Chapter 26 (Patreon)

It was a risk, but it had to be done.

Tristan took all the precautions he could think of: he bought rosemary branches and rubbed them on his skin until the smell stuck, brought cloth to wrap around his boots for when he reached the shrines and fixed a shutter on the cheap lantern he’d acquired earlier. It was still half-wincing that he ventured out from Scraptown into the rusty wasteland beyond, pretending he did not hear one of the guards betting with another on whether or not he’d ever come back.

“Four to one odds on your croaking it,” Fortuna informed him. “You should try to get in on that.”

As always, his goddess was a comfort in these trying times.

In the distance, the silver light atop the tower shone like a beacon. There was no missing that unblinking pearly glare out here, and the sight of it put some enthusiasm to his step. There were dangers in coming out here, but a prize as well. It was now the third time in a day Tristan was heading to the tower, so even with bare scraps of lantern light he was able to pick out his preferred path. This time, though, there was to be no quick march through.

Lemures were out in force.

The first warning was a moan on the wind. Tristan crouched behind a mound of scraps, bringing the lantern under his cloak and shuttering it. Quieting his breath he pricked his ear, wishing the breeze would not wind through so many pieces of metal – it added a haunting, mournful sound to it. After thirty seconds he was debating getting moving again, but then there was another moan.

And three more in answer.

Pressing himself against a caved in brass box, he tucked himself out of sight and only got glimpses of the movement outside. Dark silhouettes in the dark, shambling forward in a strange procession. The thief held his breath until they were gone, and counted another two minutes before crawling out of his hiding place. That close shave, however, was but the herald what lay ahead.

That band had been a pack of shades, and he came across a second mere minutes later - as well as the tracks for another two. The footsteps they left in the still-humid red sand were narrow and shallow, as if the creatures barely weighed anything at all. Tristan nestled against the iron ribs clawing out of the ground, pressing close and holding his breath as the scavengers ambled past him. Twice one of the lemures stopped to sniff at the air, but the rosemary did its work.

For now, anyway. He had to hurry before fear and sweat washed its smell away.

Tristan trailed in the wake of the second band, figuring they were likely to avoid the nastier creatures out there. Like him, the scavengers were very much on the bottom rung of the killing ladder. Moving from cover to cover as he kept out of sight, the thief kept as fast a pace as he dared while keeping a wary ear out. The mournful breeze, almost like sad and distant whistling, had him biting his lip as he darted a look past the twisted iron rib and found the passage clear of lemures.

He had a hard time watching out for enemies with that fucking clatter bending his ear, and out here surprise might well mean death.

He darted out anyway, feet light on the wet sand, keeping his head low. On both sides of the makeshift causeway curved ribs of rusted iron curled towards him like a jaw about to snap closed. A slice of pale Orrery light cut through the causeway, a toothy grin, and the thief’s steps turned into a slide as he caught sight of movement – to the left, in a stray pile of metal spikes. Black and white flesh. Fuck, he did not dare to speak out loud, and immediately turned to run right.

Towards a dune from which an iron rib peeked out. He needed to slide past the top of the sand, into another causeway, and get as far away as possible before it... His boots were unsteady on the sand but Tristan climbed to the top of the dune, past the crest, ready to stumble down into the other winding causeway as quiet as he could. Gods, he shuddered, that thing he’d glimpsed had looked like a-

Thin, translucent strings in the air like a net right ahead of him. Almost invisible to the eye.

He tried to pull back but he’d already been moving down – the corner of his cloak still caught on the edge of the string as he turned, a piece of black cloth fluttering through the floor as the net sliced through it like butter. Oh no. Tristan swallowed. A heartbeat of silence, then a chittering screech from ahead.

Shuttle-spider.

“Oh,” Fortuna breathed. “You really shouldn’t have done that.”

Heart pounding, he scurried back up the dune. Tumbling down the sandy slope without any pretense of quiet – to find the thing he’d glimpsed out in the spikes had come out.

It looked like a pale woman’s face, dark hair stringy and features slightly off, until you noticed the eight spindly legs jutting out the sides. Then you realized the shuttle-spider’s back was all fur and angles to better hide a multitude globulous black eyes. A spasm of revulsion went through him at the sight and Tristan ran.

There was another one at his back and he was fucked if either of the dog-sized lemures caught him. The fanged mouths shuttle-spiders hid under their trailing ‘hair’ were not venomous, but the monsters spun threads that scarred even iron.

Tristan fled back towards Scraptown, or at least tried to.  Ten steps in, another slice of Orrery light revealed there was a shape slithering along the bottom of the causeway, large and long yet fast as a man striding. The thief caught the glint of light on scales and bit his lip almost until it bled. Shit. The shuttle-spiders were… one atop the dune, eyeing him through eyes like little black fish eggs set in that nauseating ‘face’, while the other was out of sight. Shit, shit he needed to move now.

“Through,” he whimpered, and ran forward.

Down the causeway, and perhaps to his death.

Screeching from behind, almost enough to distract him from the danger ahead: a slender string had been woven across the length of the causeway, ankle-high on a human. The second shuttle-spider had only disappeared to lay one of the lethal traps its kind was known for. He leaped over the string, then panicked when he realized it had woven a second barely a foot ahead. Swallowing bile, Tristan tumbled forward in a roll as the lemure leaped after him.

Rising onto his knees he drew a knife, swinging at the arachnid, but it did not even react – merely waiting until his swing was wide then leaping in. He swung the lantern at it, hitting a leg with a crunch, and flaming oil spilled out through the shutter – the lemure screeched, clawing at itself, and Tristan ran for it again. He shot one last looking behind, catching the other shuttle-spider perched atop an iron rib and leaping down at the monster coming down the causeway.

Tristan got a glimpse of a massive snake down in the sand, of something like a stinger unfolding from its back and impaling the shuttle-spider in flight. Black ichor burst as it let out a screeching death cry, the thief getting the fuck out of there before he joined it.

Eyes ever moving as he watched out for nets, Tristan ran until the fear of finding worse ahead rose to match that of what he had left behind. His heart beat wildly, hammering at his ears, and that fucking eerie wind just wouldn’t stop. He hid behind a sheet of metal that rose from a dune like a fin, breath labored, until his hands slowed in their shaking. That had been much, much too close for comfort.

“Fortuna?” he croaked out.

“Nothing’s close,” she whispered into his ear.

He clenched, even knowing she had not done it to unsettle him.

“Shuttle-spiders are extremely territorial,” he panted, eyes still wide. “There’s no way two of them should be nesting so close.”

The whole Murk knew that story about how the Menor Mano had figured it could use the monsters as a way to get rid of bodies cheaper than pigs but the moment they’d added a second shuttle-spider to the pit the creatures went wild and shredded half a house killing each other.

“Maybe those two have shared interests,” Fortuna suggested. “Like knitting, or eating dead bodies.”

Wanting to strangle her was welcome relief from the panic still clouding his mind. He calmed, one breath at a time, and knew from the sweat trickling down his back that the rosemary scent was good as gone.

“There are too many out here,” he said. “We’re barely halfway through the scrapyard, I’ll never make it to the tower.”

“Talk the rest of the Thirteenth into coming with you,” Fortuna suggested. “With enough guns and swords, you could-”

“Or simply come during the silver hours,” he sharply interrupted. “I don’t need help, I need to get out of here before something eats me.”

“That too,” the goddess conceded.

He got up. Too much time had been wasted already. Tristan still had a notion of where he was relative to Scraptown, so beginning the trek back as simply a matter of finding a causeway that did not look like a death trap. It took a bit of heading further west, keeping to the shadow of scraps.

“Huh, another one.”

Tristan’s steps paused as he turned to Fortuna. The goddess was leaning next to a small mound of red sand. At first he thought she was staring down at the ground, but then he made out a thin metal rod. So thin, he saw when he knelt by it, that wire might be a more accurate description than rod if not for the rigidity on display.

At the tip of it there was a slight swell in the form of a flower with a hole where the pistil would be. Raising his lantern and leaning closer, Tristan saw the remains of some kind of mineral powder still at the bottom. Like salt, only yellow.

“You’ve seen those before?” he asked.

“This must be the tenth tonight,” Fortuna idly said. “Whoever put them there has fine taste.”

He frowned at her.

“Why’s that?”

“They smell quite fragrant,” the goddess said.

The thief sniffed at the metal flower, though not too closely. He did not know what those yellow remnants were. All he smelled was wet sand and iron, though.

“Does this one still smell?” he asked.

She shrugged.

“Not as much as the others, but yes,” Fortuna said.

“I’ll be damned,” Tristan whispered. “Someone out there must think this place isn’t enough of a graveyard, because this looks to me like lemure bait.”

“Are you calling me a lemure?” Fortuna coldly said.

He waved a dismissive hand.

“Aether bait, if you prefer,” he said.

“Divine bait,” she insisted. “Grand divine bait.”

Ignoring her increasingly loud complaints, he frowned down at the device. Was such bait why two shuttle-spiders had nested so closely? Maybe. Something to consider, should he get his hands on a teratology book at some point. What he’d thought to be notches on the rod turned out to be letters when he felt them out, fortunately enough in Antigua.

Bouquet Number 9.

It seemed to the thief that there would only be so many people interested in stirring the pot out here and even fewer who’d be capable of pulling off this kind of trick without getting killed: whoever that teacher in the tower was, they had a vicious streak.

Either way it didn’t change his immediate situation. He asked Fortuna to mention it if she came across another of those flower rods and hurried back to Scraptown. The journey back was not quite harrying at the one out, if only because the earlier ruckus seemed to have drawn quite a few lemures to it – they must be fighting over each other’s corpses. Knowing this was to be a short-lived opening, Tristan rolled the dice and chose speed over discretion.

There were a few close calls with shades, but when he got close to town they dared not continue to chase him.

The guards on duty cared little for his exhaustion, demanding details about the lemures he’d encountered out there, and the sergeant leading the interrogation declared him lucky to have survived that snake he’d glimpsed in the distance.

“That’s a cerastan,” he said. “They can track by heat for the better part of a mile, you’re lucky it snatched another kill first.”

As a reward for his report the watchmen waved his dormitory fee for the night, which was a pleasant surprise. Tristan crept into the large room full of beds, trying not to wake anyone, and found there was only one more person inside.

That surprise was a great deal pleasant: Cressida Barboza lay asleep in a corner of the room, or at least she looked like she was sleeping.

There were only so many reasons for her to be out here, and without her brigade to boot. That girl reeked of Mask, and that meant he had competition. Tristan claimed the furthest possible bed and kept his knife and blackjack at hand just in case.

He woke up at five in the morning to find her bed was empty and her bag gone, as if he’d imagined her ever being there.

--

The journey was tense, as much for the memory of the close shaves last night as the constant looking over his shoulder for Cressida, but Tristan made good time going to the tower. He reached the foot of the shrines when Vanesa’s watch marked the time as precisely two minutes before the seventh hour.

The shrines had returned, just as Hage promised, and two-thirds of the tower with them. Interestingly enough, the ball bearings he’d placed where the shrines were not yesterday had not gone missing: he found them half a hundred feet from the shrines, lying in the dirt. So when the shrines return, they push off whatever is occupying the space where they’re supposed to be.

“Which means the transition between ‘there’ and ‘not’ has a physical aspect to it,” Tristan said out loud. “It’s not a matter of ‘always there, but not always accessible’. Something physical happens.”

Fortuna yawned, which was purely for effect considering the goddess could not tire.

“And we care because…”

“If I’m in there when the silver light ends,” Tristan said, “something that affects my physical body will happen. It’s not like entering a layer.”

At least not like the way Maryam had explained layers to them, which was as some sort of aether-place for souls, your body entering on one end and exiting the other without ever physically being inside. If he asked her about this she might have some notion of- he bit the inside of his cheek. He was not crawling back to that cottage without a win, something to stand on. He would not.

“I told you the aether is thin around here, not thick,” Fortuna said. “There is some kind of machine at work.”

“It could have been both,” Tristan absent-mindedly replied.

Had he more time he’d want to get a caged bird and put it inside one of the shrines then come back the day after to see what happened to it, but that would take too long. He could not afford to skip classes forever even for covenant work. Shaking his head, the thief tightened the pack on his back.

“Come on,” he told his goddess. “Time to see what’s in that shrine.”

The climb up a fallen stretch of pipe to climb the one still feeding into the shrine had not changed in the slightest, though now when standing in the dark the thief lit a lantern. A stretch of bronze pipe continued into the distance with nary a speck of dust in sight. There was a slight wind here, heading inwards. Still careful even for the lack of visible dangers, Tristan advanced. It was not a long walk to the end of the pipe which was a grid in the same bronzelike metal as the pipe.

The squares were large enough for him to put an arm through and certainly large enough to peer at the room through. The light revealed a small room going above and below the height of the pipes, bronze everywhere without so much as a window.

“I’m not seeing a way through,” Tristan admitted. “Fortuna?”

The goddess stepped through the grid with her head raised high, then dropped out of sight with an echoing chuckle.

“There’s a door down here,” she called out. “And the grid isn’t welded. There are pop seals on the left and hinges on the right.”

He could fit his arm up to the shoulder through the squares, so after some blind groping it was easy enough to find the pop seals – essentially bronze corks wedged into a hole – and pull them out. Tristan pocketed them and opened the grid, chasing back the shadows with lantern light as he peered down over the edge of the pipe. The entire room seemed like a pressure chamber of some sort, but there were ladder rungs down to the bottom and Fortuna was standing by a vaguely square door kept shut by a pop seal on every corner.

He hung the lantern on his belt and climbed down, nodding his thanks at the goddess. The bottom floor had on it what he would have called pockmarks, if not for the way they were perfectly spaced and even. Holes of some sort, but filled? Either way, none was larger than an inch so he wasn’t getting out through them. Best to have at the door. Those pop seals took a lot more work, the bronze ‘corks’ each thick as a fist and needing both his hands to be ripped out. Even when he’d taken out all four, though, the door remained closed.

“Already a dead end?” Fortuna said, sounding amused. “That didn’t take long.”

Tristan brought up the lantern and had a closer look at the seals. Ah! As he’d suspected, there was still bronze in the hole. The bottom end of a seal, facing him.

“There’s pop seals on the other side too,” he told her. “But if I’m right…”

He laid a boot on the door and unceremoniously pushed. For a second he was simply struggling, but then sweetness: with a sound like the intake of breath, the bronze door fell out.

“Fluke,” Fortuna accused.

“I did a hand-to-hand lesson in Warfare,” Tristan bragged.

By the sound the door had made falling, they were above ground but not significantly so. Putting the lantern through revealed a square chamber maybe two dozen feet long. Bare stone walls with some furnishings, and it had that cold crypt smell to it. No movement, so after a second look Tristan pulled the lantern back in. He got out his rope, tied it to the bottom rung of the ladder and climbed down it.

There was a door in the back, stone on stone, but no obvious lock or handle. It would keep, though, so first he combed through the room itself. Seen from the outside, the bronze ‘room’ he had been in revealed itself to be some sort of cistern. A tank, if a large one, though somehow he doubted it’d ever held water. The holes he had seen on the floor matched identical ones on the bottom outside and beneath them a bronze receptacle waited.

No doubt there was some sort of respectable name for it, but to Tristan it looked pretty much like a tub.

The walls were bare stone, but not unadorned: they were hard to make out in the lantern light, but near every inch of them was covered in thick stripes of cryptoglyphs. Four elaborate seats of that same bronze alloy face the wall with the tank, tables of pale sculpted stone so fine it looked like lace before them, but what drew his eye was the thick metal pillar to the left of the apparatus he’d climbed down from. It went from floor to ceiling, about a foot wide, and was a mess of cogs, levers and empty glass balls.

One lever in particular had a small panel hanging off it, and he frowned as he approached. No, he had not gone mad: something was written on it. Several somethings, in fact. Spelled out in Antigua was a short sentence, and though he could not read the other languages – Umoya, Centzon, Cathayan and Samratrava – he’d bet it was the same thing all around.

“Pull to move on,” he read out loud.

“So pull it,” Fortuna shrugged. “Maybe it opens that door.”

Skeptical, instead the thief went to study the door in question. As he’d seen earlier, there was no lock or handle. For all he knew it was not even truly a door, only a door-shaped indent. Certainly the stone of the door and walls were identical, with no opening that let air through. Maybe the cryptoglyphs around had instructions, but there was no Francho around to translate them for him.

His eyes returned to that suspicious lever.

Fortuna made chicken noises, which he elected to take as a vote in favor of pulling. As it was an obvious trap, and likely the work of the same soul that’d planted monster bait out in the scrapyard, Tristan pulled a ball of twine from his bag. He made a knot around the lever, then carefully unwound it until he was as far back as he could – near one of the seats. He pulled up a cloth around his face, breathed in and then pulled at the string. The lever lowered, something metallic clenching into place, and the not-pockmarks in the floor of the tank above opened.

A heartbeat later, the bottom of the pillar exploded.

Metal shards sprayed everywhere, Tristan throwing himself behind the chair with his coat pulled over his head, and blackpowder smoke billowed out. He coughed, batting at the air, and stayed in cover for a dull minute before peeking out.

“Pull to move on,” Fortuna chortled, leaning against the wrecked pillar with her arms crossed. “That’s funny, it is.”

Tristan could think of no indictment more damning than her compliment, so he was spared the effort of looking for a curse creative enough to answer this. If he’d pulled the lever by hand, that explosion would have shredded his torso like it was paper. The thief gingerly rose to his feet, patting his cloak, and watched as the last of the smoke thinned.

Revealing a trickle falling down from the tank above.

Through one of the floor holes a deep blue liquid was leaking, only that could not be. Tristan had been in that tank and there had been no liquid, or opening for it to come from somewhere else. There’d been two ways in: the pipe and the hatch. He crept closer to the falling liquid, watching as it fell into the large bronze tub below, and frowned when he noticed something was off. The blue substance made no sound, and it was almost too visible – like it did not need lantern light to be seen.

He picked up a ball bearing and tossed it at the stream, eyed widening when it sailed through entirely unimpeded.

“That’s not liquid, it’s light,” Tristan breathed out.

“Eh,” Fortuna said. “Maybe. It’s aether too, sort of.”

“What does that mean?” he asked.

“It’s like what that gaudy thing upstairs is vomiting everywhere,” she elaborated.

“You mean the Grand Orrery,” he stated, half a question.

“This place is tied to it, somehow,” the Lady of Long Odds agreed. “Though it’s broken. I expect that old machine in the sky is too.”

He cocked his head to the side, considering that.

“Why do they want light in a tub?” Tristan wondered.

“Nobody wants light in a tub,” Fortuna said, rolling her eyes. “Tubs are for people.”

A pause.

“You could do with using them more, you know.”

The thief ignored that, watching the blue light slowly filling the bronze tub. At this rate it’d take days to fill the thing, but maybe the pipe he’d come in through had been meant to change that back in the machine’s heyday. He could no more understand the workings of the wonders left behind by the Ancients than a fly could understand poetry. On the other hand, he couldtry to make sense of the way this place had been built.

“I think this might be the aether equivalent of a water mill,” Tristan slowly said. “This room, the tank and the pipes – they brought in the ‘water’ that made the rest of this shrine work.”

“It doesn’t work, demonstrably,” Fortuna drawled.

“It wouldn’t, the pipes fell off,” he replied. “Look at that flow from the tank – it can’t even fill the tub, much less bring in enough pressure for the whole shrine. And if even the doors here worked on the aether machine too…”

“None of them will open,” the goddess completed.

“Which means I can’t access the rest of the shrine through broken pipes,” Tristan said. “I need to figure out how to open one of those still-working gates from the outside or I won’t be getting anywhere.”

Which meant this was a dead end. Still, he could pick up the work when he was back outside. Tristan carefully used the string and a cutout to pull up the lever back up in case there was a second explosion trap, but his caution proved unnecessary. The blue light stopped flowing, and when he climbed the rope back up into the tank there was no trace it’d ever passed through. In a matter of minutes he’d exited the pipe, landing atop the fallen one.

Which was when he heard a shrine gate open.

It was pure luck that had him in the right position to spy on it: from the top of the fallen pipe, he could see the tall shrine door wind open with sudden jerks. For three heartbeats they stayed open and empty, enough Tristan began to wonder if his fussing about inside another shrine had somehow caused this, but then a man in Watch black walked out.

He looked around cautiously, the thief pressing himself down against the pipe to stay out of sight, then the stranger disappeared back into the shrine. Mere moments later he walked out with a large cloth bag, which he reached in with thickly gloved hands. There was an odd sound, bits of metal on stone, and the man began going around the circle of the shrines at a hurried pace.

It took Tristan a moment to figure out what he was doing: the man was sowing caltrops.

The stranger wore the coat of a fighting fit so he was no garrison man, and that coat with so many pockets sown on they might as well be another layer. He was dark-skinned in the Malani way, tall and twitchy though his movements were methodical as he went around trapping the grounds. Broken nose and brown eyes, the sides of his head shaved while neat cornrows went down to his nape. He had maybe a foot or two on Tristan, but he was skinny enough the thief doubted he was all that strong.

It was only when he came closer to Tristan’s hiding place that the gray-eyed man caught a glimpse of elaborated colored beads around his neck – from Uthukile, then, or at least wearing markings in the style of the Low Isle. The thief would not be able to tell real Uthukile beads from fakes but it hardly mattered here.

Staying on his perch, lantern snuffed out, Tristan watched as the man liberally sprinkled the grounds with those nasty little pieces. There was strategy at work, the thief saw: they were spread on the paths nears the gates of the shrines, usually in parts shaded by the pipes and pillars. The Malani only stopped when the bag was empty, and even then he was not done.

He disappeared back into the shrine, running out moments later as the gates began to jerk closed. When those metal jaws snapped shut, the Malani fitted the gate with a tripwire and what looked like it might be some sort of powder bomb. So he doesn’t know the shrine disappears during the afternoon, or doesn’t care. Apparently pleased with his work, the Malani then spent a solid ten minutes making chalk markings on the ground in front of the gates before hoisting his pack and beating a retreat.

Tristan waited until the stranger was well out of sight before shimmying down. Careful with his steps, he went to snatch one of the caltrops and found it to be little more than bent nails welded together. Simple, but still like as not to go through a lemure’s paw if they stepped on it – or the sole of a boot, for that matter. The trap on the shrine gate had a simple trigger, but taking a closer look at the powder bomb had Tristan frowning.

The string pull was straightforward enough, but the dangerous part looked like some sort of grenade that’d been tinkered with. Not the sort of thing just anyone could get their hands on, or know how to use.

Likely he was not only dealing with a Mask but with one who had ties to a Tinker. That could get troublesome. Though he was rather curious about what might lie behind that gate, he was not confident in disarming the trap and while triggering it from a distance might work the noise would likely attract lemures - and reveal he’d snooped besides. No, he’d learned enough for the morning.

He needed to retreat, mull over his approach and grab a bite. Besides, he needed to swing by the cottage come afternoon to drop another letter – or maybe simply add a fresh mark to the last one, should it still be around. That and he had a shift at the Chimerical in a few hours.

Tristan made his way back to Scraptown, and from there returned dockside. Looking around Regnant Avenue for something cheap to eat had him stumbling into a hole-in-the-wall shop at the end of an alley, from which the distinct aroma of more than halfway decent paella wafted.

There were barely three tables insides, but the meal cost him mere coppers while the plate was groaningly full – and, the older man running the shop proudly told him, the shrimps were freshly caught. It wasn’t the classic Sacromonte dish, they’d used artichokes even if the saffron was just right, but it was still a taste of home that had him digging in enthusiastically. By far the best meal he’d had since leaving the City.

Tristan was no fool, so he’d picked the table with its back to the wall and an eye on the door. That made it all the more galling when he did not see Cressida Barboza until she slid into the seat across this. Though still in her coat and tunic with pinned back hair, the hat had changed. A broad, black beret with silver framework and a small feather angled downwards.

“Abrascal,” Lady Cressida greeted him.

Casually, he reached for his pistol and pointed it at her under the table. Only the tip touched something solid. They frowned at each other.

“Pistol?” she asked.

He nodded.

“Pistol?”

She shrugged.

“Seemed prudent, after yesterday,” Cressida said.

Tristan hummed, picked up a fork with his free hand and took a bite of his paella. He chewed as loudly and obnoxiously as possible.

“How many hats can you possibly own?” Tristan finally asked, squinting as he kept the pistol level.

“About as many as you have fleas,” she replied without missing an eye, which he had to admit was solid. “You’ve been sniffing around the tower.”

He took another bite of paella, swallowed.

“I got curious,” Tristan said. “What’s it to you?”

“I was there first,” Lady Cressida flatly replied. “And that neighborhood getting crowded.”

He made his brow raise.

“How so?” Tristan asked.

“Don’t pretend,” she scoffed. “You saw that Uthukile bastard setting up his traps. Silumko.”

This time it was no lie when his brow rose. There was no way for her to know that, unless…

“You were there,” he said. “How?”

“The trick,” Cressida said, fingers creeping towards his paella, “is that I am better than you in every way.”

He cocked the pistol under the table. The creeping hand paused.

“If you steal the only decent shrimp I’ve had since leaving the City,” Tristan blandly said, “we are going to have trouble.”

The hatchet-faced woman squinted at him, then sighed. The hand withdrew.

“Stingy.”

“Get your own,” he said, and shoveled in a large mouthful out of spite.

“But then I’d have to stop buying hats,” she idly replied.

The laugh that startled out of him had him choking on the paella, dropping his fork to cough into his fist, and he glared at the innocently smiling noblewoman. That had not been accidental timing.

“I’m not spending the rest of my meal holding a gun,” Tristan said afterwards, voice still a little rough. “Pistols on the table, on three?”

“Agreed,” Cressida replied.

He counted down to three. Neither pistol moved.

“Worth a shot,” he admitted, somewhat proud at the pun. “All right, then. How can I be rid of you most quickly?”

“The trapper, Silumko, he’s working with someone else,” she said. “I think they know about the places.”

The what now? Tristan hummed thoughtfully, putting on a thinking face.

“That complicates things,” he replied.

A heartbeat passed. Cressida cursed.

“You didn’t know about the places.”

“No,” Tristan admitted, “but this conversation’s now growing on me. Continue.”

“Most of the Mask instructors only take up to three students,” the noblewoman said. “Rumor is someone’s already made it into the tower, so…”

“Only two are left,” he completed. “You believe they’re working to keep everyone away until they’ve figured out how to enter the tower proper.”

Hence the traps. Tristan had thought they seemed more apt for catching men than lemures.

“Congratulations, you now know the things I told you,” Cressida drily replied. “I’ll cut to the chase – unless your Warfare class has been a tortured charade, you’re not much of a fighter. If you face them alone, they’ll roll you.”

So that was her angle. On the surface, it was a sensible offer. Cressida knew he was interested in the tower, and she could have tried to recruit another Mask if she knew one but that would have meant spreading knowledge of this whole affair around. He was the only ally on the table, from a certain perspective.

The perspective of someone who really wanted to get into that tower, that was.

Otherwise why would she be talking about getting into a fight instead of getting around this pair or even simply moving on to greener pastures? No, Cressida Barboza knew something about what waited inside that tower and she was hungry for it. Tristan took another bite of his paella, savoring the taste as much as making the noblewoman wait.

“What’s taught inside?” he casually asked, watching her face.

Flickers – surprise, anger, and then put-on confusion. She opened her mouth, but Tristan clicked his tongue in irritation.

“Tell me,” he said, “or this conversation is at an end.”

Her jaw clenched.

“You’re a high-handed little prick, aren’t you?” she said.

“One whose patience is running out,” Tristan replied. “So what’ll it be, Barboza?”

She drew back, breathed out. Smoothed away the anger.

“Deicide,” Lady Cressida said. “My source says that’s where the instructor for deicide is.”

His first thought was to dismiss the matter entirely, for he had little interest in such things, but the words never passed his lips. Because that wasn’t entirely true, was it? Perhaps the general art was of little interest, but the particular? Tristan had learned a name on the Dominion, the last on his List. The Almsgiver.

A god’s name.

It was the thief’s turn to lean back, studying the hard woman across from him. Her face was a bland mask, but the way she held herself was not so controlled. Tense shoulders, leaning in, fingers just a little too crisp – like she was trying not to clench them. This whole affair had weight for her. Enough that she was unlikely to turn on him unless it helped her get one of those places.

Tristan disarmed the pistol under the table, then set it down beside his bowl.

“You have my attention,” he said. “Keep talking.”