Pale Lights

Chapter 61

Chapter 61

“Huh,” Maryam said when the tale was done, honestly a little impressed. “That’s not just a fumble, it’s a disastrous fumble.”

“I am not unaware,” Song replied through gritted teeth.

Oh, she hadn’t liked that.

“A calamitous fumble,” Maryam continued.

The teeth grit harder, but not hard enough. Another log must be tossed into the fire.

“Perhaps even a cataclysmic fumb-”

“Maryam,” Song hissed angrily.

“Fine, fine, I’ll stop,” Maryam lied.

She would give her captain an hour of peace at most. Occasions to hold Song’s feet to the fire until the room smelled of pork were too rare not to thoroughly abuse when they popped up. It was like corn, you had to get your fill when it was the season for the crop.

In a sign of genuine distress, Song Ren had for once in her life refused an offer to sit down for tea when she came to Maryam looking like she did not know whether to scream or throw up. Instead the visibly troubled Tianxi – the visible part was yet another warning sign – had sat on her bed with her knees folded against her chest, holding one of the single dryest historical chronicles Maryam had ever disinterestedly paged through the same way a child would a blanket.

As a good friend, the signifier had refrained from eating the nuts in a bowl on the table since the crunching noise might distract some from the tale being told. Even though she was pretty hungry. Cashews, though. She would be getting back to those later.

“It does not sound unsalvageable, if that’s your worry,” Maryam shrugged. “Say what you will about Angharad Tredegar, but if she is finished with you there will be nothing uncertain about it.”

Neither frosty disdain nor public stabbings left a lot of room for speculation as to the Pereduri’s opinions.

“I may well have killed any friendship there was between us,” Song sharply said.

“Then you killed that back on the Dominion when you pulled that trigger,” Maryam said. “Everything that has been built since that moment was a manor on quicksand.”

She met Song’s gaze unflinching until the silver eyes turned away. Killing the infanzona had not been a moment of pride, whatever else might might be said of it.

“Ruesta was too dangerous to continue letting loose,” Song said. “Even within days of Angharad knowing about her contract she had her charmed and toeing the line of her promises again.”

“All that Malani ever do is toe the line of their given oaths,” Maryam snorted. “They tie themselves up in knots and call it an honor when they figure out how to live with what give there is in the rope.”

She cleared her throat when Song turned an unimpressed look on her. However true, her words had drifted some from the matter at hand.

“You made the decision that Isabel Ruesta should be killed,” Maryam said. “Fair enough. I am not certain I would have made the same - and I know Tristan would not have, if only in the hope that released back into Sacromonte that snake might yet bite other infanzones – but part of the trials was to make those decisions. It was your right to make that choice, and even to hide it.”

That was part of the trials as well, after all. To clip the wings of threats and get away with it, to make the right allies and the right enemies. The Watch was looking for killers and survivors, not would-be martyrs. Maryam did not begrudge Angharad how she had played the trials, trying to save as many as she could and holding to gallantry as law, but it would be childish to pretend hers had been the only valid path.

Tupoc Xical had spent his entire stay malingering, betraying and murdering but the Academy had still welcomed him with open arms at the end.

“That is not how she sees it, evidently,” Song muttered.

“That’s because when the trial ended, you didn’t tell her the truth,” Maryam said, and hesitated.

It did not escape the silver gaze.

“What?”

The Izvorica sighed. She was not eager to get into what lay between the two of them, but she supposed she owed Song as much.

“I’ve sat across a table from Angharad Tredegar quite a bit, over the last month,” she said. “And she’s not… inflexible, at least not in the way we sometimes assume of her. She would not be able to use her contract the way she does if that were the case. You keep missing it because you have the Tianxi blinders on.”

“Pardon me?” Song said, a tad coolly.

“Your people love an absolute, Song,” Maryam bluntly replied. “It’s in the bones of everything you make and do. All are free under Heaven, yes?”

“I don’t follow,” Song frowned.

“Your poetry is always about how that moonlit night is the most beautiful there ever was, that tragedy the most despairing. Your enemies are the most wretched, your affairs the most sensual. Everything Tianxia does is on a bedrock of universal truth.”

“I am unsure whether or not I should take offense to that description,” the other woman admitted.

Maryam rolled her eyes. Only gods and fools took offense to their reflection in the lake.

“My point is, the Malani do not have that,” she said. “All their truths are circumstantial. Limited.”

Song blinked.

“That is madness,” she slowly said. “Malani are famously obsessed with an unbending code of honor.”

“That’s reputation, Song,” Maryam chided. “Look at how they act, though. They qualify every sentence, word them to get around potential lies, say ‘I believed’ or ‘I think’ instead of ‘it is’. The only way they can function is by putting every action they take or witness in a little box that separates if from every other action taken.”

Sometimes she thought that the way they were able to swallow something like slavery so easily was that their honor was not so much about espousing good deeds as containing fault.

“That’s…” Song trailed off. “Well, one of the most interesting interpretations I have heard of Malani customs, but also a different discussion.”

“No,” Maryam said. “Because my point is Tredegar thinks exactly like that. If you had told her at the end of the trials she would have understood you deceiving her as being ‘part of the trial’, a closed garden where that action remains reprehensible but is allowed by the rules. But then you kept lying by omission when the only circumstances between you two were purely personal, so that part she can only take personally.”

Men tolerated things from a practitioner or a king they would not from a brother, even though they loved the brother better. The role mattered as much the act, sometimes.

“I don’t see what difference what you said makes,” Song admitted. “In the end, however roundabout the path the conclusion is still that she is angry at me for withholding the truth from her and acting behind her back.”

Maryam smoothed away the flare of irritation. For someone so clever, so capable of reading a room and turning enemies on each other, Song could sometimes miss the forest for the trees. It was not her fault, though, it was Maryam who was odd. She had to think the way she did because she was far away and surrounded by strangers whose strange ways were opaque. Knowing why people took offense to the things they did was the difference between a cold look and drawn blade.

She did not have the luxury of ignorance, not when her mistakes were always paid for.

“Because you’re not just fighting with her,” she spelled out, “you are in a spat with how Angharad Tredegar sees the world. Tea and apologies and a grand gesture aren’t going to fix this, Song, because that would be two friends mending a bridge and that’s not the trouble you’re in. Not really.”

Song’s lips thinned. Bunched up like that on her bed, the Tianxi was unusually open in her expressions – the layer of calm and control thinned enough Maryam could easily make out the shapes moving beneath the silk. Song Ren was not convinced, but enough of what she had been told rang of the truth she was considering it seriously.

“Then what do I do?” she quietly asked.

Maryam leaned back in her chair and grabbed some of the cashews from the bowl. She’d done good work, wages were owed.

“Prove her wrong by her own rules,” she replied. “Demonstrate that, within personal circumstances, you do trust her.”

“That easy, is it?” Song sarcastically asked.

Maryam popped a few cashews, chewed merrily. Salted! She stole a second handful even though the first was not entirely finished, loudly swallowing.

“Figure it out,” she shrugged. “Look, on occasion I might like Angharad Tredegar but at the end of the day I don’t like Angharad. You understand?”

“We barely speak the same language,” Song snorted, “but I catch your drift. Her being personally agreeable does not change most of your grievances with her.”

Maryam nodded approvingly. She had once thought there was no way the two of them could share a brigade, but she had been wrong in that. Angharad was not… malicious, even at her worst. Childish or selfish, but not with a poisoned edge. That she could adjust, and made an effort to, made her tolerable and admittedly sometimes even enjoyable. In small doses.

Maryam could not see herself ever considering the other woman a friend so long as she did not grasp the evil that lay at the heart of Malan, cloaked in talk of laws and honor, but a brigade was not a sworn sisterhood. They could share a roof and a side without braiding each other’s hair.

Song slowly exhaled, her knees pulling away from her chest as her legs spread on the bed. The book ended up on her lap, only loosely held.

“She said that Ruesta only wanted to live,” Song finally said. “That to kill her was unnecessary so close to Cantica.”

It was unfair to be irritated with her for that, Maryam told herself. For not getting it. Song had to think that deeds were the only that mattered, because it was the only way she could go to bed without weeping. If Song Ren did not believe that actions were what mattered most, that they defined everything and could change everything, then the certainty that had her get up in the morning and pursue the dream of overturning the legacy of the Dimming would crumble like wet paper.

It was just that sometimes that also meant Song thought of everything as things she did right or wrong, like the world was a puzzle box she had to solve correctly. Maryam felt a pang of sympathy for Angharad, who she suspected mostly wanted to know that Song did not think of her as being the Watch equivalent of an expensive warhorse.

“Days away with hollows nipping at your heels and everybody dead tired isn’t nothing. And Ruesta was constantly using her contract after having made a promise not to, the way you told me,” Maryam finally said. “Sure, a promise she was technically no longer bound to, but by that same logic you were no longer bound not to put a bullet in her skull.”

Hilarious that Ferranda had tried the same thing just a moment before, really. The infanzona reminded Maryam of some of her mother’s war captains, the ones with fine reputations and rivals who kept dying on raids.

“It is frustrating she would still defend someone using a charm contract on her even now,” Song admitted. “Enough to make me wonder at her judgement.”

“It was an influence contract, not control,” Maryam reminder her. “There’s a good argument there were insidious secondary effects to it, but I don’t think that the girl with the big eyes and the bigger tits had to do a lot of charming to talk Angharad Tredegar into walking the fine line of a promise so she’d be able to get her hands under that skirt.”

“Maryam,” Song reproached, coughing into her fist.

“That’s a lot of coyness from a girl who went for seconds in the creepy brass house,” Maryam retorted without batting an eye.

Cheeks flushed red.

“I should never have told you that,” the Tianxi muttered.

The signifier grinned. Too late for regrets. Between that and the admission that Evander Palliades was not above getting on his knees to convey his negotiating position to the Republics – and successfully, too, good on him - she had material to work with.

“But as for Tredegar… she’s always going to be who she is, Song,” Maryam told her. “Eager to get pretty girls into bed and trying to protect as many people as she can whether they deserve it or not. I’d think hard on that before deciding how far you want to go to mend bridges.”

Song frowned.

“Whether it is the friendship I want to salvage or whether I still want her as part of the Thirteenth,” she said.

“You talk like you do,” Maryam said. “And I don’t hate the notion the way I did back at Scholomance, I’ll grant.”

The Tianxi studied her for a moment.

“And Tristan…”

“I do not, in fact, speak for Tristan Abrascal,” Maryam drily said. “We argue too, you know. But if I had to wager, I’d say that he will be comfortable with the idea in a Tristan sort of way.”

“Afraid of her, but the danger is predictable and thus makes him feel safer than if there was nothing visible to be afraid of,” Song said.

Essentially. Their captain was beginning to know the man decently. In truth Maryam suspected that her viper rather liked Angharad, simply in a way that involved no true loyalty or investment of emotion. That was the Murk in him, she thought, and this Nerei’s lessons too. He’d been taught it was fine to like others, so long as it was shallow and did not weigh more than a feather on the scales.

“The friendship, at least, I would save,” Song murmured. “It was… I do like her, you know.”

It’s just that everyone else liked her too, Maryam thought, and you liked that almost as much as you do her. She could not even be too angry about that, now when could understand Song’s craving better than most. She had not grasped how much she liked to be liked before being met with casual contempt and distrust everywhere she went. Song had liked to stand by the hearth and bathe in the warmth, even if it wasn’t really hers.

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“It is refreshing, being with someone who wants to be good, and she is surprisingly funny,” Song continued. “Even as a captain, I think we are better off with her.”

The Tianxi set down the book on the sheets. Maryam discretely ate a mouthful of cashews in the interval, ceasing to chew when Song’s attention returned.

“Not even because of the blade, though that is no small thing, but she does not compromise as easily as the rest of us do,” Song murmured. “She wants us to do things right – I wouldn’t have thought twice about that deal with the Brazen Chariot, if she hadn’t said anything.”

She discreetly swallowed.

“But,” Maryam said.

“But we won’t always be able to do things right,” Song said. “That is not a luxury we have as members of the Watch. I’m not sure if she will understand that. And, to be frank, I do not always agree with what she feels is right in the first place.”

Maryam said nothing, for she had already spoken all the words she had it in her to speak. While she would consider being the voice of virtue to the Thirteenth a special kind of torment given who made it up, she thought that Song might be underestimating Angharad. The Pereduri was not afraid to twist words to get her way, when she thought something was needed, and she’d not tried to usurp captainship of the cabal even when she had disagreed with Song’s decisions.

Within the circumstances of ‘Song being the commanding officer’, the laws of engagement would likely be quite different from the lines Angharad Tredegar would draw in the sand when it came to her personal life. And she’d proved she could put the job above her pride, in the countryside. It was no small influence on why Maryam had made her peace with the possibility of the Pereduri sticking around.

But all those things she had already said, and would not repeat them. If that bird was to take flight then it was Song that needed to take the steps by herself. To speak to Tredegar about her fear, to extend the trust. Anything else was just delaying the inevitable. And now that she had been a friend, she thought as she polished off the last of the seized cashews, she must be a cabalist.

“The Lefthand House,” Maryam said. “Leveraging her, you said. That’s a concern.”

And not something they could really do anything about in the immediate. Getting the Krypteia involved with the Malani spies would inevitably also mean getting them involved in the neighboring Yellow Earth situation, which Song desperately wanted to avoid.

“Something is off there,” Song frowned. “They are blackmailing her about her father, but for what? If the Lefthand House knew about her having joined the Watch, Lord Gule would not be recruiting her into the cult of the Golden Ram. If they do not know of her joining, then what is it they want from her?”

“The infernal forge,” Maryam suggested.

“Do they need to threaten her for this?” Song replied. “From Lord Gule’s perspective, she is already obtaining it for them.”

“Then it might be the Lefthand House and the ambassador want different things,” Maryam said, more to keep Song talking than because she genuinely believed it.

“The most likely answer, and yet senseless,” Song muttered. “Without the backing of the Lefthand House, and thus implicitly of the High Queen, how could a mere ambassador dare to support a coup overthrowing the Lord Rector of Asphodel?”

“And if they’re not on the same page, why is the man still alive?” Maryam mused. “Obviously they know of the coup to some extent. It’s an extension of Malani policies in the Trebian Sea, it would be absurd for Gule to be acting alone.”

“Perhaps the Lefthand House does not want the forge in the hands of the cult,” Song said.

“It’s not the cult asking Angharad to find it, it’s Lord Gule,” Maryam reminded her. “With the implication that with her having cleaned her slate with the Lefthand House and proved herself he will vouch for her and have her initiated into the ranks.”

The Tianxi grimaced.

“I cannot make sense of it,” she said. “We are missing something.”

“Whatever they want, so long as the coup is being handled by the Lord Rector the Lefthand House can’t do much,” Maryam said. “They are spies, not an invading army. I don’t mind letting that simmer until you’ve either made amends or we can put Tristan on sniffing something out.”

“I don’t like how many of our solutions can be summed up by the word ‘waiting’,” Song grimaced, “but then it would not be a good idea to press her on this.”

“And you need to take care of your Yellow Earth situation,” Maryam bluntly said. “On top of our lingering Ivory Library problem. I tell you now, if we don’t have a solid lead by the time Tristan returns bodies are going to start dropping.”

“I am well aware, thank you,” Song sighed, passing a hand through her hair. “For the latter, I have a final suspect and a notion in how they interrogated.”

“Captain Santos,” Maryam guessed.

“He is meant to investigate the Ivory Library’s influence on the delegation,” Song said. “I might not have the power to order the arrest of a suspect, but he does.”

“If you can convince him,” Maryam said.

“If I can convince him,” Song echoed tiredly. “As for the Yellow Earth, well, not even Chilaca would dare put me out in public again after that Landing Day skirmish. I can pass them general information about the Watch and palace under my discretion as captain of the Thirteenth without it being outright treason.”

It would be a decision Song would have to justify to Wen afterwards, in the reports, but the Watch did not forbid involvement with even the worst of sorts. You never knew when you might need their help to deal with something entirely worse. Song grimaced.

“Then I will tell them that I am no longer the Lord Rector’s escort and can thus am no longer told of any measures being taken by he or the Watch,” she added.

They’re not going to let you off that easily, Maryam thought. Which, by the look of that grimace, Song suspected as well.

“Take someone with you,” she said.

Song blinked.

“That seems unw-”

“Take someone with you, Captain Ren,” Maryam said, and this time her voice brooked no argument. “They have you by the throat, bring someone who won’t just be thinking about their grip tightening the entire time.”

Song studied her a long moment.

“You won’t let me refuse that, will you?”

Maryam smiled sharply.

“Try me,” she challenged.

A long moment passed, then finally Song nodded.

“So I will,” she promised.

--

It took three days for Maryam to figure it out, all in all.

The first day was, admittedly, mostly waiting around. Her report needed to make it to the Lord Rector, who would in turn decide whether or not her request to investigate the palace looking for the ‘cork’ of the Hated One’s prison was to be accepted, along with the implicit access to the regular and private archives that puzzling out the location would require.

Normally Evander Palliades could be counted on to promptly reply whenever a matter involved the Thirteenth, usually by tossing an audience their way in the hopes that Song might thus be delivered to his palace for lusting after, but this time would be different. Maryam had been back from the shipyard for a day now, and gone through all the mandatory debriefs. Which meant Brigadier Chilaca would be headed up to the palace to have a little talk with the Lord Rector.

The one that’d been getting put off, about that coup aiming to knife him and put his old regent on his throne while the cult of the probably-not-Golden-Ram pulled at her strings to rule Asphodel from behind the curtains. Not only was that talk likely to take some time – as would the ensuing panicked preparations to make it harder to seize the palace – but there would be diplomatic talks about the shipyard, sundry negotiations and other matters to occupy the Lord Rector’s day.

There would also be the slight complication that Evander Palliades was going to be made aware that the Thirteenth Brigade had been sitting on information about that coup for some time and even at some point been contractually obligated to mention it to him only for Song to keep quiet about. At Chilaca’s order, admittedly, but that the woman he was so taken with would hide such a thing from him would finally provide weight on the other side of the balance from ‘saved my life twice and saw her naked’.

Maryam was honestly a little surprised when on the morning of her thirty-first day on Asphodel summons to the palace came to Black House. She’d been expecting to be put off for a few days more at least as a show of displeasure. Regardless, with that whole affair with Angharad and its aftermath she was only able to head out to the Collegium after noon.

The first difference was that, instead of being sent to the Lord Rector’s office, this time she was greeted by Majordomo Timon. A bit of cooling in the relations then, though not so much they were being given the runaround with a minor official. Though it might simply be that beyond the majordomo there were few in the palace that could actually voice the permission to access the private archives without it being treason, she then wondered.

Either way, she had permission to sniff around the palace – under escort – and to the general palace archives. To access the private ones again would be only on request. Unfortunate but not unfair. She did have hidden intentions, as a matter of fact, so their precautions were entirely warranted. Maryam had claimed it necessary to inspect the rector’s palace to find where the ‘cork’ of the Hated One’s prison was located, and she did intend to find that.

But allowing the Lord Rector to guard it was not the most important reason why she was after the location.

She had a theory, Maryam did. As a general rule, while aether did tend to mirror the material world laymen tended to misunderstand what that actually meant. The realm of aether was not a single great mirror facing Vesper and reflecting it darkly, it was an endless number of connected mirrors of changing sizes mirroring specific parts of Vesper.

What was a layer, then? It was easy to say that a layer was ‘a lasting impression on aether caused by strong emanations’, the textbook definition, but observed as a phenomenon how could it be described? Language tended to be one of the great obstacles in the study of metaphysics, as the concepts involved frequently had no easy description, but sticking by the mirror metaphor a layer would be as if a particular reflection was frozen in time and made into a place.

That description held up for the likes of the Witching Hour and Lucifer’s Landing, but the strange empty layer that Maryam and Tristan had tread through while chasing the assassin was a different thing. No natural phenomenon could create such an empty layer, it must be caused by an entirely artificial process. Metaphorically speaking? Someone had smashed the mirror with a hammer and frozen a reflection of that.

Given that by nature what resulted would be fragile, unstable and dangerous those pieces were bound to get swept up by the local aether currents if some strong boundaries were not set around them. That was no doubt why Lord Rector Hector Lissenos had been comfortable having the entrance to the Hated One’s prison be somewhere in the palace where he slept. The ‘cork’ to the prison, wherever it was in the palace, would be one of the strongest boundaries on it.

Which meant that somewhere in the rector’s palace Maryam would find a location with a boundary strong enough to let her finish eating the shade. It was just a matter of finding it, and she would keep looking as long as it took.

Majordomo Timon politely accompanied her for a whole minute, then just as politely saddled her with a pair of escorts: a palace servant and a lictor. The latter was a tall, taciturn woman who avoided looking at any exposed skin of Maryam’s while refusing to meet her eyes, the former a smiling young man by the name of Iasos. In his early twenties, fit, curly hair and blue eyes. Charming.

Too polished and pretty, as far as she was concerned. Maryam had no use for anything that would not well weather being splashed with mud.

They began the search with the gardens, which at this hour of the day were well lit. It was not difficult to again find the place she had first slipped through into the layer, past the field of Asphodelian crowns, but groping around with her nav she found only smooth, sterile nothingness. She and the shade had relied on some temporary ripple to enter, then. That made sense, she conceded. While her revelation down in the shipyard had cast in doubt that the shade was a parasite, it was still clearly a creature of the aether in some way.

It would be able to feel unevenness in the aether in ways that not even the most skillful of Akelarre could. No matter how skillful a swimmer a man might become, that did not turn him into a fish.

“Shall we visit the other location designated by the Watch, my lady?” Iasos smiled.

“There’s no point,” she absent-mindedly replied.

The location Tristan had given the Lord Rector would be of no use to her, since the assassin had likely been using some sort of tool to enter from there. It could not be the cork. Which, she now considered, might well mean that wherever the cork was – and thus where the killer had first emerged from - the assassin had believed it too difficult a place to return to the layer through. Inside the palace proper, then, she mused. One of the better guarded sections.

“To the archives,” she told her escorts. “I need to have a look at plans of the palace grounds.”

Captain Wen had done so himself once, so they should not be restricted. It turned out they were not – they weren’t even in the private archives, merely the palace ones – because the plans as available were really more of an outline. While the parts of the buildings used to entertain guests and the likes were highly detailed, private wings of the rector’s palace were essentially outlines with no further detailing. Still, it would do.

Aether engineering on the scale of building a half-layer wasn’t something that could be stashed in a broom cupboard, it was large in scale and relied heavily on the use of conceptual shapes.

The rector’s palace, seen from above, was essentially two rectangles sprouting out from the flanks of a large square. Gardens spun out in every direction, since the palace did not need to have roads leading to it – it was supplied by lift, from below. The natural place for a cork would be the center of the square, with hidden anchors at the four corners of the square to stabilize it. That could not be, however, because she already knew exactly what was there: the lifts leading up from the Collegium.

Constant movement and emanations from the people passing through was the opposite of what you wanted on a boundary pressed into the aether. You might as well build a palisade on a bed of termites. Besides Wen had once told her that the lift to the private archives, which was right above the Collegium lifts, had been built in the days of King Oduromai. The square section of the palace was the first and oldest, built centuries before Hector Lissenos was even born. Considering said Hector was the one to have the Hated One’s prison built, that rather disqualified the section of the palace.

It must be one of the other internal shapes, like the rectangles. As the right wing was mostly for guests and formal receptions it was very detailed on the map, enough that Maryam ended up worrying her lip: the opposite corners of that rectangle were claimed by rooms of sizes that did not match. That probably could still work, if you had the right knowhow, but it had long odds. The left wing it was, then.

She glanced back at Iasos, who had been waiting in silence with an increasingly strained smiled, while the lictor stood there staring at the ceiling in profound boredom.

“Are you familiar with the left wing of the palace?” she asked.

“I am, my lady,” the servant replied.

“Good,” she said. “I need to see the rooms in each corner of the wing.”

Maryam did remember to look up the sewer map that Angharad had requested, though gods only knew why, and traced a Sign to commit it to memory. She would trace it out for her at Black House.

They proceeded to the left wing, and by the second room she knew it wasn’t the correct part of the palace either. The top right corner room was circular, the bottom left room a long gallery hall. Maryam was not Deuteronomicon tinker, or even a Savant learned deep in the lore of aether, but she knew bare bones: contrasting round shapes and corner shapes in aether structures did not work on the scale of a building. They incited the aether differently.

“You seem dissatisfied, my lady,” Iasos observed.

“I am missing something,” Maryam replied in half a mutter, glaring at the wall. “Is there something below either room we visited? An older foundation, perhaps.”

“This level is the older foundation, my lady,” Iasos replied. “This was built under the Archeleans, only renovated during the rule of House Lissenos.”

Maryam squinted at him.

“Which Lissenos?” she asked.

He looked taken aback.

“I do not know,” Iasos admitted.

“Find out,” she ordered.

And there was the thread to pull: it was their old friend Hector who’d done those reconstructions and also he who built the level above them. It was the same for the right wing, and thus Maryam realized her mistake; she had not considered the multiple levels while looking for shapes. This time she had to send for maps from the private archives, and once she finished scribbling what should be the shape if one could see into the palace from outside the results were puzzling.

Oh, there was a pattern. Mirroring rooms in the exact same shape and size, built or renovated under Hector Lissenos. The problem was that the mirroring was not internal to the left and right wings: it was between the different wings, the top left room of one rectangle reflecting the bottom right of the other.

“It can’t be internal to either wing, then,” she muttered to herself, rubbing the bridge of her nose. “It has to be in the central square.”

Only Hector Lissenos had not, apparently, built anything there. Or even changed much beyond sprucing up the throne room some. Hitting the books, it was clear that many of the rulers who’d followed him had their own notions of how to improve the oldest part of their palace – which Maryam had to conceded made sense, since the palace she’d walked through did not look like had been built centuries ago. How could the cork of the prison be in there, if the layout kept changing?

She looked back at a still-waiting Iasos.

“The original structure that palace was built out of is Antediluvian, correct?” she asked.

“The foundation of the central palace and the lifts themselves,” the servant confirmed. “Though, of course, the materials left behind by the Ancient were used for the foundations of the palace expansions as well.”

She paused.

“You only said the foundation of the central palace,” she slowly said. “Who built the upper levels?”

“It is hard to say, my lady,” the servant said. “Presumably King Oduromai and his descendants, who in time were succeeded by the Archeleans.”

Oh, but Maryam was a fool. Hector Lissenos, who seemed to delight in cleverness, had decided to cut a corner: instead of building the cork from scratch, he’d attached his prison layer to something already there. The wings had been built that way to strengthen something that already existed, not serve as the foundation of a new cork.

The private archives were an old gaol in the shape of six rooms surrounding a single hole. And it was said that King Oduromai had locked up his six wives in there to make them into aether spirits that would serve him when he became a god. And assuming he really had used that place in some kind of ritual to press some impression of his mind into a nascent god?

Then by Necalli’s principle of occupancy, that the same discrete quantity of aether cannot hold two affects simultaneously, then the aether in the private archives was probably the single most unbreakable seal on all of Asphodel. So long as Oduromai kept being worshipped then nothing would ever get through that cork. No wonder Hector Lissenos had been willing to sleep so close to a path into the Hated One’s prison, she thought.

“My lady?”

Maryam cleared her throat.

“I need to talk to Majordomo Timon,” she said. “Please arrange this.”

Already she was preparing her wording. It was going to be tricky, convincing the man that she needed to be given time alone in the private archives with no lights and preferably no one close enough to make noise, but it was necessary for what she had in mind.

She’d been eating bites of the Cauldron taken blindly, whatever she could rip out of the shade in the moment, but that was halfhearted work. It was time for her to get her bearings and prevent the bleed destroying the rightful knowledge of the Izvoric, get everything that she could.

Thankfully, no one liked to argue with a Navigator when they started using words like ‘solipsistic contamination’ and ‘inflicted null states’, which sounded very dangerous but were just fancy ways to say it was easier to Sign when nobody else was around to distract you and muck up the aether. Majordomo Timon went pale as a sheet – or her reflection in a mirror – and promised to urgently approach the Lord Rector on the matter.

The letter bearing agreement and the Lord Rector’s seal arrived at Black House before her rented carriage did. Tomorrow evening she would be granted the run of the private archives, as asked.

Now she just needed to prepare for a ritual.