He’d never liked the Rookery.
It was a purely personal dislike, Captain Osian Tredegar would admit if pressed. He had spent half a year down in the Lanes after enlisting, becoming fit for deployment, and though that had been a foul time it was also long enough ago he hardly remembered. His antipathy nowadays came from the fact that since he’d been inducted into the Umuthi Society he had only ever returned to the Rookery for a fresh squabble over funds with Conclave bureaucrats.
The worst part was, of course, that these squabbles were largely meaningless. The Conclave’s army of clerks and bookkeepers could not actually make any decision, only pass recommendations to the Conclave itself. Which would then proceed to make no decision at all, because it did not directly allocate funding to the works of the Clockwork Cathedral whose continued funding Osian was sent to argue for. The Conclave, in practice, did not actually decide much of anything.
At the founding of the Watch the chamber had been small enough to be functional but over the years the assembly had simply become so large it was not practical for it to decide on anything but the broadest strokes of policy. Execution of those policies was then passed on to committees who ended up wielding the power the Conclave had invested in them with… varying degrees of oversight.
There was some truth to the complaints from the captain-generals that some Garrison regions were essentially rival free companies funded by Conclave coin.
But fair or not it was committees that ran the Watch, and it was such a committee that had ordered Osian Tredegar to sit in a cold damp hall and wait for his name to be called. There had been ten of them out here when he’d arrived, but one by one the other rooks had gone into the small room tucked away in a forgotten corner of the Old Chantry.
And one by one they had left, until there remained only him and the monster.
She looked like a frail old woman but Osian knew better. Fenhua had sent him word last night, warned him that he was looking not as some retired cloak but fucking Nerei Name-Eater. The worst part was that he would never have guessed if he’d not been warned. Even now he almost doubted himself, looking at how she seemed to ache from the wet cold and shiver in her shawl.
There were some who said that creature was older than the Republics, that she’d fought in the last assault on Pandemonium. Nerei glanced at him, as if sniffing out his thoughts, and offered a warm toothless smile. Ancestors, but she looked like someone’s favorite grandmother.
“I’m sure it will be soon, dear,” the Name-Eater assured him in a faint Sacromonte accent. “There is no need to be so tense, I am certain your niece will be fine.”
Osian stiffened, for he had never spoken a word to Nerei and he’d certainly never said anything about Angie around that monster. His hand habitually drifted to where his pistol would be, had he not been ordered to leave it behind at the Old Chantry’s gates.
“Oh, no need for that,” Nerei chided him. “Such a lovely girl, your Angharad. I’m sure she will be a darling friend to my Tristan. And a mirror-dancer, how precious! They rarely leave Peredur nowadays.”
“I am not without friends,” Osian coldly replied.
His work on the Isibankwa had put him firmly on the good side of his superiors. They had already done him favors, but he should be able to squeeze out a few more.
“Or debts, of late,” Nerei said, tapping her wrinkled chin. “That was most amusing to hear. To think it took the Wednesday Council itself to curb your enthusiasm!”
Osian grit his teeth. The ruling council of the Umuthi Society had not officially spoken with him at all, Professor Akia had sat him down in private so there would be no mark on his record, but the Name-Eater was a Mask and that breed always made a point of rubbing your secrets in your face when they could. Not that he would let himself-
The door opened, the same middle-aged watchman as always leaning through.
“Captain Osian, Officer Nerei,” he called out. “The committee will see you now.”
Osian bit down on his words, trying to smooth the anger off his face.
“Come, dear,” Nerei warmly said. “Let us find out what it is the Obscure Committee has to say.”
Breathing out, Osian Tredegar forced himself to calm down. The monster had just been toying with him the way a cat would with a mouse. She had no true interest in Angharad, he told himself as he followed behind the thing wearing the form of a little old woman. He must keep his mind on the Obscure Committee waiting ahead. Not that it was truly called that, at least on paper.
Its formal name on the rolls was ‘Lesser Committee for the Trebian Northwest’, the kind of name that got made fun of at parties when officers mocked Conclave bureaucracy over cups of wine. It was an oft forgotten detail, however, that the ruins of Scholomance lay in the northwest of the Trebian Sea. Though a ‘lesser’ committee would naturally not have authority over the greater committee overseeing the same region, its existence as an independent entity meant it was not subject to that greater committee’s authority either.
In practice, that meant Scholomance and all matters connected to it had been made the private fiefdom of the four people Osian found waiting inside the small, cramped room. That alone would have been worth wariness but altogether more dangerous was that this authority had apparently been granted to them by a sealed vote of the Conclave, meaning the matter was kept secret.
The Obscure Committee was called that because more than nine tenths of the Watch would have absolutely no idea it existed even though it now held great power and influence.
There were four high desks inside the room, covered with stacks of paper and inkwells, and the four members of the committee sat behind them. The watchman from earlier closed the door, leaning back against it, and Nerei trudged forward to stand before the desks. Osian followed, moving to her right but putting enough space between them he would have been able to draw and fire his pistol in time.
If he still had it.
The gesture did not escape the attention of the leftmost sitter, who raised an eyebrow at him. Brigadier Anju Laghari was a middle-aged woman of plain looks, her wavy brown hair going down to her neck. She was built like a barn door, broad-shouldered and muscled enough to wrestle a bull, and by the looks of the scar around her neck someone had once tried to hang her. Most importantly Anju Laghari was an Academian, a Stripe.
The Academy was the largest of the seven covenants, about as large as all the others put together, so its claiming one of the committee seats had never been in doubt. There was another edge to that blade, however: competition within Academy ranks for the appointment would have been brutal. That meant Brigadier Laghari was as much a political creature as a military one, for all that she looked like she should be leading some charge in the Bleaklands instead of sitting at a table.
And by the disgusted look she sent the monster at Osian’s side, she was no fonder of the creature than he.
“Officer Nerei,” Brigadier Laghari said, her voice sounding like she gargled rocks, “this is revolting. You look like someone’s grandmother.”
Nerei smiled.
“Where lies the trouble, dear?”
The brigadier shivered.
“I saw you eat a man’s entrails with my own eyes, back in seventy-three,” Laghari flatly replied. “Head right in the belly, like a pig with a trough. Put on a shape that I won’t want to shoot.”
The old creature cocked her head to the side, noticeably not moving to obey. Osian had no idea if by right she should, and neither would most in the room: ‘officer’ was the placeholder rank that the Krypteia used when they were not assigned to a duty and thus not forced to reveal their actual rank to the watchmen around them. Anju Laghari might be a sitter on the Obscure Committee, but if Nerei was of higher rank she would not actually need to obey her.
Only one person in the room was likely to know, and all eyes went to him.
At the rightmost desk sat Lord Asher of the Krypteia. He looked like a handsome man in his fifties, his short salt and pepper beard lending him a distinguished air. His clothes were perfectly tailored, their buttons gold, and if not for the polished cane in his hand Osian would have never guessed he had a limp. Lord Asher also wore spectacles, which he never took off because no matter how well a devil took care of the shell they wore the eyes tended to look a little off after a century.
Osian made sure not to look at the rings on his hand or the charming smile on his face. There was no telling if the rumors that Lord Asher was a founding member of the Krypteia were true, but there were records of the man going back centuries and when devils got that old they grew warped. The young ones, fresh out of the forges in Pandemonium, they just wanted tainted aether of any kind. The old ones who annealed grew discerning and addicted to particularities, specific tastes.
First love, fear of water, paternal pride – any of the endless corners of mankind’s soul. No one knew what Lord Asher was addicted to, but most figured it was secrets. He had certainly been in the Krypteia long enough to get his hands on a trove fit to topple an empire. As for the devil’s own rank, well, who knew? The Masks never gave that kind of information forced, and even then sometimes lied.
“Let us be courteous, Nerei,” Lord Asher warmly smiled. “Change for the brigadier.”
The old woman laughed, and after a heartbeat she fluttered. There was no other word for it, as if she had for an instant become made of a hundred thousand slices of paper moving with the wind. When the blur passed the old Sacromontan woman was instead a small Someshwari boy clutching at his too-large clothes, sending a gap-toothed grin up at the Stripe. He could not have been older than five.
Anju Laghari went red with rage, fumbling for a pistol under her desk.
“Change right now,” she hissed.
“D’you want to shoot me now, Brigadier?” Nerei asked.
The cutesy tone, just like a little boy’s, made Osian’s skin crawl. It was like looking at a crocodile wearing a person’s face.
“Asher,” the brigadier snarled, turning to the devil, “this is a threat. She can’t just wear my grandson’s face and-”
“Perhaps,” Lord Asher politely smiled, “next time you will remember to be more careful with your phrasing, Anju. Always a lesson worth learning, no matter one’s age.”
The brigadier was livid and likely to press the matter, Osian judged, but it would not get to that. The sitter next to her cleared her throat. The sound was irritated.
“This is not the Academy, Laghari,” Captain Isoke Falade said. “Your whims are not orders, and we have wasted enough time indulging your sensibilities.”
The committee seat the Guildhouse had got its hands on had been filled by an Akelarre rather than a Skiritai, which was no surprise. The Militants had well-earned their reputation for general awfulness at Watch politics, in part because of the high attrition rate in even in their most senior officer ranks. The Navigators, on the other hand, were arguably the oldest of the seven covenants and they were everywhere.
They always had favors to call on, and they were more than willing to cover for the Skiritai if they got to speak for both of the Guildhouse’s guilds in exchange.
Their representative on the committee was Captain Isoke Falade, a seemingly frail old woman in her seventies wearing humble grey robes. Her head was nearly shaved and she looked half-blind, pale cataracts in both her eyes, but she was always smiling and cocking her head to the side as if she could hear things no one else did. Given that she was rumored to be one of the most skilled signifiers alive, that was entirely possible.
Despite the seemingly low rank, Isoke Falade had in her time served as Captain-General to the infamous Dawnchasers and survived a decade attached to the court of the High Queen. Long before Rhiannon’s time, so Osian’s sister never knew her, but no one survived at the feet of the Queen Perpetual without learning how to get their hands dirty. A good thing, that. Angharad was headed for the Skiritai Guild, so Captain Falade would be on his side for the coming review.
That and he had bribed her personally, as well as the Skiritai who’d recommended his niece. It always paid to be sure, usually in gold.
Osian’s eyes moved to his other ally in the room, seated besides the signifier. Professor Fenhua He was Peiling Society, not Umuthi like him, but the College always stuck together against outsiders – especially around budget time. Fenhua was a tall and willowy beauty, their long dark hair flowing behind their back as they offered a sunny smile. Their robes were pristine silk in the traditional Jigong fashion, with billowing sleeves and discreet touches of color, every part of them meticulously neat.
Fenhua He’s specialty was epistemological foundationals – attempting to establish objective truths about the aether – and that was as much of an opposite from Osian’s work in the Clockwork Cathedral as one could find but they got on well regardless. Sharing a war room during the hunt for the Hull Breaker had left them with some ties of friendship, at it had most who took part in those months of horror. Fenhua caught his eye and winked, forcing Osian to swallow a grin.
Yeah, Fenhua had his back.
“If Officer Nerei causes such unseemly emotion in our colleague, let us finish our business with her as quickly as possible,” the professor said. “Shall we move to review the candidature of Tristan Abrascal, Scholomance candidate under Krypteia sponsorship?”
Osian cleared his throat.
“Captain Osian,” Lord Asher acknowledged him. “You have a question?”
“Sir,” Osian nodded. “May I ask why I am to be in the room when this Tristan Abrascal is to be reviewed?”
“He and your niece will be joining the same Scholomance cabal, should the reviews end positively,” the devil amiably said. “It was judged unnecessary for the questionings to be kept separate.”
Osian’s lips thinned, but he nodded. Though he misliked the possibility of some Sacromonte rat dragging down Angie with him, he would gain nothing by arguing a decision that would have required a majority vote to pass.
“If that is all, let us proceed,” Captain Falade sleepily said. “We have all read the reports from Lieutenant Wen and Sergeant Mandisa as well as the transcripts from the observers manning the Panopticon Mirrors. The boy effectively led the crew that collapsed the Red Eye’s prison and the mountain with it, though it was not his hand that did the actual deed..”
A heartbeat of silence, then the assessments began.
“He should be shot,” Brigadier Laghari plainly said. “He buried two Watch fortresses, led to the deaths of dozen of our rooks and broke a seal we have no real replacement for. A bullet to the brains is the least of what he deserves.”
Lord Asher smiled.
“There we must disagree,” he said. “As far as I am concerned, Tristan Abrascal is the only individual to have ever passed the Trial of Ruins – if I could, I would amend every preceding file on record as having retroactively failed.”
“Fucking sneaks,” Brigadier Laghari sneered. “You always-”
“You are boring me, Anju,” Professor Fenhua sighed. “All acts undertaken in the trials that do not break the rules qualify for amnesty, as you well know. Stop wasting our time on a tantrum.”
They leaned forward after, eyeing Nerei curiously.
“You have it in your written recommendation that your little maskling was likely involved with forbidden experiments classified under the name ‘Theogony’,” Fenhua said. “Elaborate. I would know if he is a potential danger to fellow students.”
Osian hid his amusement. A transparent fishing attempt, not that they were likely to be called on it. Nerei beamed up at Lord Asher, looking for permission. The monster looked like a child playing in their parents’ clothes, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Spirits but it was obscene.
Lord Asher nodded.
“House Cerdan ran a red shop out in the Murk,” Nerei brightly said, “contracting with the local co-caw-coteries for a supply of fresh bodies and running experiments that were in breach of the Iscariot Accords.”
The shape of the five-year old preened, as if the child was proud of having said all those difficult words without tripping.
“To what aim?” Professor Fenhua asked.
It was not Nerei that answered, this time.
“We are yet uncertain,” Lord Asher said, sounding ever so slightly irritated. “Like every other fool out there they tried to make a stable Saint, but they also attempted some exotic contract accommodations.”
He paused, sending the Tianxi a knowing look through his spectacles.
“They used forceful aether taint as a base for their research,” the Mask noted. “Nothing you would be interested in.”
The devil spoke true, all trace of interest leaving Fenhua’s eyes as Osian swallowed bile. Forceful aether taint was a pretty way of saying torture, most of the time. All humans not severed from the Glare tainted the aether around them by their very existence but most of those emanations were so faint they could barely be proved to exist, much less studied. Sharp emotions and sensations were a way to make that taint stronger, and nothing was easier to inflict than pain.
“We had’em, but they closed their lair and ran away,” Nerei pouted. “The Cerdan set up shop on some secret island, but we can’t seem to find their clubhouse!”
“They likely have help from one of the Six,” Lord Asher said. “We are pursuing the matter.”
“Interesting, but ultimately irrelevant,” Captain Falade said. “Our purpose is to ascertain whether or not the boy’s place in Scholomance should be rescinded. Despite Brigader Laghari’s bluster, I see no valid reason for that to be the case.”
“Neither do I,” Professor Fenhua said. “Asher, shall we assume your vote?”
“Never,” the devil seriously said. “I also vote against rescinding.”
Brigadier Laghari grunted in displeasure but argued no further after casting her vote for. She could tell a losing battle when she was fighting one.
“You’ll all be singing a different song in a few years when we are putting down the Red Eye for the eighteenth time and we can’t send anyone to a firing squad to answer for the costs and casualties,” she warned.
Osian let out a noise of interest, catching their attention.
“I heard the Dominion was sitting atop an old god, but I thought it dead from the disaster with the mountain. It survived to fragment?” he asked.
“Our signifiers have ascertained we are dealing with at least a dozen shards capable of agency,” Captain Falade said. “Pandemonium’s last surprise killed the central intellect; at a guess the fragments will be spending the next twenty years cannibalizing each other in an attempt to reform it.”
“The devils laid a skillful trap,” Professor Fenhua noted, then their tone turned teasing. “Why, it might even have been the work of-”
There was a creaking sound, the wood of Lord Asher’s cane giving under his grip.
“-the Office of Opposition.”
Those devils that served as Hell’s answer to the Krypteia, Osian recalled, though it seemed from Asher’s smiling anger that there might be old history there he knew not.
“It was not,” the old devil said, tone clipped.
“If you say so,” Professor Fenhua said, smiling like someone who had just scored a point.
“No matter whose work it was, it failed to kill the god,” Brigadier Laghari dismissed. “Now every shard is going to become patron to a different tribe and that entire island is going to become a clusterfuck of bloodletting for a decade. A clusterfuck we will need to wade into, I’ll remind you, because reports made it clear that the Red Eye made it down to the seabed. We can’t let that thing reform and grow any further.”
“Aw,” Nerei grinned, “is nani angry because her friend Commander Artal is going to have to stay and do his job instead of getting a nice cushy promotion?”
She made a soulful look with the small boy’s doe eyes.
“That’s neshpotism, gramma,” Nerei solemnly said, wagging her finger. “Very bad.”
Brigadier Laghari’s face reddened and the flash of rage in her eyes was entirely unfeigned.
The Academy’s prominence and occasional bouts of arrogance made it unspoken tradition for the other covenants to join hands and knock them down a peg whenever the occasion arose, but not even that was enough for Osian to find himself rooting for the Name-Eater. He was not alone in this.
“Disrupting the proceedings is reason enough to be barred from the room,” Captain Falade said. “I will not warn you again, Officer Nerei.”
The monster nodded, pouting as she clutched her too-large clothes to her scrawny chest. Professor Fenhua cleared their throat.
“Let us proceed onward, then.”
“Which brings us to your niece, Captain Osian,” Lord Asher said. “She makes an interesting case.”
Osian straightened his back. Interesting was never a word pleasant to hear coming from a Mask’s mouth.
“I have not read the full reports,” he carefully said, “but what I got my hands on seems a glowing recommendation.”
“If you try to rob my colleagues out of an eighteen-year-old mirror-dancer, Asher, there is going be a veritable shitshow to deal with,” Captain Falade warned him. “After that report from the cabal in Cantica there was already a fit about the Stripes getting the Xical boy, we won’t get cheated twice on a single draw.”
Brigadier Laghari looked faintly smug.
“I do not doubt her value,” Lord Asher dismissed, “but I do find it concerning that her contract appears to be with a second-order entity. Peredur is full of things best left buried.”
Osian’s jaw clenched. He knew not the nature of Angie’s contract, but the whole thing reeked of Gwydion. Rhiannon had been much too taken with the triumph of winning the darling of the season to ever dig into her husband’s past, but Osian had always found him suspect. A young man from a fallen house that was barely peers suddenly becoming the flower of Pereduri society when he made his debut? No, Gwydion had been wildly suspicious even before Rhiannon’s enemies began having a rash of mysterious accidents all involving spirits.
If the man’s meddling hurt his daughter from beyond the grave, Osian was going to get his hands on the body just to feed it to stray dogs. Thankfully, he had anticipated that the Krypteia would dig and stacked the game well in advance.
“There has been no conclusive proof it’s a genuine god of the Old Night she contracted with,” Professor Fenhua mildly said. “More likely it is some ancient oracular river-god that was missed during the High Queen’s purges.”
It took effort for Osian not to do the intellectual equivalent of pretending he could not see something right in front of him when the purges were mentioned, the trained reflex still there after all those years. It was not acknowledged that such purges had ever happened, in Malan. Or that it might be in anyway unusual that the High Queen had ruled for over five centuries.
Lord Asher shrugged.
“Absence of proof is not proof of absence,” he said. “All worries could be put to rest by allowing the Krypteia to-”
“No,” Osian burst out.
All eyes went on him. He licked his lips, ignoring Nerei beaming up his way with that childish grin.
“I mean,” he said more calmly, “that as Angharad Tredegar’s personal sponsor, I do not consent to interrogation by the Krypteia.”
As if he would let the Masks anywhere near her. Knives were the least of what their interrogators had in store.
“That settles the matter, as far as I am concerned,” Captain Falade mildly said. “Professor Fenhua?”
“It is my professional opinion that Angharad Tredegar’s reported contact with the Red Eye is highly unlikely to have resulted in contamination even if she is truly contracted with a second-order entity,” the willowy beauty replied. “I have no objections to her candidature.”
With a senior signifier and Peiling professor coming down on his niece’s side, there was no one left in the room with the professional standing to argue further. Lord Asher’s brow furrowed, but the devil said nothing more.
“I have concerns as well,” Brigadier Laghari announced, drumming her fingers against the desk. “Not about the girl’s contract, but of the potential trouble that Captain Tredegar brought to our door on her behalf.”
The Pereduri did not grimace. He had been forewarned this would likely be brought up during the review.
“I am willing to answer any question, Brigadier,” he evenly replied.
The older Someshwari hummed.
“You’re a senior officer but not all that highly ranked in the Umuthi Society,” she said. “Yet you have disbursed a sum that is around-”
She glanced down at a paper, then let out low whistle.
“Well, around the budget for our entire Dominion operation for a year,” Laghari said. “Where is the coin coming from, Tredegar?”
“That seems an unnecessary intrusion,” Professor Fenhua said. “Surely there is-”
“Sustained,” Lord Asher cut in.
Captain Falade said nothing, leaving Osian to sigh.
“As some of you may know,” he said, “the Clockwork Cathedral allows its members to register inventions with them, giving all rights over the Watch in exchange for a flat portion of revenues in perpetuity.”
One in a hundredth, which could mean either a pittance or a king’s ransom depending on what was registered.
“What did you invent?” Laghari asked, sounding interested.
To say Osian had ‘invented’ the rifle would be untrue, for there were already some in the Republics and allegedly in the northern Someshwar, but he had invented the Isibankwa-pattern rifle. Which was accurate nearly a third further than the Tianxi attempts and could be made at half the price. Most importantly, the casting process required only a few tool changes from the current Watch musket workshops. That would save the order millions over the next decades, something he would not gain coin from but had earned him many an indulgence from the Wenedsday Council. Unfortunately, his rifles were not yet being made on any large scale.
The first workshop had only just been refitted last month.
“A weapon, but it is only registered and not yet in service,” Osian admitted. “I borrowed from the Watch on future revenues.”
“Huh,” Captain Falade said, sounding amused. “How far ahead?”
No one came to his defense this time, not even Fenhua. They looked as curious as the rest.
“By the Cathedral’s estimates, I have borrowed the next eighty-three years of revenue,” Osian said, coughing into his fist embarrassedly.
All four of them were veterans, so the only indication of surprise was Fenhua’s lips slightly twitching.
“Well,” Brigadier Laghari grunted, “if you were splashing that much gold around, it explains the mess in Ixta. I won’t weep over the cutters cutting each other, but I was given to understand you nearly caused a major diplomatic incident in Sacromonte.”
Osian’s jaw set mulishly.
“I only paid for retaliation on whoever was targeting my niece,” he said. “I did not give instructions to-”
“A mansion belonging to a house of the Six was torched, Tredegar,” Laghari flatly interrupted. “The coin was tracked back to one of our payhouses in the city and House Salavera lodged a formal complaint with the Conclave.”
If the infanzones wanted to play the hirelings, Osian disdainfully thought, they should not complain of being treated as such. Besides, their hands were hardly clean: after the incident, in a fit of spite the Salavera had ordered all their contacts in the Guardia to join in the hunt on Angharad. It was half the reason Osian had done more than pretend to obey when Professor Akia had told him to pull the contract and steer his niece towards Scholomance instead.
“I was not aware that we now answered to Sacromonte yiwu trash,” Professor Fenhua sneered.
“Maybe not in your libraries, but some of us live in the real Vesper,” Brigadier Laghari flatly replied. “We import more than half the food for our Trebian holdings through Sacromonte, Fenhua. We don’t poke at the Six without a good reason.”
“Our order has a long history of taking in lost souls with nowhere else to go,” Lord Asher smiled, never quite showing his teeth. “I do not believe you want this to change, Anju, so what is it that you are proposing?”
“That we don’t rub their face in the girl joining the black any more than we need to,” Brigadier Laghari said. “Let the offence die down some by sending her cabal somewhere quiet and out of sight for its first test. We can take the temperature before their second year, see if the storm has passed.”
“There is some sense in that,” Captain Falade conceded, pawing at a stack of papers and ripping out a sheet with a noise of satisfaction. “And here: the Asphodel Rectorate requested for us to find their latest cult, it seems a fitting assignment.”
Osian’s brows raised in alarm at the suggestion. Rooting out a hollow cult was supposed to be a quiet assignment? Professor Fenhua noticed his expression and let out a snort.
“Bored nobles playing cultist, not a true cult,” Fenhua assured him. “Last time we caught them they were dealing with some fertility god for party favors. There’s not much trouble to be found in Asphodel. Captain Osian.”
“An acceptable compromise,” Lord Asher mused. “Under this constraint, I vote to maintain Angharad Tredegar’s candidature for Scholomance.”
The other three agreed, one after the other and like that it was done. It would be all right, Osian told himself. He had been to the Rectorate once or twice, if barely beyond the port, and it was a faded power. A backwater past its prime, more concerned by its petty squabbles with other third-raters than its own diminished standing. As quiet as it got in Trebian Sea.
How much trouble could one really get in somewhere like the Asphodel Rectorate?
Pale Lights 
I’m currently out of the country and my internet is spotty, so here’s the last chapter of Book I early. Seen you in a month for the beginning of Book II, updates will resume on the 28th of July.
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Safe travels. See you soon.
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“How much trouble could one really get in somewhere like the Asphodel Rectorate?”
Well, if that’s not setting up one HELLUVA next chapter, I don’t know what else would?
Great first book, EE, looking forward to picking up again this Autumn.
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Osian in the chapter is her uncle not her father. Her father she reminisces about is dead.
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Famous last words one presumes. I like the look at Osian and Abuela/Nerei we got although IMO Nerei was a bit OTT. And did we know The Watch has devils in its ranks previously?
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We knew next to nothing about the Watch, and Devil members hadn’t been mentioned.
On the other hand, Cantica proved they at least worked with Devils, and Devils were mentioned as being citizens, or at least legally allowed in some nations.
Ch 41
Modern devils, those that some nations allowed within their borders, wore skin taken from corpses. Fresh corpses, so the shell had not decayed, but they took only from the already dead.
So the Watch making use of their knowledge, skills, and experience isn’t entirely unexpected. Especially considering the Devil’s also seemed against the Gods, or at least some of them, if the Maze is anything to go by.
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Thanks for the early release.
Interesting, would really be helpful to have a list of which nations are inspired by which countries and the various circles of the Watch. Kinda reminds me of the Wheel of Time and its various Ajahs.
Tupoc seems he will be a rival in the future…wonder if he will end up on a team with one of Song’s Brothers.
I am sure nothing interesting at all will happen on this mission….I do hope since we have seven members we just role with that.
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Osain seems pretty nice relatively speaking, dude is in way over his head though. He seems to really love his niece and have a least some morals. Osain does seem pretty influential though given his ties to movers and shakers as well as his own position. His inventions seem pretty neat. But the dumbass tempted Fate with the ending line of how much trouble could possibly happen.
Abulea aka: Nerei Name-Eater is just as much of an old terrifying monster as expected and it’s wonderful. She or whatever the hell Abulea is can shapeshift so we don’t even know if Abulea is human which is some nightmare fuel. Nerei is such a glorious bitch and it’s kinda hilarious.
The Obscure Committee seems pretty cool, all the personalities are pretty neat, I din’t expect a Devil to be in the higher ups though.
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Ah, there we are. Here be monsters, tread carefully.
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abuela, it reminds me of assassin from the guide
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Abuela is just like assassin in the guide, that kind of monster living for milenia and leading men is the stuff nightmares are made.
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Personally, I think Abuela just has a very powerful Contract/God. Could be something else, though.
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My thoughts were she is possibly a Saint that didn’t horribly mutate and go insane.
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Abuela is believed to have participated in events that are centuries old so no definitely not human XD
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I’m finding Angharad’s father to be rather interesting. Definitely not the man she described in her memories, but then again sometimes it’s the people closest to you that you understand the least.
I’m not sure she is even capable of thinking ill of her family…
Also makes you wonder if there was some truth to the accusations against her family, just aimed at the wrong person.
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if you’re talking about Osian, he’s her uncle
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I’m not. I’m talking about Osian recalling how suspicious he found Gwydion, Angharad’s father, when Angharad’s contract is being discussed.
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Thats not her father, Osian is her uncle, her father is dead.
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Yes, but her uncle talked about how suspicious he thought Angharad’s father was.
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Yes. I’m talking about Osian’s thoughts about her father.
He knew not the nature of Angie’s contract, but the whole thing reeked of Gwydion. Rhiannon had been much too taken with the triumph of winning the darling of the season to ever dig into her husband’s past, but Osian had always found him suspect. A young man from a fallen house that was barely peers suddenly becoming the flower of Pereduri society when he made his debut? No, Gwydion had been wildly suspicious even before Rhiannon’s enemies began having a rash of mysterious accidents all involving spirits.
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Yeah I put her Father being “Dead” in quotation marks for now.
Definitely not what he seems lmao. And even if he is dead I would not be surprised to run into a Secret Sibling of Angharad. Feels kinda Fey.
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You may be on to something there.
Ch 20
She had not seen Father or her cousins die with her own eyes but there could be no doubt.
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Sometimes a single word is all one needs to understand how much worse a situation is than you believed.
Perpetual. A Queen Perpetual. We already knew her to be the tyrant of slavers, colonizers, and genocidal expansionists, but to have been such for five centuries without being slaughtered where she stands demonstrates the wholesale unworthiness of Malan’s continued existence. Worse, she is claimed as the keeper of their honor. Angharad defers to this beast. Their culture has twisted around her, celebrating an ageless monster.
The question must be asked again: What is it the Watch defends against? Devils which must necessarily have murdered many people in order to develop their peculiar immortality are not just members, but brokers of influence. An unnamed being, older than written records, publicly acknowledged and known by all to be an eater of men, openly mocks even the influential within their bureaucracy without consequence. A beast arrogating humanity consumed a continent half a milennium ago, spreading slavery while calling it honor, and the Watch simply did as its name suggests. And for all the dark powers leashed to their service, they cannot even accomplish their claimed purpose in Sacromonte, as the Cerdans may well get away with their illegal divine torture-murder project which has, as I predicted, been tried before. Of course people have looked at the power of Saints and wondered if they could not be used. The existence of the Watch should be all the evidence one needs that they cannot be, as someone must have tried in order to precipitate such an organization. But the arrogance of nobility knows no bounds, and the Watch has failed to stop them.
If this is what the Watch protects…
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Honestly, I’d thought you were mistaken when you ranted about this before. But the Watch is severely corrupt and much too accommodating to human evil. Frankly, Nerei picking a covert and deniable plan like “raise someone that hates them as an elite assassin” shouldn’t be fucking necessary, but clearly she made the right call if it’s treated as common sense that the Watch can’t delete the Cerdans over that Theogony shit.
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I understand all those points but my response was more along the lines of “if the watch is ignoring all this shit because they dont have the spare resources to deal with them and the aftermath, then the shit they actually use their resources on is going to be horrifying.”
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One of the things I like about EE is he brings in practical nuances analogous to the real world. 1) The Watch doesn’t have sufficient proof. 2) The Watch can’t end the Cerdans because it can ultimately screw with their ability to feed themselves. Like sure, Watch ends Cerdans, their logistics take a hit, and then every Watch operation sustained by that supply chain becomes obsolete or neutered. Following the calculus to its conclusion, more people would likely end up suffering than in a small scale atrocity.
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I think you significantly underestimate difficulty here. undeniably the queen perpetual is awful, she is a nigh-immortal entity that has corrupted an entire people’s way of life to the point that a man years if not decades out of the country still reacts instinctually to avoid punishment. instead of just thinking about how awful that is, consider if she is the lesser evil, or if the main threat they are dealing with is using up enough resources they can’t afford to deal with her and haven’t been able to for 500 years.
despite the state of the red maw dealing with it was not considered a priority while it was mostly trapped, they seemingly can’t afford to attack the six in sacramonte even when they know they’ve broken the accords just due to the risk of losing resources, they churn through combatants quickly enough that the militant branch can’t seem to maintain officers long enough to build any support in the political battleground, a freshly minted saint was able to pose a serious threat to the blackcloaks aboard the ship way back.
this sort of thing reeks of fighting a war without the resources needed to do so. deities and spirits look to be a self-renewing existential threat. sometimes you only have the option of fixing the very worst problems, and while the queen perpetual and the six are certainly awful, can you honestly say that they are the worst problems with even the tiny glimpse we’ve seen of the dangers in just the dominion of lost things, some of those dangers being beyond some members of the watch already
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It doesn’t matter how much worse the other threats are when so many resources which could be spent on fighting them are being wasted right now.
Slavery is an abomination, and all who partake of it would, in a just world, swing from their own ill-gotten rafters. Remove human decency from consideration, though, and we see slavery is also a staggering waste of resources. People only work hard enough to avoid punishment when enslaved. Talented people are squandered en masse when they are forced into fields, and those who might have been talented with a few kind lessons are never found. An infinite forced labor pool reduces the motivation to develop or spread technological solutions to problems. Slavery reduces the resources which could be spent on fighting the darkness, and yet the Watch allows an entire continent of this waste to persist, and its queen to keep her title and throat.
In Sacromonte, how many children like Tristan are in the Murk? How many talented leaders are going unrecognized because they didn’t have the fortune to be born to “nobility?” How many other people who could do so much more are languishing because the Watch sees suffering caused by humans as beneath their notice?
And I reject the suggestion they lack the resources to fix this, because all such resources were just freed up. Artillery ships, bands of superpowered blackcloaks, and the organizational capacity to maintain an operation like that on the Dominion for centuries could all be repurposed into a quick revolutionary takedown of the nobility of Sacromonte. The following reorganization would, if real-world events are any indication, produce a city with more productive capacity, more ingenuity, and more loyalty to the cause of the Watch, in significantly less than the ~15 years they have before an answer to the Red Eye must be enacted. But they won’t do it. Because they personally benefit from the status quo just as slavers do.
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ngl your latest chain of comments have declined significantly from both a quality perspective and a general coherence perspective. first of all, we know that the capacity of the watch is maintained by an agreement with all major powers called the Iscariot Accord. We can presume that, because this accord is necessary, the Watch’s military power is not sufficient to install itself as some kind of One World Government off of fiat alone. Therefore, the Watch invading and deposing the leadership of the largest city in the fucking world would clearly constitute a breach of the Accords by their hand, leading to the dissolution of the order that leads to the watch being capable of doing things like stopping fucking eldritch abominations from eating the souls of man. That’s what the Watch guards from, you sanctimonious fucking prick, the extinction of humanity at the hand of literal horrors from beyond. And also “quick revolutionary action”? Hahahahhahaha dont make me fucking laugh. There is no fucking thing as quick revolutionary action. There has never been a functioning example of a socialist state at the national scale in fucking history. Im tired of listening to your fucking drivel. Move to cuba and enlist in a fucking forced labor camp already holy shit.
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/613550
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Normally I would just be quietly satisfied at someone being so angry with my fun, but there are several serious errors here.
There are no Cuban forced labor camps. They do not exist now, and nothing like that has existed in the country for decades. There were a few in the immediate aftermath of the revolution, but they were mostly for captured members of the US mafia and government backed fascist Batísta regime’s military or police force. People who had done awful things, but nothing passing the surprisingly high bar for execution. In the wake of the revolution, under 600 people were outright executed by the new government, mostly for well-substantiated war crimes against revolutionaries, having been highly-ranked fascists directly involved in the oppression of Cuba’s people, or being rapists. When an entire country overthrows such a corrupt government, that few people getting the rope is, frankly, fairly restrained. For everyone else, once the guns were put down, they stayed down.
It is unfortunately true that those early work camps (which, again, no longer exist and have not for decades) also imprisoned people for being gay. There is no excuse or justification for this. They did it because toxic patriarchal heirarchies were stronger then than now, just as they were in the US. It was and remains an injustice perpetrated by the Cuban government…which Castro in his later years explicitly admitted, putting the blame for it on his own shoulders. Good luck finding an American politician who would admit their personal culpability in any of our far more numerous sins.
Speaking of the US, if you want to find forced labor camps that’s where you need to look. We call them prisons, and their institutional connections to actual slavery are clear as day to anyone who cares to look. We still have actual chain gangs in this country: Men convicted of a crime (both of us know conviction and guilt are not the same thing), forced to perform grueling labor in many fields for no pay. The “wages” paid in many other prisons are a joke meant to assuage the guilt of the rest of society. Make us think the institution isn’t just slavery by another name.
We have thousands of forced labor camps, and millions subjected to them. To put such a sin on Cuba would be laughable if any of this were a laughing matter.
In a signatory of the International Criminal Court, such conditions for prisoners would see the leadership of our country tried, convicted, and sentenced to years of imprisonment at the Hague. Some would likely get life. But we did not sign on to it, because we fully intended on continuing to commit crimes against humanity, and because we strongarmed the rest of the world into accepting our refusal.
As for examples of rapidly-successful socialist reform, I implore you to look at the presidency of Thomas Sankara. He led Burkina Faso for four years before he was assassinated by French-backed fascists who have since been convicted of crimes against humanity. In that time, he presided over the single fastest improvement in human conditions ever recorded anywhere. There are too many details to discuss here, but I recommend looking it up for yourself. Your claim that “socialism never works” is a lie you have been taught your entire life. It works just fine unless everyone involved is murdered by fascists. That is the real historical truth.
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I mean considering the Watch also has Ageless Monsters in its ranks…they can hardly protest too much.
Honestly the Watch probably prefers working with Ageless Leaders…reliable dependable and less politics for them to wade through.
Mostly it seems they protect against Rogue Gods. Though we do get introduced to the Devil Intelligence Org (Office of Opposition) so presumably that as well.
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From all references human evil is not the Watches mandate.
Ch 20
What do you think the Watch is, Lady Tredegar?”
“The watchmen of Vesper,” she replied. “The keepers of the Iscariot Accords.”
“They are the lid on a very deep well,” Tupoc Xical said, shaking his head. “Only when they succeed in that duty can they spare the breath to be anything more.”
Ch 30
“Do you know what it really means to be part of the Watch, boy?” Lieutenant Wen finally said. “Once you strip away all the lies and the propaganda and the prettied-up history?”
He slowly shook his head.
“We kill the things that feed on mankind,” Wen said, and for once there was not a trace of a sneer in his voice. “When horror comes crawling out of the box, we slam the lid on its fingers.”
Whether something is evil or not is a matter of the culture a person was raised in as well as personal opinion, morals, and ethics (all Angharad’s declarations on who is and isn’t honorable are a great example of this). And sometimes the lesser evil is the closest thing to a good option you have.
We don’t have exact details on the Iscariot Accords, but I’m pretty sure overthrowing governments is not part of that. Especially since the members if the Watch come from all countries and probably all have different ideas on what a “correct” government is. Who should decide? Maybe someone from Tupoc’s country where they raid their neighbors gor human sacrifices? Or someone from Malani or Pereduri? I’m sure most of them don’t think their Queen is ‘evil’.
Personally, wouldn’t want some outside organization coming in and taking over or deciding what form of government my country should have . Whether or not I agree with the current one, it is for the citizens to decide and “outside help” should only get involved if they are invited by the citizens (and a majority at that) or are being targeted by that government (war). Otherwise it is forcing your personal ideals on an entire culture.
It has also been shown that someone who disagrees, in most cases, can easily leave, with few restrictions on travel being mentioned plus the option of joining the Watch.
Also, considering most of the countries seem to hold slaves, they could also all be considered colonizers based on the history we have been given, and despite having ‘explorers’ go out their borders don’t appear to have changed in quite some time, while Pereduri demonstrates they didn’t just kill everyone after conquering when they were expanding. So genocidal expansionist is inaccurate.
According to Nerei, they tried to shut down the Cerdan’s but they moved shop and disappeared. If they just killed off the Cerdan’s with no evidence it would start a war between the Watch and Sacremonte, dragging in many uninvolved parties. One family breaking the Accords does not mean an entire city should be held responsible and purged. It doesn’t even mean the whole social class should be purged, especially since it was emphasized the Cerdan’s were doing this in secret.
Purging just the Cerdan’s (even those uninvolved), while feasible, may not start a war only if they have solid evidence (not just spy reports) and has it’s own repercussions.
They would lose any chance of identifying the Cerdan’s backer. Who would then probably just sponsor someone else to continue the experiment but increase security and secrecy.
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As a European citizen, I‘m rather sure not all European countries or ones like Sweden etc are „neoliberal“ and full-blown capitalist either.
There are a lot of mixes, including tempering by/with the aspirations of (the actual theory of) socialism (not the USSR bullshit quite wrongly claiming to be socialist).
So you don‘t have to go as far as Burkina Faso, unless you‘re talking about „only this in pure form“. No, not ideal yet. Far from it. But not the extreme and/or what you seem to think either.
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In response to your reply and the age old tankie justification of “it totally wouldve worked if it wasn’t for the evil stinky west >:(” a political system that cannot sustain itself and defend itself against outside influence is a useless system. The world does not sustain systems in vacuum, political systems are always in competition. If promising socialist regimes arent able to defend themselves against outside influence without adopting terrifying levels of authoritarianism ala USSR, then they are failed regimes. The fact that neoliberalist capitalism won the Cold War is the first and greatest endorsement of it as a political system. Sorry, but that’s the truth. Your worldviews are rooted in corpses and hypotheticals, mine deal with the world we have now. There will never be an internationale revolution, because they will always be crushed by democratic capitalist societies, or turn into terrifying examples of authoritarianism. Such is the nature of man. Choke on your losses.
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Neoliberal capitalism is literally killing the biosphere you live in. Right now. And it isn’t going to stop, either, as all of the reasons it is doing that are ideological rather than incidental. One does not need to have an alternative ready to show the status quo as unfit when the status quo is demonstrating its unworthiness by destroying, not just itself, but life as we know it.
Imperialist capitalism has won conflicts up to now, it is true. But it cannot beat the rising tides into submission, use petrodollars to bribe 120 degree farenheit cityscapes into habitability, or use nuclear threats against starvation. The resources which made this system function have been spent and cannot be regenerated. It’s the most damning indictment a system can suffer, when external reality decrees its end.
I do not know how to solve this. Nobody I know claims to. We all, however, know that trying anything else at all is likely to be better than the absolute and irreversible doom that is coming. Defeating the hopeless assertion that no possible alternatives exist is the necessary first step in that transition, and so I work towards that in whatever small ways I can.
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>How much trouble could one really get in somewhere like the Asphodel Rectorate?
Let’s FIND OUT!
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for political and dark secrets, tristan, for assassins and monsters, there is Angharad. the trial of ruins was relatively peaceful until both arrivedd and the mountain fell
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I suspect the Brigadier might also know more than she’s letting on – never trust anyone who must have high levels of political skill to be where they are but who acts like an easily taunted blusterer… maybe she wants them out of sight for a reason.
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I wonder if that „nobles‘ playing at being cultists cult“ has anything to do with the moved Cerdan „shop“…
On the other hand, „send them where no one‘s looking“ sounds like a good opportunity to silently get rid of „unwanted elements“ and blame it on the school‘s too harsh trials and/or them not just being good enough…
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Well, this was interesting. I suspect Abuela is a manifest god, but if that were so Fortuna would have noticed. We aren’t going to get answers any time soon, that’s for sure. I began the chapter thinking ‘devil’, but then she transformed and a devilish peer showed up. Lord Asher knows what she is.
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Good catch! I’d assumed she was a devil, but she’s only referred to as a monster.
Fortuna has her own agenda, so we couldn’t use her silence as conclusive evidence either way.
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If devils could shape shift they would not have to wear skin disguises.
Abuela is clearly not a devil.
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I was thinking a contractor to something extremely old and powerful or possibly a Saint that didn’t go monstrous and insane.
That is assuming it isn’t just a people or power we haven’t been introduced to in our extremely limited view of the world.
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When they talked about stabilising a Saint, they acted like it was never done, not like there was a stable Saint in the room right now 😅
I tthink she’s something we haven’t seen yet.
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Art evolution overview of the eight people surviving third trial
Just for fun. Took surprisingly long to put together.
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Also while at it: Have an Angharad and Song Fanart
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So you have any plan to do the committee members? Your illustrations really help me keep all the names straight 🙂
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My current guideline is people should show up more than once to qualify for character art.
Also, I had a very busy June. PL ended the week before my wedding (Patreon time), so I was really not motivated to start a big project with six new characters, where one of them is a shape changer. Frankly, I got lucky things coincided the way they did timewise. The between books break just happened to hit the month I was super busy.
I’m not sure if I’ll continue weekly character art for Book 2 yet. It’s probably not as crucial as the “30+ new characters from chapter 3” was in Book 1. I do have a weeks vacation with no plans starting two weeks after book 2 starts up on Patreon, so if I do, that probably would be my time to put in the big initial time investment for starting picture.
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Do we know what a “second-order entity” is? I can’t remember reading that term before, but I might just have forgotten…
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As far as I know, this is the first time we’ve seen the term. From context, it seems that the Watch believes The Fisher might be much stronger than they’re comfortable with. Beyond that, we’ll just have to wait for more to be revealed.
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It *seems* to be synonymous with (or a superset of) “god of the Old Night”, from their conversation.
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Reading the chapter where Angharad talks to the Fisher, it feels like something that could be described as a god of the old night. I am very interested to see where that leads
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I really want to read tristan tumbling the govermment of asphodel rectorate while drunk. That would be great.
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This chapter makes me curious about a couple of previous events.
When Ayanda, Bruceida, and Leander were captured as sacrifices it was mentioned
‘Even if the three were still alive to be saved, the blackcloaks would not sacrifice their own assaulting the cult of the Red Eye in its hidden strongholds’
Now the Watch is being forced to into the fight
‘A clusterfuck we will need to wade into, I’ll remind you,’
So there is a chance, however slim, that they have not all been sacrificed yet and someone may be recovered as a result of the Watch taking action.
When Tristan and Maryam were discussing who had recommended him, he specifically referred to her as Abuela instead of using the name Nerei he had learned from Lieutenant Vasanti.
Nerei appears to be rather infamous, so if Tristan had used that name how differently would Maryam reacted and treated him, and what could he have learned about Abuela?
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I don’t think he even knew the name “Nerei” before Vasanti told him.
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He didn’t. But Vasanti did tell him Nerei recommended him, he was her ‘pet project’. Nut during a later conversation he specifically called her Abuela.
Ch 27
‘He told her all of it, even his suspicions about the source of Lieutenant Vasanti’s hostility – though he called Abuela that, and not ‘Nerei’ as the watchwoman had.’
If he had said Berei during that conversation I wonder how Maryam would have reacted. Because I’m sure she would have recognized the name.
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*edit* second quote was Ch 31, not 30
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Okay, this likes to attach my replies to the wrong comments…
The correction above was in relation to my earlier comment on the Watches responsibilities.
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I think the thread was just too deep – not even seeing a reply button on your last comment.
Anyway, yeah, didn’t remember that last conversation. Would have been interesting – though of course, this is after Tristan knew Maryam was a Watchwoman, so of course he would be too careful to give that tidbit away.
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Derp, earlier than I thought, he didn’t know yet. But yeah, very Tristan of him to hide that tidbit.
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This site doesn’t allow for comment chains or conversation very well…
Yeah, that conversation was a bit earlier considering he didn’t know she was in the Watch until after Cantica. He only knew her and Song had some kind of deal, likely with the Watch, when they had that conversation back in the second trial.
Not sharing information definitely fits him, though technically may have been inadvertently dishonest since he couldn’t be positive Abuela and Nerei were the same person.
But he was as curious as Maryam about his recommendation and wanted to know how Abuela was related to the Watch so I’m a bit surprised he didn’t bring the name up, since he knew Maryam had information about the Watch and may be able to tell him more.
I half expect it’s at least partially that he subconsciously doesn’t want to dig into Abuela’s secrets and wants her to tell him the truth herself instead.
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A good thing Osian doesn’t live in Calernia or that last sentence would have really fucked Angharad over.
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l mostly do physical books as l stare at screens all day except when l travel as I can’t keep my suitcase under the weight limit if I took enough books. My daughter turned me on to this and l could not put it down. I read about 200 titles a year and this was the best book I have read so far. Thanks!
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