Pale Lights

Well, Tristan mused as he stood by the balcony’s edge and watched the colossal corpse-god climb up the side of the Collegium, his day had already been shot anyway.

At some point ‘worse’ became a relative term. Mind you, that monstrosity down there wasn’t the only god he’d have to look out for. Oduromai King had come back after the Hated One made his entrance, inevitable as flies on shit, and promptly soaked up the worship from the locals. Majordomo Timon had been moved to kneel and beg a blessing, even, which was disturbing coming from such a severe man.

Tristan knew he shouldn’t complain too much, since Oduromai popping up was the better part of why the loyalists had not immediately run when the dead god rose, but that god irked him. While he was quite fond of sailors since they drank too much and that made them easy to rob, he was rather less than taken with heroes – which mostly meant someone going around doing a popular form of violence – and as a rule even less an admirer of kings.

That made one strike in Oduromai’s favor and two against, suiting his natural instinct not to believe anything coming out of a god’s mouth. And he did not trust that thing even a fucking little bit.

“Now is the time,” Oduromai King announced. “You must reach Cleon Eirenos.”

Another cannonball hit the barricade, shattering an expensive writing desk, but Tristan had grown used enough to the bombardment not to flinch.

Asphodel’s patron was addressing a war council on the ragged end of things, having turned to the blackcloaks after stiffening the morale of his pawns with a few words. They made for a motley bunch: Song belonged there, standing pristinely uniformed despite her rising body count, and Angharad in her blood-spattered dress made some sense as well. The noblewoman was the one who knew Lord Cleon. Even Maryam, tottering on her feet as she was, could be justified as the only signifier at hand.

But that someone had seen it fit to bring him in was a sign of desperate times indeed.

Tupoc should have been in his place, but the Izcalli was instead currently… bolstering the ranks. He’d kicked and harangued the lictors and nobles who gave in to despair despite Oduromai’s words, mustering them to prepare a defense of the barricades defending either side of the stairs heading down to the once-garden. To his honor, the heavy-handed method did seem to be working more than not. He’d only had to execute one noble shouting about surrender.

Given the situation, the rest of the blackcloaks had run back into the palace to fetch cannons. Izel had made the solid argument that the pieces currently used to hold the hallways against the cult might be best put to use against the Hated One instead and Lieutenant Phos had been too deep in shock to argue. Not that any of them had the authority to order such a redeployment, but in times of madness wearing a black cloak tended to get people listening to you.

“So you keep saying,” Maryam said. “But you have yet to explain why.”

Hooks popped out of her shoulder to nod in stern agreement. His eyes lingered on her, he couldn’t help it. The most unsettling thing about the soul-ghost was how very alive she seemed. She breathed and blinked and just now, as she caught him looking at her hair and wondering how it worked that it was catching light and casting shadow, she even threw a wink his way. He wiggled his eyebrows back.

He would, at some point, need to sit down with Maryam and ask her what in the Manes had actually happened tonight.

Angharad cleared her throat and launched into an explanation on Oduromai’s behalf that he only half-listened to – apparently Eirenos was a fault line in the mixing of the Hated One and the Odyssean – as Hooks slid back into Maryam only to slide out of her side and lean in towards him. He leaned in also, the two of them in their own aside.

“We don’t think it’s a bright idea to take that one to his word,” Hooks whispered.

We, was it? Another detail to file away.

“I never trust anyone who habitually wears white,” he told her. “A man who can afford to pay for that much laundry is doing something heinous.”

The ghost snorted. How did that work, without air or throat or throat chords? Fascinating. Would she be offended if he asked to touch her cheek?

“If we stick the Odyssean with the harpoon it’ll do more than tickle,” she said. “I don’t suppose you have any idea how to get it in him?”

His brow rose. She came to him for battle tactics? She might as well go to Tredegar for advice about lying.

“Stick it point up, oil the floor and hope the god trips onto it.”

Hooks looked distinctly unimpressed with him, such a deeply Khaimov face he could not help but grin. All right, he could buy the sister thing some. He wasn’t sold, but the coin pouch was out.

“We’ll probably have to line up men and charge him,” he then tacked on. “None of the cannons here are large enough to shoot it out even if we could somehow do that without blowing ourselves up.”

Maryam’s sister pouted. She’d been banking on using the cannons, he guessed.

“How sure are you of that?”

Yeah, she’d definitely had an idea along those lines.

“As a trained artilleryman, I can confidently state this,” he replied, puffing out his chest.

“You are, at best, a trained artilleryman’s lackey,” she replied.

“Attendant,” he bargained.

“Drudge,” Hooks offered.

“I’ll take drudge,” he mused. “I did end up doing a lot of scrubbing.”

He suspected that the byplay might have gone on for longer, had Maryam not elbowed him in the side. He turned a wounded look on her, but she discreetly gestured at Song – who looked about one more word away from messily murdering him. Ah. He muttered thanks to his dear and faithful friend under his breath. ʀåꞐ𝐨฿Ɛ𝐬

“Neither shot nor steel will slay the Newborn,” Oduromai told them. “Not as he now is. First my gift must be brought to Cleon Eirenos.”

Oh, a god giving a gift. Good, because that always ended well.

Tristan spared a look for where Angharad’s once-host was supposedly holed up. With most of the garden gone the way of the world – downwards, sharply – the wild expanse of flowers and trees had been pared down to a dozen lines of crumbling earth and plants atop the long metal skeleton that had once held in place the glass of the Collegium. Small paths surrounded by the void, slapped away at by the wind.

To the left of the balcony was the lantern pavilion, slender arches under wooden grid covered in greenery. Only a single artillery piece peeked out of cover, a nasty organ gun aimed at the hanging path. There were only a few men left there, though, for the coup had gone on the offensive. The traitor lictors and their retinue allies, bold men all, had set out along the hanging paths on either side of the pavilion and were making their way towards the balcony in single file lines. Some fools were even dragging a small cannon along, a fat-bellied bombard.

Tristan considered how a man might get to that pavilion and the answers was that they couldn’t: you would have to run down a straight strip of earth into a waiting organ gun, while the advancing soldiers on either side could turn muskets on you at will. And there were still a few soldiers with the nobles in that pavilion, who would be waiting with powder and steel for anyone fool enough to make it past the organ gun to… what, offer Cleon Eirenos a handshake? Madness.

Worse yet for their prospects of making it through the night, to the right of the balcony where two thirds of some musical hall remained standing - the back having collapsed along with most the roof - from the windows peeked out half a dozen cannons that were being aimed at their balcony even now. Soldiers streamed out of the music hall in lines as well, and they’d be approaching under cover of their cannons. It was only a matter of time until this position was stormed.

As far as Tristan was concerned the only sane thing to do was retreat into the palace, bait the Hated One into narrow halls and try to stick the damn god with the harpoon. Even if they couldn’t kill it, wounding it badly enough might force it to retreat. Which in turn would let them retreat, and pass this whole mess on to those qualified to quell it. That was the hope, anyway. Oduromai seemed to be trying to sell them on the notion that it wouldn’t be nearly enough.

It would, sadly, be too fucking convenient for the god to be lying.

“-suicide,” Song flatly said. “It is a shooting gallery funneled straight into a waiting gun. No one could attempt that and live, it is not a matter of skill.”

Ah, finally sense appeared. Tristan had been hoping that pompous god would finally earn a standard Ren tirade, he intended to sit back and enjoy when she gathered a little steam and properly ripped into him.

“He can make it,” the god said, gesturing… Tristan’s way?

The thief looked behind him, finding only wall, then turned a skeptical look on the entity. Could a god go senile? Surely not, else Fortuna would have by now. Mind you, if she already had that would explain at lot. More importantly, Oduromai was pointing in his direction but not at him exactly. Could the god not see him properly?

“You might have him confused with Angharad,” Maryam said, then a beat passed and she reluctantly added, “or Tupoc.”

Tredegar, he saw, looked rather flattered by the implicit endorsement of her capacity to walk into certain death and achieving some modicum of objective in the process.

“He alone of you can make it to the lynchpin,” Oduromai said.

Gesturing more at Tristan’s left than at him as he did. This was getting rather ridiculous, and in multiple ways.

“And why would that be?” Tristan bluntly asked.

“Because you are a high priest,” the god said.

The god’s gaze had finally moved directly on him. Huh. He moved half a step to the side and the god’s burning blue gaze did not so much a twitch. A heartbeat later the words registered and Tristan shot Oduromai an incredulous look. As far as games went, he’d grant this one it wasn’t an angle anyone had tried to work on him before.

Because it was a bad, stupid angle.

“Come now,” Tristan smiled pleasantly. “There’s no call get insulting – I work to rob people, I’ll have you know. I don’t just put on robes and pass a collections plate, there’s skill involved.”

He sneered. As if he’d ever run so low on troubles he’d thought to get religion involved.

“You are your Lady’s celebrant,” Oduromai said, “and her shrine. Folly, though there is power in it.”

Fortuna was standing by him instantly, arms folded as she scowled at the other god. Who saw her fine, but the way his gaze shifted. She still wore her Asphodelian garb, though the amount of jewelry dripping off her had near doubled and was now quite ostentatious.

“Look, I know it’s bad form to put so many eggs in the same basket but I wasn’t exactly swimming in options when I found him,” Fortuna said, sounding defensive. “And it’s worked out fine!”

“My thanks for the stirring defense,” Tristan drily said.

Then he blinked at the realization that she hadn’t denied any of it.

“Wait, you mean he’s right?”

Fortuna cleared her throat, looking away.

“It may have slipped my mind to mention a few details about the nature of our bond,” she vaguely replied.

Slippedher mind. The damn weasel.

“A priest is one thing,” Tristan said jabbing a finger at her, “and I’ll swallow being the high priest of this saddest of faiths by virtue of default-”

“Hey,” Fortuna protested. “As my leading celebrant, if my rites are meager it is arguably your-”

“But a shrine?” he pushed through. “How does that even work?”

“The inside of your head is rather roomy,” she replied without batting an eye. “Lots of empty space.”

“I ought to charge you rent,” he savagely replied.

The goddess shot him an incredulous look.

“What do you think our contract is?”

“Please, I pay for every use,” he challenged. “I ought to get a discount on the luck, at the very least, maybe even-”

He was interrupted by Song clearing her throat. He turned to her with a frown, and she gestured at the rest of those present. His captain looked, he found with dawning horror, faintly embarrassed of him. And the others were standing there staring at him with expressions that ranged from glee to disbelief. Wait, not just him: Fortuna as well.

“Oh, Manes,” he croaked. “Fortuna, did you manifest so everyone would hear?”

“It would have been rude to do otherwise,” she self-righteously replied.

“I didn’t even know you could do that,” he hissed.

“Neither did I,” she replied, sounding altogether too pleased with herself.

“It must be you,” Oduromai repeated.

The god’s voice was cold water poured on everything else.

“Look, I understand apparently I’m some sort of priest,” Tristan said, hands raised. “But you have me all wrong. I’m not some Orthodoxy bootlick who got in good with a god and got a trick out of it. I cannot draw on her at all.”

He then paused, turning a wary look on Fortuna. Who cleared her throat and then whistled, a veritable buffet of half-hearted nonanswer.

“You already do,” Oduromai said. “Lady Luck’s officiant, drawing in fortune and misfortune. How many times has disaster come to find you, have miracles knocked at your door? You are a snare for odds.”

It just figured, Tristan grimly thought, that even Fortuna’s blessings would involve misfortune tanning his hide. He jutted a thumb at the proposed cause of action, a narrow causeway over the void promising a hundred different demises, and he scowled.

“Luck won’t get me through that,” he said. “My contract’s not some sort of… invincible instrument, it’s a pretty decent parlor trick. I am absolutely going to get shot and killed if I run down that line.”

“It’s true,” Maryam contributed. “I’ve seen it at work and it only can only get him out of danger by putting him in danger.”

“It must be you,” Oduromai King insisted, ignoring her outright.

Bad idea, that. She’d already shown she was willing to kill one god tonight, why would the old boy assume she’d stop at a second? It really was quite lovely how you could rely on Maryam Khaimov to hatchet someone’s kneecap no matter who it belonged to.

“I think I know what he means,” Fortuna said.

He squinted at her.

“It’s the same reason he’s not really seeing me, isn’t it?””

The patron god of Asphodel stirred angrily.

“I see you, priest,” he spat. “It is what I see that confuses the eye.”

“It’s because you’re my shrine, I think,” Fortuna said. “Gods too young or lost will think you’re inanimate.”

“Are you saying your squatting in my soul serves as camouflage?” he asked, somewhat warming to the notion.

“Which might save him from the Newborn’s attentions,” Song’s voice coldly cut in, “but will do nothing to prevent his being shot. Desist in this notion, Oduromai King.”

“We could do it,” Fortuna whispered in his ear.

“If I listened every time you say that,” Tristan replied just as quietly, “I would have a kingdom’s worth of debts.”

“I told you,” she burst out. “You don’t use our contract as much as you used to. You don’t use it like you could.”

He frowned at her.

“Tristan?”

Angharad’s voice. He turned to find her gaze wondering. She could not see Fortuna anymore, he thought, or hear her. In this particular case, thank the gods. He’d seen where she was looking and the last thing the Lady of Long Odds needed was encouragement to dress more showily. A look at the others confirmed it was the same for all but Song.

“Excuse us a moment,” he said, already walking away. “I must convene with… higher powers.”

It felt absurd to walk away to get privacy with an invisible entity, but needs must. They had no time to waste, not with the Hated One already halfway up the Collegium’s brass skeleton.

“What do you mean, ‘use it like I could’?” he asked.

“You always need to control everything,” Fortuna said. “That’s now what it’s meant for.”

“It’s what it’s good for,” he frowned. “Measured gambles when the situation calls for it.”

Turning one possible death into another he was more capable of dealing with.

“That’s not what I am,” she hissed. “I can’t – it’s not my nature, Tristan. I cannot help you if you do not lean towards me, no matter how closely we are bound.”

His eyes narrowed.

“But you could,” he slowly said. “If I took on long odds. Because it would be more of you, and you could..."

"Give you more," Fortuna said. “You can take more, you’re my celebrant.”

“That sounds a lot like becoming a Saint,” he told her.

“Only if we go all the way,” she said. “We won’t.”

His fists clenched as he weighed up the Thirteenth’s chances. They could still retreat into the palace, try to make a stand there, but Oduromai had said it would be pointless. That god had an angle, but then Tristan had a goddess of his own.

“Do you think the harpoon can kill him?” he asked. “How he is right now, I mean.”

He did not need to say who. Fortuna shook her head.

“He’s made of death,” she said. “He’s… you can’t drown water. His shape is too strong, you need to break it first.”

And Oduromai had promised that Cleon Eirenos was the key to that. Fuck. He made himself look at it cold, without fear holding the reins. They couldn’t escape the palace even if they retreated into it: the rebels held the lifts and the prison layer was scattered all over the city, no longer something they could traverse. On the other hand, with the Collegium being shattered and the rampant god seen by the entire city the fighting at Fort Archelean should have stopped. It’d be madness for the magnates to keep trying to storm those walls with a death-clad god on the loose.

If Song’s command could survive the hour, then the lictors down there would turn towards the palace and sweep out the rebels now that they could afford to take men away from their walls. But they had to last that hour first, and they wouldn’t if the Hated One got their hands on them. Which meant they either had to hide long enough – unlikely – or kill him.

And to kill him Tristan must do this foolish, foolish thing the patron god of Asphodel had demanded of him.

“Fuck,” he said, aloud this time.

“That’s the spirit,” Fortuna cheered.

They walked back to the others, to find Oduromai most gratifyingly being on the receiving end of the Song Ren treatment.

“-he could get there, then how would he come back alive after?” she sharply said. “You are asking him to die.”

“I will whisk him away, once he has delivered my words,” Oduromai said.

“Then why not deliver them yourself?” Song challenged.

“’Because he can’t,” Tristan said.

That got their attention.

“Can you, Honored Elder?” he drawled. “You make it sound like a favor you’d get me out, but it wouldn’t be. See, I can’t help but notice you came late to this party. And that you’re being light on giving us anything but orders.”

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

The god only looked at him.

“This palace is still a dead zone for aether,” Tristan told the others. “Only some small part of him is here, it’s why he can’t do much. He’d have the power to whisk me away this one time, because I would be feeding him that power by doing something as stupidly heroic as charging towards an enemy position all on my own.”

“Reach the end of the road,” Oduromai said, “and leap. I will return you to the embrace of your friends.”

Gods, Tristan thought in disdain. They all claimed to be the most powerful and important thing to ever exist, until they actually needed to do something with that supposed power.

“You’re considering this,” Song said, staring at him.

She sounded appalled. Wisely so.

“I had a talk with my goddess,” Tristan said. “It’s… less foolish than you might think.”

A pause.

“But still rather foolish.”

“You don’t have to do this,” she seriously said.

“I think it’s the only way we won’t end up eaten by a hungry god in the next quarter hour,” Tristan honestly said. “Which is somewhat improving my tolerance for foolishness.”

Oduromai, indifferent to their conversation, approached.

“I will give you my words to carry, thief,” he said, and… reached inside his own throat?

Manes, Tristan thought with disgust as the god did something down there and ripped out what looked like a small white marble. He offered it to Tristan, who reluctantly took it. He’d half expected it to be warm, but it was cool as air and almost as light.

“I just need to get this to Cleon Eirenos?” he asked.

The god silently nodded. Tristan fixed the face in his mind from the one time he’d met the man. Young, athletic, ambitions of a mustache. He should be able to recognize Cleon Eirenos, if he got that far.

“That was not all his words,” Song noted. “He kept a sentence’s worth back.”

The entity looked rather irritated, which warmed the cockles of Tristan’s heart. He pocketed the marble, then straightened his cloak.

“Well,” he said. “I suppose I’ll be off then.”

Face unreadable, he offered Song his arm to clasp.

“I don’t think so,” Maryam said, and almost bowled him over with a hug.

He sagged in her embrace, wrapping an arm around her back, and when he saw Song had frozen he sighed and nodded. Hesitantly, she stepped in and leaned close while only some of their body touched – until Maryam dragged her in. Angharad was hovering behind them, visibly unsure, until he gestured for her to come as well. Most courteously, she avoided contact save for patting his shoulder.

“It is a brave thing you’re doing,” Angharad quietly said.

“Don’t turn the knife,” he pleaded.

That got a smile out of her, strangely enough.

“The path narrows.”

Oduromai’s words were not quite a warning, but it did end this whole episode. Save for Maryam, who turned to glare at the god.

“If you don’t whisk him back when he’s done,” she began.

Her sister slid out of her shoulder, teeth bared.

“We know things,” Hooks said. “And will teach you them.”

“Nor will they stand alone,” Angharad calmly added. “You will be held to your word.”

“Fully,” Song Ren agreed. “Even if takes twenty years and a Muster to dig you out.”

“Enough of that,” Tristan croaked, embarrassed.

His pistol he slipped to Maryam, and his knife as well. They would be more danger than help for what was to come. He patted her, pressed a kiss against her temple and hastened down the stairs before the embarrassment could catch up. The grounds immediately around the palace had solid metal beneath them so a thin slice of garden remained, on which a handful lictors steadying their barricade were busying themselves. They hardly spared him a glance until he walked past their works.

One of them hailed him but he ignored the man, continuing to the edge of the hanging grounds. Turning to head at the foot of the balcony, where a line of earth barely half a street wide continued all the way to the distant pavilion. Tristan rolled his shoulder, limbered his feet and rather wished he hadn’t gotten beaten with a stick earlier.

“All right,” he forced out. “How do we do this?”

Fortuna leaned forward, chin on his shoulder, golden curls brushing against his neck.

“Pray,” she said. “To me.”

“What for?” he asked.

“That’s for you to choose,” Fortuna said, and she was gone.

The thief breathed in and let it out as the last of the false warmth from her touch faded. Watched the path ahead of him, the many deaths waiting there. A prayer, huh. He’d always thought of priesthood as an office, a racket – decent folk could do it, but most were in it for the pay and the clout. It had not occurred to him there could be something intimate about it, the relationship between you and your god. Something genuine instead of… transactional.

So Tristan cast aside all thought of the grand phrases he had heard in the halls of the Orthodoxy, of the prayers bedecked in gold and incense. He spoke, instead, to his oldest and dearest companion.

“O Lady of Longs Odds,” Tristan Abrascal prayed in a whisper. “I am a fool on a fool’s errand, so smile down on this night’s work. Bless either my game or my grave, for there is no middle ground.”

He heard her laugh then, that beautiful golden sound, and could have sworn a kiss was pressed into his hair.

“Go,” the Lady of Long Odds whispered into his ear.

And Tristan went.

The first step felt like a leap, boots on the remains of a flowerbed. A straight line ahead of him, into the belly of the beast. The jaws of death on both sides, waiting to close. Tristan ran, ran into doom’s embrace. They didn’t see him at first. Ten feet he went before the soldiers noticed him running, and it took longer for them to think him serious. At twenty feet one finally raised his musket to take the shot and the very act was like a twitch against his neck.

Tristan pulled at his luck, grip harsh, and immediately released.

He knew, without looking, how wind had blown up dead leaves into the lictor’s aim and the shot went wide because of it. He knew, would know so long as Fortuna rode his back, that already the price was taking shape: foot digging too deep in wet earth, tripping forward. And all around him, like… streaks of gold pointing his way, were his deaths. Some bright as the Glare, others almost dim. Half a hundred different shots and other deaths arrayed by the dozens. Falling from wind, from slipping, from ducking the wrong way, from – it was almost too much, the sight of them filling his mind to burst.

“Again,” Fortuna whispered.

So in that instant before the price took shape, before the misfortune crystallized, Tristan pulled at the luck again. Borrowed it fresh.

Twenty-five feet. One flintlock’s striking flint shattered instead of sparking, another’s priming powder burned up too quick – one shot stillborn, the other early. Death whizzed past his shoulder and the price took shape in his mind’s eye, his belt buckle giving and his descending pants toppling him headfirst into the dirt.

“Again,” Fortuna said.

Pull, release. The ticking was growing louder.

Tristan did not stop or slow, not even as his legs ached and lungs burned. Thirty-five feet. Izel was back, had turned cannons on the enemy batteries and the odds twisted – a cannon shot misfired, ball going wide and hitting the side of one that would have taken him in the chest. A man who would have shot him in the flank was instead shot by a man who would have hit him in the shoulder, timing slowing his stride by half a heartbeat to let it pass.

“Again,” Fortuna grinned.

Pull, release.

Tristan could not hear anything but the ticking now. It was so loud it drowned out even the beat of his heart against his ears. He began, dimly, to grasp that he was not avoiding the price of his contract. Even if as he kept pulling and releasing, walking through the swarm of angry lead and the shouts, the bombard shots that sent earth flying everywhere save his back, he felt how the… weight was not going away. It remained, it stacked. No, worse than that.

It was compounding, gathering interest.

“Again,” Fortuna madly laughed.

Pull, release. All he heard was the ticking and her laughter, all he saw was a world in black and white broken by glorious streaks of gold. Death was never more than a breath away: this pull of the trigger, this spill of earth. He slid between the streaks of possibility, Izel Coyac fighting an artillery duel with three different batteries with luck always smiling sideways on his tinker’s hands. Ahead, at the pavilion, two soldiers came out the window and aimed muskets his way. He waited until the streak was at its brightest, nearly blinding, and-

Pull, release.

A bullet caught the other’s edge, both narrowly whizzing past his cheek because of it. Close enough it tore open his skin. Even the miracles were narrower now, the… odds of this place so bent and warped that they grew hardened to Fortuna’s touch where they had been like clay to sculpt. Even the world thought they were pushing their luck, he thought, and his goddess laughed with him.

The path was getting narrower, the odds starker. He released almost as soon as he pulled now, pulled as soon as he released. It felt more like a dance than actions separate, the whole world balanced on top of a spinning coin. How long had he run, how far? He did not know, could not see, for he was blind now to anything but the gold. His skin felt cool but beneath it dwelled scorching, ruinous heat. A lock of hair on his head felt oddly heavy. His fingernails stung.

“Almost there,” the Lady of Long Odds sang into his ear.

The golden streaks were his guide now. He moved in the spaces between them, a dance with Fortuna leading as they whirled through the odds with unearthly grace.

A grand sweep ahead, a gargantuan hand trying to snatch him off the ground. He jumped ahead, rolled up into a crouch. Tristan picked the small marble from his pocket even as an angry fist large as a carriage smashed into the ground, earth flying as his cloak fluttered. He smiled as the organ gun fired – lines of gold like glittering fireworks, swirling past him and kissing the side of cloak as he tossed himself down into the dirt again. The marble went flying, the arc immaculate, and the man who had been about to kill him stopped to catch it by reflex.

Cleon Eirenos’s blade stopped as he turned visible, standing mere feet before him and Tristan watched the odds of his death flicker every which way as Oduromai King whispered into the boy’s ear.

They killed the Odyssean, the god said. Took all that he was and sold him for parts to make a new god. You serve his scavengers.

It’s too late, the boy said.

It isn’t, the god said. Not to be the man you wish your father had been.

The moment hung in the balance, but Tristan saw it before they did: it had been the right words. The god was a knife in the rib, the fulcrum of the lever.

The long odds took the pot.

And even as death was aimed at him in a streak of gold over Cleon’s shoulder, a musket and a furious face, the thief stumbled backward. His back hit the dirt and he was but a heartbeat away from the end but he raised his hands and laughed.

“I am unarmed,” he said.

And the moment of hesitation that bought was enough. Enough to save him from that death, anyway. The Hated One’s fist rose tall above his head, heartbeats away from pulping him, but that was also much too slow a death.

Because the ticking had stopped.

There was only silence now, as he sat blind in the dirt and felt all the debts he had accrued falling on him like a toppling tower.

“Alas, while it has been a pleasure making your acquaintances,” the thief began, rising to his feet with a groan of pain.

The odds were almost none, even after the damage the Hated One had done to the Collegium climbing up. The metal frame built by the Antediluvians was almost unbreakable, able to shrug off cannons. Yet Tristan saw a hundred near-impossibilities harden into being – usure, wind, temperature, cascading force, angles and all the realms unobserved – until a miracle manifested.

Beneath his feet, a span of exactly seven feet and a third of the Collegium’s frame broke off from the rest. Just long enough there was no physical way for him to avoid the drop.

The Hated One’s fist began to descend towards his head.

“I’m afraid I must bid you good evening,” Tristan Abrascal said, and with a roguish grin offered them a bow.

And just the moment the bow hit its lowest point, the ground beneath his feet dropped and he tumbled into the howling void beneath his feet, moments before he could die.

--

For three terrible heartbeats Maryam watched him fall to his death, barely slipping the Hated One’s grasp.

Then there was a ripple in the air and he fell into it, disappeared in a breath, and Maryam forced herself to unclench her jaw. He’d be all right. Her sister’s eye had let her glimpse what lay beyond that ripple: a purple current in the aether, Oduromai’s own. The god would spit him back out soon, close to where he had manifested to try to tell Song how to run her brigade.

“Sleeping God,” Angharad whispered, standing at her side. “Could he always do that?”

“No,” Song replied before Maryam could. “That was… he was a hair’s breadth away from turning Saint, at the end. That will leave marks.”

He’d been burning in the aether, at the end, more lighthouse than man. There was… Hooks and Maryam frowned, leaning into the wind. The angry breeze nipped at her cheeks, but it was their nav their attention remained on. Feeling out the change in the air, the coiling strength.

“I had not thought his patron spirit such a powerful one,” Angharad said, “that she could-”

“Stop,” Maryam muttered. “I need to hear this.”

She didn’t turn to see how the others reacted, and was glad she had not for she might have missed it. The smear of taint that was painted over the aether by a messy hand, a vivid plume of purple. The way it ate away at the aether around it, ink the water.

“Song,” she said. “Something happened. Eirenos-”

A heartbeat passed.

“He fell unconscious, Gule dragged him back in,” Song told them, then quietly gasped. “And his contract has changed. It is with Oduromai, now.”

So that was the play, Maryam finally grasped. It had made sense for Oduromai to eat away that the stitches keeping together the Odyssean and the Hated One just as he claimed he would, but she had doubted that popping a single stitch would do as much damage as the god seemed to believe. And she’d been right, it wouldn’t. But Oduromai wasn’t simply trying to split the two gods, he was trying to eat the Odyssean’s corpse right out of the Hated One’s jaw.

And, to her surprise, it was working.

It was the closeness in the aether taints. Oduromai and the Odyssean had been two sides of a single entity for centuries, and even now that Oduromai had taken the whole pot of worship to himself they remained gods of similar things. The Hated One, on the other hand, only intersected with the Odyssean so much. It had taken years of scheming by his cult and some clever rituals to make that welding stick.

And now something better had come along, Cleon Eirenos giving Oduromai the foot in the door he’d needed to subsume his divine kin.

“Maryam, what’s happening?” Song pressed.

“Oduromai’s fighting over control of the Odyssean’s remains,” Maryam said. “And he’s winning, but not wholly.”

She swallowed.

“Brace yourselves.”

“For what?” Angharad asked.

Hooks slid out of her, weaving solidity.

“What happens,” her sister said, “when two wolves pull at the same dead rabbit?”

“It tears,” the Pereduri replied.

And as if the Empty Sea itself wanted to crown Angharad’s words, it happened in the breath that followed: the spans of aether the gods were fighting over, purple and graven earth trying to swallow it all, they shattered. An invisible, intangible ripple passed the air around them – leaving a trail of unknowing, confused discomfort as men felt a god die but did not know it. Then the Hated One let out a scream with a thousand voices and she realized with Oduromai had done.

Oh that clever, clever thing.

“Oduromai didn’t get everything,” Maryam said. “But he got the name. That thing out there isn’t the Hated One or the Odyssean anymore, it’s just power without coherence. Without focus. And it’s bleeding.”

“Which means we can kill it now,” Song Ren calmly said. “Oduromai delivered.”

The screaming rose in pitch, drowning out everything else and Maryam hissed out a curse as she covered her ears. They were ringing, and she could swear her very mind ached for the might of the cacophony. When that horror passed, she raised her eyes to see why. A man stood by the near-mindless god, hand on the weave of corpses, and it had calmed the thing.

The Ecclesiast. The nameless god’s last anchor.

“Shit,” she said. “The high priest can still help it keep some sanity. Enough to-”

The rampant god took a long, angry stride towards the balcony.

“-that,” Maryam grimly finished. “To point it our way.”

And the nameless thing was not coming alone. Either reinvigorated by the Ecclesiast’s appearance or well aware they had crossed too many lines to be able to come back, the traitors were resuming their offensive: across the walkways, in narrow lines, soldiers advanced on the balcony.

“This will get messy,” Angharad Tredegar calmly noted. “Do we have a means of striking it with the harpoon?”

Song slid a glance Maryam’s way, who returned it incredulously.

“I just finished mastering the novice’s arsenal,” she said. “I can’t even begin to conceive what kind of Sign would be able to shoot that thing.”

“No, she’s right.”

Maryam turned a glare on her rebellious shoulder and the equally rebellious sister who’d popped out of it.

“You ought to know-”

“The first time we worked together,” Hooks simply said.

Maryam paused.

“You can’t be serious,” she said. “With the aether around here the way it is it’d be like throwing a dart into a hurricane.”

“Unless we gather enough of it,” Hooks said.

A flash of irritation.

“I can’t-”

Her sister flashed back the same across their veil.

“We can,” Hooks said.

Song cleared her throat, eyes still peeled on the horizon. On the god and the enemies.

“I need an answer, Khaimovs,” she said. “Can you, or can you not?”

The sisters shared a look, then Maryam cursed.

“We’ll do it,” she said. “But it’ll take time. And someone needs to get that harpoon pointed the god’s way.”

“Time we will buy, or perish,” Angharad Tredegar calmly said.

She said it like it was a certainty, like the world would not dare deny it – or at least not dare so twice.

“I’ll get the harpoon in place,” Song said, face hard. “Continue even if we fall.”

And before Maryam could reply, she walked away. Angharad patted her shoulder before doing the same, hobbling towards the lictors getting mustered into a fighting formation. Maryam, feeling lost, wandered around the balcony until she found a place that felt right to their nav. She breathed out, forced herself to focus.

“Calm and patient,” Hooks murmured. “We have to empty ourselves for it to work.”

So Maryam closed her eyes and reached for the sky.

--

They would lose this battle, Song knew. That much was certain. They just had to hold long enough to win the war, for Maryam to win it for them.

The traitors came in a tide, blades high and muskets raised.

“Here they come,” Lieutenant Phos shouted. “Fire.”

Fire spat out lead, smoke surged like a scream. Across the remains of the garden men dropped and men ran and men screamed. Song kept her hand on the chisel, atop the stairs, and picked out the men dragging up the bombard. Her finger squeezed and one dropped, toppled into the void.

Reload.

“Aim down,” Izel Coyac shouted, forcing down a steaming-hot barrel until his gloves seared. “And hold, hold – now!”

The cannons smashed into the enemy just before they hit the barricades, the balls bouncing off the earth and rolling forwards – scything legs and torsos as they did. Song aimed, snapped her shot. The second artilleryman fell but already more were rushing to replace him.

The first wave went over the barricade as her hands moved, the lictors meeting them with steel and screams.

And looming above it all, the nameless god approached one great stride at a time.

--

“Come on,” Tupoc shouted, atop the barricade even as musketmen shot at him. “Put your back into it!”

Angharad swung, carving into the face of the traitor climbing the barricade, and had to duck when a shot ripped into her shoulder. A shallow wound, she thought, but the shout she pushed down was distraction enough the sword she missed would have pierced her belly if Expendable did not yank her out of the way by the sleeve. The Malani kicked the traitor lictor who’d almost killed her back down the barricade and she managed thanks, forcing herself to concentrate.

They were holding, barely. Tupoc had ordered the soldiers to stop shooting from atop the barricade, using it to funnel the enemy into climbing instead, and for now it worked – though already some of the traitors were pulling the barricade apart, collapsing the piles of palace furniture.

Angharad drew her pistol and unloaded in the chest of a man she was startled to recognize as a lord who had attended the concert earlier, and a moment later Tupoc was impaling the throat of a lictor and tossing the corpse back into his fellows.

“I’ve had better fights from Someshwari, you-” Tupoc laughed, but he did not get to finish.

The barricade exploded, Angharad only getting a glimpse of a corpse swelling ‘til they burst before her back hit the stairs and she shouted hoarsely. Through the smoke and wreckage she saw a wild-eyed Phaedros Arkol stride, traitors steaming past him as all round her the surviving loyalists broke and ran. The Ecclesiast’s eyes found her. Angharad forced herself back on her feet, leaning on her borrowed sword, and a hand straightened her.

She turned to thank Velaphi, but it wasn’t him at all – it was a stranger, a dark-haired man. One who stood oddly, and she grasped why a heartbeat later when something moved under the skin.

“Lucky girl,” the devil garbled. “Some time left in the hour.”

“Lord Locke?” she rasped out.

The shell’s head was shaken in denial, then an arm twitched to point down at the melee – where Angharad found a hellish, chitinous silhouette weaving through the smoke and ripping off a man’s head in passing before it landed on its chosen prey.

Phaedros Arkol was struck in the belly, folding like paper, and then the creature that must be Lord Locke bit off his entire head, gulping it down.

“Until next time,” the shell besides her garbled.

And Lady Keys ripped her way right out of it in a shower of gore, Angharad having to shield her eyes. By the time she’d wiped them clean of blood and viscera, throwing up in her mouth, there was no sign of either devil. Or, for that matter of the Ecclesiast. Hope bloomed in her chest for a moment.

And then the Newborn went mad.

--

The lictors held, Song thought, for longer than should be expected of anyone not wearing the black: it was only when the rampant god smashed the barricade and all the men on it with a massive step that they routed.

And that rout was going to kill them all.

“Hold, damn you, hold!” she shouted, striking the runners with the side of her blade.

The god had turned mad, striking blindly around it and killing as many of its own as theirs, but it didn’t matter: its troops were winning anyway. In the wake of the fleeing defenders the traitors charged up the stairs, and if they got to Maryam then this was all for nothing. Song pulled her pistol, shot the man leading the enemy charge, but it didn’t slow them down.

A cannon bounced down the steps, Izel and Cressida tossing down the piece grown too hot for shooting, and that bought them a breath. One breath at a time, Song thought. She must hold them, one breath at a time.

“Form a wedge!”

Hand on her jian Song turned, startled by the sight. An officer was mustering soldiers behind her, but not one she had expected. Minister Apollonia Floros, hard-eyed, gave her a nod. Behind her white-faced traitors formed into the wedge they had been ordered.

Floros raised her blade.

“Charge,” she shouted. “Help the rooks, drive back the cult!”

Song straightened, beat out despair. They would hold, they must-

The Newborn’s massive form bent forward, some intelligence seeped back into the entity, and it turned towards the last place Song wanted it to turn: straight at Maryam.

“No,” she snarled.

But she had nothing, nothing in her arsenal that would let her force away such a thing. A foot came down on the edge of the balcony, crushing railing and barricade at once, and though it was madness Song still brought up her sword and ran towards it.

What else was there?

She was not the only one. A tall figure in an ill-fitting uniform, Expendable rushed past her towards the enemy. Song almost tripped, readying herself, and the dark-skinned man pulled ahead. Hesitating, just for a moment, but then Song saw it – Oduromai’s shape flickering into being, whispering a single sentence into the Skiritai’s ear. Those golden eyes closed, the barest fraction of a moment, then he exhaled.

“Gods bleed,” Velaphi whispered, and just as the Newborn’s foot began to rise he touched it.

And under Song’s awed stare, the mad god was sucked into his palm.

--

Maryam was failing them.

She had stepped out of herself, to see through her nav, but even as she watched she found that she could not quite finish emptying her mind. She raised her hand, tried to reach into the currents of Gloam, but they bucked her off. As they always had – always will, doubt whispered.

So she watched, anguished, as Song herded lictors into pointing the harpoon at the god, tip propped up against the balcony railing. She watched the men of Asphodel tangle in death across garden and barricades, saw courage and cowardice. Saw those who fled and those who charged.

Maryam saw it all and saw it would not be enough, because something beyond valor had come and she was not ready.

She watched as Expendable, Velaphi, took three stumbling steps. The man who had devoured a god took off his hat, looked up at the night sky and smiled.

Confusion swept across the field, shouts of joy and dismay, but Maryam let neither touch her. She continued to try emptying herself – to reach into the current, but always she found her hand rebuffed. Her thoughts too laden.

Velaphi took two more steps before he erupted into fine red mist, the corpse-god ripping its way out of the boy’s soul back into the Material. But it was stunned, she saw. Velaphi had known it would kill him to do this, Oduromai must have told him. But he’d done it anyway, giving his life for others.

Another wound, another bane knife sunk deep into the Newborn.

But it would not be enough, because Maryam could not empty herself.

She reached, and the currents almost broke her fingers. And Hooks, Hooks could not help. Her sister tried, move as Maryam willed and not an inch more or less, but this was not Craft. This was Signs, this was wind carding. This was what Maryam should have mastered years ago but she had not, because she was destined to fail everyone she ever loved.

On all sides men ran, in fear of the god still shaking off the wound, and she saw how one was about to knock down her body. Until there was a ripple in the Material just in front of her, and a boy stumbled out coughing. Tristan Abrascal, streaks of gold in his hair, nails turned into solid luck, pushed away the fleeing man about to run into her.

A traitor lictor got past Song, raised his musket, and Tristan reached for the side of Maryam’s own physical body. He drew the pistol he’d passed her earlier, blowing the lictor’s brains out, and that bought them a moment.

He used it to look round, and so Tristan Abrascal saw the end coming. The god looming over them. And, after a long breath, he put on his hat and slid his fingers into hers – wood against flesh, intertwined.

No, they screamed into the aether. Run.

He startled, as if he had heard them.

“Run?” he said. “Don’t be a fool, Maryam.”

A half-smile.

“The world’s ending, so where else would I be?”

Oh, Maryam thought, and Hooks thought it with her. So that was what it was like, for someone to love you enough to die with you. And that small breath she had not known she was holding, that last doubt in her heart of hearts, when she let it out it was a like a levee breaking.

Maryam Khaimov emptied her soul and opened her eyes.

Above her, a god stood with a killing blow raised high.

She raised her free hand at the starry sky, the dark in between the glints of pale, and plunged it into the depths. The currents of Gloam swirled angrily through her fingers, stirred and stirring, until she closed her grip. She pulled the thread out, but it was but a small thing. Thick as the span of three fingers, and angrily trying to slip her grasp. That was as much wind as she could card, novice that she was. Her limit as a signifier.

So she passed the thread to Hooks, who spun that dark yarn on a wheel of nothing.

Maryam pulled another thread, another yarn of Gloam, and together the sisters wove themselves a wind. Neither Sign nor Craft did they make, but something theirs alone: the fruit of Maryam’s bitter years of learning, of Hooks’ confined starvation. They made their grief into the machinery of want, the spinning wheel turning and turning as Maryam unraveled the sky to feed it. And their weave they wrapped tight around the harpoon, wove it a net.

First they made a breath.

Then they made a breeze.

They made that into a gale.

And when they had made a squall, howling and screaming and wriggling on the hooks holding it tight, when the harpoon nestled within rattled like a door in a hurricane, only then did Maryam’s hand stop stealing the wind. They stood there, two sisters and their work with their hand held in his, and watched the god’s body rise. Block out the sky and its distant radiance, a curtain of screaming death come to crush them underfoot. Darkness whipped about them, dimming the air and tarnishing every taste and smell. Spoiling the Material like poison.

Maryam Khaimov looked at death and grinned, drawing back clawing fingers. The storm weaves pulled back like a hundred bowstrings, howling in blind fury, and she felt her sister’s hands deftly tug at the sides of their work – adjust the tip of the harpoon, pull it up, aim it.@@novelbin@@

“You were right,” she told the corpse-god. “There is death in our footsteps.”

“We bring it wherever we go,” Hooks said.

“Here,” Maryam said. “Have a taste.”

And she released the storm.

Gloam shot in strands, cradling and carrying the sharp line of bronze within it, and the sisters Khaimov curved their blow – up and then downwards, made into a spear being thrust down, and the jagged harpoon plunged into the rampant god’s head with all the might they had gathered. It went through like a knife through butter, burying itself all the way through until the malevolent thing was nailed to the very floor beneath it.

And the old Antediluvian weapon, coated in the Gloam woven by sisters bane to the god, devoured the mad thing from the inside like a forest fire.

It screamed with a thousand voices, convulsing and clawing at itself as one by one the voices began to wink out. It took long, until the very last voice had been silenced. But the stillness that followed was as if the world itself let out a breath. The god had died, and in the wake of that last death the fight went out of his cult.

Weapons were thrown down, surrenders shouted, and thus ended the battle for Tratheke.