashace had been fair-skinned and golden-haired. And the assassin’s age – if anything about her appearance could be trusted – tallied with the early years of her father’s affair, when passion might have overruled judgement.

“Really?” said the assassin. “Then explain this.”

She peeled away her left glove and rolled back her sleeve. Indigo flame flickered along her forearm, elbow to wrist, following the whorls and spirals of an intricate tattoo. She touched her eyes closed again, and the lines shifted, geometric shapes rippling out to replace the gentle curves.

“Believe me now?” she asked, her eyes still closed. “You know he never shared the secret with anyone else.”

Kat sank against the wall, dizzy in a way that had nothing to do with the grinding throb in her arm or the lingering horror of the assassin’s torn face. Could it be true? No. But then he’d kept so many secrets, hadn’t he? And there’d been that one time when she’d gone to the Great Library, thinking to surprise him. He hadn’t been there, and later claimed she’d misheard his intentions. How often had his researches disguised other errands? Even another family?

She had a sister. A sister who had killed Azra.

“He talked about you all the time,” the assassin ground on. “I even saw you once or twice. At first he promised that if I learned to control myself, we’d be able to play together.”

“What do you mean?”

Her tone darkened. “I scared him. I’d always had a friend no one else could see. Our father said she wasn’t real, but I knew better. She’d steal things when no one else was looking. Leave little rotting presents under pillows and in the pantry. We shared everything. Then when our father started inking the lines, we became the same person, she and I. After that, food lost its flavour. When I got hungry, people died. So they sent me into the east and tried to forget me. While you sang and danced and had our father all to yourself.” Mocking cheer returned to her voice. “But now he’s gone, and here we are, playing together after all.”

Kat choked down another breath, even through wooziness the gaps in the story brighter for what she’d just suffered. Her sister was a soul-eater. An amashti. Or maybe the daemon – her “friend” – had consumed her, and now only believed itself Kat’s sister? She could have wept, had she the energy to do so.

“Playing?” Her voice sounded so ragged. “You broke my arm, you psychotic little trallock!”

“You were the one who started being rough. Just like last time.”

That much was true, if you left Darravon and Skerrik out of the running. “You killed Azra!”

“I didn’t, I swear to Nyssa.” The assassin’s voice turned reasonable, almost pleading. “Please come out. I really don’t want to hurt you further. But I will if you don’t come quietly.”

Marida wanted her alive? Why? In her muddled state, Kat could conjure only a single answer: her tattoo. The mistress of the Thornless Rose wanted its secret, unmarred by whatever lurked beneath her sister’s skin. Or maybe, just maybe, she didn’t want the tattoo at all – or not just the tattoo. Not when she could have Kat’s body as well. The assassin’s was no good to her. It was already taken.

And as for Azra? If the assassin hadn’t killed her, then her mistress had.

Faced with that, what choice was there?

“All right.” She almost gagged on the words. “You win. I’ll come quietly.”

She half stepped, half rolled off the wall. Playing up her injuries didn’t take much. Between her wrist and the aftermath of the assassin’s – her sister’s – feeding, what didn’t ache felt ready to dissipate, like a body behind the Veil.

She felt the assassin’s unblinking eyes boring into her. Read the suspicion in her gaze.

Five paces away. Just a little further.

Kat took another step. “I always wanted a sister,” she mumbled, and thought she read a softening around the assassin’s eyes. “I wish our father had told me about…”

Dredging up her last strength, she broke into a stumbling run towards the hole in the brickwork and the collapsed chimney beyond.

“No!” the assassin shouted.

Kat dived headlong through the hole.

Her wrist screamed as she landed on the chimney, face-down and head first, but she was already rushing down the steep slope, the rough brick scratching at her clothes, the wind plucking at her hair and the toes of her boots skittering as she struggled to control her descent.

The chimney was barely wider than she was tall, and for all her efforts, she slid across its circumference, closer and closer to the point of no return.

Her head slid over the edge. The sluice overflow loomed far below, white-water foam dancing on the rushing torrents. Her desperate kick against the rushing brickwork only made things worse, sending her almost at right angles to the direction of travel.

Brickwork dropped away. She hit the tiles of the lower roof side-on – left side, thank Nyssa, not right – and rolled to a stop with her foot in the gutter and her shoulder against a blocky smokestack. She would have laughed, but everything hurt too much.

She tried to rise, and discovered that her body’s veto extended to motion as well as sound.

Booted feet crunched onto the tiles beside her. “You really are trying to kill yourself, aren’t you?” The assassin sounded part-way between admiration and resignation. “Now I have to carry you, and I hate carrying people.”

A cloaked and hooded shape rose out of the smokestack’s shadow behind her. A tile scraped underfoot. The assassin spun about, her long, theatrical sigh parting the chill night air.

“Now what?”

A stubby mace struck her across the side of the head, knocking her off her feet. Her upper body cracked onto the tiles beside Kat, her legs dangling out over the drainage channel. For a long moment, she scrabbled for purchase. Then she was gone, nothing more than an indignant wail in the night and the distant splash of a body hitting water. The cloaked figure peered over the roof and grunted as if it were the kind of sight one saw every day.

“That’s the one you came to find?”

Still curled on her side, Kat finally found the wherewithal to laugh. Maxin had followed her after all. An age too late perhaps, but she could have kissed him for it. “Turns out she might be my sister.”

“Family’s complicated.”

“I told you to go home to yours.”

“Home?” The voice was wrong for Maxin, Kat realised belatedly, the earnest tone too. “That’s not been possible for a long, long time.” He drew back his hood, the tightly curled chestnut hair confirming her half-formed suspicions.

“Vallant?” she croaked. “Why are you here?”

“I’ve shadowed you since Evrios. Lost you in the Underways earlier tonight. I’d almost given up on finding you, but you certainly know how to make a scene.”

The hestic had stopped wailing sometime during her confrontation in the warehouse, but someone would have gone for help. Someone always did. And the assassin was sure to be back, just as soon as she dragged herself out of the sluice overflow. Exhausted, and sore in body and soul, Kat didn’t even begin to know how she felt about that. But she knew an evasion when she heard it.

“You didn’t answer my question.”

Vallant grunted. “It can wait until we’re somewhere safer. Can you walk?”

He held out a hand. Careful not to jar her broken wrist, Kat pulled herself into a sitting position. They’d been even, all debts settled. If she took his hand, she was in arrears once more. Then again, she’d been his debtor since the mace blow landed, hadn’t she? She glanced up at him and saw in his expression that he knew exactly what she was thinking, and also that he didn’t care. Grounds enough for refusal. But then what other choice did she have?

She took his hand. “Let’s find out.”

Forty-Five

The archway had been buried for decades, the bridge and roadway it supported overbuilt in Tyzanta’s never-ending ascent. Backfilled with rubble and half blocked by some long ago spirefall, it was now just another part of the labyrinthine Underways honeycombing Tyzanta from the lowest Undertown street to the middle reaches of the Overspire; tunnels that were once thoroughfares and caverns the collapsed buildings of yesterday. The Underways were a refuge for the penniless and the desperate, for wisp addicts and desperadoes, and for destitutes sliding inevitably into the Gutterfields on the city’s edge.

Kat tensed as something scraped at the sheet of warped planking that served as the archway’s makeshift door. Too large for rats, thank Nyssa, but not all carrion in the Underways walked on four legs. Blotting out the red throb of her splinted right wrist, she gripped the dagger tight in her left hand. In that pitch darkness, an attacker wouldn’t see how spent she was. She had a chance.

The makeshift door scraped aside. Vallant stooped low across a threshold barely two thirds his height, his oil lantern’s greasy light shaping rubble, moss and refuse.

“Easy. Easy. It’s only me.”

Kat let the dagger drop. “You were supposed to knock.”

“I guess you were asleep.”

She left instinctive denial unsaid. Like it or not, the recent past was full of gaps. “How is it out there?”

He set down the lantern and dragged the door back into place. “It’s morning. It looks quiet, but it isn’t. You know how that works.”

Even the most unobtrusive watchers changed a crowd’s character – what Azra had always described as its aura – especially when present in large numbers. “I suppose it was too much to hope Marida would just let me leave. Were you followed?”

He cocked his head and gave her an old-fashioned look. “I have been doing this rather a long time.”

“How are you taking this so calmly?”

“I’m in Tyzanta maybe twice a month. I know when someone’s watching and when someone’s watching for me.” He offered a wry smile. “Half the custodium are convinced I’m a strapping giant of a man, the other half are equally certain I’m a wizened daemon with a hook nose and crooked fingers. Being myself has always been the best disguise.”

The explanation was typical of the man. Arrogance and humility tangled together like yarn. Kat pulled her cloak tight. It might have been morning above, but the Underways were always cold. Even that slight motion set her wrist screaming. She pinched her eyes shut until the pain abated. “Did you find any?”

Vallant fished a vial from his pocket. “They said it’s last breath.”

She took the vial in her good hand and tipped its thin contents towards the light. Barely a dribble. Bad news and good. Bad, because if it was the curative Vallant’s trading partners had promised, it wasn’t nearly enough to mend her wounds – at best, it would take the edge off the pain. Good, because if it were actually a talent wisp, isshîm vapour or some other noxious brew, there wasn’t enough to be hazardous. Probably.

She gripped the cork with her teeth, spat it out and huffed the vapour. At once, the ache of her wrist receded from a red scream to a dull roar. The shadows of their refuge grew a little sharper and the sour, earthy stench of her own sweat – unfortunately – a little stronger. For the first time in what she supposed were hours, she felt like she could actually think.

Wordlessly, Vallant handed her a flask of water, an apple and a hunk of bread. They barely touched the sides.

“Better?” he asked.

“For now.” She didn’t want to give him even that much, but recognised that some concession could be made. She stared at the empty vial. Her sister – or the daemon that had thought itself her sister – had tried to use her just like she’d used the last breath. Was there really a difference? Not all donors went willingly to the shriversmen. “You’ve eaten?”

“For now.” A ghost of a smile accompanied his mimicry.

“What next?”

Vallant sat beside her on the rubble slope, his head tilted forward beneath the ceiling’s arch. “That depends a little on how you’re doing.”

“I’m good,” she lied. “Won’t be prize-brawling for a while, but I can travel.”

He didn’t even blink. “That’s not what I meant.”

She snorted and stared down at her splinted wrist. “Let’s see. I nearly got myself killed. Turns out I have a sister who’s either a daemon or is possessed by one. Which means my father had a secret life I knew nothing about.” Saying those words brought his debts into sharp focus. The debts that had set her on the run. He’d always blamed gambling. Was even that true? “Oh, and Marida likely wants my tattoo or to possess my body and soul. Other than that, pretty good.”

She left the heaviest burden unspoken. She’d come to Tyzanta to avenge Azra’s death and thus put her soul to rest. Not only had she failed to do that, in hindsight she wasn’t even sure that she wanted to succeed. A sister. She actually had a sister. The woman’s mere existence left the pillars of Kat’s world trembling.

She stared down at her left forearm. At the cold, inert lines of her drained tattoo. Her father had lied. How deep did those lies go? She’d felt the power of the Deadwinds, the rush of having their soulfire at her command. Legend told that amashti were born of excess, mortal men and women transformed by gluttony. Was that what had happened to her sister? Would it happen to her?

“How sure are you about any of that?” asked Vallant.

Kat heard no judgement in the question. Somehow, that almost made it worse.

She closed her eyes and sought shelter in darkness. “Right now, if you told me you were really the Eternity King playing at folk hero for the thrill, I’d believe it.”

He chuckled. “Then I’ll be sure not to do that.”

“Why were you following me anyway? You never said. Afraid I’d sell you out?”

As ever, her provocation found no purchase. “No. I trust my crew. You’re one of them, whether you believe that or not.”

“So you know better than me, do you?” she said, irritated.

“It’s not that. You’ve seen too much. You know just how wide the divide between cinderbloods and firebloods has grown.”

“Everyone with eyes knows that.”

He snorted. “Never underestimate wilful blindness. Plenty deny all sense and reason. The Eternity King’s prized ‘order’ couldn’t exist without them. The fearful. The selfish. The greedy. Their silence is complicity. But you’ve seen how fragile it is. You know how easily someone crosses from one side to the other when Khalad no longer needs them. If the Eternity King named you his heir and died tomorrow, you’d still know it, and you’d sleep no better on silken sheets than in the gutter.”

“Because I’m a good woman, I suppose?” she said scornfully.

“Because you know that if they came for you once,” he said, “they can do so again.”

The words stung. “You think I’m that self-centred?”

“Before Zoyen, without question. Everything with you was a trade. What you could get for whatever you were prepared to offer. I don’t blame you.” He shrugged. “But then you risked your life for strangers. It makes me hopeful.”

Kat bit her tongue, seething in the silence. At him… and at herself. Because the truth was that she had approached their every interaction as a bargain. In thinking so little of him, she’d painted an unflattering self-portrait.

“I’m not judging,” Vallant continued. “I take my allies wherever I can find them. They don’t have to like me. They don’t even have to be good people. We just have to share the same goals, even if for only a moment. Perhaps ours is only a moment.”

“And what if – and I mean if – it’s more?”

He grinned. “Then we change the world, as much as we can and for as long as we’re able.”

A noble sentiment. Maybe even a convincing one, save for all the bodies he left in his wake. “You still haven’t answered my question.”

“After we last talked, I got to thinking. I trust my crew and expect them to trust me. But trust isn’t given, it’s earned. You earned mine at Zoyen. It’s time I earned yours.”

“You risked your life for the trust of a woman you’re halfway convinced is a selfish trallock?”

He shrugged. “The Bascari, the Hythaka, all the firebloods – even people like Javar and Marida – they control through fear. Loyalty is purchased by dinars or at the barrel of a shrieker. If I’m to stand for anything – if we’re to stand for anything – we have to be different. If I’m not willing to die for one person, then I’ve no business being here at all.”

“What about your dream?”

“It’ll survive. I’m not the first and I won’t be the last. They’ve tried to crush us so many times, and we always survive. There’s nothing natural about Caradan Diar’s order. Sooner or later it will fall and we’ll build something better in its place. And if I’m not there to see it, I can at least take solace in the fact that those who are took heart from my example. A man can die, but stories don’t. Legends don’t.”

“You were an idiot to come alone.”

“So were you. So we do have something in common.”

For a moment Kat was back in Athenoch’s black tower, Rîma at her side. Just when the day is darkest, he’ll surprise you. For all Vallant’s bravado, stepping inside Tyzanta’s sprawl had been a terrible risk. And yet he’d done it anyway. He was either mad, proud… or perhaps a better man than she’d credited. One Nyssa had blessed with humility and burdened with arrogance.

“Does the legend of Bashar Vallant include a plan for getting out of Tyzanta? Or are we to soar away on wings of fable?”

He smiled, unoffended. “If your assumptions about Marida are true, she’ll have people watching every exit from the city. Tollhouses, railrunner stations and the docks. Definitely the Gutterfields roads. But I’ve an old friend who runs a quarry dredge out of Kezlir Quay. She’ll smuggle us clear.”

“Didn’t you just say that Marida would be watching the docks?”

“I said she’ll be watching everywhere. If we’re running the risk of getting cornered, better to be on a skyship than trapped in a railrunner carriage. People disappear from railrunners all the time.”

“Whereas on a skyship we can always jump over the side and there we are, free as a bird,” she replied sourly.

Vallant folded his arms. “All right. What do you suggest?”

Kat lapsed into silence. Last breath or not, weariness dogged her thoughts. Could Maxin be the answer? No. Better not to pull him deeper into the mess she’d created. “You’re right about a skyship,” she said slowly. “But let’s not take the chance that Marida knows about your friend, not with our faces glaring side by side on the bounty boards.”

“I’m not hearing a solution.”

“I’m getting there. We make for Kazzar’s Quay, mingle with the loading hands and stow away. Azra and I did it all the time if a job went wrong.” Cargo scows ran a small crew, which in turn left plenty of hiding places.

Vallant nodded thoughtfully. “Why Kazzar’s Quay?”

“Because I know it well. Because it’s about as far from Salathzi district as you can get. And it’ll be heaving with bodies at this hour.”

“All right. We’ll go whenever you’re ready.”

“Really?”

“You were expecting something else?”

“An argument. Some light pontification. Then a compromise.”

He smiled, his amusement more for himself than for Kat. “Weren’t you listening before? I trust you.”

Forty-Six

They kept to the Underways, navigating at times by shafts of sunlight that penetrated the mangle of collapsed and sunken brickwork. Azra had long ago taught Kat which passageways were truly dangerous – territory for reaver gangs, wisp addicts, shîm-heads and the like – as well as which attracted tales too ghoulish to be wholly discounted. These they studiously avoided, even though it made for winding detours through forgotten, collapsed abodes, crooked statues and orphaned tombs that had endured countless Ages of Fire.

Hooded and cloaked against the possibility of Marida’s informants, they crossed paths with folk no less outcast than they, others with nefarious intent fortunately focused elsewhere, and the inevitable reckless youths who walked the maze of sunken buildings and skyless chambers out of bravado or impatience rather than need. As at Tellwind Manse a seeming lifetime ago, mutual anonymity was readily observed. Everyone in the Underways had something to hide, and there was no surer way to draw attention than to challenge another’s secrets.

As they reached the yawning temple gateway and the sunlight of a crowded mid-spire azasouk – the temple itself had long since been cannibalised, leaving behind a stoic facade, stripped of gilding – the angry throb returned to Kat’s wrist, bringing with it all the weariness of a sleepless, pain-haunted night.

She sank onto the stub of a broken column. “I need a moment.”

Vallant set his lantern down. “Looks like we’ve got a straight shot from here to the quayside. All we have to do is get there.”

Kat adjusted her sling so that her wrist sat closer to her chest. Much as she wanted to curl up into a ball and wish the world away, waiting would only make things worse. Should a broken wrist really be taking so much out of her, or had her sister done more to her than she thought when she’d “fed”? “You lead, I’ll follow.”

“Never thought I’d hear those words from you.”

“Don’t get used to it.”

Vallant plunged into the hubbub of barter and morning gossip, his gait and unhurried stroll gauged to deflect attention. Teeth gritted against welling pain, Kat followed through stalls thick with the bitter salt aroma of fish fetched from the distant Silent Sea. Happily, it was still early enough in the morning that the sun had yet to banish the night’s chill, and there were cloaks enough in the crowd that they didn’t stand out. Even so, Kat’s shoulder blades prickled when a stray custodian’s empty, masked gaze swept across her, the urge to run paradoxically deepened by the knowledge that she was in no condition to do so.

Distracted, she all but walked into a trader walking in the other direction, and in her attempts to evade, collided with an awning pole. She spun about, stifling a gasp as her broken wrist turned to fire. As she did so, she made eye contact with a man in skelder’s garb three awnings along, a livid bruise across his brow and right cheek.

Kiasta.

“A shadow,” she murmured, eyes half lidded against the pain. “Three stalls back. Average height. Oiled hair and what he probably thinks is a moustache.”

Vallant stopped at the next stall, plucked an orange from among the wares and squeezed it thoughtfully. Kat only caught his artful backward glance because she was looking for it. Warding off the grocer’s Simah enquiry with a polite sign of his own, he set the orange down and ambled away.

“I see him,” he murmured as Kat caught up. “Stay close.”

Vallant veered off towards an enclosed awning, its stallholder not yet arrived. He tweaked open the striped canvas folds and peered inside. “This works.”

Fighting the urge to look over her shoulder, Kat followed him into a cool, dark space perhaps eight feet by eight. A collapsed trestle bench aside, it was empty – no trader in his right mind left valuable stock unattended in a mid-spire azasouk.

Vallant pointed to the opposite entrance. “Other side.”

The flaps by which they’d entered parted and the shadow slunk inside. His eyes widened as he caught sight of Kat, then rolled glassily back when Vallant’s mace crashed down.

Vallant caught the body as it fell and lowered it to the cobbles. “I’d ask you to give me a hand, but under the circumstances…”

Kat rolled her eyes. “Are you always this funny, or just when you’re running for your life?”

Vallant stuffed a rag in the footpad’s mouth, then tugged his belt free and bound his arms behind his back. “Recognise him?”

“From last night. Last seen vanishing beneath a cabinet. Don’t ask.”

“He’s certainly had better days.” Vallant ran his hands through the footpad’s pockets, claiming a handful of dinars and a wickedly curved dagger. Then he tugged down the man’s collar, peered at the nape of his neck, and froze. “He’s a custodian.”

“You’re sure?”

“The Bascari use a particular foundation for their hestic glyphs. Very distinctive, if you know what you’re looking for. You leave the service, they sear the skin to remove it.”

Kat winced. “He could be working for Marida on the quiet.”

“What? Standing guard at midnight and lurking around the marketplace come dawn? He’s either fixing for trouble when his superiors find out he’s taking side work, or—”

“It’s not Marida that’s after me at all, but the Bascari.” Strangely, it was something of a relief. She’d been running from the Bascari long before she returned to Tyzanta, so nothing had changed. Except that meant her sister was working for the Bascari as well. And who was the nebulous “she” who’d sent her there?

Vallant straightened. “It doesn’t change anything.”

“No,” Kat murmured. But that wasn’t true, was it? She’d taken the footpad – and his fellow watchers – for one thing, and they’d really been another. What if that was the case elsewhere? The engine hulks in Jothari’s yard. What if they weren’t breaking them down for scrap at all, but making them into something else? Something that needed a lot of fuel and to withstand fearsome heat? “The Bascari know you operate out of Athenoch, don’t they?”

He eyed her warily. “I’m careful about who I recruit, but I don’t claim to be infallible. I’m sure someone’s talked. It doesn’t matter. They don’t have Zephyr to breach the mists.”

Or rather they didn’t have Zephyr’s astoricum brooch, but semantics didn’t matter in that moment. “I think they’re converting railrunner carcasses into some kind of mobile torch houses.”

He shook his head emphatically. “Impossible. The supply challenges aside, they’d not be strong enough to repel the Veil any kind of distance.”

“Maybe not alone, but I saw at least half a dozen in the yard last night. They could be assembling more elsewhere. Modified to run without rails and moving in formation.”

Vallant went rigid. “It might be enough to escort a ship, maybe an army. I have to get back.”

They left the awning, urgency unspoken. Even with fortune on their side, it could take days to link up with Zephyr and return to Athenoch. Point to point, Athenoch was maybe six days away by road, less by skyship. The torch wagons wouldn’t have to rumble all the way to the Veil’s edge. They could be ferried by barges, cutting the travel time in half. If the wagons weren’t already moving, they would be soon – delay served nothing. It was a race, and one Vallant had no guarantee of winning.

Those worries carried Kat clear out of the azasouk and into Kazzar’s Quay proper, matching Vallant stride by stride until he drew up short. “We have another problem,” he muttered.

Kat stared past his shoulder to where the dockyard split apart, its stairways and ramps winding up and down the spire face to serve the various rope-anchored piers. A double line of masked custodians waited at the convergence, a crimson-triangled overseer checking the faces of inbound dockers against a sheaf of curling bounty warrants, to much vocal frustration from the jostling crowd. Two skyships were tied up beyond, one a deep-bellied cargo scow of the kind Kat’s plan required, the other a sleek-hulled fireblood barge, all smooth curves and gaudy paint.

“We’ll go back.” She stepped closer to avoid being jostled by the crowd. “There are other ways out of Tyzanta.”

Vallant stared towards the line of labourers loading the scow, but Kat had the sense he didn’t really see them at all. “There’s no time. One of us has to get back to Athenoch.” He snorted, a man acknowledging a joke that wasn’t really a joke at all. “Zephyr will be waiting at Evrios another two days. Tatterlain’s with her. Ask around for Count Tuzen Karza. He’ll find you.”

Kat frowned. “Find me? Where will you be?”

“One of us needs to create a distraction so the other can get aboard. I don’t want to sound vain, but mine’s a face they’ll follow. And you can barely stand.”

Was he really doing this to her? Vallant was here because of her. Because of her mistakes. She hadn’t asked to be his responsibility. “Don’t tell me what I can and can’t do!” she hissed. “You’ll have your distraction.”

Trembling with anger, she started towards the custodians. A heavy hand held her back. “It’s all right, Kat. This was going to happen sooner or later.”

“Your people need you.”

“Right now, they need to know they’re not safe. That’s all that matters.” He sagged, the consequence of his words taking hold. “It has to be this way.”

“They’ll kill you! Me at least they want alive.” Or they had. A lot might have changed.

“They’ve been hunting me for twenty years. They’re not going to kill me overnight.” He offered a wry smile. “But if you felt like organising a rescue, I wouldn’t mind that at all.”

Before she could reply, he stepped backwards into the crowd, and was gone.

Kat made to follow, but a jolt from her wrist reinforced the practicalities of his parting words. She could still just about make a disturbance – she was good at that – but draw a pursuit away?

Damn him.

So instead she peeled across through the crowd, angling for the far end of the custodian line.

There were four dockers ahead of her in the queue when the overseer’s voice rang out above the hubbub.

“Wait! It’s him!”

His shout mixed with the thud of his mask buckling beneath Vallant’s mace. Vallant was already moving, cloak flowing behind as he ran headlong for the far end of the dockside – the opposite direction from Kat. A custodian blocked his path. He suffered the same fate as the overseer, and Vallant ran on.

“Stop him!” bellowed a custodian as the cordon broke apart in pursuit. “That’s Vallant! I want him alive!”

Vallant. Murmur rippled through the crowd, part reverence, part disbelief. No one made any attempt to slow his pursuers, but they parted readily enough to let him pass. A hero to many he may have been, but with the prospect of immediate custodian reprisals, no one wanted to be seen as his ally. The silence of complicity indeed.

Kat’s guilt returned twofold, but all that remained was to follow through. As the labour queue shuffled forward onto the scow’s pier, she went with it.

As fortune would have it, the outward cargo was sacked not crated. She propped one against the ground and tipped its rough burlap, using her good left arm to hoist it over her shoulder. As she joined the gangway crew, she caught sight of Vallant, head down and running full pelt along a distant pier. A swipe of his mace threw a custodian over the edge to fall onto the bird’s nest of underhanging supports and beams. Another pursuer tackled him to the ground, and he vanished beneath a mound of bodies.

Kat hung her head and looked away.

Her vision dancing with pain and exhaustion, she somehow reached the foot of the gangplank without collapsing. Not far now. She’d get to Evrios. Rîma and Tatterlain would know what to do. If they couldn’t rescue Vallant, they’d at least make his sacrifice count.

A hand about her arm pulled her out of the line.

“Just where she said you’d be.” The syrupy eastern accent was lighter than the previous night, fireblood cadence breathing through the guttural vowels. “Predictable as the dawn.”

Hands wrested the sack away and Kat’s sister at last stepped into view, a masked custodian at her side. The coachman’s coat was gone, her hair an unbraided golden spill across the shoulders of an ice-blue gown. No longer the hard-edged assassin, all angles and threat, she was softer, round-shouldered, her diffident posture at odds with the certainty of her words. All save in the eyes, which, though no longer ringed with black make-up, remained cold and unblinking. Even so, Kat barely recognised her – perhaps wouldn’t have done so without the sudden, persistent itch in her aetherios tattoo. The amashti could cloak herself in finery all she wished, curb her manner to an ingenue’s softness, but some recognition went beyond sight.

“Who are you talking about?” asked Kat, defiance hiding a wallowing heart. “How did you find me?”

“So many questions.” Her sister smiled through the words, and clicked her fingers at the custodians holding Kat’s arms. “Bring her, if you would.”

They set off across the quayside, Kat boxed by her custodian escort and her sister a blue and gold shimmer in the sunlight. A winding stair led down to an adjoining pier, a narrow gangplank to the deck of the pleasure barge that was the quayside’s sole other occupant. A motionless koilos waited at the aftercastle, guarding the door to the master’s cabin. Unlike others Kat had seen, this one wore a custodian’s uniform, all save the mask, but with her body aching and her spirit sore, she’d no curiosity to spare the reasoning.

Lips curling at the koilos, her sister pulled open the door. Goaded by the custodians to her rear, Kat had little choice but to follow inside.

As with the cabins on the Mornwake, the room was opulent to the point of decadence, a fortune in portraiture and statuary displayed along just one wall. But Kat’s attention belonged in its entirety to the living corpse draped over a gilded chaise.

The woman’s hair was shorter than at her death – a boyish, feathered cut that made an already aquiline face severe, softening a likeness that might otherwise have made them twins. Equally severe was her custodian’s uniform, tailored to a fireblood’s expensive and figure-flattering tastes, but her smile was warm… warm, and just a little bit mocking. As if the world were a joke told only for her amusement.

Kat had hated that smile at their first meeting a year before, when she’d been a fugitive from her father’s creditors and on the sticky end of four-to-one odds after crossing the wrong people in the wrong part of town. Now, she felt nothing at all, the rush of conflicting, confused emotion as distant as the sun.

“Hello, darling,” said Azra. “You really have been in the wars.”

Forty-Seven

The bedchamber hung heavy with myrrh incense, the better to repel predatory daemons. Flickering candles granted light to see, but not enough to disturb the Countess. A gesture more than a necessity, for according to the physician she’d hadn’t woken all day. To Damant, the room was holding its breath, waiting for Nyssa to call the Countess to judgement. His heart ached to see her thus, the greyish tinge to her skin nothing to do with the gloom, the bedclothes scarcely rising with her shallow, febrile breaths.

“It’ll be soon now,” murmured Talyanni.

Damant swallowed a wince. Detachment too was duty. “You’re certain?” Wasted words. Talyanni’s discretion and expertise were both unquestioned.

She scooped her collection of vials from the side table and into a bell-bottomed bag. “I don’t know how she’s lasted so long.” She reached out over the bed to smooth a whitish-grey curl from the Countess’ brow. “I’ve never seen anything like this. Omen rot kills slowly, even to the end. But now she’s burning through everything I give her. Even last breath can’t help. I’m sorry.”

Damant scratched at his scar – a small subterfuge to brush away a tear. “I’ll arrange the odysseri rites.” He pressed a gold tetram into Talyanni’s hand. “The family thanks you for your service.”

She tucked the coin into a pouch belted over her thick leather robes. “May Nyssa receive her favourably in the Stars Below.”

A small bow – the creaking leather robes permitted no more – and Talyanni departed. Damant collapsed into the armchair beside the bed and stared at the self-portrait brought in from the Countess’ workroom. Her greatest work at least would outlast her. Hard, at times like these, to believe Nyssa’s promises of reincarnation. Heart and head felt only the loss to be, and wailed misfortune even in silence. But Marida had been right. Sometimes you just had to let people go.

Slowly, hesitantly – even this smallest of gestures felt like a breach of etiquette – he took the Countess’ hand. The warmth set his tears flowing, and he was almost glad that her slumber spared him an explanation.

Fingers twitched and drew tight around his.

“You are… forward today, Ihsan,” the Countess croaked, her eyes still closed.

Damant cuffed his tears away. “Lady, I…” He tried to withdraw his hand. The Countess’ grip was like steel.

“Don’t. Please… It tethers me. I’ll go to Nyssa soon.”

“No, lady.”

A soft, rasping chuckle. “Ever the poor liar. This… darkness will die with me. It made me say and do… terrible things, but I have it… trapped. I can… accomplish that much good.” Her throat bobbed. “Nyssa knows I’ve done… enough harm.”

“Vallant’s been taken, lady.” Discomfited, Damant blurted the words. “He’s in the Central Custodium as we speak.”

A long, rattling exhalation parted the Countess’ lips. Her eyes fluttered open. “Yennika?”

“Yes, lady.”

“I think we… may all have been guilty of underestimating… my niece.”

“Yes, lady.”

“You say that as… if you understand. But I’ve spent… so long watching from outside myself… It gives perspective. What Yennika says… what she does… Two different things.” Sighing, she closed her eyes again. “My only… achievement undone.”

Damant frowned. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected, not exactly, but not bitterness. But with three of four children dead and a fourth taken back to Zariqaz by the Voice? It would be a poor mother who felt nothing, however much she hated her offspring. “You mustn’t speak like that, lady.”

“We needed Vallant… to be a traitor, you see. Needed it more than Tythia’s happiness or her life.” Tears glistened on her cheeks. “My poor, beautiful Tythia.”

“Lady. Please. Don’t—”

She pulled her hand free and crossed her arms over her chest. “You weren’t punished because she died, Ihsan. Nor the child. But because Vallant…” She stumbled, sing-song with delirium. “Because Vallant almost did. Imagine that.”

Thoroughly confused, Damant leaned closer, as if proximity might give extra weight to his words. “Rest, lady. Please.”

She sank deeper into the bedclothes. “This family isn’t what it was, Ihsan. It never was what it was. You’ve been a good friend, but you don’t belong here. You should leave.”

“I can’t, lady.” His words creaked free. “Not while you’re here.”

She tilted her head on the pillow, the slightest smile on cracked lips. “What do you think I’ve been trying to tell…”

She was gone almost before Damant realised she’d begun the journey, leaving him in a room colder and darker than before.

Kat’s return to the Central Custodium saw her placed not in a below-ground cell but a plushly appointed office. The window offered a fine view of the mid-spire’s fountain court, but little in the way of escape opportunities, with barely a sill on the outer wall, and smooth, faced stonework without obvious handhold. Not that she had any enthusiasm for the climb. A vial of last breath, provided by her guards – far purer than the one Vallant had scavenged – had mended her broken wrist, but what little sleep she’d managed on the chaise had left her too groggy for yet another confrontation with merciless vertigo. Instead, she passed the early post-noon hours pacing the thick, Phoenissan carpet, drowning in recent events.

Azra was alive.

The knowledge should have sparked joy. The stuff of dreams made reality. The greatest gift Nyssa could have bestowed. And yet the circumstances soured everything. Azra hadn’t directly admitted her deception, but a custodian had addressed her as “Lady Bascari” as he’d dragged Kat away. The truth was unavoidable: Azra wasn’t Azra at all, but Yennika Bascari, whose appearance Kat had weaponised in Zoyen. “Azra” had never been anything more than a fireblood’s mask. A costume.

The more Kat attempted to untangle the mess, the more jumbled she became, until love and hate, horror and loss stirred to a poisonous, numbing brew. A hole in her heart sucked colour from the gaudy chamber, rendering crimson murky brown and bright gold sullen copper. She swore the only reason she didn’t weep was because wrath would have turned her tears to steam.

The door creaked open. A koilos in custodian’s uniform stalked inside, the dry, brittle waft of preservative fluids alongside. Kat snatched a marble statuette of Nyssa Benevolas – the office’s occupant clearly fancied they had a merciful nature – from the desk and drew back her hand to let fly.

“Really, darling.” Azra stepped pass the koilos and fixed her with a stare part amusement, part disappointment. Achingly familiar. “Have you been grubbing around wilderness so long you’ve forgotten how a guest should behave?”

Kat set the statuette down and breathed a silent apology to Nyssa.

“You’re right,” she murmured. “That’s no kind of greeting at all.”

Her right hook dropped Azra to the carpet.

Bony fingers closed around Kat’s throat, hoisting her off her feet. The corners of her vision reddened, the distant drumbeat of her pulse growing louder and more insistent.

“No!” snapped Azra, curling to a sitting position and blinking away surprise. “Jorais! Put her down.”

The koilos set Kat gently on the carpet and stepped back.

Rising, Azra rubbed at the livid mark on her cheek. “I suppose I deserved that.”

“I’d say so.” But even as Kat replied, a piece of her wailed that this was all some terrible misunderstanding. More than anything, it wanted to hold Azra, and be held in return.

“If I send him away, will you behave?”

Kat glared. “We’ll have to see, won’t we?”

“Jorais, wait for me outside.”

With a last baleful look, the koilos withdrew. Azra tutted softly and closed the door behind it. “Still as ill-mannered as he was in life. Perhaps he’ll settle down once he’s part of a matched pair. Or maybe not. Siblings do quarrel so readily.”

“I wouldn’t know.” She didn’t want to know. “Where’s Vallant?”

“You actually sound concerned.” There it was: the thin, superior smile Kat had always hated.

“And you’re still evading questions you don’t want to answer.”

“He and Castellan Damant have so much to discuss. His accommodations are a good deal starker than yours. You really should be thanking me.” Azra sat on the chaise in a flourish of skirts. She left just enough room beside her for the invitation to be obvious.

Kat remained standing. “Who should I thank? Azra, or Yennika Bascari?”

“Azra. For you, I’ll always be Azra.” She spoke with just a glimmer of regret. A brief chink in the imperious facade. “I’m still her, Kat. I’m just someone else as well.”

“Was any of it true?”

Her face fell. “Of course it was. The afternoon before Xanathros Alabastra, the afternoon before—”

“Before you faked your death and sent a pet assassin to kill the rest of us?”

“You were never in danger.” Azra shook her head angrily. “Skerrik and Darravon, yes. I gave Tanith strict instructions to keep you alive. Then, and now.”

Tanith. So that was her sister’s name? “Very generous, I’m sure,” said Kat. “What’s the angle?”

“Would it help if I apologised?”

“You never apologise.”

“Then this should be worth more than gold.” Rising, Azra cupped Kat’s cheek. “I’m sorry, darling, for everything I put you through. I almost didn’t go through with it, I swear. A year of planning and so much reliant on the outcome, and I nearly called it off. All for you. But it was necessary, so I hardened my heart.”

Kat shrugged her hand away. “Necessary how?”

“You remember what I told you? That you find your place in Khalad or one’s found for you? Well, the ruling branch of my family thought they’d decided my place long ago. They destroyed my parents, my siblings. Oh, there was invariably someone or something else to blame, but it was them. I survived only because I embraced the character they made for me: the vacuous little shîm-head too oblivious to be any threat.”

“Why would they do it?”

“Because power doesn’t share. I could almost have respected them had Uncle Raith not divided Tyzanta with Aqladi Jovîna, terrified that he couldn’t hold it. And there was I, cut off from my inheritance and slaving away at a squalid little Zariqaz tollhouse.” Her voice grew bitter, the accompanying smile’s viciousness directed inwards. “When people looked at me, they didn’t see Yennika Bascari, they saw the stories woven about her. It grew easier and easier to slip away, let some other girl play the part. Stories don’t care about truth, much less faces. Azra became my refuge. I found a freedom in Zariqaz’s Undertown that I’d never known in its spires, and I started to wonder if maybe Azra could do what Yennika could not.”

Kat listened in silence. The tale and all the unspoken horrors lurking at its fringes clamoured for compassion. She might have given it, had she heard the story a year – even weeks – before.

“When Xanathros Alabastra exploded, it impoverished House Jovîna and exposed dear Jorais for the incompetent he was,” Azra went on. “Enter Yennika Bascari, back from Zariqaz and eager to serve her humbled family. I’ve restored them to dominance and Tyzanta to an order not seen for generations. I couldn’t have done it without you, darling.”

The tattoo. It had to be. Kat had nothing else to offer a fireblood. “Why me? Why not just use Tanith?”

“She could never have got me inside Xanathros Alabastra, much less opened the vault. She hasn’t the patience for copying soul-glyphs. If she can’t force an ifrît’s compliance, she’s lost. She’s a little too… let’s call it impulsive.”

“Impulsive?” snapped Kat. “She’s a daemon!”

“You really have to let these preconceptions go, darling. She’s flesh and blood. She’s just something else as well. Your father’s tattoo awoke something inside her.”

“She told me.”

“How much did she tell you?”

“We were a little busy trying to kill each other at the time.”

“Her mother – Countess Rashace – was a Floranz by birth, and barely survived the scandal surrounding Count Oraham’s death. Fearing Tanith would expose her further – Hargo Rashace was a very suspicious man, but a husband who travels widely and leaves his much younger wife behind has no one to blame but himself – she had one of her maids raise the girl as her own. A spirefall swept the foster mother to Nyssa’s judgement, so Tanith was sent to live with relatives in Kaldos.” Azra tapped her left wrist. “Only seven years old, but already a masterpiece.”

And Kat had been twelve when their father had sought to ink his masterpiece anew in her flesh. He’d likely not started on her aetherios tattoo until Tanith was beyond his reach – or at least until he’d learned how badly wrong his experiment had gone with his younger daughter. That made Tanith around five years younger than her – twenty years old now, or near enough.

For the first time, Kat wondered if there’d been a note of mania in her father’s voice when he’d spoken of children being malleable enough for the tattoo to function as it should. A hint of the guilt he’d felt – that Kat hoped he’d felt – at what his labours had made of Tanith. Had he been certain he’d resolved the flaw that had transformed her younger sister into an amashti? Had Tanith been too malleable? Or had he risked the same fate for Kat? Had he desired the same fate for them both?

And in the end, had Terrion Arvish ever cared about either of his daughters, or had he seen only raw materials, waiting to be fashioned into his great work? The deeper Kat gazed back into the past, the less she recognised the life she’d thought she’d lived. And her father. Even herself.

She stifled a rush of horror. How close had she come to ending up like her sister?

“What made her return?” she asked softly.

“There were accidents. A higher than usual turnover of tutors. A dead fiancé. Nothing that couldn’t be explained away once dinars changed hands – and Countess Rashace spent a small fortune on such explanations – but rumours spread.”

After that, food lost its flavour. An amashti found nourishment only in the souls of the living. “I can see how they would.”

“Eventually Tanith was drawn to Zariqaz. Lost souls always are. She rescued Yennika from an unhappy situation at a party. I don’t remember much about it beyond the blood. Memory falters readily around an amashti. Feelings remain, but the details fade.”

It didn’t escape Kat that Azra spoke of Yennika as a different person, a piece of her disowned. “I almost didn’t recognise her this morning.”

“You did better than most. Ihsan – Castellan Damant – has seen her at close quarters in both guises and never put things together.”

An unpleasant thought struck. “The day we met. That wasn’t an accident, was it?”

A lie gathered on Azra’s lips only to be discarded with an artful crook of her brow. “When I recognised Tanith’s shortcomings, I wondered about her half-sister and sought you out. I never meant things to go so far. Even now, a part of me wishes I hadn’t. The other part yearns to go back to how we were. It withers a little more every time you look at me like that.” She sighed. “I am truly sorry.”

Empathy arose unbidden at that second apology – a concept rare to the brink of unknown so far as Azra was concerned. Love binds us when all else falters. Was Rîma’s adage true even here? Was there any longer a bond between them? Was there any longer love? Had there ever been? Kat wished she had an answer, or even knew what answer she wanted. She turned away before her feelings showed, and stared at the distant children splashing through the fountain court’s waters.

“How did you survive? You clearly weren’t buried.”

“That would have been careless. I detonated enough tetrams to bring down the vault entrance and part of the outer wall. After you left, Tanith rescued me in the hierarch’s sky-barge. She almost didn’t make it. The fires spread faster than I’d anticipated, and apparently you caused her quite a lot of trouble.”

The feel of Azra’s filthy fingers in hers. The growing, aching realisation that she’d have to leave her behind. Bad enough when she had thought it simple misfortune, but to learn it had all been manufactured deepened the hurt a hundredfold. “Not nearly enough.”

“You really do wish I’d died, don’t you?”

Empathy fell away into anger. “Everything your family did to you, you did to me! And now you ask forgiveness? Why should I even listen to you?”

Azra hung her head, remorse – or at least its imitator – in her stricken expression. “For one, because I love you.” Her gaze met Kat’s. “And I need you to help me save lives.”

Kat snorted. “Is this where you offer to set Vallant free if I cooperate?”

“No. Vallant’s a dead man walking. I want you to take his place.”

The stench of mould and bodily waste rankled Damant’s nostrils even before he’d hauled open the cell door. The walls were so filthy with lichen and salt crystals that only the barest shape of brickwork remained. But the cell’s sole occupant, sat cross-legged against the far wall, seemed no more aware of its shortcomings than of his own bruises, handed out by enthusiastic custodians and the inevitable bone-jarring fall down the dungeon stairs.

He raised his chin from his chest. “Where’s Kat?”

“She’s being treated well.” Rather better than Damant approved of, in fact, but Yennika had insisted. “Better than you, at any rate.”

Vallant nodded, apparently satisfied. “The price of notoriety. I wondered when you’d be along for a gloat.”

“I’m not here to gloat!” Damant cursed his loss of temper for making the lie transparent. Old friends – old family, even – knew how to twist the knife better than any. It hurt all the more because, try as he might, he found little of the anticipated satisfaction in seeing his old protégé finally brought to heel. The cell echoed with wasted years and pointless deeds.

Vallant snorted. “That doesn’t sound like you. Not the man who pursued me through the southern territories. Who swore to drag me through these streets in chains.” He gave a grim chuckle. “What happened? Ran out of chains?”

“That was a long time ago.”

“Wasn’t it? And here you still are, the good, loyal hound. Performing tricks for scraps.”

“I know my duty.”

“There’s a higher duty than to the firebloods, Ihsan. You taught me that, remember?”

“I taught you that order arises out of justice and duty,” Damant snapped. “Now look at you!”

“You dare speak to me of justice? You murdered my wife and daughter!”

Another twist of the knife. With an effort, Damant kept his expression unflinching as stone. “I gave the order to fire, but make no mistake: you corrupted Tythia. She died because of you.”

Vallant didn’t move a muscle, but somehow his posture changed. Unconcern fell away into threat. Instinct warned Damant to leave the room or call for a custodian. Pride permitted neither.

“Perhaps you’re right,” said Vallant, eyes and voice hard. “Perhaps we share the blame. But I never corrupted her. She corrupted me. She ripped the blindfold from my eyes and showed me exactly what I was protecting. I will never not be grateful. And for Sadia alone, I would tear down this whole festering heap you call a kingdom.”

For all that Damant had sought Vallant’s pain since entering the cell, he found no satisfaction in the moment, only ash. “I’ve always regretted her death. She was blameless.”

“The countess disagreed.”

“And now faces Nyssa’s judgement for it.”

“Ah. So that’s why you came down here.” Vallant shrugged. “Am I still really the closest thing you have to a friend? Or are you simply looking for a punching bag? You’ll find neither here. I’ve no tears for Elinor Bascari. May Nyssa shred her soul upon the Deadwinds for a thousand years. And yours. Blind then, blind now. Or didn’t you know that Salenna Bascari’s assassin is working with your own custodians?”

A pathetic accusation, but what other weapons did Vallant have any longer save malice? Damant turned for the door. “Coming down here was a mistake.”

Vallant’s words brought him up short on the threshold. “You weren’t there when they took me, were you? I’m wondering why. What didn’t Lady Yennika want you to see?”

I think we may all have been guilty of underestimating my niece. The Countess’ words. Almost her last words. Damant had taken them for pride, but what if they’d been something else? Why was Arvish being treated differently? Easy to dismiss Vallant’s claim as the bitterness of a defeated man, but for the sudden growl of instinct.

“If you’ll excuse me,” Damant said stiffly, “I have to tell Lady Yennika that her aunt is dead.”

Forty-Eight

Kat stared at Azra. Take Vallant’s place? “You’re mad.”

“Not a bit.” Azra rose from the chaise and drew closer, her voice low and insistent. “Listen, men like Damant believe you can keep order through fear of justice.”

“You mean retribution.”

“They’re the same thing, and quite insufficient. We could have paradise tomorrow, and still some loud-mouthed trallock would start a brawl because his slice of perfection wasn’t as large as his neighbour’s.”

“Khalad’s no paradise.”

“No, which only makes unrest more inevitable. So to maintain order, Caradan Diar decided we needed a predictable, controllable uprising. More precisely, we needed a figurehead for that uprising to form around.”

The tangled road veered arrow-straight towards an inevitable destination. “Vallant. He’s been working for the Eternity King all along.”

Azra flickered an approving smile. “Not how you mean. After Ardin Javar tired of rabble-rousing, Vallant was judged a suitable successor. We provided sufficient motivation and for twenty years he’s been a pressure valve for discontent. He draws troublemakers like flies to honey and obligingly gets most of them killed within, what, six months?”

Kat closed her eyes. Amarid’s face floated in the darkness. “Ten.”

Azra shrugged. “Near enough. But for the most part, he gives people hope, and people with hope don’t make rash decisions. Dying for your freedom is one thing, but who wants to risk that when tomorrow might be the day Bashar Vallant finally saves you?”

Kat sank against the window, the weight of Azra’s words bearing her down. “If he’s so helpful, why do you want him gone?”

“He’s grown erratic. He’s lashing out, attacking at random. He’s become the very anarchy we sought to prevent. Personally, I think he’s felt too secure since he settled in at Athenoch. It gave him territory to defend. Perhaps he fancies himself a king in the making.”

“No,” murmured Kat. “That’s not what he wants.”

We’ve nearly been wiped out so many times. Rîma knew something wasn’t right. Maybe even Vallant himself, deep down. It wasn’t anarchy, but the instinct battling against a truth his conscious mind refused to see.

Azra shrugged. “It almost doesn’t matter. The Voice has lost patience. Vallant is to die, and his stronghold is to be levelled.”

“Hence the…” Kat broke off at a sound beyond the door – perhaps a soft scuff of boots – and indulged the brief fantasy that it might herald rescue. Azra offered no reaction, either because she hadn’t heard, or out of unfailing confidence in the koilos that had once been her cousin. “Torch wagons.”

“Do you like them?” Azra flashed a smile. “I can’t take credit. The idea was Minister Aroth’s. Dear Julan does have flashes of inspiration. Fleeting and few, but he has them. They’ll be hideously expensive to run, and I’m afraid we’ll lose a village or two to blesswood shortages, but it will all be worthwhile when the Veil parts.”

“Aroth. He’s your benefactor?”

Azra blinked. “He likes to consider himself rather more than that, but yes.” Back on balance, she smiled a sneer at her absent partner. “How did you know?”

“Azra doesn’t have the connections for all this,” Kat replied, flushed with satisfaction at having surprised her. “Yennika wouldn’t be taken seriously.”

“True. Though I don’t think Julan has yet realised just how little I need him now I have the Voice’s backing. I fear he’s destined for disappointment.”

“Is Vallant even still alive?”

“So distrustful, darling. Of course he is. Julan is keen that he should see his delightful little rebel city burn before the blow finally falls. Don’t worry. Not everyone will die. The flame must pass from one firebrand to another. Before it was Vallant, it was Javar. Before Javar, it was Melissolai. There is always someone to keep the torch aloft. There has been for centuries. Tell me, does Vallant still believe cousin Tythia was devoted to freedom, or has he finally realised how she resculpted him?”

Vallant’s beloved wife. So that was the motivation Azra had mentioned. “You’re lying.”

“Where do you think I got the idea of securing the Eternity King’s favour by guaranteeing the rebel succession? Tythia was always breathtakingly ambitious. Her mistake lay in falling in love with Vallant and bearing that half-blood child.”

“And now you think I’ll do what you ask? You tried to kill me!”

“Darling, I’ve been looking out for you!” Azra spread her arms wide. “Who do you think arranged for you to be sent to Zariqaz instead of being handed to Alabastra? You saw Tanith at Kazzar’s Quay the day you left because I had to be certain which vessel they shipped you out on so I could plant the information with Vallant’s informants. I’m trying to save you now. Do you think Hierarch Ossed has forgotten what you did to his temple?”

“Me? That was you!”

Azra folded her arms, that damned smile fixed in place once more. “Prove it.”

“You still think I’ll go along with this, don’t you? Why?”

“Because otherwise everyone in Athenoch dies, their blood on your hands. Agree, and I’ll ensure that some escape. If you’ve preferences as to who lives and who dies, I’ll consider them.”

“You really think you can manipulate me, don’t you?” growled Kat.

“I know I can, darling. That’s why I want you to take Vallant’s place.”

“To be your own pocket rebel? Taking your orders?”

“I want you to be spontaneous. Anything else won’t feel real to the people who need to believe it most. It won’t matter, because you won’t succeed unless I let you.”

“You’re delusional.”

Azra shrugged. “And yet you’re sitting here. Now. Did you ever think about why? Tanith’s been strutting about the city ever since she killed Salenna because I was ready for you to return. I knew she was the one thing that would draw you back here. And when that went wrong, you could have taken any number of ways out of the city. What if I told you that Kazzar’s Quay was the only place under guard?”

“You’re lying.”

“You keep saying that. It can’t always be true. I admit, I didn’t anticipate your actions concerning the refugee train at Zoyen, but we all have lapses.”

Good to know she’d surprised her somehow. “I suppose you knew Vallant would follow me here as well?”

“Oh no, that was quite unexpected, but a delicious little bonus all the same.” Drifting closer, Azra took Kat’s hands in hers. “At the Thornless Rose, I told you our futures would always be entwined, Katija.”

“You said it would be my choice.”

“And it is. I’ll understand if you never want to see me again. It will hurt, but at least I’ll know you’re still alive. I’ll see to it that your sins are forgiven, your debts alongside, just as they were for Javar. That’s the goal that brought us together in the first place, isn’t it? It may not be happening the way we planned it, but the end result’s the same. Everything I have – everything – I’ll share with you. There’s a lot to go around. I’m practically Countess Bascari already. Tanith disposed of Salenna for me, right under Ihsan’s nose. Mirela will never return from Zariqaz.” Azra smiled, her eyes gleaming. “I killed Aunt Elinor weeks ago. Her actual death is mere formality.”

She made the pronouncement with blithe unconcern, as if such things were commonplace, and perhaps among firebloods they were. “You can at least get to know Tanith. She could use your guiding hand, believe me.”

“I thought you said I shouldn’t judge her.”

Azra shrugged. “There are limits. She almost gave herself away the first night we arrived. Drained a servant dry and sent Mirela into a panic. Still, you know what they say about stopped clocks. The custodian she took as a lover lasted a little longer. Mind you, he was adrift on isshîm more often than not. One way or another, I’m sure he died happy, and he helped keep Ihsan blind.”

Kat rolled her eyes. “So I’d be her keeper, is that it?”

“I’m hoping you’ll help me find a cure. That’s what I promised her, but it’s not going well. She needs you. I need you. And I think you need us.”

Betrayal. Penance. Elevation. So similar to Damant’s offer after Xanathros Alabastra. Then, Kat had refused in order to protect Marida and salvage her own honour. Now, her honour seemed the flimsiest of rationales, and the only way to protect anyone was to agree. “But the rebellion…”

“Will go on. When the time comes, we’ll choose a new figurehead together.” Azra slid her hands about Kat’s waist and came to rest against the small of her back. Her breath warmed Kat’s cheek. “Darling, it’s inevitable. It’s done. Vallant is dead. Athenoch is burned. I’m offering you the chance to find a new life in the ashes. But there’s defiance and there’s stupidity. You’ve never been stupid, darling. Think of yourself. You’ve always been good at that. It’s what makes us the same. It’s why I know you understand I did what I had to.”

Kat pulled away. “I’m not like that.”

“Then why was our time together always about restoring your fortunes? You never asked what I wanted. Not once.”

Cheeks burning with shame, Kat pinched her eyes shut. That Azra had manipulated her from the start didn’t absolve her selfishness. She’d pursued her desires with blinkered dedication, never considering what Azra might have wanted from their life together. Even after Azra’s “death”, the pattern had continued. Bonding with Yali to give herself reason to hold on. Bargaining with Vallant, never once thinking to help simply because it was right.

“What happens if I say yes?” she said softly.

“You’ll come with us to Athenoch, as Vallant is coming with us. Only you’ll escape and become a legend.” Azra brushed her cheek. “And when you’ve forgiven me – if you forgive me – we can be together.”

Kat took Azra’s hand and met her watery gaze, reminded that she’d undertaken her few selfless acts out of belief that Azra would have done the same. Despite the lies, Azra had made her a better person. Even without lives on the line, that made the decision inevitable. You found your place in Khalad, or one was found for you.

“I’ll do it,” she murmured.

Damant stepped back from the office door and tried to ignore the koilos’ cold stare, both grateful and appalled that he’d hesitated before knocking. Eavesdropping was a small enough sin when set against what it had revealed. Conspiracy atop conspiracy, Yennika at the heart of it.

And he’d enabled her every step of the way.

Footsteps approached the door. Still shaking, Damant beat a hasty retreat.

Forty-Nine

The candles had burned low, but the scent of myrrh clung to the darkness yet. The lightest wisps of the Countess’ soul had fled, but the heaviest remained with her shrouded corpse, waiting for a shriversman’s odysseri rites to usher them to Nyssa’s judgement. With all that Damant had learned in recent hours, he doubted she’d meet a kind reception.

How quickly admiration soured. He’d always considered her the last hale branch in a tree given to rot, and all along she’d been at the root of it. Wielding hope as a weapon against the people who looked to her for leadership. Manipulating Vallant, Javar, Tythia – and Nyssa only knew how many others – like pieces on a gameboard simply to protect her status. That she had inherited the game from generations past was no absolution. Nor was the fact that Yennika had since added her own poisonous flourish. Her actions stood counter to everything Damant believed about justice, and about himself.

But even now, duty remained. Because in rot, as in all things, there were degrees.

I killed Aunt Elinor weeks ago.

Twenty years he’d considered Vallant the greatest threat to Khalad. He’d borne the responsibility for the man’s survival – even his creation – and in the end neither had been anything to do with him at all. He’d been used. Just like Vallant.

Marida drew back the shroud. “Well, she’s definitely dead.”

Her usual silks were in abeyance – replaced by a maid’s outfit from the late Sherabi’s chambers – and her red hair unbound. Painted glass hid her oily black eyes. No one had given her a second glance as she’d passed through the palace.

“I know that,” growled Damant, his wariness of the qalimîri nothing to the cold anger that had ruled him all afternoon. “I want to know how she died.”

“What did her physician say?”

“That it was omen rot.”

“But you don’t believe her?”

“No.”

“But you trust me?” Marida offered a thin, knowing smile. “How charming.”

“I trust that you’ll honour the payment, and that you have nothing to gain by lying.”

The smile broadened. “You should work on that. There’s always something to gain.” She eyed the censer hanging from the bedpost. “Would you mind? It’s like having an itch you can’t scratch.”

Damant unlooped the heavy gold chain and carried the censer to the far end of the room.

When he returned, Marida was standing stock still at the bedside, nose raised as if scenting the room. “There was an amashti here, but not for some days.”

Damant shivered. Belief was one thing, confirmation another. “I know about the amashti. She didn’t do this.”

No, Tanith had just killed Salenna, and cut a swathe through loyal custodians – to say nothing of Josqa’s death. Damant still couldn’t believe he’d fallen for her quick-change act on the night of Salenna’s murder, nor Yennika’s “faint” that had bought the necessary time. Josqa’s death – or rather his blood – had been the final piece of camouflage, literally painting Tanith as a victim when she’d been nothing of the sort. Obvious in hindsight, but even now, reconciling the quiet, diffident, kindly Tanith with her murderous alter ego took supreme effort of will. Amashti glamour, willing him to forget the evidence of his own eyes.

“I’m sorry to be wasting your time.” Amusement rippled beneath Marida’s arch tone. “You should keep some ground blackthorn blossom about your person. Amashti don’t care for that at all.”

She laid a palm on the Countess’ forehead and closed her eyes. The dusky scent of lavender rushed into the room, smothering the myrrh and driving the darkness deeper. Damant clamped his eyes shut to escape the creeping after-images, to ignore the whispers on the edge of hearing. Even so, they drove him to his knees, hands clamped across his ears.

Marida’s gentle tug brought him back into the world, breath ragged but wits more or less intact. “You were right. There’s part of a qalimîri inside her, wrapped around her soul like mistletoe. But it’s not whole, and nor is she. Normally one displaces the other, or buries it deep.”

Damant looked from her to the Countess’ silent form. “You’re certain?”

Marida slid the lenses from her eyes and regarded him with a black, deathless stare.

Damant nodded in silent acknowledgement of his foolishness. Instinct had warned of a qalimîri, and too late had been proven right. It explained the mood swings – the bitter moments when she’d not been herself. Even the painting of the dead city, teased unknowingly from the memories of the parasitic soul suckling on her essence. And Sherabi. It explained Sherabi’s death most of all.

This darkness will die with me.

“She fought it. She knew it was killing her to do so, but she found victory in defeat.”

Marida snorted. “A romantic notion. When we take you, we take you.” Her gaze slipped past Damant to the easel-set self-portrait beside the bed. “Although… Whose work is that?”

“Hers, with the aid of those talent wisps I brought you. It began as a remembrance of Tythia. Somewhere along the way, she changed her mind. She never said why.”

“No,” said Marida, her gaze locked on that of the portrait. “She wouldn’t.”

She pressed a palm to the portrait’s face. It blackened and bubbled, bronze skin turning pitch black as the infection spread.

“No!”

Damant grabbed at her wrist. A lazy shove from a girl half his size slammed him back against the Countess’ bed. Winded, he clambered to his feet to find Marida standing between him and a portrait that now resembled the Countess only in the very loosest of terms. The face was blackened and charred, as if the artist had sought to capture the likeness of a burned corpse. Flaky, soot-crusted scraps of skin clung to hollow cheeks and withered brow, the grey eyes staring – pleadingly – as if alive. Faint glimmers of indigo flame crawled across the paint and wisped away as pale smoke.

He glanced away, gorge thickening in his throat.

Marida planted her hands on her thin hips, her tone wistful, almost admiring. “Kaldosi spirit painting. It’s old magic, used to graft favourable traits onto the subject, or excise the unwanted.” She traced her fingertips across the fire-blackened brow. “Yes. I can feel them both in here. Glints of emotion and confusion. They’re barely aware.”

Damant grimaced. “You examined the talent wisps. You said they were clean.”

“The qalimîri resided within the pigment.” Disgust crept into Marida’s expression. “We’re survivors. A little more of her flowed into the painting with every brushstroke, and a little more of the qalimîri stole into her body the same way. As murder techniques go, it’s clever, but inefficient. She was already dying from omen rot. I honestly don’t see the point.”

Damant thought back to conversations had with the Countess since Yennika’s return. The growing confusion. The distress. Maybe not all the flashes of anger had been the qalimîri’s doing, not directly. She’d been losing pieces of herself, inch by inch. What must it be like to see yourself in the mirror and see something else also? To know you were slipping away and be powerless to stop it? At what point were you yourself no longer, but something else that merely resembled you? Would you even care?

“The cruelty was the point,” he said softly. “Yennika wanted her to suffer.”

“Yennika?”

“She supplied the pigment.” Damant found no triumph in the confirmation, but nor did he feel any sorrow. Unpicking the welter of conflicting emotion would be the work of a lifetime. Duty had commanded he put his trust in the Countess, and through Tythia’s death had made him accessory to every body left in Vallant’s wake. It had then driven him to support Yennika, who’d played him like a lyre. Without duty, what remained? “The Countess was actually grateful. She said it made the portrait come alive. Is there anything to be done?”

“She’s dead, Ihsan,” said Marida, not unkindly. “Burn the painting if it makes you feel better, but it won’t help her. What will you do?”

“What can I do?” he said bitterly. “I can’t prove any of it. I don’t even know if I want to. Even if I could, Minister Aroth will cover for her.”

“What you want may not matter. If Yennika discovers that you know, you’ll be next.”

He laughed without humour. “That has occurred to me. She’ll probably kill me anyway, unless she thinks I’m so blunt as not to be worthy of the effort. I’ve certainly given her ample reason to believe that.” A thought bubbled to the surface. He hesitated to give it voice, but what else could a dead man fear? “You knew, didn’t you?”

Marida eyed him with new respect. “I knew Yennika had ambitions, and, shall we say… unconventional methodology. It wasn’t in my interest to get involved, and if she wanted the Jovîna gone from Tyzanta, so be it. Aqladi was such a boor.”

Damant drew the shroud across the Countess’ cold, immobile face. “And how fare your interests now you know the rest?”

“Why, Ihsan. That sounds like a proposition.”

“Perhaps it is.”

Damant found Arvish standing at the window to his office. She tore her attention from the fountain court to favour him with a disdainful sneer.

“I am popular today.”

At their last meeting, she’d been all but feral. Now she was collected, confident, shoulders set and eyes steady. Or perhaps Damant only recognised those traits in her because he knew them to be lacking in himself. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t learn from the mistakes of others.

“Wait outside,” he told Sinair, a patient, masked presence at his side. “No interruptions and no eavesdroppers.”

She bowed, the silvered mask shining in the light of the lumani chandelier, and withdrew. Damant drew level with his desk and waited for the click of the lock.

“I have been a fool.”

Arvish folded her arms, her face unreadable. “Could it be you’ve finally discovered that your law isn’t worth corpse rot when it comes to firebloods?”

“I know what Yennika’s done. I know what she intends to do.” Damant paused, the determination that had brought him to the room ebbing away. One last push. “I can’t be part of it. Nor can I stand by while it unfolds.”

She regarded him a moment longer and turned away. “I can’t help you.”

He started forward, temper quickening. “You don’t know what I’m going to ask.”

Arvish spun about, her forefinger jabbing at his chest. “You think I owe you anything? The last time we spoke, you tried to use Azra against me. Now I suppose you want me to betray her.”

So close, Damant realised that first impressions had lied. For all that Arvish was more composed than he remembered, she was still an animal, trapped in a corner. She could keep it from her expression, but not from her restless eyes.

“Can it be betrayal if loyalty isn’t a matter of choice?”

She snorted. “This is Khalad. You find your place or one’s found for you.”

“Then find your place.”

“I already have,” she snapped. “This is my choice.”

“You can’t believe that she loves you.” Damant’s heart damned him for a hypocrite. He’d no business judging anyone for swallowing Yennika’s lies.

Arvish shrugged. “Everyone loves someone. It may be that we deserve each other.”

“She’s a monster.”

“She’s what her family made her.” Her hands curled to fists. Then she laughed softly and sank onto the chaise. “The whole time since my father died, I’ve only ever thought of myself… but then I met Azra and she did nothing but give. When she was gone, I started helping people not because of what they could do for me, but because I wanted to be more like her. It’s the worst joke in the world, but her example made me a better person. That’s why I have to help her now, even if it means she does something terrible. Because otherwise everybody dies.”

She glared at him, daring a challenge. Damant had none to offer. He’d expected to have to persuade a selfish skelder to act for others. Arvish was three steps ahead of him. It seemed everyone was. “What if there’s another option?”

She waved his words away. “Let me guess: do what you want and I can save those I care about? We’ve danced these steps before, Castellan.”

He remembered all too well. “Probably not. But maybe we can give their deaths meaning.”

Her expression shifted. Not quite suspicion. Not quite hope. “How?”

Damant propped himself at the edge of the desk. In the long walk over from the palace, he’d anticipated feeling reluctant. Instead, there was only a strange sense of freedom.

Slowly, carefully, he laid out his plan. He spared no details, made no attempt to conceal what he knew to be guesswork, or the challenges he’d no hope of solving alone.

Arvish spoke only when his words at last faltered. “They’ll call you a traitor.”

“House Bascari has a tradition of creating traitors from loyal men. I’ll be in good company.”

She leaned forward, hands on her knees, and shook her head. “You need Vallant for this, not me.”

“Even if he’d listen, I could never get him out. But you can speak for him.”

Arvish stared at the floor. “Suddenly everyone wants me to be a leader.”

Damant shrugged. “Like you said, you find your place or one’s found for you.”

“Say I agree. What’s to stop me vanishing the moment I leave this room?”

“Nothing. But all my life I’ve trusted the wrong people. Now I’m choosing to trust you.”

Magali Zyn met them in the alleyway behind the Thornless Rose and ushered them through a heavy door with barely a word. Kat kept pace with the hooded and cloaked Damant, and hoped that Overseer Sinair, now playing decoy back at the custodium, was more comfortable in her clothes than she was in the custodian’s borrowed uniform.

Barely a soul haunted the Thornless Rose’s silk-shrouded passageways. Had Marida ordered the place emptied, or had Magali simply brought them through rooms seldom used? Kat could credit either, and both added weight to the importance of the coming meeting.

At last they arrived at the throne room entrance. No guards waited at the silvered gates. No mirth echoed from adjoining chambers. Kat’s shoulders, already tense, tightened another notch.

“Wait here.” Magali vanished through the gates, leaving Kat alone with Damant.

“She’s cheery as ever,” murmured Kat.

“As long as she makes it fast,” Damant replied. “Yennika’s overseeing the loading of the torch wagons, but she’ll return to the custodium soon enough.”

Kat nodded. The walk down-spire had taken them past Kazzar’s Quay, where torch wagons, custodians and more koilos ember-saints than she cared to count had waited on the dockside. Athenoch’s fate might have been sealed, but Azra was taking no chances. No. Not Azra. Thinking of her as Azra made things complicated. It encouraged forgiveness, birthed heartache and longing. Though she hated it, Kat knew she couldn’t trust her own judgement around Azra. But around Yennika Bascari? That was a very different matter.

“What if I can’t convince them?”

Damant grunted. “Just tell them what you know. They each have reason to believe. And if truth isn’t enough, then we trust to greed.”

The gates creaked open. Magali emerged. “Follow.”

For another wonder in a day already filled with them, Marida was not reclining on her throne but standing solemnly at its foot. Even her garb was muted, the silks sombre and her jewellery limited to sapphire chains glittering in her hair. Ardin Javar, ever the bearded bear, stood three paces to her left, close enough to be part of proceedings, but far enough from Marida so as not to suggest friendliness. Maxin, standing a pace behind his master, offered Kat a slow wink.

“Well then,” said Marida. “Where shall we begin?”

Fifty

The Veil had swallowed the road to Athenoch decades before. Seeing its grey stones passing away beneath the Everlast’s shadow served Damant another reminder of how fast life ran away from you.

His position on the scarlet dhow’s port side quarterdeck offered a clear view of four torch wagons rumbling south across the ruddy plain. Indigo flames, soot and drifting ash wreathed kiln-like funnels and trailing tenders loaded with precious blesswood. Another pair ground onward ahead of the Everlast’s prow. Four more guarded the eastward flank, completing the loose formation that forced the Veil’s mists into retreat.

In all, Yennika had mustered some one thousand custodians across the Everlast and its rather less glamorous escort of troop scows. Most were crammed aboard the scows, but there were still enough aboard the Everlast to pack the gun deck with hammocks and leave the sun-side areas crowded with waiting troops.

Damant had recognised few faces among those who’d boarded the flotilla, and none he was prepared to trust. Most could be counted among Yennika’s recent recruits, further reminder of how readily he’d misread her ambitions. Add a hundred armoured koilos ember-saints slumbering aboard the westmost barge, and it became clear that the Battle of Athenoch would be a massacre. Shriekers against crossbows, and fearless cadavers against panicked civilians.

Like the other vessels, the Everlast travelled with sails furled, hauled southwards by a web of ropes and cables anchored to the torch wagons ahead of its prow. No captain had wanted to risk the wind turning. Tacking cost time and distance, and both were in dangerously short supply in a safe zone little more than a mile across. Besides, though heavily modified with wheel spikes and rubble ploughs to cope with what few challenges the flat Saramoszi Plains threw at them, the engines had originally been designed to haul up to thirty railrunner wagons loaded with passengers, ore and quarried stone. They’d muscle enough for the task.

Yennika joined Damant at the bulwark, eyes agleam. “You look positively skysick.”

He grunted. “We should have disembarked at Evrios and marched south.” In the event, Yennika had insisted that only the torch wagons be unloaded. “Too much can go wrong.”

She smiled, for whatever that was worth. Damant was increasingly aware that such expressions never touched her eyes. “You really must cultivate a sense of style if you’re to be my castellan, Ihsan.”

Ironic that she’d little intention of keeping him in that position but had no clue he’d already stripped that decision from her. “Theatricality, you mean.”

“I suppose. Perhaps I’ve a notion to sweep into battle like the Qersali zol’tayahs of old. But I’ve never cared for the smell of horse sweat, and you have to agree this is much more agreeable than some ramshackle chariot. Besides, shrieker cannons make for a lasting impression. This is to be a great day, Ihsan. We must all rise to the occasion. And speaking of rising, I see our guest is finally awake.”

He followed her gaze past the ship’s steerage column to see Arvish – once more clad in the toil-worn skelder leathers in which she’d been captured – step clear of the starboard companionway. Tanith followed, her ice-blue traveller’s robes further softened by the unbound spill of her golden hair.

Before departing Tyzanta, Yennika had taken pains to explain that Arvish had, in fact, been working for her at Xanathros Alabastra in an attempt to curtail Mirela’s schemes – though of course their architect had been unknown at the time. Duty done, she was now welcomed back into the fold. It provoked no small chagrin that the carefully curated story might have convinced – it certainly fitted the facts so far as Damant was supposed to know them – but for the truth that he and Arvish were now conspirators in their own right.

“I was wondering if you’d choose to show your face, darling.” Yennika kissed Arvish’s cheek. “If I’d known you’d spend the entire voyage avoiding this glorious sunshine, I’d have quartered you with Vallant not your sister.”

Arvish offered what seemed a genuine smile, affection tempered by embarrassment. “You know I don’t like heights.”

Yennika laughed. “Darling, we’re barely above the ground.”

“Fifty feet is a little more than ‘barely’.”

“She shouldn’t be here at all.” The dour objection came from Julan Aroth, who stood – as he had for every waking hour since leaving Tyzanta – two paces behind the helmsman, a redcloak bodyguard at his side. Having dismissed the Everlast’s perfectly competent captain, he’d elected for sole command of the dhow. Not that there was much in the way of command to be given. While under tow, the helmsman needed only keep the rudder and pitch sails in the necessary alignment. However, had Aroth gone below, his fellow passengers might have forgotten that he was in charge, and no fireblood of his standing could permit that.

Yennika retraced her steps across the deck. “Julan, I do believe you’re jealous.”

Aroth stiffened. “Whatever she was to you, she remains a skelder. I am particular about the company I keep.”

“Don’t I know it.” She leaned closer, oblivious of the redcloak’s protective glower, and laid a hand upon Aroth’s chest. “But Katija’s an important part of what’s to come. I’m not seeking respect, nor kindness. Simple courtesy. That’s all.”

Aroth stared down at her, handsome features a flow of unreadable emotion. Was he starting to realise that Yennika saw attraction as merely another weapon in an arsenal that included conspiracy, poison and more besides? Or was he indeed simply jealous? “There’s nothing simple about it.”

Lips pinched, Yennika snatched her hand from his chest. “Must you be so difficult?”

He sniffed. “Must you be so obvious?”

Arvish cleared her throat. “I’ll go below. Turns out I’m also choosy about the company I keep.”

She lingered just long enough to offer Damant a small, almost imperceptible nod.

Kat returned not to her cabin but the windowless day room two levels below the captain’s cabin Yennika had commandeered. Once past Jorais, whose macabre presence filled the antechamber between the fireblood quarters and the Everlast’s solitary gun deck, a degree of privacy was guaranteed. That the Everlast was larger than the Mornwake – larger indeed than the superannuated hulk that was the Chainbreaker – meant not only a greater number of cabins, but also a ban on cinderblood custodians and sailriders roaming passageways entirely too good for them.

She collapsed into an armchair. Tanith leaned against a wooden column between her and the door, arms folded and the by-now-familiar expression of amused anticipation firmly in place. “Make friends everywhere you go, don’t you?”

“I don’t have your advantages,” Kat replied.

“And what’s that supposed to mean?”

She hesitated. This was already the longest conversation they’d had since departing Tyzanta, sullen silence having been the best means of ensuring she gave nothing away. “Men like Aroth always forgive beauty. And you’re a fireblood.”

Tanith snorted. “I’m a half-blood. Aroth wouldn’t touch me even if I wanted him to. Even if he wasn’t forever drooling over Yennika.”

Kat supposed she should have been jealous, but then she’d loved Azra, not Yennika, and Azra had died at Xanathros Alabastra. She had to think that way, or things got complicated. “He never told me about you. Our father, I mean.”

“Do you think I care?” Petulant tone belied denial.

“Yes. I’m sorry you were alone.”

“I survived.”

Survived by feasting on souls. How many of the Everlast’s crew had fallen victim in recent days? “Surviving isn’t living.”

“No,” murmured Tanith, her eyes distant. “No, it isn’t. What… what would you have done if he had? Or if I’d sought you out when I escaped Kaldos?”

She sounded almost vulnerable, or at least as vulnerable as it was possible for a daemon to sound. “I don’t know,” Kat replied. “I’m starting to realise I don’t know myself that well.”

Tanith snorted. “I know that feeling.”

“Yennika said you want to be cured.”

She bared her teeth. “Everyone close to me leaves, or dies. But there is no cure. Yennika only tells me there is because she thinks I’ll abandon her otherwise. But I am as I am.” Maudlin tone gave way to bitterness. “What our father made me… and not you.”

Kat stared down at her left forearm. How close had she come to being like Tanith? “I can’t help that.”

Colour gathered to pale cheeks. “I don’t want your pity. There might not be a cure, but there is an inheritance. I will be a beautiful principessa in a palace of silks, courted and admired by all.” She ran her tongue across her lower lip. “And I shall never go hungry again.”

“You can’t mean that.”

“Why not?” Tanith replied, her anger fading. “Father always told me Nyssa wanted me to be this way. If I can’t change, I should embrace it.”

“I wish it could be different.”

“I don’t. So keep your pity. I don’t need it, and I don’t need y—”

A knock sounded at the door. Scowling, Tanith yanked it open and staggered away coughing as the doorway filled with a cloud of greyish-white dust. Eyes watering and glassy, she barely made it two paces before a masked custodian slipped into the chamber, grabbed a handful of golden hair and slammed her face-first into the wooden pillar.

“Well, well, well. Blackthorn blossom does work on amashti.” Damant held the limp Tanith upright by the hair while he satisfied himself she was unconscious. Then he let her drop and pulled his mask free. “Not going to lecture me?”

Kat shook her head. “No. She only looks like a girl.” Kneeling, she searched Tanith’s pockets with practised ease. “I’m tempted to throw her overboard.”

“We’d never get her to the gunwale without being seen.”

At last Kat’s fingers closed on the key. “Aha. Is everything ready?”

Damant nodded. “Maxin’s waiting at the felucca.” The tiny sailboat tied up behind the Everlast’s keel was used chiefly to ferry goods and crew when it wasn’t worth the trouble of docking the main ship. “The sentry had a nasty fall.”

“Lot of that going around.” Rising, she started for the door. “I’d better get gone.”

“Aren’t you forgetting something?”

She halted, one hand on the jamb and head already in the passageway. “What, like thanks?”

“No.” He held out his hand. Gold gleamed in the lumani light. “This.”

Kiasta. Maybe she did owe him thanks after all. She settled for a curt nod.

The sentry at Vallant’s cell, more intent on scrying his fortune in a deck of pentassa cards than the possibility that anyone aboard the Everlast might make an unwanted call, never saw Kat coming. Likely he never felt the blow from the belaying pin either.

The tiny cabin held only a slop bucket by way of comfort. Quite why it held even that was a mystery, as Vallant could never have reached it, hung as he was from the ceiling by his shackled wrists. He looked awful and smelled worse, the week’s worth of beard making his bruises all the darker.

His eyes widened in recognition. “Kat?”

She pulled the door shut. “Tell everyone, why don’t you?”

He swallowed. “I thought they’d killed you.”

“Part of me died. I’m learning to live without it.”

He blinked. “I don’t understand.”

She looped her hands behind her back and watched him closely. “Of course not, because you don’t really listen, do you?”

Relief ebbed from his battered face, replaced by suspicion. “What is this?”

“We’re two days out from Athenoch. Yennika means to wipe it off the face of Khalad.”

Vallant’s jaw set. Chains rattled in the eyebolt as he strove to pull free. “We have to warn them!”

“Why?” asked Kat flatly. “Why, when Bashar Vallant, the great hero of the downtrodden, is a lie? Just one in a long line of tools wielded by the Eternity King to keep order.”

“You’re not making any sense.”

“Every custodian you kill, every convoy you raid, every tollhouse you destroy just drives the terrified into the firebloods’ arms. Oh, but not the reckless. They join your great crusade, and you obligingly get them killed. You aren’t freeing anyone – you’re part of the cage.”

Vallant winced. “I know you think that, but it’s not true, it’s—”

“They made you. You weren’t supposed to die when Damant fired on your ship. They wanted you to take up the mantle Javar left behind, just like I’m supposed to take up yours if I want anyone to live through the next two days.” Kat stepped closer, giving him nowhere to look but at her. “You may not be a custodian any longer, but you’re working for the Bascari all the same. Out comes the drum, and you dance. You’re not a hero. All you’re doing is getting people killed and calling it principle.”

“Kat, listen to me.” Even captivity couldn’t strip Vallant of his earnestness. “Of course they want you to believe that. It’s not—”

“Really?” She threw her arms wide. “That’s the best you have? Think back to all those close calls. All those times where almost everyone else was dead and yet you turned it around. Are you really so arrogant you think it was your doing?”

His cheek twitched. The first doubt shrouded his eyes. “Nyssa was with us.”

“You’re in the wrong profession. With divine intervention like that, you could be Qabirarch by now.” Realising that she’d raised her voice, she dropped it to a whisper. “Come on, Vallant. You might be a fanatic, but you’re no fool. You’ve known for years that something was wrong.”

He glared, teeth bared and murder in his eyes. Then all at once he sagged against the chains. “No. Not known. Suspected, maybe, but…” He sighed. “Fine. You want me to say it? That you were right and I was wrong?”

Kat offered a half-smile. “Yes.”

“Excuse me?”

She stepped closer still, eyes inches from his. “Admit that I was right. That maybe – just maybe – there’s a better way to help people than getting them killed.”

He hesitated. “All right, maybe there is.”

“If you had the chance to do it again – to do it differently – would you?”

“Yes. Not that it matters now, but yes. Yes! You were right.” He closed his eyes, worn away even as a burden lifted. “Happy?”

“Ecstatic.” Kat held up the key to his shackles. “Shall we get out of here?”

Damant hadn’t long returned to the quarterdeck when the starboard lookout pointed urgently to a lateen sail unfurling between the Everlast and the wallowing scow that was her closest neighbour.

“Where’s that felucca going?”

Yennika ran for the bulwark, only to skid to a halt as an unsteady Tanith hauled herself up the companionway steps and slumped drunkenly against the handrail. “Kat’s gone,” she slurred. “Vallant too.”

Aroth left the helm, reaching the companionway in three swift strides. “What?”

Damant bore down on Tanith, letting fury disguise satisfaction. “Why didn’t you call for help?”

“Someone attacked me. A custodian.”

Yennika touched his arm. “Ihsan, please. It’s not her fault.”

That she was still determined to maintain the illusion that Tanith was merely an unfortunate ingenue convinced Damant that he was in the clear. Still, he held Tanith’s gaze just long enough to confirm that between custodian’s mask and the after-effects of blackthorn blossom she’d no notion he’d been her attacker. “We’ll never catch them now!”

“So? We know where they’re going.” Face contorted in a vicious scowl, Yennika beckoned to the lookout. “Signal the torch wagons to increase speed. I want Athenoch ablaze by noon tomorrow!”

Far off the prow, the felucca plunged into the Veil.

It was all Kat could do not to laugh when the mists closed about her. All her life, they’d terrified her. Now they’d become a haven. She breathed deep of the scent of old memories and held Javar’s communion ring – and its precious slivers of astoricum – close to her chest. The ex-templar had refused to hand it over until she’d explained its importance. He’d promised to keep the secret, but who knew what that was really worth? One of the Veil’s secrets would soon wear thin. But no secret was worth lives.

One hand on the tiller, Maxin scratched his pate. “I don’t skrelling believe it. Eaten by the Veil and still breathing.”

She stifled a smile. “You handled this thing well back there.”

He shrugged. “Once a sailrider, always a sailrider. The day I can’t blend in with a press-ganged crew’s the day I find honest work.”

“Do we have enough wind?”

“Don’t ask me where it’s blowing from, but yes.”

“Keep this heading.” Astoricum might hold them together in the mists, but navigating was another matter. Without Zephyr to guide them, the only hope was to follow the line of the Athenoch road. “If you see anything in the mists, just ignore it.”

Maxin grunted. “Just like being around Javar when he’s in one of his moods.”

Leaving him to his work – or rather its lack – Kat headed for the prow. A short trip: anything larger than the felucca would have needed a crew or a host of motics to manage its sails. They hadn’t the former, and the latter would already have faded.

She found Vallant staring moodily ahead, arms folded and shoulders hunched.

“I can’t promise this will work,” she said softly. “If time really is different behind the Veil, Yennika might still beat us there.”

“You’ve given us a chance,” he replied. “That’s all I could ever ask.”

He fell silent, the pressure of an unspoken question building between them.

“I’ve been thinking about what you said, about how the Bascari made me.” His voice shook, just a little. “Was Tythia part of that?”

“Not that I know,” Kat replied.

He patted her on the shoulder, expression giving no clue as to whether he’d recognised the lie. “You’re a good woman, Kat. Whatever happens in the coming hours, remember that.”

The mists parted to reveal Athenoch in all its ruined – but unburned – glory. Maxin brought the felucca low over streets filled with running feet and upraised voices. Vallant stood tall at the prow, arms spread in acceptance of cheers: the unabashed celebration of a people whose leader – whose hero – had returned. Kat’s last doubts bled away. For all her harsh words aboard the Everlast, for all that Vallant’s legend was hollow to the core, he inspired hope. If one was to be a fool, there were worse causes in which to be foolish.

The cheers abated as Maxin steered the felucca pier-side opposite the Chainbreaker’s blackened, battered hull. No sooner had he tied her off than Zephyr swept across the felucca’s low gunwale without so much as a pretence of needing something solid underfoot. Laughing with an unburdened lightness of which Kat hadn’t thought her capable, the daughter of the Issnaîm swept Vallant up in a vaporous embrace that left them suspended a dozen feet above the pier, dancing to music only she could hear.

Kat had just enough time to wince in vertiginous empathy before Yali emerged from the gathering crowd and hugged her with rib-creaking force.

||You are never doing that to me again,|| she signed, her attempt at a stern expression undermined by the wobble in her lips. ||We thought the custodians had caught you. We thought you were…||

Her eyes pinched shut, hands falling to her sides mid sign. Kat squeezed her arm and stared out at familiar faces. Maxin was swept up by the crowd. Rîma, hidden from the world once again in hat, scarf and coat, offered a small nod of greeting and approval. Tatterlain, fist pumping the air, led a fresh round of cheers from onlookers, Vathi among them. It was easy to imagine Jaîna and Amarid among them, if only in spirit.

The cheers weren’t for her, Kat knew that. Or not mostly for her. But neither that nor the knowledge of the Bascari flotilla closing through the Veil could entirely dampen her joy, her simple belonging. She finally had a home.

Time to fight for it.

Fifty-One

It began slowly at first – a simple thinning of the mist off the Everlast’s prow, beyond even the torch wagons’ leaping flames, the greenish white shimmering blue with the promise of something beyond. Then all at once the Veil peeled away to reveal an impossible city stretching away along the banks of a wide river.

Athenoch.

Damant leaned on the quarterdeck’s bulwark and made a careful sweep of the city. All was as the informants’ reports had promised: a clear zone behind the Veil, dominated by a sole black tower and the ruins of ages past. No defences to speak of. But those same reports had skimped on non-military details. The reclaimed buildings. Windmills turning lazy circles above verdant hillsides. Roadways free of weeds and potholes. No paradise, certainly, but better than a good many of Tyzanta’s outlying villages, and miles beyond the squalor of the Gutterfields.

And they’d come to burn it down.

“At last,” said Aroth, a wolfish expression on his face.

Yennika touched his arm but had eyes only for the city. “Indeed, darling.”

A shimmer of indigo light flickered into being beside Aroth. Damant glimpsed the translucent shadow of a thin, featureless face, its skin waxy and drawn. The heraldic spoke softly, words swallowed by distance, then its dissipating light shot skyward towards the Deadwinds, invisible even before it had cleared the sail.

Aroth scowled. “The lead torch wagon reports they’re under fire. Where did these rebels get shriekers?”

His back to Yennika, he’d no chance to see the disdain flicker across her face.

Damant coughed. “It’ll be crossbows, Minister.”

“Good. Then they pose no danger to the wagons.”

No, just the crews, thought Damant, though he was well past the point of believing that Julan Aroth had anything other than contempt for the lesser orders. “Probably not,” he said aloud, “but without crew to operate them…”

Aroth pinched his lips tight. “Quite right, Castellan. We don’t want to be trapped here.” He turned to the signaller. “Give the order to cut the tow cables. Helm? Run out the sails and bring us about. Let’s give them a taste of what’s coming.”

The helmsman touched a hand to the motic prism jutting from the steering pedestal and hauled the lateral wheel clockwise, straining against the pull of counterweights that otherwise held the rudder sail amidships. Bellowed commands echoed along the main deck. Motic winches rumbled into life. The Everlast pitched to starboard, sharpening the turn.

Athenoch’s outermost street, scarcely more than a series of low ruined walls, swung into view off the port bow. Figures scurried behind the makeshift rampart. Some shaded their eyes and peered skyward at the Everlast’s majesty. Others loosed crossbows at the embattled torch wagon, which already had two bodies in its wake.

The helmsman gave the pitching wheel a final nudge. Damant spluttered as the levelling Everlast plunged through the torch wagon’s trailing smoke plume and came about parallel to the ragged street.

“Give them a volley,” snapped Aroth.

“Open fire!” bellowed an overseer.

Boatswains relayed the cry twice more. With a rumbling shudder and a chorus of ear-piercing screams, the skies shook with indigo flame.

Two shots sputtered into nothing long before impacting the ground. A third ploughed a spray of dirt and exploded half a dozen yards from a stone wall. The remaining three punched home with a thunderclap, hurling fountains of dirt and stone high into the air. Bodies plunged from the makeshift ramparts. Some scrambled to their feet, or were dragged upright by comrades. Others burned where they’d fallen, indigo fires turning orange as ifrîti wrath sought new fuel.

Damant, who hadn’t been under cannon fire since the Jovîna–Bascari trade war, winced and reminded himself that whatever his new allegiance, Athenoch’s defenders had the blood of his comrades – his friends – on their hands. His dispassionate logic wilted when the screech of the second volley blew apart a townhouse gable, cascading rubble and corpses across the street. As the third volley collapsed the townhouse entirely, he eased his grip on his holstered shrieker – he’d no memory of putting a hand to it in the first place – and urged himself to patience.

“Sail!” shouted a sailrider. “Sail to port!”

Aroth crossed to the bulwark and stared out across the rising dust cloud. “Is it Vallant?”

Damant conceded that in the excitement of the one-sided battle, the minister might have forgotten that none of the buildings on Athenoch’s northern edge were large enough to conceal a dhow of the Chainbreaker’s size. Cynicism suggested a simpler answer, and one that spoke ill of Aroth’s expertise.

Away through the dust, a white lateen sail billowed across a cramped deck – the Everlast’s felucca. It held only Maxin and a tall, square-shouldered man in a maskless custodian’s uniform, complete with the flowing silk cape ordinarily reserved for ceremonial duties. Even at a distance, Damant recognised his mannerisms. The prideful posture not lost even buried in a cell. The unhurried, contemptuous stride from tiller to prow. The old uniform – one since betrayed a thousand times over – was an almost unnecessary flourish. As the last of the mooring ropes slithered away and the sail caught the wind, the man set one knee on the narrow prow and with expansive hands offered Aroth and the Everlast’s crew a terse Simah instruction laden with anatomical impossibility.

Yennika joined Damant and Aroth at the bulwark. “So he made it here after all.”

“He’d never abandon his people.” Damant ignored her sneer.

“So why’s he running now?” Contempt rippled beneath Aroth’s words.

Sure enough, the felucca was pulling away south. The streets too were full of fleeing figures, a stream of skelders flowing towards the lone black tower at Athenoch’s heart.

Yennika drummed her fingers on the bulwark. “He’s trying to draw us in. There could be anything waiting in those streets.”

“You think he’s got torsion ballistae?” asked Aroth. “Those things are antiques.”

“A lucky shot into our buoyancy tanks and it won’t matter.” Yennika beckoned to the nearest overseer. “Order the Mindful Keeper, the Errant Word and the Oathbound to deploy their custodians.”

The overseer bobbed his head. “Yes, lady. And the Servitude?”

“We’ll leave the koilos out of it for now. After all, I do want prisoners.” She offered the brilliant smile that could be disarming or chilling depending on the thought behind it. “But not too many.”

“No!” Scarlet robes whirling, Aroth turned on the overseer, index finger extended. “Wake the koilos. If Vallant wants a fight, let him have one.”

Yennika’s smile stuttered out. “Julan, darling. The koilos were for emergencies. Once they’re loose, they’ll kill everyone. We agreed—”

“Your plaything had her opportunity,” he replied coldly. “As far as I’m concerned, she can take her chances with the rest.”

“But without someone to take Vallant’s place—”

“There will always be someone to take Vallant’s place. There’s no shortage of misfits in Khalad.”

“This isn’t what we agreed.” Ice crackled beneath her words. “This isn’t what the Voice authorised.”

“Don’t forget your place.” He towered over her, eyes full of disdain. “The Voice wanted Vallant removed. That’s what she’ll get. Her authority – the authority of the Eternity King – flows through me, not you.”

His expression carefully immobile in the face of a death sentence being passed, Damant cleared his throat. “With respect, minister, that’s not how I remember the Voice’s decision.”

Aroth didn’t even glance at him. His eyes never left Yennika’s. “I thought it only proper the Voice hear first-hand some of the stories about you so she’d know the kind of person she was entrusting with her patronage. She decided she’d rather have someone more reliable in command. I’m a minister of the King’s Council, and you?”

“I’m the Countess Bascari.”

“You’re Yennika Bascari. Everyone knows your value. You made a mistake with Arvish. You don’t get to make another.”

Yennika’s hand brushed the emerald-set dagger sheathed above her skirts. She spread her fingers, palm outward, and offered a shake of the head so minuscule that Damant wouldn’t have seen it had he not been watching for it.

Aroth, shrouded in a fug of self-importance, missed it entirely. Not so Tanith – who’d abandoned both her position at the Everlast’s stern and the forlorn persona worn since Arvish’s escape – to stand midway between Aroth and his bodyguard. At Yennika’s gesture she kept moving, tension slipping away from her posture but not her eyes.

“Of course, Julan,” said Yennika, her gaze now firmly on her feet. “As the Voice decrees.”

Aroth glared at the overseer. “You have your orders. Relay them.”

“Yes, lord.”

As the overseer made for the low cupboard holding the Everlast’s precious supply of heraldics, Aroth returned to his station behind the ship’s wheels. Yennika gripped the port bulwark, her knuckles paling. She gazed out across thinning dust clouds falling behind as the Everlast swam serenely across Athenoch’s northern face, her stare a promise of death.

Beyond the drifting dust, anchors thudded and scraped into the rubble as the scows moored above the ruin-strewn outer streets. Shriekers and scimitars drawn, custodians flooded onto the upper floors of still-standing buildings or else abseiled from boarding lines. They fanned out, the flash and wail of shrieker fire marking brief resistance – or, Damant suspected bleakly, an especially startling shadow. The Servitude drifted low over the riverside path. Robes fluttering in the wind, its koilos dropped from gunwale to ground and formed into a narrow column of lamellar plates and ridged gold helms.

Gilded bone and flamberges gleaming in the sunshine, they began their remorseless march to the black tower.

“It’s too easy,” murmured Yennika. “It was never supposed to be difficult, but this? Where’s that floating wreck of his?”

“Sail!” shouted a sailrider. “Sail ahead!”

Fifty-Two

A weight lifted from Kat’s shoulders as Zephyr brought the Chainbreaker out of the mists directly above and ahead of the Bascari dhow. In all their hurried planning, the relative positioning of the two ships had lain beyond their control. Arrive too far away and they’d never have closed the distance in time. Arrive prow-on to the Everlast’s broadside and shrieker cannons would have torn the Chainbreaker apart.

Now they had a chance.

“Waholi! I need more sail!” Zephyr spun the lateral wheel anticlockwise with one hand and corrected the pitching wheel by a quarter-turn with the other. “Wind’s in the wrong place, it is.”

Up and down the Chainbreaker, crew wrestled with stays, giving more canvas to the rudder sails and hauling the yardarm about the mast to steal every scrap of wind. Kat shifted restlessly as the distance shortened. Never had it been clearer that the Everlast was half as large again as the Chainbreaker. That meant twice the crew, and most of them better armed. Nyssa had given them a chance, but only a chance.

Not that Kat would have known it from Vallant’s expression. Even through the bruises, he looked determined, even eager. One hand on the for’ard quarterdeck rail, he hefted his mace – close enough in shape and size to the one confiscated by the Bascari that Kat suspected he had no small stock of the things – and grinned.

“I knew they’d not risk the dhow,” he said. “It’s a lot to lose, tallied in pride and tetrams both.”

“Just as well,” Rîma replied flatly. “That torsion ballista in the tower is as likely to implode as shoot.”

“You need more faith.”

Kat, having glimpsed the weapon in question as its handlers had winched it up into the black tower’s main chamber, quietly sided with Rîma. She peered south-east. The felucca was still halfway between the tower and the Bascari advance – well beyond shrieker range – its lazy inward arc crafted to tantalise pursuers. Below, the last of the defenders had finally reached the tower’s gate. Kat had hated the idea of Tatterlain’s diversion. Now, with the wind tugging at her hair and vertigo tugging at her senses, she accepted its necessity. Had the scows not emptied, they could have reinforced the Everlast’s crew.

Of the five hundred living souls who called Athenoch home, barely half were reliable fighters, the rest being old, infirm, or not yet of age to hold a sword. Discounting the fifty aboard the Chainbreaker, perhaps two hundred now held the tower, protecting the defenceless within. There wasn’t a living soul elsewhere in the city, but the custodians weren’t to know. Caution would slow their advance.

“I think Tatterlain’s enjoying being you,” she said.

Vallant shrugged. “Wouldn’t be the first time.”

“Hold onto something!” shouted Zephyr.

She spun the pitching wheel anticlockwise. Kat grabbed at the for’ard rail as the Chainbreaker’s bow dipped five, ten, twenty degrees. Two paces to her left, braced against the gentle curve where the rail met the companionway, Yali grinned and threw her hands into the air. Kat, now presented with a clear, dizzying view of Athenoch’s streets, threw her a disbelieving look.

||What?|| signed Yali.

Lacking free hands to reply, Kat pinched her eyes shut.

The attack on Athenoch was Yennika’s doing. A sword at her throat would end it. It wouldn’t save Athenoch – now that the Eternity King had the means to penetrate the Veil, another attack would come even if this one failed – but it didn’t need to. Its people were what mattered.

“Looks like they’ve seen us,” said Rîma.

Kat risked cracking open one eye to see Everlast drifting across the river on a south-west heading. The great fin of its rudder sail bloomed, extra canvas speeding the turn. Six gun ports loomed ominously in the dhow’s crimson flank.

Vallant patted the rail. “Looks like we’ll see how much damage the old lady can take.”

Flame blossomed from the Everlast’s gun ports.

One shot tore through the mainsail with a hollow, ripping whoosh. Another took a chunk out of the starboard rigging and swept a luckless sailrider into the sky. Other crewers ran forward to anchor the trailing stays, but the sail was already ablaze, the Chainbreaker slowing as canvas turned to ash.

Damant looked from Aroth to the descending Chainbreaker, still a hundred yards distant. Its mainsail was already a quarter ablaze, its deck listing to starboard to match pale vapour hissing from a ruptured buoyancy tank.

He’d never been a spectator to a battle before. He hated it. However imperfect his allegiances, he’d chosen Arvish and Vallant’s cause. There had to be something he could do. Some way to make a difference.

The Chainbreaker shuddered as another salvo slammed home. A body plunged from a section of fire-blasted bulwark.

Aroth clenched a fist. “They’re finished! Stay broadside-on and keep firing.”

“No!” Yennika started forward, her words addressed to the helmsman. “Bring us about! Put as much distance between us as you can.”

“Belay that!” Aroth interposed himself between Yennika and the helmsman, his redcloak bodyguard a threatening presence beside him. “I’ve made my decision. They all die.”

Yennika met him glare for glare. “You’re a fool, Julan. If Kat’s here, she’s on that ship, and if she’s on that ship, she’s coming for us! Don’t you see it? They haven’t the numbers or the weapons to fight head-on, so they’re going for the throat.”

Aroth glanced at the blazing Chainbreaker, intellect vying with suspicion. “You’re certain?”

“I know how she thinks. I hurt her. I lied to her. She’ll make me pay for that, and here’s you standing right beside me.” She planted her hands on her hips. “Is your victory worth your life, darling? Because that’s the price of this childish gratification. They’re dead in the sky already. Leave them be. If the fire doesn’t get them, gravity will.”

For a heartbeat, Damant was tempted to shoot the helmsman, even though his own death would follow soon after. But killing the helmsman wouldn’t make the difference he sought. It might startle the helmic into locking the wheel, but a dozen others aboard the Everlast had the necessary glyph to sooth the ifrît and lay in the course. Any sabotage had to focus on not the man, but the machine.

Aroth scowled, pride and necessity fighting for dominance. Earlier, Damant had suspected the minister to be out of his depth; now he knew it. He also noted that somewhere along the way Yennika had forgotten that he didn’t know the full scope of her plans, or perhaps that she no longer cared to conceal them. But then between the argument, the cannon fire and the imminent prospect of being boarded, it seemed everyone on the quarterdeck had forgotten he existed.

Which suited him just fine, because he suddenly knew exactly where he needed to be.

Moving slowly so as not to arouse suspicion, he headed for the companionway.

As he reached the steps, Aroth at last overcame his indecision. “Hard to port! Keep that wreck to our stern. I want to watch it fall out of the sky.”

||They’re veering away!|| signed Yali, all joy gone as adventure burned to nightmare.

Kat followed her stricken gaze down to the Everlast’s prow, already five degrees off and yawing further with each passing moment.

Vallant turned back towards the helm. “Get us in there!”

“What think you I’m trying to do?” Zephyr retorted. “Ayin, losing speed, we are.”

The Everlast’s gun ports roared. The Chainbreaker’s deck shook to a low, grinding roar.

Pale vapour hissed up over the port bulwark.

||I felt that,|| said Yali, her face aghast.

“We’ve lost another buoyancy tank,” said Vallant grimly.

The prow dipped. Overhead, the flames spread from the sail to the mast.

Four decks below the Everlast’s helm, Damant edged across the ballast hold walkway to a wooden hatch. Wrenching it open, he was relieved to find that for all that his command of the Triumphant lay two decades in the past, his memory of a dhow’s layout held true. On the Triumphant, the tiny compartment had served as a rope locker; on the Everlast, it was a paint store, barrels of black and crimson identified by the overspill at their rims.

But the differences between the ships didn’t matter, only their similarities. A pair of creaking rope cables entered the compartment through parallel ceiling-set holes, passed through an array of winches, pulleys and counterweights, and then left through a second hole in the aft wall. The steerage lines, attached to the lateral wheel high above, and to the rudder sail’s tiller a deck below. Two motic prisms – one for each line – glinted on the nearest pair of winches, the means by which the Everlast’s helmic steered the ship when no one had the helm. It was an arrangement that could work miracles, allowing a skyship to run practically unmanned, at least for a time.

But even motics had their limitations.

Damant drew his shrieker.

A heavy hand spun him around. A sailrider’s bearded teak face crowded his. “What’s this corpse rot?”

“It’s very simple. Let me—” Damant kneed the sailrider in the groin.

The man doubled over, his howl gasping into silence as Damant brought the butt of his shrieker crashing down.

Ignoring cries of alarm echoing from further along the hold, Damant levelled his shrieker at the starboard steering line and opened fire. The tiny compartment filled with the scream and soot of the weapon’s discharge. Blinded by the smoke, he never saw the shot that severed the line, but he did hear the musical report of its breaking.

Freed from the tyranny of helmsman and helmic both, the counterweight plunged, dragging the Everlast’s rudder sail amidships.

Grunting his satisfaction, Damant backed out of the compartment. A bony hand twisted the shrieker from his grip. Another closed about his throat.

Jorais’ sightless, gilded skull glimmered in the darkness.

“She’s stopped turning!”

Kat couldn’t see who shouted, but even through half-lidded eyes, she saw they were right.

“Zephyr!” shouted Vallant. “Get us over there!”

“Better make it fast, ayin,” she retorted. “There’s no saving her now!”

Stung by the strain in Zephyr’s voice, Kat fully opened her eyes for the first time since the Everlast’s initial salvo. The Chainbreaker was no longer a mortal skyship but a daemon galleon out of legend, wreathed in flame and with smoke for canvas. Fires raged across the mainsail. The rear was shot completely away. The entire port side bulwark was ablaze, a handful of skelders fighting a losing battle with a bucket chain across the canted deck.

They were still higher than the oncoming Everlast, but just barely. Two dozen feet above the quarterdeck, perhaps three dozen above the main.

Vallant tugged at her arm. Rîma and Yali were already moving for’ard. “We’ll have to abseil.”

Sailriders unfurled boarding lines and flung the trailing ends over the starboard bow. The first shriekers blazed from the Everlast’s deck and thumped into the Chainbreaker’s abused port flank as custodians realised their danger.

Kat glanced at Zephyr, who’d abandoned all pretence of needing the deck for support. Starlight hair and gossamer dress streaming behind, she clung to the lateral wheel with outstretched hands, a wild grin on her lips.

“What about you?”

“She’s served well, nasaîm,” Zephyr replied, breathless with joy. “Deserves a good death, she does.”

Kat’s heart lurched. Was Zephyr talking about the Chainbreaker or herself? From their first meeting, impishness had struggled to conceal ennui, Vallant’s obsessions and her own people’s passivity weighing her down. “Come with us!”

“Someone needs to keep her straight.” Zephyr’s grin broadened. “Be not afeared. Not dying today, am I.”

Vallant’s hand closed about Kat’s upper arm. “We have to go.”

Kat bit her lip and stumbled across the deck after him. Sweet, mournful song blossomed behind her, the Issnaîm lament rising to challenge the crackle of smoke and the wail of shriekers. Mournful. Triumphant. Savage.

The Everlast’s sail filled the sky above the blazing port bulwark. Staggering against the angle of the deck every step of the way, Kat joined the scrum at the boarding lines. A shove propelled her to the gunwale. Staring dead ahead to deny vertigo its fuel, she swung one leg over the bulwark and grabbed a rope. Just like the descent to Javar’s mansion: a sheer drop, and Azra waiting below.

She’d survived that. She’d survive this.

Before delay turned to hesitation, she gripped the rope and plunged.

Fifty-Three

Kat plunged through the smoke. She glimpsed shadows moving through the murk, heard the first scrape of vying blades, the first screams. Then her boots hit planking with enough force to break her grip on the rope.

She staggered towards the Everlast’s prow, fighting for balance as the Chainbreaker’s black keel rushed along behind her, crosswise to the deck. A roaring smoke-shadow became a Bascari sailrider, his eyes wild and his scimitar slicing at her neck. She ducked, the blade hissing over her head, and turned the momentum of her stagger into a shoulder charge. Breath whoomphed from the sailrider’s lips and he went backwards.

Gasping for breath, Kat fumbled for her sword. Her draw became a desperate parry as the sailrider thrust, the shock of impact shuddering her elbow. Her back-cut bit into his arm and tasted blood. He collapsed with a mewling scream as Yali hacked two-handed at his spine.

Yali stepped away, sword trembling but her eyes proud as she prised her left hand free of its grips to offer terse signs. ||Don’t run off!||

The shadow of the Chainbreaker’s flank loomed larger. Kat yanked Yali towards her.

The deck bucked and shuddered as the dhow’s trailing keel slammed into the planks where Yali had stood moments before. Remnants of aethersails and flaming debris raining down all around, it scraped through the smoke with a rumbling, tooth-grinding howl before smashing a section of the Everlast’s port bulwark to splinters and vanishing into skies clogged by the smoke of its own demise.

Kat doubled over in a paroxysm of coughing as ash hit her lungs. When she straightened, the smoke was thicker than ever, the deck of the Everlast some filthy imitation of the Veil, smoke-laden and bitter where the mists offered solace and calm. Shriekers wailed away towards the stern, the flash of their firing brief sparks amid the murk. And from everywhere came the snarl and scream of men and women locked in desperate struggle.

Two of the Chainbreaker’s sailriders ran past her, howling challenge into the smoke. Another stumbled and died at her feet, clothes already dark with blood from a gashed neck. His killer, a hulking custodian, silvered mask dulled by the smoke, lowered a slick scimitar and levelled his shrieker at Kat.

She shoved Yali one way and dived the other, the searing backwash of the invisible flame warm against her cheek and scalp as her shoulder hit timber. She rolled to her feet, sprang at the custodian and cut him down.

“Impressive.” Rîma emerged from the smoke, sword on her shoulder and coat tails brushing at the dead. “You’re improving.”

“Survival’s a great motivator.” Kat nodded breathless thanks and wiped at her streaming, sweaty brow with the back of a hand. It came away black. “Vallant?”

Rîma shrugged. “I haven’t seen him.”

Shrieker reports flared, the screams of the dying hard on their heels. ||We’re being cut to pieces out here!|| No danger of finding Yennika in the thick of the fight. She’d be on the quarterdeck, safe behind a line of custodians. Kat scowled at the dead custodian’s shrieker, wishing she’d had time for Zephyr to take her into the Deadwinds and feed her tattoo. Too late now. She waved at a companionway. ||Head below!||

||Look!||

Kat followed Yali’s pointing finger off the port bow, where a fickle gust of wind parted the smoke and offered a last glimpse of the Chainbreaker. Wreathed in fire, no longer a ship but a funeral pyre, it plunged mistressless towards riverside ruins thick with advancing custodians.

No, not quite mistressless. Even as Kat watched, the mass of flame that had once been the rudder sail somehow lurched about, nudging the Chainbreaker’s course a few degrees further east. The custodians in its shadow scurried like ants to escape.

The skyship’s prow shrugged a tower from its path, spilling dust and stone into the streets below. The hull screamed and buckled as it slewed into the hollow shell of a three-storey mansion, scattering flame and timber fragments across the fleeing custodians. Not to be left out, the mansion’s surviving walls gave way in an avalanche of stone, hurling a cloud of grey-white dust skyward to challenge the smoke.

||Zephyr said she deserved a good death,|| said Kat, her throat thick with loss. Easily fifty custodians had died in the crash, or at least were so wounded as to be unfit to fight. ||She…||

A woman-shaped cloud drifted amid the maelstrom of dust and smoke. Hair and skirts streamed behind as the wind bore her south over the untouched column of marching koilos and towards the black tower. Then the wind gusted anew, and the Everlast’s drifting smoke hid all.

“I don’t believe it,” breathed Kat.

||You can’t kill the wind by dropping it off a cliff.|| Rîma tilted her head, a knowing smile tugging at her lips. ||You didn’t think their settlements were on the ground, did you?||

Kat stared a moment longer, glad of the reminder that not everything was as impossible as it first appeared. Then she ran for the companionway.

Orders rang out through the smoke, boatswains and overseers bellowing at their charges to repel boarders. Damant marked the panic in their voices and smiled bitterly through the pain of his crushed wrist. Whatever happened next, his actions had been worth it.

The jab of a sailrider’s scimitar sent him stumbling towards the quarterdeck companionway. Leaning on the rail more than holding it, he staggered up the steps. At the top, a heavy shove from Jorais sent him sprawling. A bad landing on his wrist shot pain along his arm and deep into his chest. Gasping away the red flashes behind his eyes, he straightened to his knees.

Yennika crouched beside him and brushed the back of her hand along his jaw. “Ihsan. Words simply cannot express my disappointment. Why ever did you do it?”

Damant held his injured wrist close and glared up at the audience he’d drawn. Aroth, with his nose aloft to avoid the stink of betrayal. The stern gaze of his redcloak bodyguard. The two sailriders whose warding glyphs had allowed them to wrest him from Jorais, desperate to draw no more attention than necessary from their fireblood betters. The koilos itself, cold and impassive. And of course Tanith, who regarded him unblinking.

Ignoring them all, he focused on Yennika. “I’ve served House Bascari all my life,” he croaked. “I never once questioned. Never once doubted, until I met you. How corrupt must you be to make the blind see?”

The skin tightened about her eyes, a storm gathering. A sharp, insincere smile banished it. “Oh Ihsan, darling, you have no idea.”

Her hand transferred from his jaw to his wrist and squeezed. Red flashes behind his eyes blazed back. Bony hands clamped about his shoulders, holding him down. He gritted his teeth and met Yennika’s glare, hoping against hope that the sounds of battle rolling along the Everlast’s deck swallowed his small mewling noises.

“I warned you he’d be trouble,” said Aroth. “Duty stretches only so far before it snaps.”

“Just kill me,” breathed Damant. “It’s the only satisfaction you’ll get.”

Yennika withdrew her hand, her smile turning genuine. “That would be wasteful. Katija may have rejected my offer to take over from Vallant, but I’ve a feeling you’ll play the role very well.”

Damant pinched his eyes shut. The pain was less in the dark than in the light. “Let me live, and I’ll kill you if it’s the last thing I do.”

“You see?” She patted his cheek. “We’re all finding our place today. Jorais, please throw this fool into Vallant’s old cell. And Tanith?” Her voice hardened. “My ship is full of vermin. Clear them out, if you would.”

A shrieker shot screamed across the gun bay, leaving a ragged, charred wound across a beam. The shooter collapsed behind a stack of barrels, a black-feathered crossbow quarrel protruding from his chest. With a wordless cry, skelders charged on through the wooden pillars, their lumani-cast shadows dancing through the smoke.

Kat went with them, her tongue bitter with ash and her left arm aching from a cut taken earlier in the battle. The wound screamed like fire beneath the crusting blood, but she dared not pause to tend it. Yali was already somewhere ahead. Whatever luck the girl had relied on to that point couldn’t last. She’d not seen Rîma for even longer, but held no fears for the swordstress of the Hidden Cities.

“Skelder vermin!”

A sailrider’s scimitar flashed down. It chimed off a cannon barrel as Kat threw herself aside. Her slash met the brief resistance of flesh and scraped between the man’s ribs. She left him thrashing on the deck and moved on.

A skelder dropped, screaming as fire raced across her clothes. Shadows blurred in the smoky air, footfalls thundering.

Kat flung herself into the sparse cover of the partition between two gun bays. Two sailriders and a custodian hurtled past, and were met with swords at the edge of the next partition. A second custodian bore down on Kat, sword flashing in a series of vicious cuts to drive her back.

He was stronger and taller than her and though the low ceiling forced him to stoop, no trick she mustered from a weary sword arm could force an opening. One elbow brushing the partition and the other scraping across the shrieker cannon’s brass barrel, she retreated. Her back pressed up against the hull, her neck cricked where the curving wall met the low ceiling.

The custodian lunged. His foot caught on the edge of the cannon’s wooden carriage, throwing the point of his sword just a little wider than before. Pushing off the wall, Kat speared her scimitar forward. The custodian howled in pain, his sword slipping from a blood-slicked hand. Kat twisted her blade and sliced upward. Her elbow jarred itself numb on the cannon’s barrel, but the tip of her sword took his throat.

As his body slumped, she clambered awkwardly over the cannon.

“Yali? Where are you?” she shouted, concern trumping reason with the pointless shout.

The sounds of battle had already moved aft through the smoke, fresh bodies left behind. She’d never have credited how easy it was to lose so many people so swiftly. Vallant, Rîma, Yali. All gone.

She continued aft, past the mainmast’s blood-spattered flank. A latticework hatchway above her head offered a glimpse of straining combatants on the main deck. A body thudded against the lattice and rolled away, the accompanying scream drowning beneath a flash of shrieker fire.

As Kat left the hatchway behind, Yali appeared out of the bitter haze, filthy but unharmed, her sword – still by all appearances too heavy for her – scraping against the deck. She tugged Kat’s forearm and jerked a thumb back the way she’d come. ||Come on. We’re almost through!||

With the sounds of battle raging, Kat barely heard the creak of the hatchway or the soft, almost breathy impact close behind her. But for the sudden widening of Yali’s eyes she might have missed it entirely. She spun around.

Tanith stood in the latticework shadow of the hatchway, one side of which still hung open above. “Hello, dear sister.” Her syrupy words were thick with unconcern.

A cold hand closed around Kat’s heart. Eyes never leaving Tanith’s, she raised her scimitar and gestured to Yali with her free hand. ||Run. Now.||

The icy hand squeezed tighter as Yali instead shook her head and stood at her side, sword trembling for all that two hands strove to hold it steady.

Tanith stooped and wiped her bloody scimitar on a dead custodian’s uniform. “Won’t you introduce us?”

Yali scowled. ||I know who you are,|| she signed, then returned her hand to her sword.

Tanith stared blankly. Like Yennika, it seemed she’d never troubled herself to learn Simah. Deciding that the brief distraction was the best she’d get, Kat threw herself forward, sword arcing at Tanith’s head.

She parried the blow without obvious effort, faster even than Kat remembered and far faster than the unwieldy ice-blue robes should have permitted. Her vicious riposte scraped halfway along Kat’s sword before she managed to twist it aside. With a grunt of effort, Yali swung from the left. Tanith flashed her a smile and darted back. The mainmast to her back, she tutted and settled into a crude mockery of a duellist’s stance.

“Katija… We’ve fought twice, and both times you lived only because that’s what Yennika wanted.”

Kat edged closer. “And this time?”

Thin lips offered a malicious smile. “She expressed no preference.”

Tanith sprang forward, slashing at ankle height. As Kat moved to parry, Tanith twisted away. Leaning forward, she lashed a booted foot out behind, slamming Yali against a gun carriage. Yali rebounded and dropped with a thud, the sword falling from her hand.

Kat lunged. “No!”

Tanith sighed and struck her sword aside without so much as a backward glance. Turning, she rammed a balled fist into Kat’s midriff. Kat sagged, lungs burning, heaving for air. Gloved hands ripped the sword from her grasp and shoved her against the mainmast.

“You don’t get it, do you?” Tanith lowered her lips to Kat’s ear, her eastern accent more pronounced as languor burned away. “Father might have loved you more, but I’m better. He made me better.”

Kat doubled over gasping as another punch slammed home. Tanith released her, letting her drop to hands and knees. Then she kicked her hands away. Kat’s head struck the deck. The world vanished in dull red.

“Don’t go anywhere, dear sister,” said Tanith, her words distant and treacly. “I’ll kill the skirl, then we’ll continue our conversation.”

Get up. Kat’s words barely reached her thoughts, let alone her tongue.

Her chest heaved, the raspy breaths working to dispel the splotchy, stifling red fog.

Get up!

Footsteps retreated. Kat got one hand beneath her, then the other. Her elbows buckled and her head struck the deck once more. Red fog returned, thicker than ever, broken only by boots scrabbling on the deck and Yali’s choked gasp.

She braced a hand against the deck once more, already knowing she’d be too late. But all of a sudden it didn’t matter, because it was then that she heard ten words more beautiful than the sweetest music, more wondrous than the most devout prayer.

“Are you sure you wish to go through with this?”

Fifty-Four

Damant missed his footing on the below-decks companionway and fell the last three steps. He twisted as he dropped so that his back and shoulder thumped bruisingly against the wall and not his broken wrist.

By the time he righted himself, the koilos that had once been Jorais Bascari had made his own metronomic descent of the stairs. Impassive as ever, he extended a bony finger along the passageway, the lavender grave-stench filling the space between them.

“Fighting’s getting closer,” gasped Damant, straining to be heard above the screams swelling along the passageway. “Your cousin – your mistress – might be in danger. Doesn’t that bother you?”

Jorais’ skull didn’t so much as twitch, his baleful, gilded stare unanswerable. So different from the braggart he’d been in life, forever ready with a denial, a joke or a threat.

“They really did scoop out every last piece of you, didn’t they?” Alabastra always insisted as much, of course, claiming that rendering the koilos ifrît down to an obedient core left the soul bereft of pride, ambition and emotion, and Jorais Bascari scarcely existed at all without pride. “Truth is, I prefer you this way.”

The insult earned only a shove that sent Damant stumbling backwards along the passageway. Behind Jorais, two skelders clambered through an adjoining hatchway, the eyes of the nearest widening in terror as she recognised that the thing in the custodian uniform wasn’t a custodian at all.

“Koilos!” she shouted.

Jorais spun jerkily about, screeching wordless rage. He slammed the skelder against the wall, the crackle of breaking ribs choking off her agonised whimper. He let her body drop and took a hunched gangling stride towards the second skelder, whose face Damant should have recognised from the first.

Vallant.

Stooping under a beam, Jorais swept his scimitar clear of its scabbard. Vallant edged backwards, trading distance for time. Both dwindled fast. Scarcely half a dozen feet to his rear, the passageway ended in the red brick of the chimney that served the galley’s hearth.

Vallant blocked the scimitar with the head of his mace and swung at the gilded skull. Steel smacked into a bony palm. Jorais’ vicelike fingers closed around the head, holding it fast. With his other hand, the koilos thrust. The scimitar tore through the corner of Vallant’s tunic as he scrambled away, letting the mace fall in exchange for survival.

Shoulders hunched and his triumphant hiss echoing down the passageway, Jorais stalked in pursuit.

Tanith let Yali drop and stepped away as Rîma bore down, dipping briefly to reclaim her discarded sword. Head ringing and her sight still drowning in red, Kat somehow bullied bruised limbs into propping her against the mainmast.

Rîma halted and shrugged her own sword from her shoulders, its blade slanting away and its point an inch above the floor. “So you’re the amashti? You’re not my first. Nor are you impressive.”

Tanith’s eyes narrowed with disdain. “Should I be scared?”

Rîma shrugged. “Shall we find out?”

Tanith lunged too fast for Kat’s gummed mind to follow. There was only the gentle twist of Rîma’s wrist, the flash of her sword and Tanith’s frustrated snarl.

“Is that really your best?” asked Rîma, indifferent.

Tanith feinted at Rîma’s head, then cut savagely left and right. Rîma deflected both without obvious effort and returned her sword to the diagonal. “You’re fast, but lazy.” Her tone was that of a disappointed tutor. “Too assured of your speed to hone your craft.”

Screaming pure rage, Tanith pounced.

Before, as during their clashes in Tyzanta, Kat had thought her sister’s attacks a meld of brute force and flowery superiority. She saw none of the latter through clearing eyes. Whatever masks Tanith had worn elsewhere, now she was little more than a wild animal, lashing out through instinct alone. And instinct, however formidable – however buttressed by the daemonic – would always struggle to challenge skill honed across millennia.

For every thrust, every cut, Rîma parried, or simply turned aside to let the blade pass. Two-handed hacks she blocked with the flat of her blade, her left forearm bracing her sword’s tip as steel chimed. Once – only once – she lost a sliver of coat to Tanith’s sword. Step by step she drove the amashti back, steadily manoeuvring her into a gun bay’s confines.

Her vision at last clearing, Kat scrambled over to Yali, who grabbed Kat’s hand and rose unsteadily, cheek already swollen and her grimace speaking to hidden bruises. ||That’s your sister?||

||So she says.|| Kat glanced back along the deck. ||I prefer you.||

Tanith’s wild upward swing swept Rîma’s hat away. The swordstress lunged before it struck the deck, then twisted her sword about to a rising overarm cut. Flat-footed, Tanith stumbled into the gun bay’s shrieker cannon.

She screamed as Rîma’s sword ripped into her upper arm, indigo fire rippling from the wound. Her sword still trailing that flame, Rîma whirled about, slicing at thigh and waist. Ice-blue silks tore, the poisonous flames of Tanith’s blood leaping for freedom.

Sword abandoned, Tanith collapsed against the cannon’s barrel, hatred in her eyes.

“Kat? It would be kindness to kill her,” said Rîma, the point of her sword at Tanith’s throat. “But she’s your blood.” Tanith sagged, her breathing ragged. Rîma glanced back at Kat, a question in her eyes.

“I…” Kat hesitated. Tanith had done terrible things, and would surely do more. She was a terrible thing, in the evidence of eye and folklore. Wisdom insisted Rîma ram the sword home and end her life. Nyssa’s creed demanded it, for a daemon could never be permitted to live. And yet Tanith was also a victim. Of their father’s obsessions if nothing else. Did that counterbalance her deeds? Did the blood they shared? “I don’t know.”

Snarling, Tanith struck the sword aside and flung herself at the open gun port. A sliver of torn silk on the coaming and a fading wisp of indigo fire, and she was gone.

Rîma stared at the empty gun port, the scarf across her nose and mouth doing nothing to hide her unhappiness. “Sometimes refusal to choose is a choice.”

“She doesn’t matter now,” said Kat, and wished it were so. “We have to find Yennika.”

Still scowling, Rîma turned her back on the gun port. “That’s why I sought you. Vathi has her cornered in the captain’s quarters.”

Too late, Vallant realised his error. His back to brick, he feinted left, then right, but the narrow passageway offered no leeway, no escape, only death at Jorais’ hands.

The part of Damant who’d lost friends and acquaintances to Vallant’s twenty-year defiance found justice in the sight – as clean a decree as any handed down from Nyssa Iudexas. It heard the voices of the dead crying out for vengeance and silently urged Jorais to claim it on their behalf. But the rest – the part that had once been as close as family, and that recognised that their paths had run differently only through the cast of a die – urged his battered body to motion.

Roaring with the pent-up fury born of decades-long betrayal, Damant ran headlong down the passageway, vaulted the dead skelder and rammed his shoulder into Jorais’ spine.

Imbued with unnatural strength by secret Alabastran rites, the koilos barely shuddered.

As Damant rebounded, Jorais whirled about, the blade of his scimitar a wind across Damant’s face as it thunked into the passageway’s timber wall. Damant stumbled away. With a furious, soul-chilling screech, Jorais ripped his sword free in a spray of wooden fragments and pursued. He closed the distance with a loping pounce and slammed Damant against the companionway stairs, rigid, bony fingers about his throat.

Damant gazed into those empty, expressionless eye sockets and wondered dully if Yennika’s instructions would hold, or if his actions had freed Jorais to act on darker, personal whims. They’d never been allies, much less friends – a mutual contempt all they’d shared. As fingers tightened about his windpipe, Damant knew as certainty that more of Jorais Bascari survived in the koilos’ golden bones than anyone had even known.

The crown of the gilded skull shattered beneath Vallant’s mace, fragments pattering off Damant’s face and the surrounding walls. With a shuddering, staccato sigh and a wisp of vapour more imagined than seen, Jorais collapsed.

But the koilos still wasn’t done. As Damant doubled over, spluttering for breath, Jorais thrashed and flailed, grasping at his leg as he sought to rise. Vallant brought the mace down once more on the gaping skull, and twice against the spine. Jorais dropped. Breathing hard, and his own rictus expression an unintended imitation of the fallen koilos, Vallant brought his heel down on Jorais’ jaw.

“This doesn’t settle things between us,” he gasped.

Damant rubbed his throat. “I don’t imagine anything could.”

At least the sounds of battle had grown sporadic. He only hoped the right side was winning.

On balance once more, Vallant knelt briefly beside the fallen skelder and closed her eyes with a gentleness at odds with his earlier ferocity. His lips moved briefly in silent prayer, then he stood and reached for the companionway handrail.

He seemed to think better of it almost at once and paused on the lowest step.

“When I was here before… You could have freed me any time, but you waited. Why?”

“You mean Arvish didn’t tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“She wanted Yennika here in Athenoch, with as many loyal custodians as we could manage. What better bait than the prospect of destroying Bashar Vallant for ever, especially when Yennika set the hook herself?”

Damant permitted himself a flash of perverse joy at a sight that almost made his aching bones worthwhile. It was a moment so many would have killed to witness, Katija Arvish likely among them: Bashar Vallant wrong-footed and confused.

“But why?” said Vallant. “Athenoch can’t survive this.”

So she hadn’t told him. There was guilty pleasure in that, in seeing Vallant wrong-footed just as he’d so often wrong-footed others. “Maybe it doesn’t have to. If all’s going to plan, the Bascari no longer control Tyzanta.”

He blinked, still not believing. “You cut a deal with the Jovîna?”

“What would be the point? If the Bascari are snakes, the Jovîna are scorpions, and penniless scorpions at that. But one of Yennika’s recent ‘innovations’ was to hand over the running of the city to Marida and Javar, provided that they answered to her. They’ve agreed to a… change of management.”

“Your idea?”

“Let’s say rather that I was pushing at an open door. Javar never forgave the Bascari for what they made of him.” Damant grunted. “As for Marida, I’m halfway convinced she always wanted this. Between their enforcers and what little of the custodium prizes service and honour over thuggery and advancement, it should all be over. You haven’t lost a refuge, Bashar. You’ve gained a city.”

“No.” Vallant shook his head, a man waking from a dream. But there was something else there too, something Damant hadn’t heard in decades: a note of approval, and perhaps even respect. “The Voice will never permit it. She’ll send in the redcloaks.”

“I don’t think she’ll care, not if the tithes are paid.” Damant shrugged, and winced as something pulled in his chest. “Either way, it’ll take time. Time in which to find a better way.”

Vallant narrowed his eyes. “A better way to help people than getting them killed? Is that what Kat said?”

“You’d have to ask her.”

The smoke was clearing as Kat reached open air. The dead of both sides choked the deck, the wounded tended beneath the shadow of the mainsail or guarded at the gunwale according to allegiance. The Bascari crescent-and-hawk flag had gone from the stern, presumably to discourage a shot from the rebels’ ancient torsion ballista as the Everlast drifted ever closer to the black tower.

For all that the brawl was as good as ended, the wider battle remained. An escort scow augured inwards towards the Everlast, its crew mustered to the gunwale in preparation for boarding. Flame belched from the Everlast’s gun deck and screamed across the skies between, presumably hastened by a dead man’s glyph pressed to a cannon’s prism. The shot went wide, but the scow nonetheless veered away to a chorus of skelder cheers, its captain taught the value of discretion.

Kat would have joined the cheers, but for the situation at the black tower. Figures thronged the balconies, contesting the flare of shriekers with crossbows and chunks of rubble. The stolen felucca circled the approach, Tatterlain at the prow and loosing arrows from a hunter’s recurve bow. Scattered black-clad bodies marked successes, but the leading custodians were already at the gate, the koilos column closing fast along the river.

At the double doors leading to the captain’s quarters she found Vathi rifling the pockets of Aroth’s dead bodyguard while two skelders stood watch. “Your skelpie’s inside,” he said, morose even in victory. He nodded at the scorched fragments of glass in the upper side of the left-hand door. “The minister had strong feelings about privacy, so we left them to it. They’ll come out when they’re hungry.”

Kat winced, in her mind’s eye seeing the tower’s doors shattering beneath the koilos assault. “We don’t have time for that.” She turned to Yali. ||Two decks down, through the day room, first door on the left. You’ll find a locked trunk beneath the cot. There are three vials of tessence inside. I need them, but be careful.||

Yali offered a sore grin. ||Back in a flash.||

“I’ll go with her,” said Rîma. “Don’t hurt yourself.”

They departed without a promise given, which was just as well under the circumstances.

Kat rapped on the glass. “Yennika? I’m coming in.”

No answer. She supposed she hadn’t really expected one. Before she could change her mind – or Vathi could stop her – she eased open the rightmost door and slipped inside.

She’d last been in that room the night Everlast had left Tyzanta, an unwilling guest at a banquet thrown in anticipation of victory. Then, the lumani had blazed, the air rich with roast meat and sweet with sugared glaze. Now they were dark. Copper blood mingled with bitter smoke. How swiftly glory soured.

“Yennika?” Why did she feel compelled to whisper? “Or would you prefer ‘Azra’?”

“That’s far enough.”

Shadows shifted beyond the table as Julan Aroth raised his shrieker.

Kat raised her hands. “I’m here to negotiate, not fight.”

Yennika moved to stand behind him. “No hasty choices, Julan, I beg you.”

Aroth’s shrieker dipped, just a fraction. Yennika’s eyes were clearer than his, unclouded by fear. Ready to cut a deal. Good.

“This is how it’s going to be, darling,” said Yennika. “Your scum will leave this ship. They will free what captives they’ve taken and perhaps – perhaps – I’ll spare the lives of your compatriots in Athenoch.”

Kat almost laughed at her brazenness. “Those are your terms?”

“They are.”

“These are mine.” She lowered her hands. “You both surrender, or you both die.”

Yennika chuckled, the hated superior smile visible even in the gloom. “You’d let that happen to me, darling? Do you love me so little?”

Kat swallowed to clear a throat suddenly dry, her heart aching with a wound not yet healed. “You were my world. You taught me how to survive when I’d lost hope. You showed me the kind of person I wanted to be. Love you? I’d have died for you.” Eyes on Aroth’s shrieker, she stepped closer. “But we all leave things behind in the mists. I left you, and everything you were to me.”

Aroth stiffened, the shrieker’s barrel a black hungry hole in the dark. “Then I hope your replacement is more reasonable.”

“Yes, darling,” murmured Yennika. “I suppose you’ve made your choice.”

Aroth’s finger tightened on the trigger.

Kat flung herself aside. She collided with a chair and clattered to the deck in a tangle of broken spars and bruised limbs. The shot screamed over her head, shattering a lumani prism and scattering dying flames across the carpet. She kicked free of the chair’s wreckage and clambered to her feet, the skin on her neck already prickling in anticipation of the next shot.

Instead, there was a wet, ripping thud. A gasp. The heavier thud of a falling body. When she turned around, Aroth lay face-down on the carpet, an emerald-hilted dagger protruding from his back.

Yennika stared intently at her shaking, bloody hand. “Poor Julan. He never did recognise a lost cause.” She clenched her fist, quelling its tremors. Rounding the table, she turned her smile on Kat. “I trust I’ll now be allowed to live?”

The door to the deck crashed open. Rîma and Vallant ran into the room, weapons drawn. Yali crowded in behind, horrified expression receding as she met Kat’s eyes.

“It’s all right! I’m fine.” Kat turned her attention back to Yennika. “Send a helmic to your custodians at the tower. Have them fall back and take the koilos with them.”

Yennika shook her head. “I can’t.”

“Fine,” growled Vallant, starting forward. “Over the side you go.”

“Wait!” Kat stepped between them. “Yennika, you expect I’ll believe that?”

Yennika spread her hands. “I can send the helmic, draw the custodians back, but do you really think the hierarch would trust me with control glyphs for so many koilos? It cost me the proceeds of nearly every tetram I stole to purchase the one for Jorais! They were supposed to be a last resort, but Julan set them loose. They’ll kill everyone who doesn’t have a warding glyph, and keep killing until the hierarch sends someone to set them sleeping. It’s too late, Katija.”

“Kiasta,” Kat swore, her options slipping away. There’d always been a possibility Yennika would refuse. That was why she’d ensured there was some tessence aboard the Everlast to give her Veil-drained aetherios tattoo enough of a kick to let her copy the glyph and halt the koilos herself, one by one if needed. But if there was no glyph to copy…? ||Vallant? We need to get this ship over to the tower, get them off from the balconies.||

He gave a terse shake of the head. ||Damant severed the rudder. That’s why we caught her in the first place.||

Yali held up the tessence vials. ||You commanded a koilos at Zoyen. Can’t you do that here?||

Kat scowled. ||That was one koilos and I was drunk on the Deadwinds, I can’t…||

She tailed off. There was a chance. A mad chance, tiny to the point of non-existence, but it was all they had. She shoved Yennika towards Vallant.

“Hey!” shouted Yennika.

Kat ignored her. “Get her to a heraldic so she can stand the custodians down.”

“And if she doesn’t?” asked Vallant.

“Throw her overboard, with my blessing. And while you’re at it, send another heraldic to Tatterlain.” She paused, stomach already churning in anticipation. “I need that felucca.”

Fifty-Five

Maxin brought the felucca alongside the Everlast’s main deck, sail furled and tiller amidships. As waiting hands grabbed the mooring rope, Kat eyed the boat with gnawing dread and silently begged Nyssa to send fire from below, to forgive the koilos’ enslaved ifrîti their sins and grant them reincarnation – anything to spare her the coming ordeal. But if Nyssa heard those pleas, she offered no sign.

In the shadow of the black tower, the dark column of marching koilos passed the tidemark of custodian dead.

Tatterlain braced a hand on the dhow’s bulwark and vaulted aboard. “I heard you needed me.”

Forcing a smile, Kat strove to match his easy confidence, and knew she failed. “Sorry, just your chariot.”

Gritting her teeth, she patted his arm and clambered over the bulwark. “Maxin, get us moving.”

“What’s our course?”

Vision already spinning, she grabbed the mast and risked a skyward glance to where the Deadwind motes danced above the clouds.

She had to be out of her mind.

“Up. We’re going up.”

“Up?” Maxin narrowed his eyes. “Up into the Deadwinds up? This boat wasn’t built for that. We’ll be lucky not to capsize once we clear the Cloudsea.”

“So stay. I’ll manage.” How, when she could barely keep her eyes open without the world dancing about her, she wasn’t sure, but what else was there?

He grunted and tugged at a stay, the felucca already moving as the unfurling sail caught the wind. “Might as well see it through.”

Yali jumped aboard, face filthy with smoke but her eyes bright.

Kat unlooped an arm from the mast and gestured to the Everlast’s retreating deck. ||Go back!||

Yali gave an unapologetic shake of the head. ||You think I can jump that far?||

The Everlast was already a dozen feet away, the angle widening as Maxin worked the lateral tiller. Kat scowled. ||It’s not safe.||

||For who?|| Yali retorted, her signs calm and her face impassive. ||Whenever you go off by yourself, something bad happens.||

Realising she’d no answer worthy of the name, Kat clung to the mast and clamped her eyes shut.

Damant staggered to the bulwark just as the felucca began its cloudward climb, the mooring rope snaking free below. “Blessed Flame! What’s she doing?”

“I’d tell you,” Vallant shaded his eyes as the felucca’s shrinking silhouette drew level with the mainmast, “but I don’t know that I understand.”

Now thoroughly confused, Damant opened his mouth to demand an explanation. He glimpsed a dark shape making a faltering run along the mainmast’s yardarm, silhouetted against the sun save for a halo of golden hair. Reaching the yardarm’s end, she launched herself into the sky, her left hand snaring the trailing end of the felucca’s mooring rope.

For a long moment she hung, corkscrewing to and fro. Then she clamped her insteps tight. Left hand about the rope and her right dangling behind, she began to climb.

“We have to warn them,” snapped Damant. “Send a heraldic!”

“There aren’t any more,” said Vallant, his voice taut. “They’re on their own.”

Feeling Yali’s tap on her shoulder, Kat risked opening her eyes. She found herself adrift on the Cloudsea, the ground barely seen through patches of vaporous drifting white. She clung to the felucca’s low gunwale and forced slow, heavy breaths. Nausea abated until there was only the sun, the cerulean skies, and the swirling of the Deadwinds high above. Further out, beyond the influence of the black tower’s silver and astoricum sphere, the Veil raged.

||Feeling better?|| signed Yali.

||A little,|| Kat replied, careful to keep her head still.

The felucca shuddered as it hit an air pocket. Kat closed her eyes and squatted beside the mast. “Maxin!”

“I warned you,” he said, strain rippling in his voice. “It’s only going to get worse.”

Wonderful. Little by little, Kat eased her eyes open.

Yali propped herself against the prow bulkhead, sickeningly untroubled by the twenty-degree pitch of the felucca’s boneshaking climb. ||So what happens now?||

||Nothing until we reach the Deadwinds.||

||And then?||

How to explain something she wasn’t certain of herself? ||On the Mornwake, I could feel the presence of every ifrît. And not just those on the ship. At Zoyen—||

||You stopped the koilos and saved Rîma.|| Yali’s eyes widened, enraptured. ||You think you can do that again? Then why do you look so worried?||

The first Deadwind motes danced overhead. The felucca creaked and groaned as the winds picked up. In her mind’s eye, Kat saw the timbers shaking apart, the wreckage falling like rain across Athenoch, her screaming body with them.

She kept talking to banish the image. ||Because I don’t know what I did at Zoyen. That was one koilos. Close up. This a hundred, at a distance. And even if the Deadwinds give me the power to reach them…|| She swallowed as she recalled a sensation she’d fought to forget. ||The last time I touched the Deadwinds deliberately, I think… I think I lost a piece of myself. That was barely a moment. If this is to work…||

She touched her eyes closed, only to open them again as a warm hand closed about hers. Yali was kneeling beside her, staring in wonder at the Deadwind motes swirling high above the prow.

||You’ve always come through whenever people needed you,|| she signed. ||This is no different.||

Kat snorted. ||No pressure, then?||

||You can handle it, honest and true.||

How she wished she could believe that. ||What if I can’t?||

The felucca bucked, the distressed groans of its planking gaining in pitch and frequency. An involuntary gasp burst from Kat’s lips as the first flames flickered to life across her tattoo. Barely anything yet, just a wisp of possibility, of promise.

Yali grinned. ||Time to be a hero.||

Kat nodded with more confidence than she felt. Bracing a palm against the mast, she slid to her feet. “Maxin, I need to be where the ifrîti are thickest.” Receiving no reply, she turned around. “Maxin?”

He lay face-down in the scupper beside the tiller, blood streaming from his brow. Tanith stood astride him, feet planted and shoulders braced against the angle of the deck, golden hair streaming in in the wind.

Or more precisely, what remained of Tanith.

Wisps of dark indigo fire streamed heavenward from wounds on her right arm, hip and thigh. It gathered in her eyes, welling up under her brow and rushing over pasty white forehead and temples like impossible tears. Her right arm hung lip and nerveless at her side. Her whole being shimmered as it had at Jothari’s yard, both there and not, the mortal woman overlaid by the daemon in her blood, neither of them fully real. Hunger and desire radiated from her like heat from a furnace.

“We never said goodbye, dear sister.”

Her syrupy accent was cracked and brittle, the need bubbling beneath as stark as that of any wisp addict or shîm-head. For the first time, Kat beheld her as something to be pitied.

“Tanith…” She held up her hands, and wished she’d brought a weapon. “Yennika surrendered. It’s over.”

Tanith edged closer. “So once again, I’m left with nothing and you have everything.”

“It doesn’t have to be like that.” The felucca shuddered. Kat stifled a rush of nausea. “Yennika used you, just as she used me. She was never going to help you. But I will.”

Tanith froze. “I don’t want your help.”

Kat recognised that expression. She’d seen it reflected in a puddle the day Azra had pulled her out of the gutter. Too proud to know she needed help. Too lost to accept it. “I understand, I do. It’s hard being alone, but it’s harder to stop being alone.”

She tucked her left hand behind her back. ||Hold tight,|| she signed, and hoped Yali saw.

“Let me help you,” she said aloud.

Tanith’s shoulders shook. Her cheeks glistened with tears. “I’m so hungry. You’ve only one thing that can help me now, dear sister.”

Features hardening, she pounced. Kat dived low under her outstretched hand. She slid face-first along the deck and thumped into Maxin’s unconscious body, eliciting a muttered groan.

Halfway to the mast, Tanith snarled and closed on Yali. The girl scrambled away and clung to the stay she’d twisted around her arm. She had seen.

“Thank you, Nyssa,” breathed Kat, and kicked the pitching tiller.

Tanith fell backwards as the felucca lurched from a twenty-degree climb to nearer fifty. Yali yelped, clinging to the stay with both hands as her feet left the deck. Maxin slid fully aft, his body jammed beneath the lateral tiller.

Kat flailed at the mooring rope’s eyelet and missed. Her shins cracked against the stern box seat.

Then there was nothing beneath her but the clouds.

Plunging, she grabbed at the stern bulwark. Varnish scraped beneath her nails. Deadwind motes thickened all around her, indigo and magenta bright against blue skies.

A hand smacked into hers. Her shoulder screamed as her arm locked tight.

“So very careless, dear sister,” said Tanith.

One foot braced against the box seat, she nudged the pitching tiller fully horizontal. As the felucca levelled out, she hauled Kat aboard. The flame about her eyes pulsed. The world grew distant, swamped by cold contentment.

Kat struggled for breath. Her lungs refused to obey. Her eyelids fell shut, heavy as lead as Tanith bled her soul away.

“I’m sorry it has to be this way,” Tanith murmured through the growing darkness, and somehow sounded like she meant it.

Light blazed. Not Tanith’s poisonous, smoky flame, but the crisp light of Kat’s aetherios tattoo, crackling merrily as it drew sustenance from the Deadwinds’ embrace. Indigo motes fluttered all around, countless soul-fragments dancing towards Zariqaz.

Tanith gasped.

“You can feel it, can’t you?” Kat dredged forth the words. “If you’re hungry, this is a banquet.”

“Yes,” Tanith breathed. “Yes. It’s wonderful.”

She opened her hand. Kat’s knees cracked against the deck.

Tanith stumbled back, eyes wide with rapture. Motes drifted closer, bright moths to her flame, bobbing and weaving in defiance of the wind. One by one, they went out, darkness spreading like rot across the sky. Tanith’s wounds closed, her flesh restitching, her fires fading, resealed within. She fell to her knees, panting with effort, cheeks streaming with tears of delight.

“The hunger… it’s gone,” she gasped. “All the way gone. No more gnawing. No more pain. No more— No! Stay away! Leave me alone!”

She froze, her cheeks sunken and her eyes stark with terror, fixated on something only she could see. Vapour curled from her fingers, her shoulders, her hair. The pieces of her being, boiling away in bright motes as what she’d taken from the Deadwinds was stripped from her in turn.

Stricken, she stared at Kat, her eyes pleading even as they bled away into the dancing lights.

“I wish he’d let us play together.”

The Deadwinds gusted, and she was gone, a cloud of bright indigo and magenta motes, blown out across the felucca’s bow. Only a pile of charred clothes proved she’d ever been there.

Yali stumbled forward, her brow creased in horror. ||What just happened?||

Kat stared at the blackened silks, her heart a swirl of emotion. She wanted to weep, to cheer, and compromised by feeling nothing at all. “She took too much,” she murmured, in her shock remembering only belatedly to sign. ||The Deadwinds took it back.||

Yali glanced from the smouldering clothes to Kat and back again. ||And how’s that different to what you mean to do?||

||It’s not.||

Her face fell. ||Kat, no. You can’t do it. Not if that’s the price.||

Kat stumbled upright. ||I have to.||

||Why?||

She stared down at the fires of her aetherios tattoo. ||Because I’ve always come through when people needed me.|| She offered the ghost of a wry smile. ||Or so I’m told.||

Before she could change her mind, she spread her arms and reached into the Deadwinds.

Fifty-Six

The skies boiled away into a black haze.

A thousand voices whispered to Kat, called to her, addressed her by secret names never shared with another living soul. She fought the urge to unravel herself and float for ever on the unseen currents.

She clamped her hands over her ears, for even in the spirit world she had physical form, or at least the memory of that form, and clung to the soulfire she’d brought with her into that place that was no place. The voices shied away, retreating to the edge of hearing, and in the silence, Kat rediscovered purpose.

The koilos. She had to stop the koilos.

Lights glimmered in the void: the sparse ifrîti of Athenoch. The motics and helmics of the Everlast and its escort scows. The bright, angry flashes of shriekers. The cold, icy horror of the koilos. All of them at once dizzyingly far away and suffocatingly close. The air about Kat thickened with conceit and sorrow, malice and curiosity. Fragments of the shackled dead, and something else behind them. Looming. Hungry. Jealous.

She focused on the nearest koilos and sent soulfire to greet it. Her tattoo guttered. Malevolence flared just beyond sight. She froze, reliving Tanith’s terror as the Deadwinds had consumed her. She’d already taken too much. Taking more invited disaster.

Lavender thick in her nostrils, she pushed harder with what soulfire remained, the flames of her tattoo faltering as she vied with the koilos’ cold, abyssal soul.

All at once, its defences melted away and she was behind its eyes, the dull, droning buzz of its thoughts like the pressure before a storm. She felt the weight of its ember-saint crown. The hard, heavy mass of the flamberge in her hands. The fleeting pressure as it – as she – hacked down.

Blood’s sticky warmth trickled between her fingers.

A piece of her shied away, repulsed. The rest shared the koilos’ bleak satisfaction, the hatred that wasn’t really hatred at all, for even hatred needed a spark of purpose, and the koilos had none. It didn’t care that it brought death. It didn’t question why it did so. It felt only the echo of old orders and obeyed only the sun-bright glyph burning at the back of its thoughts. The glyph commanded death, so death alone would serve.

She shouldered open the black tower’s gate and strode inside across a field of dead. Defenders cowered behind a thin barricade upon the stairs. Zephyr stood tall among them, a scimitar in each hand.

The last of Kat’s tattoo’s fire faded. She no longer recognised the part of herself that had become the koilos, though its sorrow suffocated and smothered every thought, every emotion save that duty of death. She hacked down. Blood flowed. This time, the koilos’ satisfaction was hers too.

The final, desperate piece of her soul screamed.

A hand closed tight about hers in the darkness and pulled her away. She raced through the void until the koilos was but one light among others and she herself once more, trembling but whole.

You must not fear the flame, child.

The voice was not a voice at all, for the words came to Kat without need to be heard. She drew down a shuddering breath and cast about, scrying the darkness for the speaker. Nothing in the spirit world had ever spoken around her, much less addressed her directly.

A hundred tales of Deadwinds’ daemons screamed for attention.

“Who are you?” she stammered.

He is coming. And he does not tolerate thieves.

The darkness softened around a woman in a clinging pleated dress – distant from her, and yet not. Her face was neither young nor old, neither kind nor cruel in its timeless beauty; her hair a spill of indigo flame that uncoiled across her shoulders and leapt into the black. Kat had seen the likeness a hundred times in portrait and sculpture. You couldn’t live in Khalad and not know it. Her own father had painted a grand, vast ceiling-spanning version in the Rashace grand dining room. His finest work, he’d said, save Kat herself.

The heretic prophets had been right all along. The goddess did speak through the Deadwinds.

Kat fell to her knees, eyes averted in fear of half-remembered tales of punishment for those who gazed upon the goddess unbidden. “Nyssa?” she breathed.

I tried to reach you before, but you wouldn’t hear me. You must hear me now.

Kat blinked. She’d seen her before, hadn’t she? When she’d wrested control of a koilos to save Rîma’s life. And on the Mornwake, the presence in the Deadwinds she’d taken for a daemon… had that too been Nyssa? Did that make the goddess any less the delusion?

But if she were real, what did it mean? What should she say? She stared down at her hands, still slick with the blood of the koilos’ – of her – victims, and in that sight found strength to speak.

“Blessed Goddess, please—”

I have great hopes for you, Katija, daughter of Terrion and Siette. Nyssa tilted her head, her lips unmoving. But not if he finds you here.

“He?”

The thief who would be a god.

Kat felt it now, a daemon’s stifling presence on the edge of sight, withered with age and dry as dust. Closer with her every ragged breath.

She risked a glance at Nyssa, and for a wonder was not set alight or turned to stone. For the first time, she marked the silver shackles about the goddess’ wrists, their chain pooling beneath her skirts and snaking away into the darkness. Nyssa, a prisoner? Kat reeled with the impossibility of the notion.

“He did this to you?”

Nyssa smiled without joy, the indigo flame of her hair dancing on unseen winds. You cannot help me, Katija. Not yet. Save your friends. Find your sister.

Tanith? Why did the goddess care about her? “My sister’s gone. He took her.” The withered presence was close enough now that Kat tasted the daemon’s bitterness on every breath, felt its eyes on her even in the darkness. “She deserved to die.”

Even as she spoke, she knew she lied. Tanith might have lived her life a monster, but in her final moments she’d been only a terrified girl. Perhaps part of her always had been.

She is a soul adrift. Seek her where she belongs.

Kat shook her head, thoroughly confused. “I don’t understand.”

The bitter stench of the daemon thickened in her nostrils.

Nyssa spun about, the silver chain taut about her skirts. Go, child. I will distract him as long as I can. Do not fear the flame.

Kat plummeted towards the light of the ifrîti, her mind racing. The last time she’d touched a koilos’ mind, it had almost consumed her. Her tattoo was spent, and drawing from the Deadwinds risked Tanith’s fate becoming hers.

No.

Do not fear the flame, Nyssa had said – had commanded. Kat recalled Tanith’s last moments. The rictus of terror and the unblinking stare. It hadn’t been the Deadwinds that had claimed her at all, but the daemon waiting within. The daemon the goddess had promised to hold at bay, perhaps for moments, perhaps for no time at all.

Kat plunged deeper into the Deadwinds. Flame rekindling about her forearm, she reached for the koilos she’d touched before. Defences melted, its baleful spirit a swirl of black dust about the sun-bright glyph. She lashed out, the power of the Deadwinds searing as it crackled free of her tattoo.

The sun-bright glyph shattered. The koilos screamed.

Kat fell to her knees in the darkness, shaking with effort and pride. There was pain too, hot and bright along her forearm. She didn’t care, For there was now one koilos fewer gleaming in the darkness, and if she could unmake one, she could unmake them all.

Wreathed in determination, she moved from one koilos to the next. Whether it took moments or eternity, she couldn’t tell. There was only the joy of the shattering glyphs and the ever-deepening pain coursing from elbow to wrist.

As each koilos went dark, she caught glimpses of the world beyond. The sudden hope in a victim’s eyes. A child scurrying for safety. Zephyr leaning hard on a scimitar, its point down. The crunch of bone beneath a mace. As the last glyph broke apart, cheers rang out beneath the tower’s honeycomb ceilings. And then there was nothing more, for no eyes remained by which to see.

Breathless, Kat sank into the void, eyes half closed against the agony raging along her forearm. She cradled it tight as the fires faded. “I did it,” she gasped. “Blessed Nyssa, thank you.”

The goddess offered no reply, but the voices of the Deadwinds rushed back. Curious. Indignant. Confused. One drowned all others, a roaring torrent among trickling streams, withered with age, and dry as dust. Its wrath shook the void.

RETURN WHAT YOU HAVE STOLEN!

Something brushed Kat’s skin. She felt a piece of herself coil away into the darkness. Another. Screaming, she drew herself tight, but the more she fought, the faster she unravelled, strands of being bleeding away into the void.

“Goddess, help me!”

If Nyssa heard, she gave no sign. Indeed, the void held no trace of her. No suggestion that she’d ever existed beyond Kat’s desperate need to hear a voice other than her own.

The daemon enveloped her.

“Nyssa!” pleaded Kat, her voice barely a whisper. “Please!”

She no longer knew where she ended and the daemon began. Its triumph was hers. Its emptiness became the boundaries of her fading thoughts. One by one, they blinked out.

Suddenly, there was warmth in the spirit world’s void. Solidity. Certainty.

With her last sliver of awareness, Kat clung to that warmth and let it draw her into the sunlight. Pieces of her being reknitted as the presence plunged into the darkness. Sensation returned. The hardness of the deck beneath her knees. The cold wind stinging her cheeks. The crackle of pain along her left forearm. Arms tight about her shoulders and a hand cradling her head. A cheek wet with tears pressed against hers.

Yali drew back, her eyes shining and her signs full of rare stumbles. ||You were coming apart, so I held on to you. It was all I could think to do.||

Behind her, Maxin sat propped up by the tiller, battered head in his hands and expression frozen between disbelief and delight.

Kat stared down at her forearm, her tattoo’s lines lost beneath layers of blistered, charred skin, the pain a distant ache certain to return. Had she really seen Nyssa? Had any of it been real? The more she tried to recall the details, the faster they faded, but one thing was true beyond all others: real or imagined, Nyssa hadn’t been her salvation. When all else had faltered, love had bound her together. Rîma had been right.

||You did good, little sister.||

Uncaring of the fresh pain it provoked, Kat drew Yali into an embrace, and didn’t let her go that side of the clouds.

In the End

Crowds milled through the dawn rays at Kazzar’s Quay, jostle and barter already under way along the dockside beneath bright azasouk awnings. The dry northern wind wafted tantalising aromas from a newly berthed spice freighter to mingle with the bitter salt of fresh fish. A barge crew hammered out an atonal shanty as they stripped their vessel’s sails. Tyzanta might have changed hands, the future uncertain for all within its walls, but life went on. As a fugitive, Kat had always felt apart from it. Now she didn’t know how she felt. Both she and the city had changed too much.

But somehow, some things contrived to stay the same. A large dhow was tied up one pier over from the barge, streaks of crimson visible through patchy black paint. Once the Everlast, now the Chainbreaker, it owed only name and figurehead to the wreck scattered across Athenoch. Kat had felt a pang of sorrow when Vallant had declared the vessel unsalvageable. When she’d admitted that to Zephyr, the daughter of the Issnaîm had shot her a weary look.

That was never her name, waholi, she’d said. Only her purpose. That purpose lives on.

Above Kat’s head, sailriders scurried on a carrack’s rigging, the last preparations for sailing under way. The skyship was near a twin to the Mornwake, and like its sibling had been pressed to ferrying undesirables beyond Tyzanta’s walls. Custodians for whom Damant would not vouch. Firebloods disinclined to chance the city’s new order. Skelders too unscrupulous for Marida or Javar to bring to heel by means short of execution. And one who was a little of all three.

The pair of custodians marched their unbound prisoner to a halt at the gangway foot. Like those patrolling the dockside, they no longer wore masks, their anonymity traded for renewed authority and – hopefully – new-found honesty. Though the worst of their number had died at Athenoch or had already been rounded up and shipped out to Kezedi – the only other city where House Bascari held influence – Kat had her doubts about those who remained. Then again, she herself was proof that changing circumstances brought out the best in some people.

Others? Well, some folk never changed.

She looked the nearer custodian in the eye. What was her name? Sinair? “You can leave her with me.”

Sinair shifted. “My orders were—”

“To bring her here.” Was it petty to enjoy the interruption? Probably, but it remained a small sin in the grand scheme. “She’s here.”

Sinair glanced at her companion and shrugged, perhaps deciding that between the cordon at the pier’s dockside end – its members arrayed in a mix of custodian black and the deep burgundy scarves that marked members of Javar’s newly raised militia – and the sheer drop down the Spire, there were a dearth of places to which the prisoner could flee. “Have it your way. I’ll tell the castellan.”

They marched away, leaving Kat and the prisoner as alone on the dockside as it was possible to be.

“Hello, Katija,” said Yennika. “I wondered if I’d see you.”

The cotton blouse and pleated labourer’s skirt made no allowance for figure or form, and yet somehow she looked still stunning. She always did.

“Me too,” Kat replied.

She’d avoided Yennika ever since the Battle of Athenoch, afraid of how she’d feel and what she might say. Face to face at last, her emotions were no clearer. Part of her wanted to hold her tight and surrender to the lie that things could again be as they were. Another would gladly have shoved her off the pier. The rest didn’t know how it felt, and resented all attempts at enquiry. She had hoped she’d be beyond that by now. Plainly it wasn’t so simple.

Yennika cast an appraising eye across the dockside. “You’ll never hold it. The Voice won’t let you.”

Kat shrugged, glad of the impersonal topic. “The Voice has other problems. Qersal isn’t as settled as it was, and plenty of cities don’t care who runs Tyzanta so long as trade continues. Maybe that’s enough.”

“We’ll see.” Yennika dipped her head, lip twisting. “Why are you doing this, Katija?”

“Doing what?”

“Letting me go. Don’t deny it. Ihsan would have pegged me out for the vultures days ago, and if Vallant had his way, I’d be nothing but a memory beyond the Veil.” Her head came up, her stare piercing. “Which brings me to you.”

Kat hesitated and cursed herself for her cowardice. “You could have let Aroth kill me. Instead, you saved my life. I still don’t understand why.”

Yennika’s soft laughter danced along the pier. “Just because you abandoned me doesn’t mean I was ready to abandon you. Not everything between us was a lie, darling. Not even most of it.”

Kat glared. Just in time, she recognised the provocation. “Is that really true?”

Yennika shrugged. “I might ask you the same. Letting me go repays a debt? That’s all?”

“That’s all.”

She cocked her head, her expression thoughtful, superior… infuriating. “Hmm.”

Kat held her gaze, determined not to be the one to turn away. Had Yennika read the lie? Could she see her uncertainty? Did she conceal any of her own behind those dark, appraising eyes Kat had once thought she’d known so well? She thought she saw an eyelid flicker. A hint of doubt in the furrow of a brow. Or maybe she just saw herself reflected, and simply wished it otherwise.

Kiasta. What was she even doing?

“I’m not the woman you pulled out of the gutter, not any more,” she said at last. “You taught me strength and compassion, even if you didn’t mean to. You showed me that I could fight for more than myself. I’m the best of what you could have been, of who I thought you were. That’s the debt I owe you. That’s what I’m repaying.”

Just for a second, Yennika’s features crowded with hurt. Or perhaps it was disappointment. Or maybe Kat simply read what she chose beneath the contours of a fleeting, cloud-cast shadow. All she knew for certain was that she’d spoken a truth that had needed saying. It didn’t offer as much satisfaction as she’d hoped, but it was perhaps enough.

“Goodbye, darling,” said Yennika. “I hope you’ve found your place, I really do.”

“And what about you?”

She sighed a smile. “I was a survivor long before we met. I’ll survive this. Aroth insisted on taking authority; now he can take the blame.” She stepped closer, eyes entreating and tone wistful. “And perhaps one day you and I will meet beneath silken canopies and the past will simply be the past. Or maybe it’ll be your turn to pull me out of the gutter.”

Kat stepped away before Yennika’s fingers found hers, and looped her hands behind her back. “Don’t count on it.”

This time, there was no imagining Yennika’s frown. For a long moment, she stood stock still, no longer gazing at Kat, but through her. Then, without a word, she began the long ascent of the gangplank, and never once looked back.

The palace residence burned magnificently, the bright, brilliant flames ushering black smoke into the open skies. Damant watched from the terrace, the boundary beyond which the comforting prickle of heat grew searing. By nightfall, the palace would be gone, but he would remain. Or perhaps he wouldn’t. His greatest joys and bitterest regrets had unfolded in its shadow. It had been the focus of his duty, his life. What was he without it?

“I remember suggesting that burning the portrait might make you feel better,” said Marida. “This feels a little excessive. Or did you grow so impatient waiting for a new Age of Fire that you decided to start your own?”

He found her standing on the path behind him, distant enough for denial, close enough for comfort, gemstone-set chains glittering in her red hair and her slender, stolen shadow the mantle of aeons.

He grunted. “The Triad granted me the house. What I do with it is my own business. The servants have taken what they want, and the grounds are secured. The fire won’t spread.”

The estate’s conclave hall now served as the meeting place of the Triad, the newly established council upon which Vallant, Marida and Javar each had an equal voice, even if Javar’s often spoke louder, and at greater length. The torch house still blazed, warding away the Veil. Vallant had taken the lodge for himself. Only the overlook cottage stood empty. Though it had been offered to Arvish, she’d never set foot within. Not that Damant cared. The palace was all.

“Is the conclave over already?”

Marida reached his side in a swish of silken skirts. “Vallant had other business, and I’ve always found the smell of smoke distracting. We’ve ratified trade agreements with Naxos and Etranta. Osios and Vanarea are holding out for better terms, but a whisper in the right ear, a glimpse of a secret thought forgotten, and they’ll be more accommodating. We also agreed, once again, to make you the head of the custodium. Say ‘yes’.”

“I’m not interested.”

“I said I’d persuade you,” she said, honey in her words and blades beneath.

With a yawning, stuttering crackle, a beam gave way. Roof tiles sagged. A fresh gout of smoke heralded escaping flames.

“Why?”

“Because you’re the only one all three of us are prepared to trust.”

“Even Vallant?”

“Even Vallant.” She shrugged. “He doesn’t have to like you to recognise your worth. Of course, he might change his mind if he knew you were still heartbroken over Elinor Bascari.”

Damant snorted. “This place was my last link to her. Left standing, it would retain power over me. Better to burn it down and seek something new amid the ashes. Or somewhere else entirely, perhaps. Athenoch was the first time since Tythia’s death that I’d sailed the Cloudsea. I never realised how much I’d missed it. Maybe I should just go. Leave it all behind.”

Marida smiled. “I’ve never been able to do that. Everywhere I tread I’m walking in my own shadow.”

“Perhaps you should try it.”

“Ah, but I’d lose so many secrets. My lovely files. You should peek at a few. Elinor’s, perhaps? Malissa’s?”

Malissa. What would she say to see him now? I told you so, for a certainty. In the time they’d been married, she’d always known him better than he’d known himself. That had been part of the joy, and part of the problem. “You know where she is?”

“Of course.” She cocked her head. “I could tell you…?”

Damant’s pulse quickened with temptation, but subsided almost at once. The past was the past. He’d chosen his life long ago, Malissa hers. Whatever she now had deserved to go untroubled by him. “Just how much of Yennika’s scheme did you know about?”

Marida went still. “You can’t possibly expect me to tell you that.”

“Of course not. Half the value of secrets is knowing where they begin and end.”

She levelled her inky black stare, the waif she wore never more obviously a vessel for something older and bleaker. “Then why ask at all?”

“To see if you’d lie.”

She laughed, bitter music spiralling into the drifting smoke. “I’m starting to think I’ve underestimated you all these years, Ihsan.”

“Maybe I did too. Or maybe I’m not the man I was.”

“Then I suppose all that remains is to determine the man you wish to be.”

Damant stared into the flames and there found his answer.

The railrunner station was just as it had been when Kat had first arrived in Tyzanta: crowded, filthy and made sweltering where the low glazed roof trapped steam from idling engines. Even the guard rail was still buckled from where she’d run headlong into it, fleeing Alabastran bailiffs that had existed only in her exhausted, frantic thoughts. Only a year ago, and she barely recognised herself.

But not everything about the station was the same. A year before, she’d not known a living soul within its walls. Not so today. Vallant stood beneath the arch separating the loading platform from the ticket hall, shoulder propped against the wall and arms folded. His bruises healed, and clad in genuinely clean clothes for the first time in their brief association, he looked every inch the hero rumour held him to be. That he stood alone spoke to the fact that rumour still dwelled more on his accomplishments than his appearance, for however long that would last. Pushing away from the wall, he met Kat halfway to the arch.

“So Rîma was right. You are leaving.”

Kat shrugged her haversack from her shoulder and set it down on the floor. She’d not expected to slip away unnoticed, but she had hoped. “Are you surprised?”

“If I said I was, would you believe me?” His earnest smile still irritated, but not as much as it once had. “Can I convince you to stay?”

She shook her head. “I experienced something at Athenoch. Maybe it was Nyssa. Maybe it was my own voice when I needed to hear it most. I don’t have an answer, but that’s not the problem.”

She hated how muddled she sounded, but was powerless to bring clarity. She stared down at her left forearm, hidden beneath her sleeve. Last breath had numbed the pain and in time would mend the flesh. But her aetherios tattoo had been cold and quiet since Athenoch, and nothing – not tessence, nor time, nor pleading – had goaded it to life. It left her numb in a way she couldn’t explain.

If that was the price of victory, she was glad to pay it. The tower’s defenders had smashed half the koilos before they’d realised they weren’t coming back to life. Vallant had escorted archons to retrieve the remainder, though the facts of what had happened at Athenoch had quickly yielded to a rumour that Nyssa had intervened to spare the innocent. Kat had seen no reason to correct the record. Vallant may have sought a legend. Not her. Besides, Nyssa had intervened.

Probably.

She sighed. “I’ve spent my life not bothering to ask questions. I don’t really know what this tattoo is, or why my father made it. I had a sister I never knew about. Blessed Nyssa, I don’t even really know why my father died. I need to close the door on some of that or I’ll go mad.”

That wasn’t even half of it, of course. If she hadn’t been hallucinating at Athenoch, then the questions only multiplied from there. In the Deadwinds, she’d taken the presence that had chained the goddess for a daemon, but that was a vast and imprecise category. And had Tanith truly survived? Kat had only tried to explain the mess to one other person, and she’d not done much more than tangle it all up tighter.

“I think I understand,” said Vallant, his smile fading. “Be careful. The truth doesn’t always make things better.”

It didn’t take divine insight to know what he meant. “Tythia?”

A shadow fell across his eyes. “Back in the Veil, I asked you if she was part of all this. She was, wasn’t she?”

“Yennika lied as easily as breathing. You have your memories. Trust them.”

“I want to, but if I’ve learnt anything, it’s that certainty is anything but.”

Alerted by a strange note in his voice, Kat regarded him closely. “You sound like you’ve made a decision yourself.”

The smile returned. “I’ll tell you if you promise not to lecture me.”

“You’ll have to take your chances.”

“We both know I can’t hold Tyzanta if the Voice decides otherwise. If the redcloaks march, it’s going to be bloody.”

“That never bothered you before.”

He narrowed his eyes. “That sounds like a lecture.”

Kat shrugged. “I never promised.”

He chuckled. “True. We’ve bought time, and I want to spend it doing something other than burying friends. If Zephyr says there’s another realm beyond the Veil, I want to find it. If we can’t offer people freedom in Khalad, we can at least offer them a choice. Who knows?” His chuckle faded. “Perhaps I’ll find Sadia in the mists. Wouldn’t that be something?”

“What if Zephyr’s wrong?”

He shrugged. “As long as I have questions, I have hope.”

“Then at last we have something in common.”

“Perhaps one more thing.” He tilted his head. “If you ever need me, just call. I’ll be there.”

Kat blinked and covered up her surprise the only way she knew how. “I hope you’re not expecting me to say the same.”

“You don’t have to. I already know.”

“Careful. The last person who thought she could read me like that lost everything.”

“I’ll take that chance.” Vallant paused, a faraway look in his eyes, then patted his pockets. “Oh, and one last thing. A gift.”

He held out a small envelope, sealed with ridged wax shaped to Alabastra’s stylised flame. “The other copy went to Zariqaz by courier three days ago. I thought you’d like this one.”

Suspicion flaring at his blatant enjoyment, Kat broke the seal, drew the letter forth and read aloud. “‘By the authority vested in me by the most Benevolent Goddess and the grace of the Qabirarchi Council, I confirm that Katija Arvish, daughter of Terrion Arvish…’” She tailed off and read it twice more, scarcely able to believe her eyes. “They’ve annulled the debt? How? Why?”

Vallant grinned. “Hierarch Ossed heard Nyssa call him to Zariqaz. I refused to let him leave until he signed.”

“But… my father owed hundreds of tetrams.”

“A price worth paying, he seemed to think. With your part in the business at Xanathros Alabastra muddled by so many conflicting stories, you should find your time in Zariqaz less complicated.” He shrugged. “Of course, if the Voice takes as badly to Tyzanta’s new circumstances as Vathi’s insisting she will, it might get complicated again, but…”

Kat lowered the letter, her brain finally catching up with her ears. “How did you know I was going to Zariqaz?”

“Where else would you go?” Perhaps Vallant did know her after all. He held out his hand. “Goodbye, Kat. I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

She stared at the hand, riven by indecision, then passed it up and hugged him instead. “This is how friends say goodbye. But tell anyone we’re friends, and I’ll kill you.”

“My lips are sealed.”

Still inordinately pleased with himself, he walked away and was lost in the crowd.

Kat heaved her haversack onto her shoulder and passed beneath the arch. She lost track of how long she stood there, watching the steam swirl across the underside of the glass ceiling. Time and again she glanced at the letter, unbelieving. Once, it had been all she’d wanted. Now? Now, it was just a step along the way. Tangible, immutable proof of how her horizons had grown.

She was still staring when Yali joined her in the shadows. ||You are trying to sneak away.||

Kat mock-scowled. ||I wasn’t sneaking away. I was waiting. What about Qarian? I have it on good authority you and he have been thrown out of every tavern in Undertown.||

Yali shrugged. ||I like him, but he doesn’t need me. You do. So where are we going?||

||Zariqaz.||

||Are you sure that’s a good idea?||

||No. But if I wasn’t hallucinating in the Deadwinds, that’s where Nyssa told me I’d find Tanith. If there’s a chance she’s still alive, I have to look for her. To help her, if that’s even possible.|| She is a soul adrift, Nyssa had said. Seek her where she belongs. Where else other than the City of Lost Souls could that possibly be? ||Tatterlain has a house there. He says we can use it.||

||And if you were hallucinating?|| asked Yali.

The railrunner’s whistle blew a warning of imminent departure.

||I guess we’ll see,|| said Kat.

The story continues in…

Book TWO of the Soulfire Saga

Glossary

Cinderblood | One born to the lower class
Fireblood | One born to the upper class
Ifrît(i) | Fragment(s) of soul, shackled to service
Lock Charmer | One accomplished in opening locks without benefit of a key
Skelder | Broad-ranging term for criminals and the societally undesirable
The Deadwinds | Vortex of soul-laden winds, centred on the city of Zariqaz
The Veil | The ever-hungry mists at Khalad’s border
Xanathros Alabastra | Grand temple of the Alabastran religion

Adobe | A brick made of sun-dried straw and clay (also buildings constructed thereof)
Akîa | Issnaîm definition of the soul
Alabastra | State religion of Khalad
Amashti | Soul-sucking daemon
Archon | Member of the Alabastran priesthood
Astoricum | Mythical metal
Aurora Eternis | Sky-borne portent of a coming Mistrali
Ayin | Issnaîm expression of dismay
Azasouk | A grand marketplace
Blesswood | Sanctified timber burned in torch houses
Carrack | Medium-sized square-rigged military skyship
Custodian | Keeper of the law
Custodium | Body tasked with enforcement of the law
Daric | Primary language of Khalad
Dhow | Large, lateen-rigged military skyship
Ember-rot | Liveried koilos guardians; also, Nyssa’s first, deathless apostles (archaic)
Felucca | Small lateen-rigged skyboat
The Golden Stair | Approach to the Eternity King’s palace
Helmic | Ifrît that governs guidance
Hestic | Protector ifrît
Hierarch | Senior Alabastran priest
Ilfri | Kleptomaniac daemon
Isshîm | Illicit narcotic
Issnaîm | Race better known to the people of Khalad as “veilkin”
Kiasta | A mild Daric curse word
King’s Council | Governing body of Khalad, subordinate to the Voice
Koilos | Preserved, indentured servant
Last breath | A restorative harvested from the recently dead
Lumani | Ifrît that provides illumination
Mistfall | The descent of unnatural mist
Mistrali | Seasonal rainstorm
Motic | Ifrît that governs simple mechanisms
The Obsidium Cult | Mythical (and secret) society
Odysseri rites | Funerary prayers for the deceased
Omen rot | A fatal disease of body and soul
Overspire | A city’s more well to do streets (generally the highest)
Palka | A mischievous demon
Pyrasti | Flame ifrît
Qabirarch | Supreme head of the Alabastran temples
Qabirarchi Council | Assemblage of Hierarchs
Qalimîri | A deathless, parasitic soul
Qeenaki | Daemon that warns of imminent death
Qersi | Language spoken across eastern Khalad and in Qersal
Railrunner | Steam engine governed by ifrîti
Redcloak | Soldier of the Royal Guard
Sailrider | Crew member on a skyship
Scow | Ungainly skyship, used for cargo
Shrieker | Flame-based weapon, powered by an ifrît
Shriversman | Craftsman responsible for the dissection of souls
Simah | Widespread sign language
Skirl | Slang term for an annoying youth
Talent Wisp | Distilled essence of deceased talent
Tessence | Distilled soul
The Thornless Rose | House of ill-repute
Torch House | Beacon that burns back the mists of the Veil
Trallock | A shiftless and unreliable individual, too focused on their own pleasures
Undertown | A city’s lowest (and most unsalubrious) levels
Vahla | Spirits who escort the guilty to judgement
Veilkin | What the people of Khalad call the Issnaîm
Waholi (impolite) | Issnaîm word for outsiders
Xanathros | A high temple
Zol’tayah | Ruler of the Qersali people

Acknowledgements

The acknowledgements page already? That came around fast. Then again, if you skipped straight here (though why you’d do such a thing, I can scarcely imagine) you’ve only yourself to blame. You should go back and read the other pages first. I think we can all agree they’re better. By and large.

Anyway… for my sake and yours I’ll keep this brief.

As ever, my inexpressible gratitude to my wife, Lisa, for her unflagging encouragement – especially this past year, which has been far busier, work-wise, than is strictly sane. She reads everything and knows just how much of a bag of snakes any given story is until it hits the page. It’s hard to overstate the barrage of So, I was thinking this might work… or Does this make any kind of sense at all? And What this book needs is… she endures on a regular basis. A trip to the shops is an opportunity to pick at a scene. A six-hour drive to Scotland? Three storylines to cover, often in three different settings. Somehow, I remained unburied beneath the patio.

(At least, as of writing. Time tells its own story.)

Likewise, I’m hugely thankful for the support of my agent, John Jarrold. Though I’m certainly not the first to say it, John is one of the finest fellows you’ll ever meet. I’m fortunate beyond words to have access to his wisdom and guidance. Fewer patio fears here, though mostly because I’m reasonably sure John doesn’t have one.

And finally, my thanks to my editor, James Long, who elected of his own free will – and I daresay against all good sense – to embark on another journey with me once the Legacy Trilogy came to an end. Patio status here is a big unknown, but I’m almost certain James is too nice to contemplate employing garden landscaping for anything than its intended purpose.

And… I think that’s it. What happens next? Well, I guess we’ll have to see.

So much for keeping things brief.

C’est la guerre.

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MATTHEW WARD has frequently been accused of living in worlds of his own imagination, though really he lives near Nottingham with his extremely patient wife and several attention-seeking cats.

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THE DARKNESS BEFORE THEM

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Lands of the Firstborn: Book One

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Set in a world of dark myth and dangerous prophecy, this thrilling fantasy launches an epic tale of legendary warriors, living weapons, and bloodthirsty vengeance.

Many years ago, Sir Aelfric and his nine companions saved the world, seizing the Dark Lord’s cursed weapons along with his dread city of Necrad. That was the easy part.

Now when Aelfric—keeper of the cursed sword Spellbreaker—learns of a new and terrifying threat, he seeks the nine heroes once again. But they are wandering adventurers no longer. Yesterday’s eager heroes are today’s weary leaders—and some have turned to the darkness, becoming monsters themselves.

If there’s one thing Aelfric knows, it’s slaying monsters. Even if they used to be his friends.

CHAPTER ONE

His story had not begun in a tavern, but Alf had ended up in one anyway.

“An ogre,” proclaimed the old man from the corner by the hearth, “a fearsome ogre! Iron-toothed, yellow-eyed, arms like oak branches!” He wobbled as he crossed the room towards the table of adventurers. “I saw it not three days ago, up on the High Moor. The beast must be slain, lest it find its way down to our fields and flocks!”

One of the young lads was beefy and broad-shouldered, Mulladale stock. He fancied himself a fighter, with that League-forged sword and patchwork armour. “I’ll wager it’s one of Lord Bone’s minions, left over from the war,” he declared loudly. “We’ll hunt it down!”

“I can track it!” This was a woman in green, her face tattooed. A Wilder-woman of the northern woods – or dressed as one, anyway. “We just need to find its trail.”

“There are places of power up on the High Moor,” said a third, face shadowed by his hood. He spoke with the refined tones of a Crownland scholar. An apprentice mage, cloak marked with the sign of the Lord who’d sponsored him. He probably had a star-trap strung outside in the bushes. “Ancient temples, shrines to forgotten spirits. Such an eldritch beast might…”

He paused, portentously. Alf bloody hated it when wizards did that, leaving pauses like pit traps in the conversation. Just get on with it, for pity’s sake.

Life was too short.

“… be drawn to such places. As might other… legacies of Lord Bone.”

“We’ll slay it,” roared the Mulladale lad, “and deliver this village from peril!”

That won a round of applause from the locals, more for the boy’s enthusiasm than any prospect of success. The adventurers huddled over the table, talking ogre-lore, talking about the dangers of the High Moor and the virtues of leaving at first light.

Alf scowled, irritated but unable to say why. He’d finish his drink, he decided, and then turn in. Maybe he’d be drunk enough to fall straight asleep. The loon had disturbed a rare evening of forgetfulness. He’d enjoyed sitting there, listening to village gossip and tall tales and the crackling of the fire. Now, the spell was broken and he had to think about monsters again.

He’d been thinking about monsters for a long time.

The old man sat down next to Alf. Apparently, he wasn’t done. He wasn’t that old, either – Alf realised he was about the same age. They’d both seen the wrong side of forty-five winters. “Ten feet tall it was,” he exclaimed, sending spittle flying into Alf’s tankard, “and big tusks, like a bull’s horns, at the side of its mouth.” He stuck his fingers out to illustrate. “It had the stink of Necrad about it. They have the right of it – it’s one of Bone’s creatures that escaped! The Nine should have put them all to the sword!”

“Bone’s ogres,” said Alf, “didn’t have tusks.” His voice was croaky from disuse. “They cut ’em off. Your ogre didn’t come out of Necrad.”

“You didn’t see the beast! I did! Only the Pits of Necrad could spawn such—”

“You haven’t seen the sodding Pits, either,” said Alf. He felt the cold rush of anger, and stood up. He needed to be away from people. He stumbled across the room towards the stairs.

Another of the locals caught his arm. “Bit of luck for you, eh?” The fool was grinning and red-cheeked. Twist, break the wrist. Grab his neck, slam his face into the table. Kick him into the two behind him. Then grab a weapon. Alf fought against his honed instincts. The evening’s drinking had not dulled his edge enough.

He dug up words. “What do you mean?”

“You said you were going off up the High Moor tomorrow. You’d run straight into that ogre’s mouth. Best you stay here another few days, ’til it’s safe.”

“Safe,” echoed Alf. He pulled his arm free. “I can’t stay. I have to go and see an old friend.”

The inn’s only private room was upstairs. Sleeping in the common room was a copper a night, the private room an exorbitant six for a poky attic room and the pleasure of hearing the innkeeper snore next door.

Alf locked the door and took Spellbreaker from its hiding place under the bed. The sword slithered in his grasp, metal twisting beneath the dragonhide.

“I could hear them singing about you.” Its voice was a leaden whisper. “About the siege of Necrad.”

“Just a drinking song,” said Alf, “nothing more. They didn’t know it was me.”

“They spoke the name of my true wielder, and woke me from dreams of slaughter.”

“It rhymes with rat-arsed, that’s all.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“It does the way they say it. Acra-sed.”

“It’s pronounced with a hard ‘t’,” said the sword. “Acrai-st the Wraith-Captain, Hand of Bone.”

“Well,” said Alf, “I killed him, so I get to say how it’s said. And it’s rat-arsed. And so am I.”

He shoved the sword back under the bed, then threw himself down, hoping to fall into oblivion. But the same dream caught him again, as it had for a month, and it called him up onto the High Moor to see his friend.

The adventurers left at first light.

Alf left an hour later, after a leisurely breakfast. Getting soft, he muttered to himself, but he still caught up with them at the foot of a steep cliff, arguing over which of the goat paths would bring them up onto the windy plateau of the High Moor. Alf marched past them, shoulders hunched against the cold of autumn.

“Hey! Old man!” called one of them. “There’s a troll out there!”

Alf grunted as he studied the cliff ahead. It was steep, but not insurmountable. Berys and he had scaled the Wailing Tower in the middle of a howling necrostorm. This was nothing. He found a handhold and hauled himself up the rock face, ignoring the cries of the adventurers below. The Wilder girl followed him a little way, but gave up as Alf rapidly outdistanced her.

His shoulders, his knees ached as he climbed. Old fool. Showing off for what? To impress some village children? Why not wave Spellbreaker around? Or carry Lord Bone’s skull around on a pole? If you want glory, you’re twenty years too late, he thought to himself. He climbed on, stretching muscles grown stiff from disuse.

At the top, he sat down on a rock to catch his breath. He’d winded himself. The Wailing Tower, too, was nearly twenty years ago.

He pulled his cloak around himself to ward off the breeze, and lingered there for a few minutes. He watched the adventurers as they debated which path to take, and eventually decided on the wrong one, circling south-east along the cliffs until they vanished into the broken landscape below the moor. He looked out west, across the Mulladales, a patchwork of low hills and farmlands and wooded coppices. Little villages, little lives. All safe.

Twenty years ago? Twenty-one? Whenever it was, Lord Bone’s armies came down those goat paths. Undead warriors scuttling down the cliffs head first like bony lizards. Wilder scouts with faces painted pale as death. Witch Elf knights mounted on winged dreadworms. Golems, furnaces blazing with balefire. Between all those horrors and the Mulladales stood just nine heroes.

“It was twenty-two years ago,” said Spellbreaker. The damn sword was listening to his thoughts again – or had he spoken out loud? “Twenty-two years since I ate the soul of the Illuminated.”

“We beat you bastards good,” said Alf. “And chased you out of the temple. Peir nearly slew Acraist then, do you remember?”

“Vividly,” replied the sword.

Peir, his hammer blazing with the fire of the Intercessors. Berys, flinging vials of holy water she’d filched from the temple. Gundan, bellowing a war cry as he swung Chopper. Gods, they were so young then. Children, really, only a few years older than the idiot ogre-hunters. The battle of the temple was where they’d first proved themselves heroes. The start of a long, bitter war against Lord Bone. Oh, they’d got side-tracked – there’d been prophecies and quests and strife aplenty to lead them astray – but the path to Necrad began right here, on the edge of the High Moor.

He imagined his younger self struggling up those cliffs, that cheap pig-sticker of a sword clenched in his teeth. What would he have done, if that young warrior reached to the top and saw his future sitting there? Old, tired, tough as old boots. Still had all his limbs, but plenty of scars.

“We won,” he whispered to the shade of the past, “and it’s still bloody hard.”

“You,” said the sword, “are going crazy. You should get back to Necrad, where you belong.”

By Matthew Ward

THE LEGACY TRILOGY

Legacy of Ash

Legacy of Steel

Legacy of Light

THE SOULFIRE SAGA

The Darkness Before Them

Praise for
Matthew Ward and
the Legacy Trilogy

“Hugely entertaining.”

—John Gwynne

“As intricate as a precision-engineered watch.”

—Gareth Hanrahan

“Epic fantasy as it should be: big, bold and very addictive.”

—Starburst magazine

“Ward has created a novel with such intention and craftsmanship that it brings back that feeling of excitement fantasy readers felt when discovering masters like J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis.”

—Shelf Awareness

“Packed with big battles, shadowy intrigue, and a large cast of characters, Legacy of Ash is an absorbing debut.”

—James Islington

“This is the first epic fantasy book I’ve enjoyed getting immersed in for ages.… A great fat romp in a brilliantly realised setting.… I have lost sleep, forgotten food… and made this the thing I pick up every moment I can get.”

—SFFWorld

“A perfect blend of Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire and Bernard Cornwell’s The Last Kingdom.”

—FanFiAddict

“An incredibly impressive piece of fantasy fiction.”

—Fantasy Inn

“Outstanding.… Ward presses all the right, well-worn buttons with enough vigor to make them feel fresh. The result is a ripping yarn that more than earns its length.”

—Publishers Weekly (starred review)