Pale Lights

Chapter 72

It took an embarrassing amount of time to wiggle all the way to Izel so Tristan could get his hands on the man’s knife and cut free of the rope around his hands and feet.

Once the last of it fell he pulled upright and groaned, rolling his shoulders. The beating from Kiran hadn’t hurt anywhere important – more because of the Skiritai’s restraint than any skill of Tristan’s – but he’d still pick up a few bruises. Maybe he should have set aside something for the pain, considering he still had a long night ahead of him, but he balked at the idea of taking poppy. Better aches than a habit.

“That worked out surprisingly well,” Tristan told the paralyzed brigade, rubbing at his wrist. “You drank more of the water than I expected.”

He paused, gaze sweeping across the room to the prone forms of the Nineteenth – Tozi and Izel crumpled on the floor, Cressida belly down over her own poison bag and Kiran slumped against the side wall.

“Though hopefully not too much,” he muttered.

Spinster’s Milk was a paralytic but it could still be lethal. Caotl’s Spinsters, the horse-sized scorpions that produced the venom, were known to accidentally kill their prey with the sting if the creatures were too small. Cats, dogs. Children. Too much of the Milk would stop the heart instead of slowing it down and dumping vials in barrels wasn’t exactly what one would call precise dosage. Dusting himself off, the thief rose. He checked on Izel first, measuring the man’s pulse, and hummed thoughtfully. So long as it didn’t further slow, he should be fine.

Izel Coyac was the only one who’d earned any personal concern in this regard. Besides, even if one of the others went wrong he had the antidote. It was much more expensive than the Milk but the poison box he had bought off Hage still had six doses– which worked on all three of the venoms the box contained.

He flipped Tozi and Izel on their back instead of leaving them face down on the floor, then grabbed Kiran’s feet and dragged him across the room to join them. None too gently. He hesitated before moving Cressida, half-tempted to take no care in dragging her off the bag of poisons. He’d liked Cressida, he could admit to himself. He was not so much of a fool as to think that meant anything, but it made the way she had planned to sell him like merchandise stick under the fingernails.

It would have been different if the paper Angharad passed him painted Cressida Barboza as someone in trouble, like some of her fellow cabalists. Someone who needed the Ivory Library, a cornered rat. But as far as he could tell she was doing it for the payout. Still, he mastered himself and slid her off the bag gently before putting her with the others. He’d not dosed her with Milk just to see her die to some errant vial spill. The boy could be spiteful, but the Mask must be a professional.

Tristan inspected them, checking pulses and the eyes. Regular heartbeats and the gaze could still move, which meant no one was currently slipping into the grave. Good. Now, the usual practice would have been to separate them to play off doubts and distrust during the interrogation. Unfortunately he was short on time, so he would have to brute force the process instead.

Tristan reached into the inner pocket of his cloak, fishing out a small metal disk and unscrewing it. Inside was a pale brown balm and he dipped a finger in before kneeling down besides Tozi Poloko and rubbing the balm against the skin above and below her lips. He did the same to the others, one after another, then went looking through the Nineteenth’s belongings. Kiran had a spare cloak bundled up, which he ripped four stripes from.

He gagged everyone except Tozi, then went back for the knife he’d thrown earlier. He cleaned the hemlock off it and settled in to wait. It took two more minutes before the balm sunk in properly. Tozi, as the first dosed and only one not gagged, was the first able to speak.

“Abwascahl,” Tozi got out. “Twaiteer. Why-”

Holding a knife steady was all about the wrist. Tozi felt no pain, when he sliced into the cheek horizontally just beneath her right eye, but she stiffened when the trickle of blood slid down to her lips. It was a shallow cut, barely breaking skin, but face wounds were always bleeders. Her muscles did not allow flinch, but her eyes and lips did twitch at the sound.

“I know about the Ivory Library,” he told her, wiping the knife against her collar. “And your deal with them. I ask questions, you answer. If you lie or quibble, I take a finger.”

Izel tried to call something out, slurring the syllables, but through the gag it was unintelligible. Tozi let out a snarl and Kiran a grunt. Barely. Which made sense, the Someshwari’s dosage of Milk was the strongest of the Nineteenth by a fair margin. Cressida said nothing at all, unmoving, so Tristan spared a moment to check her pulse again. No, she was not degenerating. Only watching him with cold eyes. He pushed down the impulse to slice through them, going back to Tozi’s side.

“Why is the Ivory Library after me?” he asked her.

She laughed. He gave her three seconds of it, then raised the knife. The threat provided motivation enough.

“I never asked,” Tozi said, her enunciation only slightly thick now. “They wanted a specimen, sent the assignment. Not worth arguing about.”

She licked the blood off her lip, spreading red on them like rouge. Tristan’s free hand clenched. It was empty, he knew. And yet he could almost feel the cool edges of the tile digging into the skin. It would have been childish to blame Tozi Poloko for her indifference. She had no reason to care, and Izcalli of her birth treated the vast majority of men like beasts of burden. Anger would be irrational. But a voice that sounded a lot like Abuela’s noted, clinically, that Tozi Poloko was unlikely to ever consider him a person in any meaningful sense and thus making a bargain with her would be pointless.

Simpler to slit her throat. Quicker, too.

“And if you had argued?” he asked instead.

Angharad marked Poloko as having joined the Watch to flee a dynastic struggle turning against on her. Apparently a bastard girl killing her way up the line of succession was frowned upon even out in Izcalli. While Tristan had little sympathy for her actions, it did not change the lay of things: namely that Ivory Library had likely saved her life by brokering her enrollment in the Watch when they did. Did they still have that lever to wield against her?

“Death,” she said, confirming the suspicion.

Mind you, why would she not? Even if it were untrue, she lost nothing by making herself seem cornered. The Spinster’s Milk made her face difficult to read, with her muscles frozen and her breath kept artificially steady.

“My father’s whore wives paid upfront for my head, rat,” Tozi said. “If the Library had not gotten me out of Tepehuac they would already have it fitted to a spike. The scholars hide my trail still.”

“You are Watch now,” he noted. “There would be consequences to killing you.”

“The contract was paid before I put on the black,” Tozi snorted. “Their hands are clean.”

He hummed. That did sound like the sort of technicality that sufficiently powerful people would be able to use to wiggle out of the greater part of consequences. Presumably the consorts of a Sunflower Lord qualified as that, even when working against their husband.

“And the Library threatened to withhold their protection?” he asked. “To let your father’s wives find out where you are?”

“They didn’t have to,” Tozi answered.

As if it were evident. Perhaps it was. If the Library had no more use for her, why go to the trouble of keeping her hidden? Still, no threat had been made. Why would it? She never tried to refuse. He moved away from the captain, crouching next to the tinker. He took off the man’s gag, sliding it down to his chin.

“Izel,” he said with put on cheer. “Talk to me.”

“It doesn’t matter why I did it,” Izel Coyac said, tone resigned. “There is no good reason for this.”

Tristan frowned.

“Would refusing have put your life at risk?”

“It does not matter,” Izel insisted.

Tozi laughed. Tristan had refrained from gagging her in an effort to play them off each other, time to see if it paid off.

“He is just dying to die, Abrascal,” she said. “Our Izel ran out on the Jaguar Society: half the great lords have family in those ranks. Daddy dearest sold him to the Library and the only thing keeping the Jaguars from dragging him back to Izcalli by the ear anyway is that it would cross the scholars to steal an asset from them.”

“Which is no excuse,” Izel said. “The cost of my choices is not for others to pay.”

“Where was that spine when you fled Izcalli?” Tozi scorned. “Where was it months ago, when we first planned to take him?”

Tristan glanced at this face, interested by the answer. There came the same trouble as with Tozi, however. Izel was the largest of the four so by weight he’d ingested the least Milk but he had still drunk enough that his face was frozen. The way the man closed his eyes, though, was clearly in shame.

“Nowhere,” Izel evenly said. “I bent to fear. And not even to a threat.”

The last part was spoken with contempt, turned entirely on himself. It did not endear him to Tristan: regret was nothing. A guilt-ridden ratcatcher still made a living off their corpses.

“I chose to act according to promises I privately doubted because it was… easier to go along with it.”

Izel gritted his teeth.

“No more, Tozi,” he said. “It was wrong from the start and we all knew it. Dues must be paid.”

“You yellowbelly ixo,” Tozi bit back. “Just because you’re resigned to the grave doesn’t mean we-”

A decent harvest, but nothing all that useful would come of letting this continue. He rose and gagged her, ignoring her curses as he did. Izel went gagged as well, after which Tristan turned to Kiran. The Someshwari scoffed in his face before he could even ask a question.

“You get nothing from me, Mask,” the man said. “No reasons or tears.”

Because you have none to give, Tristan thought. Kiran Agrawal was not fearing for his life when he went into the Watch. The thief was no great student of the ways of Someshwari nobles, but he knew a little about marriage tournaments – if only because Ramayan sailors occasionally mocked the practice, comparing it to their own ‘seductive prowess’. Minor houses in the northern parts of the Imperial Someshwar put on these tournaments to find able spouses for their children, who would pick a suitor from the participants.

To attract warriors of some skill prize money was put up, as winning the bouts did not guarantee a courtship. Consolation money, this was called. By the sound of it Kiran had been a skilled enough fighter that his parents had stopped caring about getting him a wife and instead kept sending him from tournament to tournament for the prize money. A good reason to leave them but not some great peril he would need protection from.

He flicked a glance at Cressida, who tried a sneer but succeeded only at making her nose twitch. He was so unlikely to get anything from her he was disinclined to even try. Why waste the time? Anyhow, as far as he could tell she had no better reason than Kiran. It was not even all that clear what Cressida wanted, considering her family’s lands were now lost to the Gloam and unlikely to ever be reclaimed, but Tristan would bet that whatever she intended the wealth and influence of the Ivory Library would aid the cause.

Like Kiran, she was trading him for coin and favors. His grip tightened around nothing, around the merciless certainty of what he knew he could do.

“Fair enough,” he finally said, eyes returning to Izel.

As before, he ‘thoughtlessly’ left Kiran’s mouth free before moving back to the tinker to free his.

“Coyac, tell me about the aether machine downstairs,” he ordered. “What does it do?”

He forced his tone to stay casual, his face to remain indifferent. Not to show that was the single most important question he would ask them tonight.

“We gathered aether taint from the murder sites,” Izel said. “By forcefully coalescing it into a conceptually resonant shape the machine will force the presence of the remnant god and-”

“Would you stop,” Kiran Agrawal snarled. “He’s about to murder us, and you want to spoonfeed him answers?”

Izel hesitated. Not spurred by argument this time. Well, couldn’t get them all. Tristan rose from his crouch and gagged Kiran again.

“I am yet undecided how this will end,” Tristan mildly said.

“Shure yuh are,” Tozi mocked.

She had enough control of her face back to get around the gag, huh. Somewhat impressive. Tristan ignored her. Kiran was too sharp-edged to serve in getting more out of Izel, but Tozi might be a better tool for it.

“Forcing the presence of the remnant god, Izel. Continue.”

“With the furnace-fed auger we would then drill a temporary breach into the empty layer your cabal discovered,” Izel finally said. “The remnant would be sucked in and imprisoned.”

Tristan swallowed his triumph. Hage had been right, then, that was what their machine was for. Izel paused.

“We also intended to-”

“Coyac,” Tozi hissed.n/ô/vel/b//in dot c//om

A tightening around Izel’s eyes. Interesting. From Kiran that might have given him pause, but from Tozi it angered him. He blames her for all this. An exploitable enmity.

“Don’t complain,” Tristan said. “He just saved the two of you a finger – I knew about the compass already.”

Tozi spat out a few words in Centzon that sounded less than flattering.

“Essentially,” Izel tiredly said, “the intent was to slice off a part of the remnant and use it to power the compass. It would then be used to track you.”

“Several times you have claimed reluctance in the matter of my abduction,” Tristan said. “But you still made this compass.”

Would the Nineteenth have conceived of such a tool without him? Maybe. They would not, however, have been able to build it. Tinkers did not grow on trees, much less those who had experience with aether machinery at large and Scholomance roseless compasses in particular. The large man snorted.

“Yes,” he said. “Proposing as much stopped the search for you in the city.”

Tristan frowned down at the large Izcalli.

“And I sabotaged it,” he added, to the angry yells of the rest of the Nineteenth.

Huh. Tristan cocked his head to the side, studying Izel. Hard to tell if he was lying, but at the very least the rest of his brigade seemed to take him at his word. Kiran seemed particularly incensed, frothing through his gag. Tristan now somewhat wished he’d used something filthier for the job. There had to be dirty socks somewhere in the packs.

“I mixed in one of Shu Gong’s hair with yours, it would have boggled the direction,” Izel said. “I intended to blame it on her, since she provided your hair on the first place.”

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

Tristan filed away that particular detail. Song had made Lieutenant Shu Gong sound a paragon of incompetence, but evidently she was still capable of securing his hair. She had most likely paid a servant, he thought. Something to look into. Izel paused, realizing that the name could be foreign to him.

“She’s-”

“A lieutenant part of the delegation under Brigadier Chilaca,” Tristan interrupted. “One of several Ivory Library agents on the island. She is also currently under house arrest, along with Sergeant Ledwaba.”

A startled silence from them all. Tozi, in particular, looked at him as if he were a stranger. Her gag was just below her lower lip now, chewed up and spat out enough she would be able to speak.

“You left your conspirators under the same roof as Song Ren,” he reminded them. “What did you expect?”

Another illusion of safety stripped away from them. ‘The Watch has arrested your fellow conspirators’ would put a hole in the wall of the perception they still could get away with this. Tristan rolled his shoulder.

“I’ve known about your intentions for some time,” he said. “Were I not otherwise occupied these last few days we would already have settled our accounts.”

“And you still came here alone?” Tozi asked. “You arrogant fool.”

She looked like she would have spit had the Milk’s effect allowed it.

“You got lucky,” she added.

“I came alone,” Tristan said, “because even as we speak, out in Tratheke two different coups are taking place.”

Kiran mouthed something into the gag. Curious, Tristan went to remove it.

“So you murder us while the chaos is going on,” the Skiritai said. “Fucking Masks.”

The gag went back on.

“The lot of you seem remarkably aggrieved by the situation, for a cabal intending to sell me to people intending on vivisecting me,” Tristan replied.

He offered Kiran a pleasant smile.

“Is it less pleasant, being on the other side of the knife?”

A grunt. Cressida signaling she wanted to talk. Out of curiosity, he removed her gage.

“What do you want?”

It was the first time Cressida spoke since she’d been poisoned. Her voice was rough and she looked half asleep. Less resistant to the venom? Hard to tell. Either way, those four words went through the room like a cold wind. Tristan hid his irritation. He had wanted to wind them up a little more, get a read on where their heads were at. He had a decent read on Kiran and Izel, he thought, but Tozi was still opaque and Tozi was the key.

He put the gag back on Cressida. Rising to his feet, he groaned and stretched his limps before dragging Tozi out back into the hall. The others protested, even Izel, perhaps expecting him to slit her throat. Either way, soon enough he had the captain propped up against the wall with her legs extended in front of her. Closing the door, he sighed and took her pulse again. About as expected. None of them were going anywhere without the antidote.

He lowered Tozi’s gag properly while checking Vanesa’s watch. Two past five. The wick was burning, burning, burning. Sighing, the thief put his back against the wall opposite Tozi Poloko and slid down. Settling half-comfortably, he faced her and leaned his head back against the wood. A moment passed before he spoke, the two of them watching each other.

“You know, Tozi, of all your brigade you’re the one that makes most sense to me,” Tristan admitted.

“Is that meant to be a compliment?” she scoffed.

“Oh, the very opposite.”

She glanced at him.

“At least you didn’t pick Izel,” Tozi finally said. “Any more sanctimony under this roof and I may have to bite off my own tongue.”

“Of course I didn’t,” Tristan snorted. “See, your man Izel he wants to be good. Checkered record in practice, I’ll grant, but he’s trying.”

“He fears violence,” Tozi scorned. “It was for the best he fled Izcalli. No man so squeamish survives long in the Calendar Court’s shadow. Our societies rightly wear their names, Abrascal: jaguars, eagles, scorpions, rattlesnakes.”

She thinly smiled.

“Killing beasts one and all.”

“It’s a fine line between fearing something and hating it,” Tristan disagreed. “And even running is a choice, when it comes down to it. A choice. But Coyac’s game isn’t mine. It’s when I look at you, Tozi, that I find the same thing I do when I chance a mirror.”

She laughed, incredulous.

“I am the daughter of the lord of the Mountain Gate,” she said. “Bastard I might be, but I was raised in a great hall of the greatest realm in the world. Born to command, to water the flowers of the land. You, Abrascal, are a rat.”

“So I am,” Tristan agreed. “That’s the ugly truth of it. Even though some expect better of me, I am still a rat down the marrow of my bone. The same way that you’re still that girl in Tepehuac, climbing the ladder one corpse at time.”

He picked at his black sleeve almost mockingly.

“Putting that on, it didn’t change who we are,” he said. “Because we’re not trying to change, not really. Not like Izel is. We’re just keeping the parts the nice folk would balk at under the table, out of sight. Like a scorpion putting on a pretty little bow so they all forget what it really is.”

“Am I to weep now, Tristan?” Tozi mocked. “To sit here and lament with you the horror that I am, transformed by your moving words?”

He laughed.

“No, I don’t think so,” he said. “Because it doesn’t feel bad, does it? Being who we are. Most the time anyway.”

She frowned at him.

“It feels so much safer, being a rat,” Tristan confessed. “Warm, in a way. Knowing that I can flee when I want, kill when I need to. That there are no rules, not really. Because laws only matter if they can catch you, and if you’re good – like I was, like I think you were?”

His lips quirked.

“Then they never catch you.”

Tozi studied him, silent.

“What are you getting at, Abrascal?”

“That it’s beginning to cost me now, being who I am,” he said, looking at the wall. “I missed things when I was gone, chasing shadows and your brigade. And Manes but I hate it, how the same choices that got me here now burn me every time.”

His fingers clenched.

“It should have been like lancing a wound, slitting all your throats tonight,” he said. “Like a hot bath and featherbed.”

“How sad for you,” Tozi said. “Shall I curse you first so the murder feels better, you whining child? Just be done with it.”

He could almost admire it, the haughty disdain on her face at the prospect of her own death. Almost. It looked good, contempt for death, but when you scratched under the gilding it lost all luster. To think so little of your own life, how much less must you think of everyone else’s?

“That’s the thing, Tozi,” he said, bumping the back of his head against the wall. “I didn’t even come here to kill you.”

Surprise stole the words out of her mouth.

“Every part of me screams that I should,” he ruefully said. “That you are an unacceptable risk. But I got fat, Tozi. I got greedy. They got to me.”

He clenched his fingers.

“I care less about killing you than I do about getting my friends out of this mess alive.”

And it’s going to kill me, he thought. I can almost smell it. Here lies another rat, who got too old and too slow and too fucking cocksure.

“Then why are you here?” Tozi asked.

“Because I can’t get to my brigade. As we speak there’s hundreds of rebels smashing their heads against the walls of Fort Archelean,” he said. “I’m not getting through that army, or the one defending the walls. And even if somehow I did? Up those lifts the cult of the Odyssean infests the rector’s palace like a disease, half my brigade stuck in their midst.”

He eyed the knife still in his grasp, flipped it. The handle smacked against his palm, the meatiness of the sound satisfyingly physical.

“Two of them up there,” Tristan said. “One of them down here. Because about an hour from now, near the Reeking Rows, the Yellow Earth will pull at Song’s tail.”

“Good on them,” Tozi dismissed.

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” Tristan softly said. “See, people tend to think they’ve got the line on Song Ren because she is polite and methodical and orderly.”

He gestured at the wall.

“They look at the sum of that and think – oh, here is a reasonable woman. I know her kind. She takes orders and respects ranks, she follows rules. Obedient souls like her are the backbone of every standing thing in the world.”

He lifted the knife, pointed it at Tozi and shook it like a wiggling eyebrow.

“The problem there is that Song Ren is not, in fact, a reasonable woman,” Tristan informed her. “She is a complete lunatic.”

Because Song believed. All those platitudes people mouthed, the rules and philosophies and prayers? She took them with the utmost seriousness. The girl born in a world broken just for her name, a land of blame and dead ends, she’d looked beyond for something to hold on to. For anything to keep from drowning in that sea of hatred. And all there’d been was principles, so that was what she clutched in her death grip.

Song wasn’t Angharad, who danced around her own rules with a mirror-dancer’s grace. When she believed, it was the harsh inevitability of a bullet going down the barrel of a gun. Tristan knew she would remember that, when her back hit the wall and she was forced to make her choice. And somewhere in Tratheke, at that very moment, some fool was preparing to learn that lesson the hard way.

“Poking her as they did will inevitably result in Song going scorched earth on everyone involved, even at her own expense,” Tristan mused. “Going after her the way they did, it’s a little like threatening a grenade with arson.”

Tozi grunted, obviously disinterested.

“You’ve yet to say what this about, Abrascal,” she said. “How would we get you any nearer the palace? I cannot see what you came here for.”

“For your help,” Tristan said.

Tozi’s face blanked.

“What?”

The thief could sympathize. He, too, thought it a fool thing.

“I can’t get into the palace,” Tristan said. “There are two armies in the way. But you can.”

He pointed at the floor, at the level beneath their feet.

“Your little aether machine down there,” he said. “You were going to use it to seal the remnant into the prison layer, but for reasons of which you are still unaware that won’t work. What it could do, though, is get me into that layer.”

“But you don’t know how to make it work,” Tozi slowly said.

“I don’t,” he agreed. “And I suspect getting me across in one piece won’t be as simple as sucking in a god like you’d planned anyway. I need a tinker, and then when I’m up there I will need hands to help me get my brigade out.”

Tozi watched his face for any trace of deception, then slowly breathed out.

“So you come to us for help,” she said. “Your own hunters.”

“Madness, isn’t it?” he smiled. “Because there’s a voice in the back of my head, Tozi, that still screams I should smash all your skulls in and take my chances. And it terrifies me, the idea of not listening to that voice. Because it’s what’s kept me alive.”

He looked down at his trembling hands, squeezed them into fists. One of them around a knife.

“But that’s its limit, as a method. Me. It can never save anyone else,” he said. “So here I am, making you an offer.”

He caught her gaze.

“You get to wiggle out,” he said. “We’ll go to Brigadier Chilaca when the dust settles and tell him we were working a game to get the most Ivory Library names possible. That we were in it together from the start, unknown even to my own captain.”

He breathed out.

“The Krypteia will want to wring you dry of everything you have on the Library,” he said, “and you’ll have to flip on them and name names. But that also means you’ll be useful witnesses – worth keeping away from the devils on your trail.”

“Our safety depending on keeping the same enemies as you,” Tozi said.

It would have been an accusation, in another woman’s mouth. In Tozi Poloko’s it sounded like a compliment. He said nothing, watching her eyes. The wheels turn. Because once she had the antidote down her gullet, there was not a thing preventing her from turning on him. From them at his mercy, he would be putting himself at theirs.

“How do I know you’ll keep your end of the bargain?” she asked. “After tonight.”

“How do I know you won’t run me through at the first opportunity?” he asked.

She did not answer immediately. If she had, Tristan would have slit her throat. It spoke to serious consideration of consequence that she hesitated. Not simply to saying whatever got her out of danger.

“If you have Shu Gong, you have the Grinning Madcap,” she finally said. “It’s you or dead ends, isn’t it?”

Quite literally so.

“I won’t sign onto a suicide pact,” Tozi continued. “If what you ask is sure to get us killed, I’ll back out and take my chances.”

“I would expect no less,” Tristan acknowledged.

If her life was to be spent anyway, he’d not expect her to spend it the way he preferred.

“Then you have a bargain,” Captain Tozi said.

Tristan let out a long breath, watching her still. Fingers closed around the knife. And inside his coat, quietly ticking, waited Vanesa’s watch. He did not move and neither did his enemy, for she could not and he would not.

“You’re still thinking of cutting my throat,” Tozi Poloko said.

“Yes.”

Tick, tick, tick went the watch. Every moment bringing him closer to the point from which there would be no return. Every moment wasted might be the fishbone he choked on in years to come, when he arrived just a moment too late to keep Maryam from getting shot. From burning herself with her ritual.

“Fuck,” Tristan Abrascal snarled.

He went reaching in his cloak and got the antidote vial out. Tozi’s eyes widened. She had expected a gun.

“Izel will follow,” Tristan predicted. “Kiran, Cressida?”

“Kiran is in it for the coin,” Tozi said. “But the deal’s burned, he’ll see reason for a pardon. Cressida is… hard to read. Leave her for last, she will bend if everyone else does.”

Tristan watched the Izcalli’s narrow face one last time, then nodded. He pulled the cork on the vial and pressed it to Tozi’s lips – she leaned in eagerly, almost slurping down more than her allotted dose. He pulled away the vial, corked it and dragged her back into the room so she could announce a deal had been struck. He kept his eyes on Kiran’s face even as the Nineteenth’s captain laid out the terms, but the Milk had him still. The Skiritai’s eyes tightened, but that could mean a hundred things.

The antidote took just shy of five minutes to act, so Tristan checked his watch and staggered the doses. Tozi alone for two minutes, Tozi and Izel for another three. After that Kiran would be on his feet. Cressida was left to rot. She was not needed for anything urgent, better to stick her with a solidified bargain than risk her tipping the cup.

Not that Tristan was putting it all on hope. He still had Yong’s pistol tucked under his cloak, loaded, and his hand stayed on his knife as he watched Tozi rub her wrists and grimace.

“That tasted disgusting,” she told him. “Like fish, for some godforsaken reason.”

“Leviathan oil,” he provided.

She whistled.

“Might as well add gold flakes in,” Tozi opined.

Her limbs would be shaky for an hour still, feeling like they were wrapped in cotton, but by the time Izel pushed himself up she could move around. Tristan’s grip tightened around the pistol, but Tozi Poloko did not move towards a weapon.

“Izel,” she said instead. “The machine, what can be done?”

“If we do it here, I expect only somewhere around a third of the physical would make it into the layer,” the tinker replied.

Tristan cleared his throat.

“Tell me that’s not as grisly as it sounds.”

“More,” Izel grunted, rubbing his forehead. “The parts carried through would be picked randomly from the body whole, which would be…”

Tristan winced. Yes, best not to try that.

“But there is a better location?” Tozi asked.

“A direct connection to the layer will stabilize the passage,” Izel said. “Any of the brackstone walls would do.”

He paused.

“It will wreck the engine,” he specified. “Meaning we will need to find another way out.”

“I have a plan for that,” Tristan said.

Which was only somewhat of an exaggeration. Hopefully Maryam would be able to get them into the prison layer the way she had that first time she slipped in by accident. If not, well, he would have to do something foolish: attempt a bargain with Locke and Keys, who clearly knew how to get inside from their talk about the harpoon artifact. From the corner of his eye he watched as Kiran began to stir. Moving hands and feet, first, then folding up his knees. Tristan stepped back until the wall was but a foot behind him and he was in running distance of the doorway. But Tozi still did not go for weapons, and Izel was on his feet. Kiran rose on shaky legs, then glanced at Tristan and spat.

“You cost me enough to spend the rest of Scholomance comfortable,” he said.

“Oh, not at all,” he said. “I’ve been at the Port Allazei holding cells, Kiran, I assure you they are middling hospitality at best.”

The man rolled his eyes.

“Just dose Cressida, would you?” he said. “She will already be murderously angry as is, no need to-”

A flicker of red and gold at the edge of his sight.

“Move,” Fortuna hissed.

He dropped to the floor without hesitation, the knife slicing through his hair as he did. Twisting around he brought up the pistol aiming left, and - Izel was scrabbling for his roundhead mace, Tozi was fuck. He squeezed the trigger, but the Izcalli slapped his wrist aside and it went wide. He drew the knife, but she headbutted him and he staggered back with a groan. Pressure on his wrist and he tried to headbutt right back, but Tozi angled her head and pain.

His wrist was bent and he felt the knife tear into him, through the cloak and coat, until it hit something solid and – a crystalline crunch as it plunged into his watch, scraping against the copper and scrapping the gears inside. He shouted in pain and anger, slugging her in the jaw, but she bent her head to the side with the blow like a brawler. A heartbeat later she slugged him back, and Tristan hit the floor with a groan. Tozi ripped out the knife and he tried to back towards the door, but movement to the side.

A gleeful grin on his face, Kiran Agrawal kicked him in the side. He hit the ground hard, breath beaten out of him.

“You didn’t frisk us for weapons, Abrascal,” Tozi said, clicking her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “Sloppy.”

A pause as he tried to get up. Kiran kicked him again, aiming for the ribs. He groaned, curled in on himself. Fool, fool of a rat.

“Izel, make yourself useful and dose Cressida would you? There is no time to waste if we are to get out of the city before pursuit is mounted.”

Kiran let out an interested noise.

“The Lordsport will be closed,” he said. “We’ll need to head west for another port, take a ship to Sacromonte and trade him in for a coverup. At least the rest of his cabal will clean themselves up, that saves us the effort.”

“No.”

Tristan blinked, vision swimming, and tried to rise – a boot on his chest stopping the movement, slamming him back down nonchalantly.

“Pardon?” Tozi said.

Tristan blinked through the sweat and pain, picking out the three silhouettes. Tozi picking through her pack, Kiran over him – his spear in hand. Izel Coyac, in the middle of the room. Alone.

“No,” Izel quietly repeated, straightening.

He had not seemed like such a large man, before he stood up straight. The bulk of him, the belly and the broad shoulders, they did not seem like such a harmless thing now. They felt heavy.

“It was not a suggestion, Izel,” Tozi scorned without even turning.

“I did not leave Izcalli so I could become a cog in a different machinery of evil, Tozi,” Izel harshly said. “Enough. This is over. We let him go, and we help him.”

Tozi twitched, turned to him with a scornful look.

“Or what?” she asked.

Tristan could not tell when the decision was made for there was no warning, no hesitation. What he did see was when Tozi Poloko stiffened suddenly, her contract screaming in her ear, and by the time she thought to reach for her weapon Izel Coyac’s mace smashed into the crown of her head.

It pulped red, cracking the skull and killing her before she could so much as let a breath out.

“You traitor,” Kiran hissed, and the boot came off Tristan’s chest.

The thief gasped, shakily pulling himself into a kneel, and blinked at the struggle erupting before his eyes. Izel was strong, and knew how to use that mace better than Tristan had expected of an Umuthi Society tinker.

But Kiran Agrawal was a Skiritai.

On the second pass Izel smashed down at Agrawal’s shoulder only for the Someshwari to push him back with the side of his spear and slap the mace out of his hand. Tristan pushed himself up, stumbling forward, and threw himself into the man’s side – but Kiran caught him with the haft of the spear, casually scything the side of his knee and toppling him. He groaned and dropped, watching as Izel reached for his mace only to have it kicked away.

“What a shitshow,” Kiran Agrawal sighed.

The spear rose and-

Click. Blam.

The Someshwari’s face exploded in a shower of gore. A heartbeat later, as if reluctant to acknowledge the death, his body toppled. Cressida Barboza brought her smoking pistol to her mouth, blowing off the curling gray, and sighed.

“Indeed,” she agreed.

Tristan gaped at her. She coldly smiled back. No one had given her antidote, how could – no, he realized. She had never been under the Milk’s effect in the first place. How? She must have taken the antidote in advance. But how could she… Cressida knew he had a standard issue poison box, she had seen it. She would thus know what was in it, what antidotes to take.

She had drunk hers before she ever came down from the roof. Had she even been poisoned by the caltrops in the first place? She wore bandages with a little touch of red on them, but he’d not actually checked the wound with his own eyes.

Why, though, why play paralyzed? He sifted through reasons feverishly only to realize that she had wanted him to do exactly what he did: interrogate them. Reveal his hand. Tell her everything she needed to know about the situation before she acted. And as he looked into those cold blue eyes, he knew down to the marrow of his bone that if Tozi hadn’t died she would not have lifted a finger to save him. That she had waited until the very last moment to find out which plan held up better, then pulled a trigger once at exactly the right time.

What side was Cressida Barboza on? The winning side, those icy blue eyes told him. Always.

“Well,” Cressida said, smoothing down her uniform. “Shall we get a move on? It is a long way to the Reeking Rows.”