Pale Lights

“It doesn’t matter,” Maryam snarled. “It doesn’t matter.”

Hooks spoke not a word, only staring at her seemingly stuck halfway between terror and astonishment. That made it worse, in a way. Maryam’s nav still held her and she could feel every fluttering thought, like bird wings against her fingers. She looked at the pale girl in the pale dress, and though she tried not to see it there was no denying the obvious: the cheekbones and the eyes, the lips and even the shade of hair.

How could she ignore she was staring at her sister when Hooks’ looks were so close to her own? She had been able to resist the resemblance before, deem it just another thing her enemy had stolen from her, but now that she knew it was rightly hers? Now she could not help but find Mother in the harsher cast of Hooks’ chin, in the way the thinner lips found a sneer easier than Maryam’s own.

“I – I didn’t know,” Hooks said. “I didn’t remember. I thought I was…”

The aether around them rang out like a bell, a titan’s knock on a box. The currents blew through them both unkindly, but neither broke the stare binding them. Blue on blue, neither daring to blink. Maryam’s hand tightened around her nav, all ten rake-rings biting into the aether.

“It’s too late,” Maryam said. “I called on the Threefold Crowns to bless these grounds for the purpose of contest between us. It’s begun, Hooks. Even if one of us stops-”

She swallowed. Whoever gave in would be at the other’s mercy, fully and utterly. Victor takes all, that was what she had carved into this moment.

“And if we both stop,” Hooks quietly said,” it burns us both.”

It wouldn’t be a draw, if they both gave up. That wasn’t the taint that would be released into the aether, that would be fed to the gods of the Threefold Crowns through the chalk marks that had consecrated these grounds. It would be taken as two defeats, running against the very purpose of the ritual, and that made backlash certain. Maryam licked her lips.

“It might not be lethal,” she slowly said.

“But the blowback will strike at what we wagered,” Hooks replied. “Your nav. The Cauldron.”

Maryam did not answer, for while she did not have all the knowledge that her… sister could call on, she had enough to know she must be right. The destruction of her nav would end her ability to signify, even if it didn’t kill her – which it well might, if her soul was scoured by the wrath of gods instead of something more delicate. And for Hooks, losing the Cauldron would be like getting most of her brain cut out.

And it’d destroy centuries of Izvoric learning in the same stroke.

She licked her lips again, looking for a cheat, but no matter how she twisted and shook the situation in her hands the conclusion stayed the same: it was too late. Surrender would be letting Hooks devour her, opening all the fortress gates and throwing down her arms. Giving up would destroy them both, or close enough. She looked into her sister’s eyes and found there the same ending she had reached.

“You can preserve everything, if you devour me,” Hooks bitterly said. “Everything except me.”

Maryam felt sick. This should have been a triumph. The thief destroyed, the Cauldron reclaimed and her signifying brought to a peak that would eclipse all her peers. She’d known the price she would have to pay too, even though she couched it in maybes when speaking with others: absorbing so many memories would change her in some ways, dilute the boundaries of what was ‘Maryam Khaimov’. She could have made her peace with that, made herself see it as the process that turned a caterpillar into a butterfly.

Instead, to get it all, she had to murder her sister on the altar of the Threefold Crowns and drip her blood into Mother Winter’s empty bowl. And who under firmament was more rightly reviled than a kinslayer? Not that she had not already crossed that line once, today taught her.

“Again,” Maryam managed, nauseous. “I just need to murder you a second time.”

Once in the womb, a second time outside it. A never-born soul made into power for her to wield.

“You get everything you want,” Hooks said. “Again. I see a way out, a chance to live, and again-”

She bit down on whatever else she had been about to say.

“Don’t stretch it out,” her sister bleakly said. “You’ve already won. Cruelty now is a choice.”

I’m what’s left, Maryam had claimed but moments ago. That everyone else was dead had been meant to be an epitaph, not a prophecy, but oh when was a ritual under the auspices of the Crowns ever anything but a bitter brew? She could be all what was left, all of it down to the last drop of the Cauldron, but only if she murdered the only other soul to make it out of the wintersworn. The only other survivor, her own sister.

And the reasons came to her legion, orderly and ironclad. Hooks was already dead, or close enough. The soul had been made malformed and incomplete, atrophied by years of being starved of anything but the scraps Maryam accidentally fed her. And had Hooks not ruined years of her life, however unknowing? Had she not, in a way, killed Mother by sliding in the knife of a final disappointment she would never overcome? Ȓ₳₦ỌʙË𝘴

Besides, was it not the right decision to sacrifice a single soul to preserve the Cauldron? And for Maryam to be armed with all the power she could wield, was it not wiser than casting two mutilated souls out in the wild where both might perish? There were rows and rows of reasons, each more sensible than the last.

Blue eyes looked into a mirror. Be a coward, Tristan would tell her. Do the right thing, Song would expect. And Angharad… There was no need to wonder, for the Pereduri had already told her. No one else can balance those scales for us, can they? And that last thing, it had her fingers balling into fists because she was letting someone else balance the scales. No, not someone – something.

“It’s not really a choice, is it?” Maryam rasped out. “To be on either side of the knife. You tell yourself it is, because once you’ve been on the sharp end you never want to be again. So you reach for the handle, and no matter how ugly it gets you can silence the voice of conscience with the reminder of much worse it was when you were the one getting cut.”

Her fingers trailed against the wood grain of the roof on which they both knelt. Hooks watched her in silence. Already beaten, and harshly enough the fight had left her.

“But it’s not really a choice,” she said. “It’s just moving around the parts. The real choice you made is the knife. It’s cramming the entire world into that vicious little equation – murderer, knife, victim. You play the game and you think you’re winning because you’re not the one getting cut, but you’re still part of the same… scheme.”

Her nails were too short so scratch at the panels, but she clawed at them anyway.

“And you chose to be part, this time.”

Hooks said nothing. Wan, silent. Utterly at her mercy. Her fear fluttered against Maryam’s nav like a dove in a wolf’s maw.

“I should kill you anyway,” Maryam quietly said, rubbing at her eyes. “You get to take me otherwise, that’s what this ritual is. But the only reason we’re down here with that knife between us is because I dragged us into this, Hooks. Because I made that choice. And I’m just… tired.”

She swallowed. That confession had come unbidden.

“Of the hate,” Maryam said. “Not because they don’t deserve it, but because I have been carrying that hate with me for so long I can’t remember who I am without it. Because I won’t get to know who I might have been without it, and gods but I hate them for that too.”

She weakly laughed.

“There’s no forgiveness in me,” Maryam said. “The Kingdom of Malan will have a foe in me until the day I die, and I will never be anything be proud of that. But you... “

She shook her head.

“You’re dried blood on the altar of empire, same as me. And I was going to do the same thing to you because an empire’s not a crown or a line on a map, it’s fucking disease.”

Her eyes closed.

“It slips into you when you touch it,” Maryam whispered. “Even if that touch is a hand strangling you. It whispers that the tools of the enemy are the tools of victory, that only by embracing their methods can you match them, surpass them.”

Her jaw clenched.

“But that’s just another defeat,” she whispered. “That’s telling them they were right, that they were allowed to do what they did and no one has a right to face them and look them in the eye and tell them: this was evil

. This was evil and you knew and you did it anyway.”

There was war, and Maryam knew how ugly war could get. What fighting for your freedom looked like when it wasn’t in the folk songs. But she wasn’t at war with her sister. And what she had come here to do here tonight, it was evil and she knew it. She had known it all along.

“The world,” Maryam Khaimov whispered, “is more than the two ends of a knife. And my enemies do not get to make me less than what I am.”

And with the last whisper, she let it go.

Everything. Grasp and Command, her will and her anger and her fear. The nav went slack between them and she felt disbelief slither down the chord. Hooks tugged at it once, as if calling a bluff, but Maryam wrestled down the urge to tug back. Narrowly.

“Do it,” she croaked. “Gods, do it now before I can change my mind.”

And her sister did. Her soul-effigy, years in the making, the brush through which she painted the Gloam, was pulled in like a child haphazardly collecting a rope. Hooks was yet incredulous, mistrusting even as she pulled to the very end of the nav and hastily bit down.

Maryam screamed. Screamed in pain as white-hot knives of pain tore at the inside of her head.

“Do it,” she snarled, fists hammering against the roof. “End it, gods damn you.”

And her sister tore at the nav, teeth tearing into flesh fearfully as she severed the soul-effigy by consuming what tied it to the rest of Maryam. Bite by bite, the pale girl writhing in suffering and screaming against the roof as a third of her very soul was torn out. Pain flensed her body, limbs and innards and gods her left eye felt like it had been boiled out. Hooks could have taken more, even through the torment Maryam knew that. Ripped more of the soul out, winner takes all. But a third had been offered, and a third was taken as Maryam Khaimov screamed her lungs out.

Only when the teeth finally bit through the chord tying the both of them together, when the suffering cut out, was there finally a moment of stillness.

Maryam tried to reach out, face on the ground, but she was… contained. Her sixth sense was gone, the eye that saw through the bounds of the Material punctured. There was no longer a nav for her to move, to feel through. There was only a wound now, bleeding into the aether, and the prison that was her feverish, sweat-drenched body. She moaned and opened her physical eyes, but her vision remained dim. Was the room gone dark? Only then she blinked, and terrified nausea reared up as she realized that the room was the same as before.

She had gone blind in her left eye. She reached for it, trembling, and found the flesh stiff. Unnatural. Dead. A sound ripped free from her throat that straddled the line between weeping and laughter.

“And why should you get anything for air?” she asked the silence.

Oh, the arrogance of her. She had told Angharad that a sacrifice had to cost you something. She had made her sister whole, restored some of what she had taken from Hooks unknowingly and then almost taken again on purpose, but it couldn’t be enough. Not, why would it be enough that Maryam should lose the ability to signify, to use the Gloam? No, her body must be wracked as well. Made sickly and an eye gone blind.

Maryam had made a life, made a woman whole. How could it cost her anything less than a life ruined?

Of Hooks there was not a sign. To her own surprise, Maryam was darkly pleased by that. Good. Let her leave this place, let her make it out. Let at least one daughter of Volcesta escape the shadow of that city’s ruin, of that world’s end. May Hooks reach the far end of Vesper and never once look back. She tried to rise to her feet but the world spun and she dropped back down on her hands and knees, noisily emptying her stomach on the roof.

Wiping her mouth against her sleeve, she heard footsteps. Glancing up, she saw in the glow of the last remaining lantern that someone was walking out of the alcove facing her. Hooks? Had she returned? Only the silhouette stopped at the edge of the traced chalk, erasing shapes with the sole of their boot, and Maryam saw it was not her sister at all.

It seemed a man, until she took a closer look.

The clothes were worn and old-fashioned, striped green cloth fraying at the edges and tall thick boots coming apart at the seams. Long hair like ragged seaweed fell all over the face, on angular features yet veiled by shadow. Then he crossed into lantern light and what she had thought skin pulled taut was revealed not to be skin at all but bare bone. On the right side of his face, from the brow to the lip, dead flesh had sloughed off the face. Like a mask peeled off.

And the eye, the eye was not empty. Some glinting ruby was in it, but it looked… wet. As if alive, while the matching flesh eye on the other side seemed strangely dead. She knew what she was looking at. Who.

“Hated One,” Maryam greeted, still bent over her own vomit.

She could not have run away even if it would have made a difference, and it wouldn’t have. The corpse-god paused in his steps, looking up at the ceiling, and breathed in deep of dead lungs. Something rattled inside them, not quite a snake’s tail nor a man’s last breath.

“No,” the god said. “Not anymore.”

She flinched at the words. The voice, it sounded like any man’s but that undertone… Even bereft of her nav she could hear the whispers in it, the faint scream of someone buried alive and desperately trying to claw their way out. Had her stomach not already been empty she would have emptied it now.

Trembling, she pushed herself up and though her vision swam she managed not to fall again. The god resumed his advance, slowly. Unhurried. There was nothing natural to that gait, for all that its steps were not clumsy – they were brusque, like a jolting puppet that the puppeteer only pulled at half-heartedly. He stopped when he reached the bottom of the tower on whose roof she still stood.

“You aren’t her either,” the god said, sibilant whispers trailing in the wake of his words. “The woman who made a shrine of these grounds. Not anymore.”

This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

She swallowed. He could tell, then, that she no longer had a nav.

“I’m-”

“Bleeding,” the Odyssean said. “Dying. Soon you will be one of mine.”

That last word rippled like a blow. The whispers grew louder, a thousand thousand secrets stolen from graves and there for the reaching, but she gritted her teeth. She was already dying, dead. There was nothing left to fear and she would not pass from this world cowed.

“Oh,” Maryam softly said, “I think not. The shores of my birth are far, but not so far I will not return to them in death. It is the Nav for me, Odyssean.”

The god laughed, a sound like crumbling rust.

“My gut is closer, child,” he said. “And my grasp stronger. But you are not offal for my plate.”

“What am I, then?” Maryam challenged, too exhausted to care for consequence.

“Worthy,” the Odyssean said. “An apostle of ambition, fooled into putting down her blade. But I will show you, child.”

Maryam blinked, for that last word had echoed like a clap in an empty cavern, and in the fraction of a moment she closed her only living eye the god moved. Gone from the bottom it was now on the roof, facing her. He was so close now, mere feet away. His visage burned to behold: an eye of flesh and an eye of red, set in pale bone. Was it truly human bone? Something whispered in her ear it was not. That it belonged to something older, hungrier.

“What was taken from you can be forged anew,” the Odyssean said. “A life is currency, Maryam. It is meant to be spent.”

She blinked in surprise. Intent dripped from every word he spoke, like ink seeping into the water of her mind. She glimpsed truth, sifted through the influence for implications.

“You offer,” Maryam slowly said, “to help me forge a new nav. Out of…”

A sacrifice, she did not quite dare say.

“We will find you a soul deserving,” the Odyssean said, sounding almost fatherly.

A warmth in her limbs, chasing away the hollow ache, but it felt… wet, she realized. Not like a hearth but instead like warm water. Or blood.

“The lictor whose stare slighted you, perhaps. Or that meddling majordomo, so insolent.”

Fatherly, he sounded, and that was what broke the spell. Maryam remembered her father and Goran Khaimov would have never spoken like this. He’d hated fighting, hated death. Not so much as to be weak, but he had always preferred trade and peace to the clash of arms. Gold is sweeter than iron, daughter, he liked to say. It does not rust.

“Why?” she croaked out.

Why was it bothering to offer her a bargain, however poisoned?

“There is death in your footsteps,” the corpse-god said. “It whispers, it schemes. You will make a fine witch for the court of my Ecclesiast.”

It came as twitch in the shoulder, first, but the convulsion spread. Maryam held her ribs and laughed, laughed in the old dead thing’s face, for how great a fool did it think her?

“You lie,” she said. “You are a thing of death, and death is all you peddle.”

It was trying to undo something, she thought. It did not fear her, not exactly, but there was some… detail she was missing. How absurd, she thought, that when she was at her most powerless such a great thing would be wary of her. She might as well be an ant, faced with the might of the Hated One’s new face.

“I am a god,” the Odyssean said, and he loomed over her now. “Truth is mine to ordain.”

I am a daughter of the Craft, she thought. I deal not in truths but in the lies we call miracles. The corpse raised a commanding hand.

“Kneel,” he ordered. “Kneel and rise remade in my service.”

“I am the least of the Akelarre, Odyssean, but a witch still,” Maryam told him, and grinned a death’s grin back at Death. “My knees do not bend to the inevitable, much less the likes of you.”

“Then you will fall,” the Odyssean said, “and rise a servant still.”

“No, I think not,” she said. “I think, corpse-god, that I will be a poison in your veins so long as anything at all remains of me.”

She had lived in spite, why should her death be any different? Maryam straightened, legs trembling, and met the god’s stare unflinching.

“Come on, then,” Maryam said, smile mocking. “Try your luck – I know Her well, these days, and I do not think she will care to smile on this night’s work.”

And she spared a thought, then, for Fortuna. A prayer. Tell him goodbye.

The Odyssean’s hand snapped out, grasping her by the throat, and she met death with bared teeth. But instead of one last spurt of pain, she smelled burning meat and found herself dropped. She landed half on her knees and watched in disbelief as the corpse-god’s hand began to crumble.

“Bane,” the Odyssean snarled.

He raised his other hand for a blow even as she tried to draw away, and she laughed at the concern she saw twisting his face. He’d do away with the theatrics and just smash her head in, no doubt, but so much for devouring her. Only before her head could be caved in she felt a shiver run up her spine, as if winter’s own hand lovingly trailed the skin, and the Odyssean’s blow was caught by a hand.

One at the end of an arm of pure, roiling Gloam emerging from Maryam’s own chest without so much as ruffling her clothes.

“You will not,” Hooks furiously said, “lay hands on my sister.”

The world shivered in dismay as if a knife had been slipped between its ribs, a slender blade of will, and Maryam saw the working unfold like elegant, looping cursive trailing ink against the curve of the Material: rasplesti, it whispered, and a self-enforcing truth slipped inside the Odyssean’s corpse-host.

It unraveled.

Like a roll of thread pulled at, the Odyssean came apart in eerily perfect stripes of cloth and flesh and bone, in the span of a heartbeat fallen apart like a pile of ribbons at Maryam’s feet. The ruby from the eye dropped a fraction later, falling atop the pile like an ornament. Gone.

“No one else,” her sister whispered in her ear, “can balance those scales for us.”

Her body twitched, something slipping in, and Maryam felt it then: the place where a wound had been left, where her nav was ripped out and her very being left bleeding. She felt something press against that wound gently, like a request, and she reached out in agreement.

Connection. Understanding.

Knowledge raced down Maryam’s veins, roiling Gloam filled her lungs. This was not a mere touch, a passing moment. The connection delved deep into the remains of her soul, grew roots, until she felt her sister’s soul bound to hers so tightly the difference was no longer a moat but a veil. Her will could move it, Maryam somehow knew. That entire soul. So could Hooks’ own will, but-

“You,” she began, then had to lick their lips for her dryness. “You made yourself into my nav. All of you, not just the third of my soul you ate.”

A sense of agreement, so refined and clear it might as well have been a whispered yes. Maryam swallowed. That was… no, it was not the same as before. Could not be. All her life Maryam had struggled to master her power, her talent to weave Gloam, and now that was forever beyond her reach because her nav was not hers alone: it was her sister’s as well, forever shared. That had been the price, she realized, for making the soul she broke whole.

Maryam Khaimov’s craft, the discipline to which she had dedicated her life, would never entirely be hers. She would always, always, need another to use Signs and Craft and whatever else she might learn. That dream of having it all in her hands, of being the sole mistress of her own fate, had been the sacrifice on the altar.

A sense of grief touched her. Not an apology, but not far either.

“No,” Maryam quietly said. “No, sister. It was a fair price. Harsh but fair, as is the way of Craft.”

She exhaled shallowly.

“There is no precedent for this,” she said. “None that I know. This is… you are not a logos as the Watch would teach me to use. And neither are you one of those souls Mother carried bound to her – we are… the ties are different, aren’t they?”

She felt her nav pull and did not fight it, Gloam coalescing as her sister stepped out of her shadow. Wearing, she saw with dim amusement, Watch black in a fighting fit. Not unwarranted, now.

“They are,” Hooks said. “We won’t blend, the boundary is clear. Already I can feel your memories seeping back into you while I keep…”

“Depth,” Maryam murmured. “Potential, maybe?”

Her sister slowly nodded. The way she had been before, an unborn soul devoured and tied to Maryam’s own, Hooks had been stunted. Atrophied, like a child fed only table scraps and left to waste away in the dark until it became barely better than an animal. Now, though, even though Maryam’s hidden memories were returning to her she could feel that Hooks had changed.

She was clean of Maryam’s own memories but strengthened enough that she would be able to grow. To learn, to become someone of her own.

“Has there ever been anything like us?” she quietly asked.

How would it work, having her sister’s soul as her nav? What would it mean? She had so many questions and so very few answers.

“We will learn,” Hooks said. “We will-”

Footsteps. Behind them. Hooks slipped back inside her and they turned, finding a mangled corpse in beggar’s clothes emerging from the room behind her. The corpse the Odyssean now rode erased another trace of chalk with his bare foot, a glint of light on a red stone revealing the same mark as on the last: sloughed off skin from brow to lip, baring bone and a ruby set inside the empty socket. The clarity she saw this with startled Maryam, for she was now one-eyed and yet… she blinked, and her entire field of vision obeyed. Was it mended? No, she realized.

“It is dead, but I see through it,” Hooks murmured. “And share that with you.”

Maryam breathed out, looked at the approaching corpse-god, and raised a hand. Her nav, her sister, moved along the furrow of her will as she began tracing a Sign. Oh, and more than that – from her side an arm of Gloam emerged, beginning to trace Craft as Hooks prepared violence of her own. There was more than one will to her nav and there was weakness in that, but there was also strength. If you cared to look for it.

“That thing,” Maryam quietly said as she watched the corpse approach the tower. “It fed on death, on the dead. Became them.”

“It has as many lives as it ate corpses,” Hooks agreed.

No wonder the Watch had thought it better to imprison it instead. Their nav, it tasted of the aether around them and even with another hand on the brush besides hers Maryam almost wept in relief. It was back, it had not all been for nothing. They tasted the god’s taint in the aether here, but it was faint. Like veins in the solid stone that was the cork on the prison layer, the stony denseness of faith in the god Oduromai.

The god would not truly be free of the prison layer before he destroyed this room, this lock. And he would never cease coming until he had.

“The longer we hold,” Maryam said, “the longer everyone else has.”

The others, Tristan, Song… Gods, even Tredegar. Her heart clenched. She could do only one thing, from here: keep standing. Hooks had saved her, but they were not saved. The Odyssean was coming and there was no one else for them to go. They would die here, in this room. That was certain.

The only part of this tale unwritten was how long they would last before the god slew them.

“Together,” she offered.

“The last princesses of Volcesta, alone against the world,” Hooks softly replied. “Yes, I think that will do.”

The corpse-god climbed the tower, come for their blood, and the two of them moved as one: Gloam screamed and they began their dance with death.

--

Time lost meaning, swallowed by Gloam and darkness.

In that shadowy archive, standing by the last lantern, the two of them measured the length of fate by a simple scale: one more death.

Every ridden corpse put down was a moment stolen back from the inevitable, every drop of sweat rolling down their spine an inch crawled closer to the finish line of what Gloam they could wield before dying. It could only end one way, they knew.

But oh, they would make Death pay for it.

They began with simple wiles, Maryam cuffing their enemy in the same Burden she had once used against her sister while Hooks tore through the corpse with a lance of Gloam that looked like a root grown out from her palm. But the Odyssean, he learned. Slowly he began to remember how to avoid harm – taking cover, throwing himself aside.

So Hooks flushed him out with hounds shaped of Gloam and Maryam shackled him with Burden so they might rip him apart.

The god kept creeping out on the six alcoves riding a fresh corpse, never the same one twice in a row, and with every death they learned from each other. He began throwing furniture and books at their workings, forcing them to adapt and find a new way to reach him. Hooks wove oily strands of Gloam along the floor and Maryam’s will rode their nav to the extremities, erupting into a Bayonet at the end.

They were bane to him, working together, and even the mere touch of their Gloam scoured the Odyssean harshly. Maryam had put down the knife of ambition, and so had her sister. Their every breath was despised by the corpse-god.

It was brutally satisfying, killing the host of a hateful god, and even more satisfying when Maryam realized she could see through more than dark corners. She could see the divinity running through corpses like sinews, even glimpse the currents in the aether without need to feel them out by hand. Of course she could: Hooks saw through her dead eye, but she saw through Hooks’ own and her sister did not behold reality through anything as limiting as a ball of flesh.

The Odyssean turned to guile, tacitly conceding simple might would not win him the night. He began to hide, to stay out of sight, which Maryam thought pointless until the first time he managed it long enough a second corpse walked out of an alcove.

The god could ride more than one at a time.

It became madness, after that. With two vessels crawled out the Odyssean had more grip on the Material and managed to push his vessels out of the layer faster, the trickle of god-hosts turning into a flood. They walked out of the shadow, the bodies of lords and farmers and soldiers. All wearing the garment of their burial, a horde scrabbling for the two Izvorica atop the tower even as they wrecked the archives around them.

All to murder the conceptual thorn in the Hated One’s flesh, the bane that kept him from simply cracking his place open like an egg and spilling out into the world.

Maryam’s fingers scratched at the void, tracing the Sign for a Sphere, and with a Grasp and Command equal to unnatural degree she manifested a sphere of Gloam inside a slender lady’s skull to pop it like a grape. She could feel Hooks slashing through a soldier’s torso, slipping out of Maryam long enough to kick the corpse down from the roof and returning in time for the signifier to land a Burden on some massive bear of a man in blacksmith’s clothes.

Hooks casually tossed a wriggling lizard of Gloam at the bound corpse, the shape burrowing itself into the flesh and tearing it apart from the inside while Maryam turned to trace as Sign at a corpse dripping in jewels that… got its head caved in by a mace?

“What?” she forced out, mouth so dry it felt like sand.

Had the god killed itself? A novel strategy. But then elbowing aside the fallen corpse was…

“Izel Coyac,” Hooks said, head emerging from Maryam’s shoulder. “Huh. Mania setting in, do you think?”

Only the tinker was not alone. With him came a harried-looking Expendable, Tupoc, Cressida Barboza and Song. Last to emerge, stumbling away from a corpse that Tupoc casually slew, was Tristan. A disbelieving grin stretched Maryam’s lips, which were so parched the skin cracked. He’d come for her. Oh.

“Ugh,” Hooks muttered. “I hope that’s still you and I’ll be rid of it soon. He looks like a god only poured out seven tenths of a person, Maryam, it shouldn’t be attractive.”

“I have no idea what you mean,” Maryam coughed into her fist.

“Maryam, Maryam!”

She startled at the sound of Song’s voice, Hooks’ head popping back in as an arm erupted from Maryam’s back to impale a corpse trying to sneak up on her from behind with a branch of Gloam that erupted into thorns.

“Here,” Maryam called back.

“I know that,” Song shouted. “I’m asking what in all the bloody gods this is!”

‘This’ was accompanied by gesturing around them.

“Magnificent, is what it is,” Tupoc laughed out.

The corpses kept coming as the blackcloaks retreated towards the bottom of her tower, the door leading to the room with the lift. All save for one. Tristan, having climbed the side while she wasn’t looking, hoisted himself up and dusted off his cloak as he offered her a winning smile.

“Evening,” he said.

Hooks popped her head out Maryam’s shoulder.

“Evening,” she replied, batting her eyes. “Come here often?”

“First time,” he replied without hesitation, then cleared his throat. “Maryam?”

“Hooks,” she introduced, then hesitantly smiled. “My sister. We came to an arrangement.”

“Well, the last Khaimov turned out mildly tolerable so I’ll give it a shot,” he replied, dipping his head. “Tristan Abrascal, a pleasure.”

Hooks began to reply but they all startled when someone shot a pistol below. Cressida, Hooks wordlessly passed on. Shooting one of the corpses. There would be more on them, were the ridden bodies not more interested in pulling down shelves and ripping books than fighting their company.

“Now that introductions are finished,” Tristan tacked on, “let’s run away, yes?”

“I can’t,” Maryam said. “If we go the Hated One has no more bane in the room. He’ll escape the prison and-”

“And he’ll escape anyway,” Tristan interrupted. “The coups have begun and he’s being served up a feast, so even if he had to hammer his way out he will. We don’t have the firepower to end this, Maryam. We need to pick up Angharad and get out of the palace, then we can regroup at Black House and get orders from people who might actually have a real notion of how to handle this.”

She hesitated.

“Maryam,” Song shouted from below. “Hurry up, damn you!”

“Ignore that, Khaimov,” Tupoc shouted after. “I bet we could last until dawn if we dig in!”

Petty as it was, she would admit within her own mind – and her sister’s awareness - it was the open approval of Tupoc Xical that tipped the scales.

“You’ll need to help me down,” she told Tristan. “My legs are shaky. The, uh, process was rather rough.”

“The blood and vomit I stepped on were something of a hint,” he drawled.

Tristan helped her down into Izel’s arms then tossed the lantern after her and as corpses began to swarm out of the alcoves they fled into the tower’s lift – all save Tupoc, who stayed at the door of the room and held the threshold against the horde with glee. A lever was pulled and it began lowering, much too slowly for her tastes. The Izcalli only joined then halfway down, leaping onto Expendable’s back with a whoop of joy. The Malani’s golden eyes glowed for half a heartbeat, the beast within almost lashing out, but he held it in.

Song led them through the bottom floor, lantern in hand, and in moments they were through the door just as Maryam heard the first ridden corpse fall at the bottom of the lift. Upstairs echoed with the sound of destruction, the private archives getting thoroughly wrecked. How much damage would it take, before the seal was broken? At least enough that - Tristan gently pushed her through the door before she could see more and Maryam blinked at the sudden onslaught of light.

When the discomfort passed she saw their company had stopped moving barely five feet out the door and she elbowed her way past Izel to see why.

The answer was not hard to divine: at the opposite end of the hall, where a barricade had stood, what must be a dozen lictors and just as many armed men in different liveries were finishing off other lictors. The rebels were slaying the last prone survivors of the barricade defense, and one of them shouted a warning at the sight of a company of blackcloaks suddenly appearing.

Muskets rose, shots echoed and Maryam found herself dragged back into the dark room at the bottom of the lift as their crew fled and shut the door behind them. Song hastily locked it, then barred it twice. Two more ridden corpses dropped at the bottom of the lift, one able enough to get back on his feet before Expendable shot him through the head.

“Maybe they’ll go away if we stay behind the door,” Tristan said. “They must have better things to do.”

Muskets were hammered against the door for half a minute, fruitlessly, then an officer decided on another tack.

“Get a table,” the man shouted. “We’ll batter it down.”

There was a beat, then every last of the blackcloaks – Song absent-mindedly raising her pistol to shoot another ridden corpse – turned to stare at Tristan. Even Expendable. The thief coughed into his fist. Feeling a smidge of pity along with the amusement, she took pity and cleared her throat loudly to claim back everyone’s attention.

“Well,” Maryam said, “consider me rescued. Now, I don’t suppose you have anyone lined up to rescue you?”