Pale Lights

Chapter 174 47

It came in fits and starts, in flickers.

Someone shouting. Angharad?

Red and gold, Fortuna clutching at his arm and silently mouthing words he couldn't make out: his sight was hazy, he was both falling and not.

The endless void on all sides somehow pressing against him, like the waves of a yawning empty sea.

A ghost with a ragged hole in her stomach, begging and bargaining as she held on to a rope of nothing dragging her into the deeps.

Porcelain fingers digging into his wrist, flickers of colors as gods tore through nothingness like a shower of falling stars.

Fortuna forcing his eyes to meet hers, her golden locks and eyes dimming.

"Scholomance," she whispered. "It's taking us into Scholomance. I bet on you."

A ripple of something like heat through his veins, his fingernails aching as a lock of hair pressed against his head.

Tristan let out something like a scream even as Fortuna pushed him away and fell through a wall like it was made of paper, barely slowing until he hit the ground at an angle.

He landed in a mad whirl, head over feet, tangled in his own cloak as his shoulder bounced off the floor and he fell flat on his back with a groan of pain. Gods, his spine. Only fear kept him moving, kept him crawling to his feet even as his shoulder throbbed and his breath wheezed. His limbs felt like they were some ungainly tool he was wielding, tripping and trembling, and his vision swam. He could see a dim light around him, tinted red, and there was profound and unsettling silence hammering away at his ears. The sound of his own breath felt like a scream, his own scrabbling boots the loudest thing he had ever heard.

There was no movement around him, not even an insect, and after a moment he fell to his hands and knees. Panting, his head pounding as the flashes came to him one after another. He'd had her. Fortuna had been in his hands, but he'd been too slow and too foolish and too unprepared and he'd let her go again and now she was going to dieeatenleave and there was nothing he could do- the fullness of that shame and terror filled him to the brim, blotted out everything else until there was nothing but a trembling shred of Tristan Abrascal wriggling under the enormity of how badly he had fucked this up and he could never take it back.

He heaved, twice, and threw up over the floor. It tasted of bile and failure. He wiped his mouth against the back of his hand, then threw up again at the sight and smell of his own sick. Gods, he should just drop and drown in it. What else was- oh, but that was an old song, wasn't it?

No. Get up, keep moving. You beg and steal and do what you have to. The game's not over until the last nail is in the coffin. He breathed in and out through his mouth, closed his eyes and spat out gob of fouled spit. The things he could not do did not matter, they were a foreign land. What could he do? Wipe his lips on his cloak, get up to his feet. Tug his clothes into place, step away from the throw up. Look around and figure out what to do, no matter how warm his skin felt, sweat trailing down his back as his thoughts spun feverishly.

Where was he? It took a moment to realize, but only that: Tristan knew this place, for it was not the sort you ever forgot.

The colossal emptiness that somehow never went cold. Those sculpted pillars of dim red stone that looked half alive, roots and branches and bones beneath which crept fleshy appendages. Cryptoglyphs and worse had been carved into the great square stones of the floor, itching away at the eye like it was getting scraped and lingering even after you wrenched your gaze away. The mirror polish of the walls whispered lies of endlessness and the maybe-ceiling was veiled by the burning light of hanging iron orbs and the hazy, lukewarm redness they filled air with.

This was the graduation hall of Scholomance.

Only some details were not the same as he recalled. There was no fog under the orbs, and scattered across the hall were dozens of high seats of stone adorned with gildings and reliefs. Thrones, he would have called them, if not for the hulking thing at the end of the hall that denied use of the word to anything else. This was not, Tristan realized with a twinge of fear, the graduation hall he knew. Because this was a layer, and in this mirror of a time long past it was still the throne room of the Lightbringer himself.

Tristan swallowed, wiping his palm on the side of his coat, and his eyes were inevitably drawn to the towering thing in the distance. The throne made of some leviathan beast's skull cut through and turned upside down, the quarterer's throne that pulled apart Scolomancia at the end of the year to feed pieces of her to the students that'd survived the god's wiles. It was too far away for him to discern anything but the hulking shape itself.

The stillness in the great hall was oppressive, a heavy weight licked away at by the sensation of susurrant whispers in your ear, the impression that something in the pillars was following you. Something old and blind and hateful, wanting only to grab and crush you until there was nothing left but trails of blood. The thief shivered, pulling his coat closer. It was worse here than it was in the material, fresher. The not-yet-school was still a summer palace whose mortar bled red from the bodies of the slaves and prisoners crushed between the stones.

He glanced back at the open doors that led into the palace and wondered if he should take his chances there. The palace existing at all meant this must be the Witching Hour, the layer born of the Watch's invasion of Tolomontera, so the halls of the palace might just be empty. But if they aren't, it is devils or hollows I'm like to run into. The latter would kill him out of principle, the former for the sport of it.

Gods, but he had to try the throne first. See if there was a way out at the feet of the Morningstar's seat. He must leave, escape, try again. There must still be angles, there must. And the first move was to stack the odds on his side as much as he could.

"Rat King," he murmured, reaching for the knife at his hip. "Prince of dregs and dross, sewers and scurry, take pity on me this night. I'm in the shit again, and rightly afraid."

He pulled back his sleeve and cut into his arm a little above his wrist, then wiped the blade and sheathed it. It was mildly impious of a priest to beseech another god, but Fortuna was in chains so she'd have to cope. If she came back to whine at him, it would be a second prayer granted.

Tristan's boots tread nigh silently against the floor as he began to cross the hall, the chorus of whispers swelling as he headed deeper. The throne room felt alive, though not the way a beast would be. It felt more like a cursed tree, a hungry grave waiting for you to rest to slowly embrace and smother you. To stop here, to slow or rest, would be the death of him. His every instinct screamed it.

How long did he walk, alone in the seemingly endless temple?

Long enough that even carefully policing his gaze he found that the scratching got worse, that every time he blinked it felt like worms were crawling under his eyelids. There was a faint buzzing in his ears that bit through the whispers, like a swarm of insects, and he was almost grateful for it because those murmurs were growing distinct. They were promising things – you can have her back, have her back right now – and hinting at knowledge - I know where they hide, beloved, where the Cerdan buried their secrets – that he craved like air.

Despite his fear and his wariness, he still half-leaped like a startled cat when he realized he was standing before the throne. He'd reached it without even noticing. His heart beating wildly, Tristan's eyes rose up the crown of the skull to the sharp cheekbones, up to the unhinged jaw that served as the back of the throne and the nose holes that were as footrests, and he sucked in a fearful breath because on that throne rested a corpse.

A woman with once-tanned skin gone deathly pale, sprawled atop the throne like she had been thrown there. Her hair was raven-black, her eyes gone that pale unseeing way of dead bodies, and she was frozen in an open-mouthed scream. Her old-fashioned gown was a faded blue with worn edges and trailing ribbons that looked frayed, her flat leather shoes scuffed. She looked like some infanzon's poor relation, fitted in their hand-me-downs.

Tristan blew out a breath, tearing his eyes away. Just a corpse. Someone an example had been made of, or some poor fool who'd thought themselves fit to sit Lucifer's throne. Either way, she was beyond his help or harming.

"May your next spin of the Circle be luckier, tia," he whispered. "Still, better you than me."

Rolling his shoulder, he took half a step back and looked for the throne's shadow. If there was to be a way out, it would be there. Professor Sizakele had taught him that layers loved thresholds, boundaries. Only for all that the lights above were largely the same as in the material world, he could not seem to find-

"What are we looking for, nieto?"

Knife in hand before he even finished turning, Tristan angled his wrist ready to slash into – nothing? From the corner of his eye he saw the throne was now empty, heart catching in his throat, but where had it... A small, impatient movement had him realizing he'd been looking at the wrong place. On the same side but lower, near his feet, a dog was sitting and scratching his ear.

It was a stray mutt, like you could find in any part of Sacromonte. Brown and white coloring, floppy ears and a shaggy mane. A little on the skinny side, a little mangy, but with that kind of trusting cheer you couldn't help but love. To sneak a few scraps to, if you could spare them.

"Well?" the dog prompted in a voice not quite a man's.

The surge of terror that sight brought was unnatural. He had seen horrors and monsters, why should a mere talking stray unnerve him so? Yet there was something about it...

"You call me grandson," Tristan croaked out. "Why would you-"

"You bear the mark of a daughter made by my hand," the dog interrupted, stopping to bite at his own ass then turning a look on him. "What else should I call you, Tristan Abrascal?"

Oh, Tristan thought with pure animal dread as his mind finally caught up to what was happening. Oh fuck. He threw away the knife and hastily knelt, bowing his head.

"O Lightbringer, I beg your pardon," he fumbled out, shivering. "I meant no offense by my informal greeting, Your Infernal Majesty."

Silence. He angled his head to have a look, but the layer shadow of Lucifer was no longer there. The dog was gone, and- a hand came to rest on his shoulder, incongruously comforting, and there was a deep-voiced chuckle.

"There's no need for that, Tristan," Lucifer chided. "We're old friends, you and I. Come, you look cold."

A heavy woolen blanket was laid on his shoulders, the Prince of Lies helping him up, and Tristan caught only a fleeting glimpse of the face he'd been wearing. Dark hair, old laugh lines, gray eyes and - Father. Gods, had that been his father's face? Only by the time he could even begin to make sure the Father of Lies was trotting along on the ground, a stray dog once more.

"It's been a pig of a year for you, hasn't it?" Lucifer said, stopping to pensively lick at his raised paw. "Everything going wrong even when it goes right."

"You know my name," Tristan got out.

"Of course," the King of Hell said. "I told you, we're old friends."

"We have never met before," he croaked.

The dog laughed, flopping belly up as he quivered.

"Tristan, Tristan," he chided. "Next you'll tell me I'm not real because I'm just an impression of Lucifer in a layer."

His blood went cold.

"You know-"

"I know that time is the attempt of feeble, limited minds to force a label on the course of entropy," Lucifer said, pawing at the floor and shaking his tail. "Me? I am all that I am, always."

Despite himself, he clutched the warm wool blanket all the closer. It pricked at his hand, but that was almost a nostalgic kind of pain. Did he mean that they would meet in the future and since the Lightbringer's mind was one across all time and possibilities it – gods, he couldn't even begin to consider what that meant. An arm looped into his own and he went still as the missing corpse.

"Oh, you look like you'll fall over any moment," Lucifer said, only the voice was not his. "Come on, let's get you a seat."

Gods, he felt feverish but he could only wish this was a fever dream. Tristan looked at Abuela's weathered smiling face, the hard lines of it and her hair kept under the green bonnet he'd only see her wear once as she tugged him forward just as the Lightbringer did, through the streets of the Murk. The day they'd first met. He did not dare resist being tugged towards the throne.

"I mean you no harm, nieto," Abuela's face and voice assured him, patting his arm as they walked.

"I am very glad to hear this," Tristan rasped.

He blinked away sweat slicking its way through his eyebrows.

"I always did like that about you, Tristan," Hage's face and voice told him. "The practicality. Men are ants, these days, but most of them prance and pretend. You, though, you still remember that the name of the game is survival and it's really the only word that matters."

They were at the foot of the throne now, that shadowless monument of bone waiting to devour him whole. Tristan saw it whole, the savage majesty of it, and thought that if he sat there death was as certain as the coming of dark. He must delay, by any means.

"You take Hage's face," he said. "So you remember him still."

"Oh," Lucifer spoke through a snake's mouth, coiling around Tristan's shoulder as the thief forced himself not to flinch, "that's not his face. But of course I remember him, Tristan, I love all my children equally."

He paused, flicking his tongue.

"Well, mostly," the Prince of Lies conceded. "Haagenti was always a bit of a drag, just between you and me."

The snake hissed and Tristan drew back, flinching despite himself, only to find wings flapping at the other side of his head as a large raven landed on his shoulder, talons digging into his coat.

"Go on, Tristan, sit down," Lucifer said. "Don't you know you should always listen to talking animals?"

"I can think of at least two stories where that led to tragedy," Tristan tried, putting on a smile.

"Nieto," Abuela's voice told him through a raven's beak, "your life is already a tragedy. That's why you have a roof over your head, we broke you in a way that makes you useful. Sit the chair before you fall over."

He swallowed, weighing the risks. What was more dangerous – displeasing the Morningstar, or sitting that throne? His mind spun, half-panicked, and he ended up settling on Lucifer being the most dangerous of the two.

There was no grace to how he did it.

He climbed up the skull, nails scrabbling against bone as the faint stench of old blood went up his nostrils. His shoulder ached again, his muscles burned as he pressed his foot against the rim of the great nostril and hoisted himself to the edge of the cheekbones. There he scrabbled upright, looking down at that seat of bone. It was not carved but ever so slightly shaped, as if the very skull of the beast had wanted to accommodate the kingship of Hell. It would be too large for him, he thought.

"There there," an old Someshwari woman said, helping – pressing - him into the seat.

It took him a beat too long to realize who. The white hair and wrinkles, the sharp look in her eyes. Lieutenant Vasanti, from the Dominion. Who had once tried to send him to his death as well. Tristan killed his whimper as he sat, settling into the Lightbringer's throne. Impossibly, it was a perfect fit. His legs should have dangled, his aching back should have seized from the backrest, and yet he had never sat a more comfortable seat in his life.

"See," the raven said from his left shoulder, beak against his ear. "Safe, just like I said. Did you think that just because this is the blanket your mother died in, you'd end up like her?"

His fingers froze against the wool. Old, worn wool. The most threadbare blanket left to household dying out, too worthless to pawn for even coppers. He remembered the light through the door, the desiccated thing that had once been Mother writhing under the blanket as she begged for another coffin nail. Cursed him, his father, ever having left her family home and-

He ripped the blanket off his shoulders, casting it below as the raven cawed and flapped and laughed, landing on his right shoulder. The cold was better than that memory eating away at him like acid.

"Safe, I swore to you," Lucifer said. "So set down your troubles, Tristan, my old friend, my accomplice. I have arrested the march of progress, so you can finally let out that breath-scream you keep in your lungs and slump a little."

The black-fathered thing cawed out a laugh.

"Go on, you've deserved it."

And Tristan felt it welling up his throat, something too ragged to be a scream, but he choked it down.

"I am at your mercy, Your Infernal Majesty," he got out instead. "What might I do for you?"

A thoughtful hum.

"Look ahead, Tristan," Lucifer said. "See what it looks like, this place when seen from the throne. Think it through."

He did not dare refuse. His gaze rose, his trembling hands clutching at impossibly perfect armrests of bone, and below him the Mask saw Lucifer's court from the Lightbringer's own perch. The way the pillars were as a curtain, forming a wall as a trick of the eye, the way the lights above burned a red road all the way to the door. The way this entire misbegotten place seemed to be leaning in, a dark forest at night reaching with hungry hands. The way what he had thought to be haphazard thrones had been set down at the precise angles to look like statues, decorations.

It was looking at a world arrayed for his eye and nothing else, a sort of monstrous arrogance that disposed of every speck of Vesper for their sole pleasure.

It was a lord's view, a tyrant's view, a god's view.

"It is a wicked thing, isn't it?" Lord Asher said, lounging against the throne to his right. "Power."

And Tristan did not have it in himself to argue that. Not when he had only ever known power as a stomping boot. Even him, in the end. He'd poured that poison, hadn't he?

"This is not the seat," Tristan finally said, "of someone who hates power."

"I hate nothing," Lucifer assured him Asher's voice. "Much less wickedness. But power, well, it's really the building block of it all isn't it?"

The stray dog whuffed, sitting upright by the throne with great dignity, a mangy yet loyal hound.

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"It's what everybody is really asking for," the Morningstar said. "People say they want money, but gold's just shiny debris – what they want is the power to eat what they want, have what they want, live how they want. No one really wants to be a bureaucrat or a king, my friend, they want power over others and themselves and the world."

The stray scratched as his flank, chasing fleas.

"We chased that mastery to the end, my fellows and I," Lucifer told him. "Through the simplest methods, of course. All natural things are fundamentally lazy."

Lucifer licked his chops, showing a hint of white fangs.

"First we massacred every living thing that might have contested the world, and then from atop that pile of bones we bent that very world to our will: choked rivers and split mountains, ripped up the earth and filled the sky."

The dog rose to his feet, shaking itself.

"And when we were done we stood alone in a land made mute, petty gods unchallenged, and despaired of our pettiness," Lucifer said. "So we sought to master higher powers still, Tristan, to rise above the material."

"Did you?" he asked, mouth gone dry. "Master them."

"We broke them," the dog idly said. "Some would say that was an act of mastery, however petty. I was never one of them, but then my fellows and I have long been at odds. That is why you're here, old friend, so fortunately delivered into my company."

He blinked and Abuela smiled at him, patting his arm from the left of the throne.

"We've work to do, Tristan," her face told him, and he could not help but shiver.

"I am at your disposal, Majesty," he lied.

"Not mine," Lucifer dismissed, taking on Asher's face and fiddling with his spectacles. "My most befuddled daughter's. You see, my dear accomplice, there is a prison. And the wicked things that reach a finger beyond it, they always try to... widen the gap, so that they might escape entirely."

Asher leaned in, gesturing at the distance.

"But that's hard work, Tristan, and a smith needs metal. So the prisoner made a little something to go and grab it."

"The false Lord of Teeth," he said. "The construct."

"Yes," Lucifer grinned with dog's teeth. "Fortuna's an ingot. Densified, refined aether that just needs to be wiped clean so it can be forged into proper tooling. And with every hour, a little more of her is scrubbed out."

The old thing leaned closer.

"You'll go last," it said. "She'll clutch to you tightest. But already she's missing parts, Tristan. Already she won't be quite the same, and there will be no repairing that."

He was being played. He could tell, he knew. And it was still working, because every part of him wholeheartedly believed what he'd just been told.

"Where is it?" he rasped out, then asked what he really want to know. "How do I get to her?"

"It hides in a layer," Lucifer said. "Working at a forge, making its net and casting it. It is wary of my beloved Ashmodai's bite, so when its first scheme failed it withdrew deeper. Shut the doors behind it. There is only one way in now, in the deepest piece of Scholomance: my own repository."

The Glass Repository. Of course it would be there. All roads led to Liergan.

"I have to join the delve," Tristan said, and unwisely let bitterness speak. "Your own palace will fight us every step of the way."

"Everything," the Lightbringer whispered, "exists for a reason. Tristan, Tristan, Tristan – we both know you're not Watch, really. You just love some of them, so you wear the color. Broaden that practical mind of yours, old friend, and stop thinking like a tin soldier."

He rapped his knuckled against the armrest, to a dull thock.

"Scholomance isn't a barrier, she's a road," Lucifer said. "One I lay down to kill our enemy long, long before it ever got its finger through the bars. You just have to know how to ask."

"You're using me," Tristan evenly said.

"Everybody's using you," Song's face and voice gently told him. "We found you after the stone hit the glass, and why would anybody want to mend the cracks when they're what makes you valuable? Nobody cares about the boy hiding under that table, Tristan, he's worthless. He has no power."

Lucifer paused.

"Well, that's not true, I lie," the Prince of Lies mused, and even as he spoke he began to shift. "One person loved that boy. It's getting her killed as we speak."

Fortuna smiled at him, that triumphant haughty smile she reserved for the pettiest of victories, and tossed back her golden hair.

"But I get it," Lucifer assured him, his own voice out of Fortuna's lips. "You're a watchman these days, that's the most important thing. You have new people to love who are less inconvenient. Not as loud or capricious or demanding. It's best to cut ties now, when no one will blame you for it. You tried your best."

The Morningstar passed before the throne, red dress fluttering, and it caught his eye – enough that Tristan did not see the shift into the boy. He frowned at the sight, after. It was just some boy, he thought, studying the shape as it looked out into the distance of the hall. Black hair, skinny and with the bad skin of someone taking the first steps into manhood. Lierganen, probably.

"And you finally got the blood out of under those fingernails," Lucifer said, turning his head. "You can't go and dirty them again."

He knew when the face turned all the way towards him.

Gods, he was ashamed it had taken him this long to recognize it but it had been long ago, and in the dark. There was no mistaking the ruin made of half that face, though. The savage, bloody violence that'd been visited upon the boy until a blow to the skull cracked it enough he died. Tristan could still see where he'd hammered in the tile that final time, where the corner had caught on bone and sprayed red up his wrist.

"But, just in case..." the Lightbringer smiled, and whispered a single sentence into his ear.

He clapped his shoulder, afterwards, smiling with that mangled boyish face.

"Now get off my seat," Lucifer said, hand snatching him by the neck and tossing him down as if he were weightless.

Face first, screaming, only he saw the throne's shadow spread across the floor like ink even as he fell and it outpaced him just before he hit the shadow-covered floor and-

And emerged, stumbling into silver Orrery light. He was... in a street? On his knees, and his disoriented mind took a moment to adjust what had been up and down as his guts clenched. It was night out and-

"Tristan?"

Six people ahead. In the gloom, one thing stood out above all the rest: almost luminescent silver eyes. Yet it was not Song who ran towards him, equipped in full kit. Maryam's body impacted his, almost toppling him as she checked him over in a frenzy.

"Are you all right?" she urgently asked. "Where did you end up, what happened?"

The rest of the Unluckies followed behind her, he saw as he blinked. Tried to focus his mind. Gods, he had never been so exhausted in his life. It was as if his mind was in a sandpit. Angharad, Izel, Song, Hooks. Even Ishanvi. He licked his lips.

"Layer," he rasped out, his tongue feeling like leather. "I was in a-"

"Shit," Maryam suddenly said.

Oh, was he dying? But when he followed her gaze, he found it led behind him. To the end of the street, where a mass of black was moving. Men in black cloaks, regulars. All of them with their muskets up and at the ready, pointed – his way? Their way. They halted, and parted down the middle like a school of fish for a shark. The sharp sound of a cane on stone echoed, a bespectacled man limping past the firing line as the Unluckies tensed around him.

"Weapons on the ground," Lord Asher Modai ordered. "Tristan Abrascal, by order of the Krypteia you are under arrest. Any attempt to resist this will be met with lethal-"

Oh, Tristan thought as his vision swam.

This was, he mused a second before he fell forward, a really inconvenient time to fall unconscious.

--

He woke up sitting in a chair when something soft batted away at his face.

It was a nice chair, he found as he gathered his bearings. Dark wood with padded leather seat, arms and backrest that you sank in ever so slightly. It was, honestly, one of the finest chairs he had ever sat in. Shame about the steel fetters that kept his arms and feet bound to it.

They detracted from the experience somewhat.

There was only a thin slice of light in the room, coming from above along with a faint tune and the sound of voices, but there was a more immediate preoccupation: on his lap a stockpile of fur and fat was purring loudly. Mephistopheline was settled against his knee and occasionally flicking his tail up to bat at his face, which must have woken him in the first place.

The thief forced his breathing to stay even, steady. As if he were still sleeping. He might not know this room, but there was no mistaking the smell: that warm, bitter thing lingering in the nostril. He was somewhere in the Chimerical, and that meant at least one of the voices he could make out was a devil's.

The deep, steady breaths kept his heartbeat regular. If it went wild with fear or anger, Hage would hear it. Eyes closed, he forced himself to think. He was in Krypteia custody, obviously, but the fact that he was in the Chimerical instead of a heavily guarded warehouse besides a rack of drugs and torture tools was tentatively a good sign. If the Masks intended to interrogate him about Lucifer then slit his throat and dump his body in the bay, he wouldn't be here.

So why was he?

Deep, steady breaths. The slice of light was from an almost-closed trap door on the ceiling on the other end of the chamber. By the smell and the color of the glow upstairs, it must lead to the main room of the coffeehouse. Down here were only bare stone walls, that sinfully comfortable chair and an inexplicable Mephistofeline. He looked at those granite walls without marks or decoration, at the way the trap door had been built to meld into the ceiling to give an illusion of the room being a perfect cube without any way in or out, and had to wrestle his breath back down.

It looked like the kind of room built so screams wouldn't leak out. There has to be a way out of this, he thought, closing his eyes and pricking his ears. There were still voices upstairs.

The first thing he discerned, though, was the music. A man's voice and a lone violin, soft and sorrowful.

"-once loved a maid in Jiushen

A scholar, so clever and bold

Saying: beloved, why must we die?

I have found methods untold

That we might never say goodbye."

A slash of the violin, a pause.

"I once slew a maid, in Jiushen."

Hage's strange music box. And it was Hage's own voice that cut through the tune, speaking with another.

"-on't deny he came in contact," the old devil said. "I deny the need to act in haste, to cut before we measure."

"There is no answer but the cut," Lord Asher's voice flatly replied. "We cannot let whatever Father meant him for come to pass."

"This isn't a time of leveling, he won't be aiming to uproot the world," Hage insisted. "And there is one thing he cares about more than-"

"O Father, are you smiling

At the weeds you have sown

Or the sickle that we swing?

The reaper man's own."

"-raphanidou," Lord Asher bit out. "Mono kai mono epeidi-"

"Gnaw on it first," Hage sneered. "Showing your age, Ashmodai. Speak the right century, it won't be bringing him back to gabble in his old ton-"

"I once hated a man in Tenoch

Crafty and cruel, candlemaker

A hundred did he feed to fire

And twice that died to the dagger

But his candle, it burned brighter."

That accursed song kept cutting through their talk just as it began to yield- Tristan's heart seized when Mephistofeline suddenly rose in his lap, stretching with a little yawn and leaping onto the ground to land like an upended pie. The music above ended, which was ironic because Tristan was about to face it. The trapdoor slid open without a sound and the devils came down – themselves light-footed, but their rich clothes flapping as they fell.

They looked, Tristan thought, like a study in class. Hage the merchant, a slashed rusty jerkin over a black doublet and matching hose, his feathered beret at an angle and his great eyebrows owlish. Asher the aristocrat, in fine Someshwari tailoring and a silk waistcoat, his hands beringed and his eyes behind fine spectacles that framed a salt-and-pepper beard.

Hage had brought down a terribly tacky oil lamp in the shape of some sort of Someshwari woman-faced bird and Lord Asher carried a hooked pole, which he used to close the trapdoor behind them before he slid it into a corner – there was a seam in the wall that swallowed it whole, another illusion to sell the perfection of the cube. Hage set down the lamp, bright Glare light filling the room to burst, and extended his arms just in time for Mephistofeline to flop upwards into them and meow happily.

Neither had addressed him just yet, so Tristan opened the dance.

"You can't torture me in front of the cat," he complained, "that's just hateful. What if he gets nightmares?"

"Warrant Officer Abrascal," Lord Asher Modai greeted him. "Good evening."

Formal, he assessed. To show this was no roadside hanging tribunal, or to try and smudge over the reality that it was? Hard to tell. Either way, neither had brought down interrogation tools and that was a good sign. On the other hand, Hage was an alchemist of great talent. He might well have truth telling in a bottle, which would make slicing off toes pointless.

Tristan considered pretending he'd heard nothing of their talk upstairs but doubted either of them would buy it. He could, though, feign not having heard as much as he truly had.

"I can understand why you two argue," he mused. "It always happens when parents play favorites. Your maker called you beloved, lord, but Hage 'a bit of a drag'."

"Father lies easily as he breathes, which he does only when he wishes to," Hage noted, petting his cat.

"You do not deny, then, having come into contact with the Lightbringer's shadow?" Lord Asher asked.

"There's no point, I'm guessing you have some way to tell," Tristan noted. "Else you wouldn't have been at that layer exit."

It occurred to him, belatedly, that his Aetheric Warfare class being held in a tower straddling a layer and the material world might have been for reasons beyond testing the resourcefulness of students in getting there. It's a monitoring post for the layers or I'll eat my hand. Lord Asher, idly, reached for the inside of his jacket and produced a small silver case he popped open. He picked out a thick maize-paper cigar and struck a match to light it, sucking at it so the flame would catch. Hage eyed his fellow devil with disapproval, edging away his cat, as Lord Asher pulled at it once more and let out a puff of gray smoke.

Whatever was in there, it smelled like no tobacco Tristan had ever encountered.

"Under the Krypteia's founding mandate, that admission is enough to allow for your immediate execution," Lord Asher told him.

Huh. Interesting. Asher was making a point of mentioning the 'crime', which implied the old devil couldn't just make the decision to slit Tristan's throat on his own. There must be, the thief thought, another jurisdiction at play. He forced himself not to look at Hage.

"This is not reflection on you personally, Tristan," Lord Asher assured him. "He's done untold damage to the world by speaking the wrong sentences to the wrong people, so it is our standing policy to simply nip the trouble in the bud."

He breathed in, breathed out, did not allow himself to panic. They would be able to taste it in the aether. There were stories about Lucifer. How when he did not lead great hosts to ravage the world he joined the courts of kings, whispered poison into their ears to shatter from the inside great realms that might have withstood his might.

But that was king's business, and he was a rat.

"He took your face," Tristan admitted. "Both of yours."

And now a calculated risk.

"But I don't think he cared about the Watch."

The devils shared a look, but one hard to parse. No doubt they were communicating in that silent way devils could, spurts of 'color' released in the aether not unlike pheromones. Young devils could barely get basic instructions across that way, but annealed ones like these two could allegedly wield great nuance – if never quite as much as by language. Their kind preferred words for a reason, though their elders tended to accompany spoken language by aether secretions to layer meanings.

"What, then, did he care about?" Hage asked.

His heart skipped a beat before he mastered himself. The risk was paying off. I'm not a threat, I'm a scout back to report. Use me instead of burying me.

"The construct," Tristan slowly said, looking for reactions but finding only unmoving flesh. "The false Lord of Teeth – he said something had made it, something reaching out from inside a prison. That it was trying to collect gods so it could forge the tools to break free."

The shift was slight, but Tristan had spent the better part of a year under Hage learning to read devils. His teacher was pleased, Asher very much not.

"Having that knowledge is also motive enough for execution," Lord Asher sharply said.

Tristan cocked his head to the side, studied the bespectacled man.

"But you already knew that," the thief slowly realized. "About the construct. It's why you're still in Allazei. When Misery Square was hit, you had – well, suspicions at least. And now they are confirmed."

Hage smiled, teeth peeking out behind teeth.

"As a point of order," his teacher said, "that knowledge is only a legitimate reason for execution if it was deliberately sought. Not acquired by accident. We do not execute watchmen for happenstance."

"The leaks we did not handle all ended disastrously," Lord Asher bit out.

"Tristan Abrascal is Krypteia," Hage said. "For him to know this is not a leak."

Was Hage protecting him? Tristan narrowed his eyes. It could be a game they were running on him, stick and carrot, but why bother? They had the authority to just squeeze until answers came out, if that was what they were after. The older of the two devils pulled at his cigar, considering.

"I could make it an order," Lord Asher Modai said.

Hage laughed in his face.

"I am a winnower assessing a pupil," Haagenti said. "You do not have that authority to gainsay me, Ashmodai. No one does: even if all the kings under firmament order him dead, he will live until my report is handed in."

It was a strange, misbegotten thing but somehow that sordid turn of phrase made Tristan feel safer than if Hage had simply promised protection. It felt, in a twisted way, more trustworthy than a blanket oath.

"An unfair bargain," Lord Asher sneered. "Are you so starved?"

His eyes narrowed. Wait, was Asher implying that Hage's addiction was...

"Me?" Hage softly said. "Listen to yourself, brother. You are fiending."

And that, Tristan saw, finally gave the older devil pause. His shell slumped, went still like a puppet whose strings had been released, and something wriggled under Asher Modai's face. His hand stayed unmoving while the cigar singed the side of a finger. A long moment passed, the silence of it only broken by Mephistofeline's loud purring.

Then Lord Asher twitched, turning to Tristan and moving like he had just come alive again.

"Everything Lucifer told you is to be considered forbidden knowledge, not to be spread under pain of death," Asher said. "And that I can enforce, Hage."

"So you can," Hage agreeably replied.

Lord Asher pulled at his still half-there cigar, spat out a stream of smoke. Gods but the smell was foul, like metal and rotten eggs.

"Perhaps you are fated to it," the bespectacled devil conceded, addressing him now. "This, however peripherally, is your second encounter with a Principality."

And finally he had a name for his enemy. Tristan cocked an eyebrow.

"Principality, like a prince's realm?"

"Their realm is princes," Lord Asher said. "They move through the hands of others. Every tribe, tongue and nation is subject to their authority."

"For one to have appeared here is unusual," Hage noted. "They prefer longer games, subtle until the finale. This ploy with the construct was quite blunt from the start."

"They are not all the same," Lord Asher said. "And as always, Father has the last laugh –Scholomance hates it just as much as it hates us."

Tristan licked his lips.

"When I fell," he said. "I saw a soul going down. Cai Wei is her name. I think she struck a deal."

The devils shared a look.

"We are aware," Lord Asher said. "She has reappeared."

"Already?" he blinked.

"You have been missing for six days," Hage informed him. "Already the dantesvara's replacement has emerged and struck at students. The traitor Cai Wei was seen leading the enemy's forces."

"Forces," Tristan repeated, forcing himself to be curious about that so he would not pay attention to the other details.

Six days. Gods. Lucifer had implied that time was arrested, but why should he have trusted anything out of the Prince of Lies' mouth?

"It crafted a new beast," Lord Asher said. "That one has been raising the corpses of lemures and students, which Cai Wei has led in raids against the delve and, as of this morning, two classrooms."

The devil took one last puff of his cigar, then tossed it onto the floor and ground it under his boot.

"You are a lit fuse," Asher Modai informed him. "Hage evidently believes you are one meant to blow in the face of the Principalities, but he is an eternal optimist."

The devil folded his hands behind his back.

"I hope you are," Lord Asher told him, and sounded like he meant it. "And I hope you survive the purpose Lucifer shaped you for. But hope is not my trade, so I must prepare otherwise."

He inclined his head.

"Still, I wish you luck," Asher said. "Tell Hage everything, and know that the Prince of Lies earned his name a hundred times over."

Lord Asher opened the trapdoor, leaping back up into the Chimerical without another word, and left it open behind him. Tristan distantly wondered how he was supposed to get back up there, since he was neither a devil nor a cat. Hage held up Mephistofeline to the edge of the opening, the fat feline waddling a jump and hitting the side with wriggling legs before narrowly making it past the edge and sauntering away like he'd made the leap perfectly.

Tristan stayed silent as Hage approached, unlocking the fetters on his hands and then his feet. To his surprise, the old devil did not immediately leap into the interrogation.

"It will have been a harrowing experience, speaking with him," Hage said.

Tristan let out a mirthless laugh, rubbing his wrists more out of form than any real pain.

"You could say that," he said. "He kept taking different shapes, toying with me. It was like he knew everything about my life."

"Everything you ever emanated into the aether," Hage grimly informed him. "It is not a clean reading of mind or memories, but much can be learned through it."

He hesitated.

"He called me an old friend, said we'd met before," Tristan said. "It is true that..."

"It is called concurrent actualization," his teacher said. "His consciousness is whole and indivisible, unaffected by time or distance. Some of the eldest Akelarre ape parts of the principle, but never to the extent Father has mastered it. Even among his kind he was... exceptional."

"Gods," Tristan softly cursed. "How do you face someone like that?"

"You burn and salt everywhere he has trodden and drown him in violence," Hage said. "Asher, for all his flaws, did not want you dead out of dislike or a taste for killing. We have been taught to be rightfully fearful of our father's work."

The question itched away, and for once he did not force down the impulse.

"If he is so fearsome, how is it that traitors to Hell like you and Lord Asher still exist?" Tristan dared to ask.

Hage seemed amused.

"He never saw us as sworn to him, and thus we cannot be traitors," he replied. "Besides, Asher is in his own way more loyal to the Great Work than any duke of Pandemonium – he merely decided that the greatest obstacle to its fulfilling was Lucifer himself."

"And you?"

"I left Hell when I saw it had become a dead end," Hage said, sounding oddly melancholy. "I will not return until I have found a way out of the impasse."

The devil rose to his feet.

"I am pleased," Hage told him. "I feared that the mounting pressure would cause you to relapse, but you held the course and refrained from disproportionate retaliation even when severely provoked."

He dusted off his jerkin.

"A promising young girl's career was too high a price to pay for you to learn that lesson, but you did not waste the coin you spent," Hage said. "Your access to the Krypteia index is restored."

Tristan swallowed, mumbling thanks as he read between the lines. Being returned the index but not the menu was a statement: he was still being punished for what he had done to Ahuic of Zapala, but he was no longer walking the edge of the cliff. He was back in the flock, and the stain he'd put on his name would wash out in time.

"I pray you keep that lesson close," Hage said. "It may yet save your life again."

The devil backed away, leaning back against the wall, and crossed his arm.

"Now, tell me everything. Leave no detail out."

And Tristan did. The forms the Lightbringer had taken, how he had called him an old friend and an accomplice, how he seemed to know things about Fortuna and how he'd intimated that the only path left to the lair of this enemy, this 'Principality', was through the Glass Repository in the depths of Scholomance. How he'd claimed that the god in the walls was a road and not an obstacle.

Tristan told him every last bit, except for the whisper at the end.

Last year, he would have told even that. But not now, not when he'd been reminded that Haagenti was his warden but also his warden – as much a noose as a shield, should he step out of line. Tristan was only safe under this roof so long as he was good Krypteia clay, something of use to the order. And if he told them they'd tell in turn, and he couldn't take the risk the Watch would get in the way, not for this. He'd lost too many already, and the order was ever eager to cut its losses.

It didn't have to get ugly. They could do it the right way, and knowing Song they'd try. But if it didn't work, if it stalled, then- well, he'd have the option. A way to walk the road.

Tristan Abrascal finished his report to the sound of silence, his control ironclad. Not even a mote of fear could leak. Hage's eyes stayed on him. The thief's face was calm, his heartbeat steady. He yawned, and when his teacher did not suddenly accuse him of having held anything back he knew it had worked.

He did not let his control lapse. Relief would be as bright a beacon as fear.

"Your brigade twice entered a layer in your absence," Hage said, and his thoughts stalled. "They did this through largely legal means. On the third instance, however, they sought to violate a rule of Scholomance by entering a forbidden area in order to reach the Witching Hour."

The devil's eyebrows twitched

"They were interrupted before doing so," Hage said. "So no punishment will be given this time. Yet convey to them our warning – they came close to crossing a line that night in more ways than one."

Tristan mutely nodded. Upstairs there was a clatter followed by an offended yowl, and the music box let out sound of tick, tick, tick before another snippet of the song came out.

"I once spared a man, in Tenoch," the voice mourned.

Tick, tick, tick, and it went silent again.