Pale Lights

Chapter 68

It was infuriating that he’d not immediately gone to her when he arrived, and thus only fitting he suffer the consequences of this slight. Maryam kicked his ankle: boot tip right on the bone, and not skimping on the swing either.

“Ow, ow ow Maryam what in the Manes-”

The second thing she did was hug Tristan’s scrawny frame until his ribs were nigh creaking. The Sacromontan went stiff as a board, for a moment, then unwound like a breath released. Enough to rest his chin on her head while she buried her face into his shoulders. He smelled liked grapes, for some inexplicable reason, but that was not enough to ruin this.

“Where have you been?” she asked.

“I’m not sure how I’m meant to reply to ‘mwah wah bwah’,” the prick informed her. “Is this some foreign cant?”

Maryam took her face off his coat long enough to glare and kept it there when asking her question this time.

“Where have you been?” she repeated.

“Broadening my horizons,” Tristan replied. “I learned a thing or two of cannonry.”

“I don’t see why you’d want to,” she said. “They’re too heavy for you to throw.”

“I’m not even sure you could throw a cannon ball,” she honestly told him.

“Well, that’s what the cannon is for isn’t it?” he muttered. “Those things are bloody solid stone, Maryam, they weigh a ton.”

Someone cleared their throat. Tristan had not lost weight since his disappearance, not that she could easily tell anymore, and for once he wasn’t covered in bruises. That did not mean, however, that he was unharmed.

“You cut your face,” Maryam frowned, looking up at the red line beneath his eye. “Did you fight someone?”

That did not tend to go well for him.

“This from someone I found napping in a knockoff Meadow during the middle of the day,” Tristan replied, eyebrows raised. “What have we been up to at night, Khaimov?”

Dreaming of being strangled and eaten alive, she thought. Not that he needed to know that. Someone cleared their throat louder.

“You’d know if you had been around,” she reproached, stepping away to cross her arms. “You couldn’t have sent a letter?”

“I ran out of ink,” he drily replied. “It must have all gone to those rings around your eyes, given how dark those got. Did you even sleep a full night since I’ve been gone?”

That was irrelevant. Besides, she’d hardly been sleeping even when he was there.

“Please,” she huffed, “I-”

A loud bang. The two jumped and turned, finding an irritated Song holding the pistol whose handle she had just smacked against her writing desk. Angharad was sitting on the Tianxi’s bed, hand on her cane as she tried very hard not to be amused. The pair had the good sense to wake her up the moment they knew Tristan had returned, at least, unlike the thief in question. He’d left her in the garden for an hour while he sat down here, the fool! He ignored her glare at the reminder of his sin, only adding to the tally.

“As has already been mentioned it is pleasure to have you back, Tristan,” Song evenly said. “Maryam, have a cup of tea.”

“I don’t feel like tea,” she muttered.

Song Ren turned a very calm smile on her.

“Have it anyway.”

Maryam eyed her for a moment, then decided that she was a diplomat at heart and capable of compromise. She only filled the bottom of the cup and made sure to dip one of the flaky tea cakes in it before scarfing it down, however, because insults were also part of diplomacy. Song looked like someone had just messily spat on the carpet, which went some way in evening the scales.

“I also am happy you returned, Tristan,” Angharad volunteered.

“It is even gladder news that you came back largely unharmed,” Song added. “Given the lack of word from yourself and Officer Hage, I admit to some concern over your situation.”

In the Song Ren dialect, that meant she had been laying out patterns and schedules for the search parties. Maryam nibbled at the sugary tea cake. It was hours yet from the evening meal, but the more she ate the more she found she was starving. Considering she had not skimped on breakfast, that had unfortunate implications. Hooks was drawing on her, preparing for tonight. It won’t save you.

“Not unwarranted,” Tristan said. “As it happens, I spent most of the week prisoner of the Trade Assembly.”

“You what?” Maryam said, choking on her mouthful.

“I escaped,” he dismissed, like he’s not been abducted.

Busy coughing into her fist, she was not able to answer as she should. This was starting to get worse than the bruises. How many times was he going to get kidnapped in a year? Gods, Maryam was going to have to learn a tracking Sign wasn’t she? Those were awful, conceptual to the bone with almost no direct Gloam manipulation. She had never met a single signifier who actually enjoyed using tracking Signs, it was like walking around with strings tied to your hair that got caught up in everything.

“I had some help from Hage, whose disappearance I can explain,” Tristan continued, “He went to ground after Locke and Keys attempted to kill him.”

Angharad sucked in a breath.

“Why?” she asked. “That is good as an act of war against the Watch.”

Which meant either they were not afraid of the rooks or that had reason to believe the Watch would be too busy to retaliate. Neither boded well. It occurred to Maryam she had yet to hear the results of Angharad’s infiltration, or what she and Song had been up to this afternoon. Her side eye at the Pereduri was cut short before it could bear fruit, however.

“Start from the beginning,” Song ordered. “Leave nothing out.”

Tristan spun his tale, beginning with the revelation that the Yellow Earth was backing the magnates then journeying through becoming a hostage trained by Tianxi artillerymen, escaping with Hage’s help and then returning to interrogate Hector Anaidon only to run into Locke and Keys to bloody results. Maryam was down three biscuits and an actual cup of tea by the time he’d finished, while Song had filled two pages with notes. Angharad was the first to break the silence, face serious.

“That you escaped at all is noteworthy,” she said. “That you did so without killing anyone is laudable.”

Tristan coughed into his fist, seemingly surprised. Maryam’s lips twitched. Sincerity was one of his blind spots, she had found, and Angharad wore hers like a coat.

“It is,” Song agreed, her tone was absent-minded. “Do not take my distraction as chiding. It is only that the news you bring fit oddly with some of what we’ve learned.”

Maryam blinked. Oh, good, she could finally ask what Angharad had-

“I attended an initiation ritual of the cult of the Odyssean last eve,” Angharad said. “The priestess leading the rite, Lady Doukas, spoke of the cult’s support of the noble coup that will be taking place in four days.”

Tristan blinked. So did Maryam, for whom this was equally news. Doukas, Doukas… Was that the one Tristan had caught fucking a servant in a closet? Well, that was one way to throw people off your scent. Song was unsurprised, clearly having heard all this before.

“Huh,” Tristan exhaled. “Hector implied the cult was playing both sides, but that seems like a strong commitment to the side of the ministers. I’ve seen nothing implying to me they run similar rites for the magnates.”

“That is noteworthy,” Song said. “But not as much as Hage’s assertion there is no infernal forge.”

“What about it?” Tristan asked.

“He’s wrong,” Maryam told him. “Angharad found one.”

Before she could ask him if he was certain he was the Mask in this brigade, the woman in question spoke up.

“I am not entirely certain of that,” Angharad said.

Maryam frowned at her. Why the quibbling now?

“As someone who saw such a forge in a layer back on Tolomontera, I assure you your description matches,” Maryam told her.

A strange expression flicked across the Pereduri’s face – anger, regret, something like… rue? And it was gone in a heartbeat, almost fast enough for Maryam to wonder if she had imagined it.

“That part I do not doubt, Maryam,” Angharad replied. “But I did wonder, after first seeing the device, how exactly word of its existence spread around in the first place. Lord Menander did not know what it was, so it cannot be his work.”

That was a fair point, in truth. But there were ways.

“One of his guests,” Maryam suggested. “You said he’d brought others to the crypt before you, showing off his treasures. Someone must have had a loose tongue.”

“Ah,” Tristan muttered. “I see her point. Why spread rumors if you recognized the forge? Either you covet it, and thus do not want Lord Drakos to know what it is, or you intend to wield that knowledge against him and thus spreading the secret across the entire capital would make your leverage unusable.”

But if no one benefited from the news being out and the secret was well kept, how had it come to be spread? Maryam put it together a second later.

“Officer Hage’s right that Locke and Keys spread rumors about the presence of an infernal forge to justify their presence on Asphodel,” she slowly said. “Only they thought the rumors were false, when by coincidence they happened to be true.”

Which explained why everyone but the devils was looking for that forge, as they would be convinced everyone was chasing a false trail they’d laid themselves. That was almost worth a laugh, if not for the way the pair apparently went around snapping the necks of useful witnesses while hunting whoever it was they were after.

“But the devils were correct that the harpoon has something to do with the cult of the Odyssean, at least,” Song cut in, staring down at her notes. “A worrying picture begins to emerge.”

Right, Anaidon had confessed that this ‘Ecclesiast’ had ordered him to smuggle the harpoon into the city using his family’s warehouse. Odds were the Ecclesiast had also been the one to use it to punch into the Hated One’s prison.

“The cult’s running a game on this country,” Tristan said. “And I think we put together quite a bit of what’s afoot but we are…”

“Drowning in the details,” Maryam suggested.

“That,” he replied, flashing her smile.

Gods, it was good to have him back.

“Then let us lay them out in proper order,” Song said, a stubborn set to her jaw and a piece of chalk somehow already in her hand. “I already have a slate in the room, we can put it to purpose.”

“Allow me,” Tristan said.

He reached for the chalk but Song withheld it.

“Not you,” she said. “Angharad?”

The Pereduri eyed them both, confused, but gallantly took the chalk when Song passed it to her. A beat passed, gray eyes staying on her until Tristan’s lips finally twitched. So did Maryam’s, who had caught on before he did.

“You think my handwriting’s too sloppy,” he accused.

“If I wanted a headache, I would drink mercury,” Song primly replied. “Now, without further distractions, let us proceed.”

“Magnates first,” Maryam said. “That’s where all the details go contradictory.”

In that if the cult of the Odyssean was backing the nobles, why in Hell was it also in bed with the Yellow Earth and the Trade Assembly? Angharad shrugged and Song did not object, so their expert on the matter began speaking.

“To resume the position of the magnates,” Tristan said. “They are preparing a coup with weapons smuggled into the capital from Tratheke Valley, which we know courtesy of Song and Angharad-”

Song waved him away, but Angharad was visibly pleased at the acknowledgement. As she should be, it took keen eyes and hands to undo a false bottom like the one the Pereduri had taken the cyphered journal Song deciphered from.

“That ring of magnates intends on arming workers and sailors to seize Fort Archelean, then the capital itself. They have Yellow Earth backing, both material and political, and supposedly a promise from Tianxia to sponsor Asphodel as a sister-republic.”

He paused.

“The magnates have been spreading around word that some leashed god is killing ‘malcontents’ on behalf of the Lord Rector, but we have no evidence that’s true.”

Angharad cleared her throat.

“I may have some insight on the process of those deaths,” she said.

The ceremony she described after – even throwing in the bits about the cult’s hierarchy at Song’s invitation – was not all that grim by Maryam’s standards but it was most definitely a breach of the Iscariot Accords. Bleeding a god to buy the deaths of your enemies was the sort of thing the Watch hanged you for. After putting you to the question for names.

“That’s useful to know,” Tristan noted. “And makes it seem rather likely the cult of the Odyssean was actually given names of those reluctant to join the revolution so they can be thrown into the death pile along with all the other people getting offed by the Odyssean’s jolly boys.”

Not the most inspired of tactics, Maryam thought, but it was likely to work if only because it would be difficult for anyone to believe the Trade Assembly had a leashed god assassin. If they did, why not knock off the ministers instead of their own reluctant workers? The answer was simple enough: they didn’t have a leashed god assassin. Their allies in the cult did, and they weren’t going to kill the membership of the other coup they were apparently running.

“Like your patron under the Kassa, this Temenos,” Angharad recalled.

“Like Temenos,” he agreed. “Who was very skeptical of the sales pitch from the Kassa about signing up to overthrow the Lord Rector and then got a visit from the leashed god. One that would have killed him if I were not present.”

Something he had never adequately explained, Maryam thought. The Thirteenth was currently assuming the leashed god was the same assassin the Nineteenth was pursuing and thus had the same signature – no witnesses, a single cut to the back of the neck – and that begged the question of why the bound god appeared while Tristan was still in that house. Even more so of why the thief had been invisible to it until he stepped in.

But that was not the thrust of their talk tonight, so Maryam joined in the others in turning an expectant look on Song. Their captain eventually sighed.

“My family is far estranged from the grand policies formed in the halls of the Ministry of Rites,” she reminded them. “Even before the Dimming we were not all that influential.”

The stares did not waver, so the Tianxi pinched the bridge of her nose.

“That said, I expect that if the magnates seizing the capital and the Lordsport it might be enough for the Ten Republics to offer their support regardless of whether or not it truly was promised through the Yellow Earth. Securing the shipyards would be worth the risk of war exploding across the Trebian Sea.”

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Angharad wrote ‘Magnates’ on the slate belatedly, then added Yellow Earth and Tianxia in smaller script beneath. In even smaller script she added ‘Cult of the Odyssean’ with a question mark.

“Then we have the ministers,” Maryam said. “They have Lord Gule among their ranks, which means some degree of Malani support. Their candidate for the throne is, at least nominally, Minister Apollonia Floros.”

Who in all these plots had not been mentioned as a participant even once. Was she truly a woman with clean hands like her old pupil the Lord Rector believed or had she simply slipped past the Thirteenth’s investigations? Were the Ecclesiast not noted to be a man by several sources, Maryam would have been tempted to bet it was Floros behind the veil. She still half-did. The known Ecclesiast might just be a fake, and Floros run everything from behind the curtain.

“That coup,” Angharad noted, “is backed by the cult of Odyssean in a rather more straightforward manner than that of the magnates.”

“They run it, maybe,” Tristan objected. “But the rank-and-file of that coup is too large to all be part of the cult. Besides, Gule told you the edges of the cult don’t know anything about what’s really going on. My guess is the cult took the reins of what was already a brewing coup around Apollonia Floros.”

“That…” Angharad began, then stopped. “That is not impossible. It might explain the sudden turn the cult took towards western nobles, bringing in key members of that incipient coup when they took it over.”

That and why no one in the cult seemed to care that whatever strange rituals were going on, they were unleashing lemures across Tratheke Valley. If all the main noble backers came from the other parts of the island, what did they care what happened to the heartlands? Foolish, considering the vast majority of Asphodel’s grain came from that breadbasket, but many lords would march right past the edge of the cliff if you dangled a pretty enough prize. Angharad finished writing ‘Malan’ and ‘Cult of the Odyssean?’ under ministers, Song speaking up the moment she tied off the last letter.

“As the cult of Odyssean is in the two columns, I would say it warrants being added to the slate as a third party,” the silver-eyed captain said. “One who has intentions separate of the other two.”

There was no objection, so Angharad did. Song leaned in.

“You told me, Angharad, that Lord Gule hinted at tensions within the ranks of the cult.”

“He seemed to believe it inevitable that after Apollonia Floros took the throne, cultists would begin turning on each other,” she said. “It is why he sought my services as a champion.”

Meaning the cult was more of a loose alliance under a god, bound by the priesthood, than a movement with a shared ambition. Considering the Odyssean was a ruthless, treacherous prick in the stories that wasn’t exactly a surprise. The god Oduromai might be a later coat of paint on the old tales, Maryam could easily understand why people preferred praying to him rather than Ol’ Knife-in-the-Back.

Older didn’t always mean better.

“I think Lord Gule has been had,” Song told them bluntly. “I believe that whoever this Ecclesiast is, they’ve never had any intention that the ministerial coup should succeed and they have been playing everyone from the start.”

“Now there’s an audacious leap,” Tristan cheerfully said, rubbing his hands. “Sell me on it, Ren.”

Said Ren shot him an amused look. Mere months ago, Maryam thought, that cheer would have been feigned and Song would have scowled at him so hard for the ‘insolence’ his face caught fire. Now it was she and Song who avoided looking at each other instead. Gods, even Angharad appeared more comfortable around their captain at the moment. She clenched her fists, feeling ever so slightly as if she were being left behind.

She wasn’t, she reminded herself. Tristan was back.

“It comes down to the assassins,” Song announced. “The bound god and the Obsidian Order. Now, we know that the contractor was sent by the cult of the Odyssean because they are the only ones who can cross the layer.”

That actually wasn’t true, Maryam thought, since Locke and Keys knew about the harpoon. On the other hand, the devils did not seem to be directly involved in any of the scheming so it was fair to discard them. Things were messy enough without cramming them in.

“And the contract with the Izcalli assassins bears the same initials as the name of Hector Anaidon, a confirmed priest of the Odyssean,” Tristan noted.

Song nodded at him.

“From Tristan’s time as a hostage we know the cult is associated enough with the magnate coup - and thus the Yellow Earth - that the Trade Assembly is able to send the bound god to kill individuals whose death would benefit their cause.”

“Within limits,” Maryam noted, echoing her earlier thought. “Else Minister Floros would be dead, and likely the Lord Rector as well.”

Song paused, conceded the point with a nod. As well she would, since it fed into her earlier assertion: the Ecclesiast wasn’t going to knock off all the pieces in the way of the magnates if he did not genuinely want them to succeed. He’d instead given just enough rope they could be convinced to hang themselves.

“When the contracted assassin first escaped the palace, by dint of her being Tianxi we originally suspected the Yellow Earth of being involved,” Song reminded them. “But when I sounded them out, they gave me a credible argument why it would not be them.”

“They claimed that civil war would prevent Tianxia from having access to the shipyard, which they ardently desire,” Angharad recalled. “Which was a lie, as they were already fomenting a coup.”

There had always been scorn when Angharad spoke of the Yellow Earth, Maryam thought, but now there was heat as well. She breathed in sharply, finally realizing why the two of them had left Black House for a few hours. They had gone to meet the Yellow Earth together. That should have been pleasing. And it was! But it also had her clenching her jaw, because why did Song only ever listen when it came to other people?

Song was willing to trust Angharad with a knife at her throat but not Maryam with a blade at her own. Infuriating.

“But was it a lie?” Song challenged them. “Tristan, you told me that when you attended the rally where Ai made an appearance many of those in the warehouse seemed newcomers, previously uninvolved.”

“They were,” he agreed with a frown. “The Kassa boys would never have come if Temenos didn’t have a close shave with the god, I am sure of it, and I asked around when I was a prisoner. At least another two of the major trading houses had never had workers show before that night.”

From what Maryam recalled, among the magnates something along the lines of seven trading families stood at the top of the heap. If the Trade Assembly hadn’t even been able to bring in the whole set of its most influential until this week, Song had a point: that did not sound like a coup ready for the trigger to be pulled.

“Hao Yu was not lying, even beyond his being unaware of what Ai was up to,” Song said.

Now that was news. Maryam glanced at Angharad, whose face betrayed nothing of the secrets she must have become privy to. Trouble inside the Yellow Earth? She itched to ask, to be brought into Song’s confidence again, but she knew the price for that. She refused to pay it, always shelling out the gold where everyone else tied to Song Ren got it all for free. It wasn’t Maryam’s fault that Song refused to listen when she told her the entire affair with Hooks was under control.

Maryam reached for another tea cake and scarfed it down, starving.

“They weren’t ready to seize the city, not back then,” Song said. “They might be right now, but weeks ago while they might have had the weapons they did not yet have the men. If they attempted a coup there was a good chance it would have failed, and if Evander Palliades died…”

“They would have to strike,” Maryam quietly said. “Otherwise the odds are good that Apollonia Floros would be on the throne by the week’s end without even need for a coup of her own, and she’d move against them immediately. The moment Evander Palliades dies, they have to move.”

Palliades really was the key to it all, wasn’t he? Not because of anything he did, but what he represented: legitimate order, the keeper of oaths. He was not so much a king as the bridle forced onto the bucking chaos.

“Exactly,” Song said. “Now, on the other hand, consider the position of the ministers: their coup is deeply infiltrated by the cult of the Odyssean, which knows a secret way into the palace through which soldiers can be smuggled. There are troops hidden in the capital, enough to take the palace, and the longer they stay out there the greater the odds someone will find their trail – as both the Watch and the Yellow Earth have.”

She paused.

“Assassinating Evander Palliades is preferable,” Song said, smoothing out a visible twinge of discomfort at the words. “It allows Apollonia Floros to take the throne without much violence. But when that assassination attempt failed, given possession of sufficient forces and a back entrance, why did the ministers not simply take the palace?”

“Traversing a layer is highly dangerous,” Maryam pointed out.

She did not look at Angharad as she did. No need to twist that knife, not when the other woman was still paying the dues on that debt.

“So they lose men,” Tristan shrugged. “Even if only half of what they march in gets through, with surprise on their side they probably win – or at least seize the lifts, which lets them stop reinforcements coming up from Fort Archelean. I recall that back when the Lord Rector made Song check through his lictors, there were about three hundred. When Brigadier Chilaca made his estimate of the ministerial forces it was…”

He trailed off, inviting someone who remembered the numbers to elaborate.

“Eighteen hundred,” Angharad provided. “And that estimate was made without knowledge of the Ambassador Gule’s involvement. It might well be more.”

“So even if only a third make it through the layer, they’ll rout the lictors,” Maryam conceded.

She leaned back, eyeing Song.

“All right, then. Why haven’t they taken the rector’s palace?”

“Because the cult of the Odyssean – the real cult of the Odyssean, not the gaggles of plotters they are using - hasn’t told them it is possible,” Song said. “And it has not because the Ecclesiast no more wants the coup of the ministers to succeed than he does the rising of the magnates. The intent is for both of them to try and fail.”

Tristan breathed in softly, cursed. Maryam frowned, for she wasn’t seeing whatever he just had.

“That would be lunacy,” Angharad frowned.

She hummed in agreement with the Pereduri.

“What would it accomplish?” Maryam asked. “I see no real gain to be had there.”

“Chaos,” Tristan said. “They’re not in it for a crown, Maryam. Shit, I said the same thing to Hage last night but I didn’t have enough to put it together then: this is too much work for just a crown. They’re not after a throne, never have been. They’re a cult, they worship a god.”

“The Ecclesiast sent an Izcalli assassin after Evander Palliades through one of his priests because he wanted both conspiracies to attempt their coup early,” Song said. “He wanted war in the streets of Tratheke with the last of the Palliades dead in the palace above, accusations flying while every noble in Asphodel calls their levies and great powers muster intervention fleets.”

“The Ataxia,” Maryam quietly said. “You’re describing the Ataxia come again, only worse.”

None of the great powers had stepped in when Asphodel last tore itself apart. Nothing on the island had been worth stepping into the mess, but the shipyard changed things. Song gently approached the board, lifted the chalk from Angharad’s hand and crossed out the ‘Odyssean’ part of the ‘Cult of Odyssean’ column. That word she replaced with two: Hated One.

“Fuck,” Maryam said, rubbing her forehead, because it made sense didn’t it? “The sickle, the one that the bound god wields to kill people. There’s nothing in the stories about the Odyssean that mentions a sickle and I would know - I read the damn Oduromeia front to back. It’s another god wearing a corpse, like the Red Maw.”

“It’s worse than that,” Tristan suddenly said. “Fortuna would have told me, if we had a repeat of the Dominion on our hands. She could see through it back then, to some extent.”

Song blinked.

“Are you certain?”

Maryam was treated to the mildly amusing sight of Song staring at thin air and precipitously having to put up her hands in apology at having doubted the unseen goddess. Well, she might as well twist that knife.

“I would never doubt you so, Lady Fortuna,” Maryam lied to thin air. “I trust you implicitly.”

She felt a brush against her nav, almost like an exhale, and swallowed a grin. It was always a good idea to get on the right side of gods. Especially those as consistently petty as Tristan’s patron.

“That’s the second part of the puzzle,” Tristan mused, ignoring the byplay. “Look, Angharad told us that her buddy Cleon mentioned the Odyssean going strange a while back. But evidently the god still exists enough that the contract exists, because Song read his off Cleon that first night at the feast.”

Song frowned.

“That’s… true,” she slowly said.

“And when Maryam cracked open the Odyssean’s old books, she found out that he used to be Oduromai before Asphodel decided their titular god needed a nice coat of paint,” Tristan said, jutting his thumb at her. “The Odyssean still exists, but he’s hardly even the stories now and he’s got exactly one contract that you saw in the entire royal court – with a second-rate country noble who’s got an old shrine to him on his lands. That god is more than halfway into the grave: he still has a story, but no one is praying to him anymore.”

“Enter the Hated One,” Maryam said. “Who has the opposite problem. If it is the Sickle – and it must, by its use of the artifact – then even centuries after it was sealed people still swear by its existence. Yet it no longer has a name to consolidate its power under, because the aether seal did exactly what it is meant to: it killed the old name.”

“Every time I heard it mentioned, it’s as a nameless god,” Tristan confirmed.

“Cleon held to its ways and considered them superior to current practices, but still could not name the spirit,” Angharad noted. “And he believed it was killed by the Second Empire, to boot.”

“The last two dynasties of Asphodel have been cleaning up their history,” Song said. “Evander admitted as much to me. I expect Hector Lissenos himself rewrote the histories to make the Sickle some ancient dead god. One there would be little gain in worshipping.”

And given that the latter years of the Ataxia had been spent exterminating the priesthood and temples of the Hated One, after a hundred years who would have been left to contradict those histories? Small pockets of faithful, but as their sealed god remained silent the temple would have become a cult and then withered on the vine. One did not long sacrifice to gods that gave nothing back.

“Prayer without a name,” Maryam muttered. “A name without prayer. It’s not a puppet, they’re fusing. That explains what’s happening with the Asphodel crowns.”

She got odd looks from everyone save for Song. Admittedly, it would have sounded strange without knowing what the Asphodel crowns were.

“They’re flowers, tied symbolically to Oduromai and the crown of Asphodel,” she explained. “They’ve been having strange effect on the local aether. I didn’t think it would be related to the Odyssean, considering it’s a symbol of Oduromai, but it makes sense. Oduromai became the patron god of the isle by replacing the Odyssean.”

“And now the Odyssean, or something close, tries to steal back that presence in the aether,” Song mattered.

And the flowers were a logical symptom of that struggle, Maryam thought. Tied to Oduromai but not the Odyssean, they were as a fault line where one god began and the other ended. Their strange emanations were the metaphysical equivalent of the sound a loaf of bread made when being ripped in two. And it explains why Oduromai gave Song a hint when the Obsidian Order came for the Lord Rector, Maryam mused. He was aware enough of what was happening to try to check the plots of the cult of the somewhat-Odyssean.

“There is some clear overlap between the two deities,” Tristan mused. “The Sickle’s some sort of death god and the Odyssean wasn’t short on corpses in his legends, the way you tell it.”

He paused.

“The Odyssean’s worshippers don’t know about this, though, not even the contractors – else Cleon Eirenos would have been aware enough he shouldn’t talk about it even to pretty girls. That tells me this entire plot should be the doing of a cult of the Hated One.”

“Your point?” Angharad asked.

Tristan cleared his throat.

“Now, I’m no theologist but I figure it’s probably not as easy as rubbing idols together to make gods become one. It probably takes a ritual.”

“It isn’t,” Maryam agreed.

Captain Traore’s words from this morning came to mind: it wouldn’t be as simple as a few human sacrifices to wake up the Hated One in its prison, much less amalgamate him with the Odyssean. This sort of theology was hardly Maryam’s area of expertise, but if she had to guess? Sacrificing gods would be the easiest way to get those horses running, in particular gods whose aether taint was similar to the result you were trying to achieve. Force-feeding the nascent new god, essentially.

That would have taken decades anywhere else she could think of, but here on Asphodel? The furious aether currents made it doable in mere years instead.

“The four contracts the Scholomance brigades took on are connected,” Song said. “They must be, it all fits together.”

She stepped up to the slate, taking the chalk from Angharad. 4, she wrote.

“Tupoc’s brigade discovered an old temple out east, one with sickle symbols inside that has traces of being forcefully shut down in the past,” she said. “More recently, an expedition takes from its altar a sacred artifact, in the process expelling a Ladonite dragon from its lair and setting it on the countryside.”

11, Song wrote.

“The bloody rituals out in the hills that Imani Langa has been investigating,” Maryam said. “They said that six people were buried alive at the sites. That number doesn’t mean anything to the sickle god, but it’s the number of wives the Odyssean had imprisoned to follow him into death.”

Burial for the Sickle, six living souls for the Odyssean. A ritual stitching the gods together, one bloody summons at a time.

“A marriage of the concepts, ritually sealed by murder,” Song unknowingly echoed. “And what does it achieve?”

19, she wrote.

“The murders investigated by the Nineteenth Brigade,” Angharad said. “The cult collects names from both the magnates and the ministers, then sends the bound god to kill them. Given the sometimes-contradictory interests this represents, the murders appear without reason.”

“Tozi complained that some of the murders seemed without any possible political reason,” Song noted. “That likely springs from the personal deaths requested by cult members at ceremonies like the one Doukas led.”

Maryam frowned, not yet sold on that. Song had told her simple shopkeepers had been murdered the same as nobles, so she did not believe it so simple. There had been something important about those seeming nobodies, it simply was not yet apparent. That was instinct talking instead of reason, though, so she held her tongue. Tristan had risen while she was lost in thought, rapping his knuckle above the written 4.

"Here's my curiosity,” he said. “So some cultist of the Hated One gets his hands on the sacred sickle after finding the temple, likely our not-yet-Ecclesiast. Odds are that’s the same artifact the cult cuts up the Golden Ram with, and maybe even the one the bound god uses to kill people.”

He paused, leaving room for others to disagree, but no one did.

“Now, no matter how many people get cut with that sickle it won’t change anything, because the Hated One is still under the aether seal,” he continued. “So the Ecclesiast gets the bright idea to connect his patron to another god and use that name to sidestep the seal, doing the religious equivalent of fencing the goods through the Odyssean. All the while, the sickle stays front and center in all the rites to ensure that his god stays the big dog in that kennel, that the final result is more Hated One than Odyssean. Which would work?”

Eyes went to her.

“Which would work,” Maryam confirmed.

Using an artifact soaked in the Hated One’s particular aether taint would seed it through the coalescing entity in the aether like grain in a field. It was not a guarantee, but it should strongly tip the balance the way of the Hated One. Tristan nodded sharply.

“All right, good. So as I said here’s my curiosity: if the Hated One gobbles up the Odyssean more than the other way around, won’t the Odyssean get sucked into Hated One and thus the prison layer? If the whole point of this is to get the Hated One out, it seems a glaring flaw in the plan.”

“Fusion would mean they become a different god than either, strictly speaking,” Maryam said, then bit her lip. “But I think you’re right – if the Hated One wins out, then the resulting entity should still be stuck inside the prison layer. Like two weights at the opposite end of a rope, the heavier of the two will move the other.”

“With a new name and dominion, the aether seal might no longer apply,” Angharad noted. “It could be a measure to enable the empowering of the Hated One so the spirit might break free of its prison on its own.”

“All this just to get around the seal?” Tristan challenged. “There had to have been easier ways.”

He had a point. For such a massive plot to culminate in a chance to free the Hated One after several years more of sacrificing to him would be absurd.

“And it leaves a question: what is it becoming a god of?” Maryam wondered.

“Killing for gain,” Angharad absent-mindedly said.

Every other gaze in the room went on the Pereduri, to her visible surprise.

“Well,” she said, startled by their startlement, “who has it been killing? Those who would advance the cause of one coup or another, or the personal ambitions of cultists. If the cause does not matter, then it must be the very act of killing that matters.”

“Huh,” Maryam said.

Song cocked an eyebrow at her.

“No, no,” Maryam said. “That holds up. The Odyssean murdered for ambition constantly, in his story, and from what we know of the Sickle it’s a god of death empowered by the corpses in the ground. There’s a working intersection there.”

“But the new deity would still be imprisoned in the layer,” Song slowly said. “Unless, of course, it were to suddenly be fed a sacrifice beyond compare. Strength enough to break free.”

“A sacrifice like two failed coups resulting in a civil war, everyone killing everyone else to grab the empty throne,” Tristan finished. “Killing for gain on a scale not seen in centuries.”

There was a moment of shivering silence, as they realized what they might just have unearthed. With a slightly trembling hand, Song wrote ‘13’ on her slate. The last piece of the puzzle, the explanation for the incoherent maze of contradictory conspiracies their brigade had uncovered one after another.

“Fuck,” Maryam said, and by the looks on their faces they all agreed.