Chapter Text
War is coming.
The forces of the naib have already marched out, pushing down the mountain valley approaches. Ney says this is just a diversion, and more subtle and powerful forces are gathering, moving down via hidden routes already pathed out by Ney and other experts down to the outskirts of Zamash. And there are allies being called up and deals being made with the divine and a ritual at the new moon and so on and so forth.
Eko pays practically no attention to this. Yuu will tell her if anything is happening that she has to care about, because Akhmi is a reliable source of information. Mostly, anyway; they’re still a szirom, so the rumours and gossip they pass to big sis Yuu are more concerned with narrative interest than accuracy, but frankly Eko considers that better than boring silly truth anyway. And she has more important things to concern her.
She has a nemesis now, and while she totally won their epic duel on the night of the new moon and stole the curse-soaked oar that was powering Lady One-Eye’s dark ritual, the nephwrack got away with some of her blood on those writhing, screaming chains. That’s the kind of arcane link that can be used for all manner of nasty curses, so it’s pretty important Eko gets rid of it before her wounds reopen and refuse to ever stop bleeding or start leeching necrotic poison into her body or draining her essence or whatever other horrible things a witch who draws power from the corruption-soaked nightmares of the slain Primordials’ decaying corpses can come up with.
This is not as easy as it sounds. While her beloved Örömi is simply the best ever at cutting through barriers or obstacles that would stop her from going wherever she wants, a curse dogging her steps and afflicting her from far away isn’t the sort of thing her knife is made for. And while Eko herself can cut the ephemeral bonds of ownership and sympathetic resonance between an object and the person who it belongs to, that depends on her having the object and cutting it off the person (and then attaching it to herself). You’d think that doing it in reverse and cutting an object she owns - her own blood! - away from herself would be easy, but it turns out arcane links aren’t symmetrical compositions; go figure.
So instead she’s gonna have to do it the hard way, which means doing blood alchemy about it. Targeting thankfully won’t be an issue - just as her spilled blood is a link to her, so she is a link to her blood. As such, she’s currently thinking the best option is to use a stolen Fire hearthstone to induce a metaphorical and very literal ignition within the blood, wherever it is, and remotely boil it until it denatures.
The challenge is going to be doing that without also boiling the blood that’s inside her veins, which would not only be extremely painful but also probably make her lose her grip on the working before the arcane link degrades, which would be a whole lot of searing agony for no actual gain. Super-definitely something to avoid, so Ney’s complicated planning and scouting and military faffing around can frankly take a hike until she’s done working out how to construct a Silurian sentence that grammatically isolates the blood outside her body from both the blood inside her body and also the blood she shares with mama and her siblings and all her cute keruby, none of whom she’s particularly keen on accidentally boiling alive because she messed up an exclusion-clause.
Mama would be all “Eko, I’ve built this spoopy laboratory full of gurgling cauldrons and glass equipment and all that kind of thing, don’t steal them, something something” and while Eko finds that all interminably boring, it’s also true that all the equipment and resources and stuff that Eko doesn’t have right now makes things easier when she can just steal ‘em from Mama. Instead she’s forced to do it more witch-like, heading out into the mountains around Malra to do what she can under the pretence of scouting for ghosts. This would, she complains, be much quicker if she could get even one proper blood-vat set up. But noooo, it’d be all ‘super-noticeable’ and ‘highly illegal’ and ‘liable to get her caught or banished or slain’, ugh. Also she’d have to kill, like, a whole lot of animals or people to get enough blood, since Creation is dumb and stupid and doesn’t have proper blood-rivers like the Ruin does.
“Sounds like a helluva place, boss,” responds a cheerful, chatty voice with a twang to it that suggests one should never, under any circumstances, take one’s hand off one’s wallet while listening to it talk. “Am I ever gonna get a butcher’s hook at it?”
Her mood lifting substantially, Eko glances over at her newest crony. Poncory is the first of his breed, the bohockae, and not to pat herself on the back but he’s basically proof that she remains the undisputed best creator of demons ever. He stands just a little shorter than mama, a red-streaked raccoon with an eye-mask of black horn and a giant paper scroll for a tail that his clever, nimble-fingered hand is currently unrolling just a little to stash a- hey, hey, hey! That’s Eko’s bag of boiled sweets! Taking advantage of her narrative soliloquy to pickpocket her is foul play! Go steal sweets from Yuu instead!
“I did, I did, those ain’t yours, boss,” he shamelessly lies to her face. “These are Yuu’s. Ain’t they, Yuu? Being I such a cunnin’ thief and all.”
“Course they are - as long as half of them are mine. If they aren’t, then you stole them from Eko,” Yuu says, sprawled out in the branches of a dead tree, spinning a knife on her finger.
Bah. Bah! It’s only because her little prank of sending one of his siblings back to the Ruin every few nights is so funny and rewarding that she’s letting him get away with this, Eko insists, hiding her very real pride at his impertinence behind her mask. It’s the fifth and last of the ones Lilunu made her; a face-covering lattice of woven ribbons cut from flags that survived Adorjan’s passing, with two wide, angled eyes covered by dense white lace - which pairs nicely with her high ponytail and excessively frilly red-splattered white dress. She spins happily as she imagines the chaos going on back home, with ledgertails showing up every few days and going about their thieving, burgling, pilfering ways without anyone being able to track down where they’re coming from. She really has made the best ever partners and cronies for little keruby to induct into their gangs.
Anyway, she gestures, snapping her fingers several times. If he’s got his tail unrolled anyway, he can dig around in there and pull the maps out. She’s pretty sure there’s meant to be a Fire demesne somewhere up here, and that’s almost certainly probably going to have some words in its underlying ontological narrative that she can use. Possibly by dripping some of her blood into it, and maybe chanting grammatical variations on her half-constructed sentence at it until something reacts.
There is, it turns out, a Fire demesne up in the mountains, in a dry and dusty valley full of lowland deciduous trees instead of the pines that inhabit the other valleys up on the Malran plateau. The demesne’s even uncapped! Probably because the naib hasn’t got around to it yet; there’s no way he doesn’t know it’s here. Given what she saw down in Pershwa while she was sabotaging that manse, Eko is pretty sure a Garda Bird was reborn on this site at some point in the past - not recently, a few centuries ago at least, but the flames that cluster in the centre of this deep triangular cleft in the rock are feather-shaped, and burn steadily without ever consuming themselves. Heat pools here, trapped by the acute angles of the fissure and magnified by the angle that has it catch and hold the heat of the sun’s rays.
Basking in the hollow lies a mountain lion. It seems to be using this rent in the rock face as its den, enjoying the warmth that radiates from the walls and the fire-feathers in the slightly charred central depression. Its mane is also on fire. Wait, no. Mountain lions don’t have manes. That’s not on fire; it is fire, licking along its back and framing its face. It’s been changed by its long exposure to this place, made magical by the burning energies here.
Eko observes the lion. The lion observes Eko. Yuu and Poncory observe both of them from a respectful distance that won’t get them involved if negotiations devolve into a fight.
Listen, Eko says, crossing her arms. She’s not here to take Mr Fire-Lion’s home. She’s not gonna build anything on top of it or try to turf it out. She’s just here to chant at the nice pile of burning feathers for a bit, bleed on it, and then leave. She’ll even - she beckons Poncory over, then rolls her eyes and goes to him when he refuses to approach the magical flame-wreathed apex predator, snapping her fingers sharply until he unrolls his tail and unseals a small deer carcass that was planned to be dinner - she’ll even make it worth its time with some food, see?
The fire-lion blinks lazily, looks the offering over, stretches a little to pin it under a heavy paw without getting up, drags it closer, puts its head down on the carcass, and goes to sleep.
Well. That was easy.
“That weren’t fair, we were gonna eat it-” begins Poncory, before Yuu cuffs him over the back of the head, hissing a warning about not drawing the big fire-kat’s attention. He decides to sulk instead.
Approaching the central fire, Eko cracks her knuckles and gets to work. She more or less got the grammar of her ritual down on the way here, at least as far as targeting the effect and including and excluding all the things she wants included and excluded goes. Now she just needs the fire bit. A few small bowls go around the perimeter, which she fills with blood, and then she carefully paces around them counter-clockwise, making unfamiliar and uncomfortably difficult signs drawn from the shapes that birds make when they flock over deserts and volcanoes to invoke the flames in different ways, seeking the truest, most fundamental words that describe its nature and induce it to burn and purify.
The first try fails. The second works, but not very well. The third makes her fingers briefly catch fire before she finishes signing, necessitating a quick, silent and frantic bit of flailing to put them out and check that Mr Lion is still dozing (he is). The fourth is another failure. The fifth...
... well, it works. She’s not sure it works perfectly, but she’s run out of ideas, and doesn’t really have time to sit around listening to the essence-song of the flames for a few days trying to pick out more. This one will have to do. As long as it can induce an ignition in her stolen blood, she’ll count it as a win.
Eko Kerisdokht opens up her thumb again and drips fresh blood onto the flames. She closes her eyes and shapes arcane syllables with a silent tongue and bleeding hands and a sorceress’s soul. From the flames of the demesne she invokes the word Fire, with the nature of purification, consumption and change . From the tips of her fingers she invokes the word Blood, with the associations of sympathy, connection and life. From Poncory, cowering outside the cave, she invokes the word Theft, and ties it to the qualifiers of possession, malice and victim. From Yuu, loyal and watchful, she invokes the word Guard, and reinforces it with associations of safety, prevention and protection.
Let the blood that was stolen from her burn, she commands, within layer upon layer of Silurian syntax and structure that specify how and where and what and when and why. To safeguard her against any curse that might use it as a medium.
Every drop of blood she spilled - on the ground, on the flames, in the bowls - goes up in ruddy-red fire fringed in arterial scarlet. Even the blood still smeared on her fingers ignites. She feels the power move through her and knows that elsewhere, the blood on Lady One-Eye’s chains is burning too. There’s no heat to it, and it doesn’t spread to her gloves or any other fuel. Eko watches, fascinated, until the last specks of blood are gone and the fire flickers out. Bloodflame, she thinks. That was a preview of the bloodflame concept she thought up after meeting Kalido.
Now she just has to figure out how to realify it outside of ritual Workings. And maybe also hope really hard (but without admitting she’s at all concerned) that Lady One-Eye hasn’t done anything tricksy and clever.
When all the boring back-end planning and supplies and all that jazz is done, Ney tracks down Eko to provide a very abridged version of the plan.
“Why aren’t you telling us the whole plan, huh?” Yuu demands, hands on her hips. The wind blows through the grove, bringing the smell of hot Fire grass.
“Because Eko’ll just forget everything or get bored and run off, so I thought I’d just give a summary now and save the effort for nearer the time.”
“I mean, you’re not wrong, but tell me these things separately and I’ll tell her what she needs to know.”
Absolutely, Eko nods, backing her bestie up. That’s basically what Yuu is for; remembering things so Eko doesn’t have to. Also carrying things and doing heavy lifting, which she skived off from back when Eko was handing over all the stuff to Aunt Zanyi in Baisha. Helping her with mischief, theft and other acts of general cronyism, of course - that should probably be at the top of the list, really. Plus, plus, backing her up when she-
“Maybe you should just give us the short version of the plan and I’ll stick around after she gets bored halfway through and leaves,” Yuu suggests, rudely cutting Eko off in the middle of listing her duties as a bestie. She hadn’t even gotten to the reciprocal benefits and privileges Yuu enjoys in return! Like being able to ask Eko to stab things that are too strong for her to stab herself! Or being allowed to share her very tiny snacks! “We all know things’re probs gonna go wrong-wrong so the short version is all we really need.”
“See, this is what I like about you,” Ney says earnestly. “So many people - like Eko’s auntie, say - are all like ‘Ney, tell me all the steps you’re going to do, including details you don’t actually know yet, and tell me at least two weeks before things start’. But you’re just like ‘Tell me the general thing, we both know the plans are going to fall to pieces mid way through, so just let me know the intent of what we’re doing so when we all start improvising we’re working towards the same goals’.”
“But you do have the detailed plans,” Akhmi interjects. “I wrote them up. And made them better.”
“You put paperwings piloted by elemental dragons in.”
“Which would have been a huuuuuuuge improvement.”
“Checks out to me,” Yuu agrees, patting Akhmi on the head. “I bet you ruined things by taking them out.”
“Because we don’t have any elemental dragons.” Ney pauses. “Well, apart from that old codger Mereon, but he doesn’t have any interest in flying.”
“Ha! I knew it! That’s just a lack of planning on your part!”
“Maybe, maybe, but as the stories go, do not anger dragons because a bitten off-head often offends. Where was I?”
“Getting to the point?” Yuu suggests.
“La, la, so pushy. Incidentally if that oversized racoon doesn’t stop eying up my bag, there’ll be a rock to his face.”
“I didn’t do not’ing, guv, and I’m hurt you’re thinking I’m trying to steal things,” Poncory says, pulling back his hands.
“Sure you weren’t. And this way you’re not gonna.” He clears his throat. “We’re going to Zamash, all sneaky-like, while the naib marches there with his big obvious army and his new war-mechanisms and his dragonbloods, etc etc. While we’re there, we try to kill major parts of the shahbanu’s army, supporters, necromancers, etc etc. And at some point, if we get the chance, we try to take her out - but if she marches out to fight the naib, we instead try to pick her off in the middle of the battle. Is that enough getting to the point, your highnesses?”
Eko slams her fist into her hand. Got it! She totally understands what Ney is saying. He doesn’t have to worry; she’ll do her part perfectly. It’s a great plan, ‘cause it was what she was probably gonna do anyway. She gives him a thumbs-up for an excellent choice of target, cracks her knuckles, and sprints off in the rough direction of the nearest bakery.
“... I don’t think you said anything ‘bout a specific target,” Akhmi points out after a moment. “Unless she means the shahbanu? But it didn’t feel like she did.”
“She prob’ly means that new nemesis she keeps going on about,” Yuu contributes wisely. “See, see, Ney said ‘necromancers’, that was his big mistake, and now she’s decided he means the ghosty witch is gonna show up there for sure and it’ll be her rematch.” She tilts her head, looking in the direction Eko left. “Also, also, not sure if that was her actually getting bored and running off or her going for a snack break. She was just talking about sharing tiny cakes with me. She might be back in a few if you’ve got anything else you wanna tell her.”
“I hope she gets me some good stuff for all the abuse I get,” Poncory says, and is largely ignored.
“I’m pretty sure I’m making her worse by playing along with how she’s got the attention span of a cat on catnip,” Ney says with an easy smile. “It lets her think she doesn’t even need to try and can just dance around doing whatever’s the most fun in the moment.”
Yuu shrugs. “I mean, half the time she’s right even without being enabled. And the other half of the time, it’s usually funny watching her trip over a dungeon full of traps and riddles and a flock of ribbon-eating skeleton butterflies she forgot she put there and then get super mad when she opens the treasure chest at the end and it’s empty ‘cause she got distracted when she made the place and forgot to put anything in it.”
Little Akhmi sighs. “You two live in such a strange place. I think you’re just making things up most of the time, but you’re really consistent about the stories you tell.”
“I only lie when it’s funnier. Or more interesting. Or I feel like it. Anything else, Mister Adami Boss-dono?”
Ney massages the back of his neck. “Just make sure you’re prepared for the trip to Zamash. Supplies, weapons, clothes, all that and more. But remember we’re going to be going on foot. We’re trying not to be noticed and ‘wings are not exactly hard to miss, yeah.” He worked his shoulders, idly tossing a knife from hand to hand. “Anything else you need to know from me? And not bullshit things like ‘why do we exist’ because I don’t know and you know exactly why you exist. Also, no, Akhmi, the question isn’t for you. Or that raccoon thing either.”
“I’m called Poncory, guv!”
Yuu hums, and swaps her mask for an exaggeratedly old and pompous strategist squinting through spectacles over a fierce mustache. “Well well well,” she mocks, “let’s evaluate our deployments, eh? For naib and nation, and all that.” She pretends to adjust her moulded-into-the-mask glasses and smoothes out the waxed moustache. “Kay then, Mister Ney - will Eko’s ghosty-witch nemesis show up, you reckon? Also, also, what’s the deal with Orange Blossom and Mashy? ‘Cause Eko told me I shouldn’t get close to Bloss’s killy soul if I liked being alive, and I don’t wanna get scorched by sunlight either.”
Ney pulls a face. “Dunno about that specific ghast, never had records of it before,” he says. “Which might make it less likely since my spies ain’t seen it bodyguarding Sabah. Then again from that you lot said it seemed nettled at Eko so, y’know, might mean it’s gonna try to track her down out of spite. Ghasts hold grudges, everyone knows that. So,” he spreads his hands, “it’s anyone’s guess.
“As for the little question of aid from friends on the other side, well, Taym’s playing it very hush hush, and I know he’s taken more help than he wants me to know. Partly because the plan is for me to babysit Mashy and get her and her Dead-burning light into the right place at the right time, which means he knows exactly where she is and she’ll be away from the main body of the forces which means there’ll be things happening there that he didn’t want her to see. And partly because, c’mon, of course I broke in and read all the real plans he was hiding from me. That’s just common sense.”
Yuu snickers. “Obviously. If he didn’t want you to read ‘em, he wouldn’t have written it all down for you and left the notes in his safe behind all the fun locked doors an’ patrolling clanky-chell things he knows you can get past. That’s basically asking you to have a peek, really.” She nods at this self-evident logic, and Ney nods along. Akhmi and Poncory join in the nodding, on the grounds that it’s the currently-in thing and Yuu is just stating obvious facts that anyone would agree with.
“But, ‘kay, if you’re babysitting Mashy as a big sunlight hammer I guess that means we’ll be a ways away from where you are, ‘cause we’re the kinda thing she’d wanna smash. Got anything we can use to call for help if we need it? Not that Eko’ll admit she’d ever need it, but I wouldn’t mind having something in my shawl just in case we run into, I dunno, another dead Chosen the shahbanu hired from the Underworld that nobody knew she had ‘cause they’re as sneaky as Queenie or she made sure they’d only show up for the trap since she knows we’re coming or whatever.”
“Yuu should know,” Ney smiles, “I am a super-special sneaky war-party leader, to put in terms you understand. Trust me, follow my orders and if I need you, you’ll already be in the right place. And vice versa, of course. Sabah II’s nearly as good as me, but there’s no one else in Taira who can rival me. Mashy’s wife wishes she could lead people like I do.”
“Wot ho, good sir, of course!” Yuu responds, straightening her back and throwing a crisp, precise salute that’s deliberately angled more towards her mask’s elaborately waxed moustache than where it’s supposed to go. “I’ll follow your orders to the very letter! The shahbanu’ll never expect our attack she poked us into making, and we’ll sweep the day with ease!”
“You don’t believe that bullshit, but too many of the sheep-brained Tairan nobles attached to Taym do,” Ney says with a mocking twist of his lips. “You’d think that him training them up with gold magic would make them less stupid, but the fools just use his training to find new ways of being braying twits. I tell you, Yuu, you might be mimicking one of them, but they’re beyond parody. I shouldn’t complain because there’s a reason the Tairan toffs needed us highlanders to fight their wars for them, being that we’re the ones who know how to do things that aren’t just getting as many cataphracts you can muster together and charging, and yet I should complain because I have to deal with them.”
Something cold emerges on his face, something from the layers normally hidden under the smiles and easy manner.
“Zamash isn’t much better. But Sabah’s better at warfare than Taym; she can bring back the dead from four centuries of the conquest and lead them with the ghosts of the best generals of the Tairan empire. It doesn’t matter much when you only get one or two good generals a generation when you can bring back all the ones who lingered as undead warlords who are more dangerous than they were in life.”
Yuu looks at him for a long, long moment, her smile lingering oddly. Then she lowers her hand from the mock salute.
“Hey, hey, Mister Ney,” she says, tilting her head to one side. “I reckon your mask’s slipping. S’fine around me, I been around a bit and know what that’s like, but make sure you put it back on before you head back out on stage, yeah? Sometimes you gotta act alongside some real dumb people, but you can’t risk makin’ mistakes in your performance and letting people see you all naked-like. Think how embarrassed you’d be.”
Ney rolls his shoulders. “Aw shucks, it’s a good thing you’re here to remind me about these things,” he says with faux humility. “‘I don’t know what I’d do without you’, that’s probably what you’re expecting me to say? You probably hear that enough from Eko, though. And Akhmi too, honestly.” He pulls a face. “Honest to Ahlat, you’re good for the kid. I’m not good at being a big sister to them, ‘cause I’m their boss. They can do with more sorta-family like you.”
“‘Course they can,” says Yuu flippantly. “That’s what I’m here for.” The words are neither insincere nor emphatic; she says it like it’s a simple fact, long-accepted and utterly natural.
Off goes the ridiculous strategist’s mask, and on goes one Ney has seen before - a vaguely catlike mask of fired clay, large-eyed and triangular-faced, with an exaggerated ruff of sheep’s wool all around the edge. He knows this is the mask Yuu uses for looking after children - and more generally for parenting and big-sistering things - though why this is what an exaggerated parent looks like is something he still hasn’t got an answer to. Akhmi just shrugged and accepted it on first sight, so maybe it’s a demon thing.
“Now, I gotta go fill Eko in on all the stuff she ran off and missed,” she says brightly. “Ahh, she’s such a rambunctious little thing, but I still love her even when she’s bein’ a total brat. Guess I’ll reward her with a whole tray of little cakes if she manages to listen to a whole sentence before getting distracted again. Poncory, come-come, before Mister Ney brains you with a rock. Seeya, Mister Ney. An’ remember to eat somethin’ before you go back to planning all day!”
When they do set off, it’s very familiar to Eko. Taking an army to war is basically just like rounding up a group of your friends and going off for a spontaneous tea party in someone else’s land when they don’t want you to be there, so the fact that Ney and his Blades are basically just heading off in loose groups for a stroll makes sense. Then Yuu reminds her that she’s been seeing troop-gliders setting off every night for over a week, so this small group with Ney and Eko in is just the last to head off, moving fast enough on foot that they don’t need a glider.
And they do move fast. Eko and Yuu are used to not getting tired, but the Blades run alongside with the two girls in a way that humans don’t. She hears the sunlight sizzle in their steps and in the ground behind them, wiping away their passage from the world. Thirty men and women can’t normally sprint across a grassy field and leave it completely untouched. The birds in the pine forests they pass through don’t cry out or scatter as they pass. And there are hidden paths and concealed mountain passes and in one case a trip through an abandoned silver mine that speed their travel and make it an easy run and so within half a day Ney is at the rallying camp of the Blades, already off the Malran plateau. It looks like a market town, but Eko isn’t fooled; there are no children here, and all the adults are fit and unnaturally healthy under their simple clothing.
For her part, there’s no joking, no lightheartedness or whimsy. As fond as the memories of surprise tea parties with her little siblings are, this is serious. She and Yuu have their war-masks on; hers the hook-beaked bird skull, Yuu’s a cavalryman with wild eyes and an unsettlingly wide, fierce grin - the look of a warrior about to let loose on an unprotected baggage train or an enemy’s vulnerable flank. Örömi is loose and eager in her sheathe, and Yuu carries a slashing sword at her hip and razor-ribbons wound around her wristguards.
The late-year heat beats down as they start their journey through the heart of the Tairan empire. The land is dry, and close to the border most of the villages they encounter are shells of their former selves. Even when they are inhabited, they are much-reduced, and oft-times the settlements are the homes of deserters who have taken up banditry. Ney’s Blades avoid such places when they can, and ruthlessly eliminate the desperate men and women when that can’t be done.
Eko finds Yuu pondering the graveyard in one of these mountain villages. It is bare and barren, not of the plant growth which sprawls wild and free without a priest in the shrine to maintain it, but of bodies. Every grave here has been disinterred, long enough ago that the sides of the empty graves are slumping in.
“What’d’ya reckon happened here?” Yuu ponders, squatting down beside overturned markers. “Do you think they moved their dead when they abandoned the village, or do you reckon the dead crawled out on their own?”
Eko shrugs. Even odds, really. Ney would probably be able to tell, but Yuu and Eko are out of luck since it’s been so long.
She wanders closer and crouches down by one of the graves, flicking pebbles and clumps of earth in with her hair. Why’d Yuu come here, she asks with a tilt of her head and a flick of her wrist to take in the empty graveyard. Of all the places in the village, why the one with death hanging over it like a shadow? Is she worried about tomorrow?
“Tryin’ to work out what the shah-lady is like as a boss,” Yuu says, not rising. “‘Cause we don’t know what she’s like or nuffin’. There’s all this thing about who gets to be boss of Taira, but I mean, from what I hear, someone murdered her when she was young and then she came back like she is and she’s majorly out for revenge. The sort of thing your brother would do, y’know. And we ain’t really looked up what she’s like for people. For example, did her people kill the people in the village, did the naib’s people do it, or did this village just get abandoned? Stuff like that.”
Nodding in understanding, Eko taps her lip thoughtfully. She doesn’t remember much about when mama was in Terema, so she can’t help with anything from the only time any of the family have been in contact with places the shahbanu ruled. Those hardened killers she sends out are nasty, and if she’s messing around with ghosts like Lady One-Eye, that’s not a good sign either. But - Eko jerks a thumb back over her shoulder - if they want answers about what she’s like, they’re not gonna get unbiased ones from Malra, or places Malra controls.
“Yeah, yeah, but...” Yuu trails off, clearly thinking. “You made all those bone-skeleton ribbon thingies to lurk around in underground places to protect the treasures you hid in the Ruin. And they were well cool-cool. But if she’s the boss of this place, should she be making the skeletons that humans aren’t using anymore wake up and go do things? Did she even do it, or did the people who lived here move their dead? Does it make a difference?”
Eko has to stop and think about that for a while, her hair slowing as she crouches beside the grave. Perched beside it on the soft, overgrown loam with her bird-masked head cocked to one side, draped in a heavy black-and-red haori, she momentarily resembles her little sister in one of her brooding moods.
After a moment of stillness, she nods decisively and lifts three fingers, ticking them off as she continues. First! Her super-cool ribbon-animated skeletons were homegrown, shaped from dust and blood and the occasional tree. She didn’t disturb anyone’s resting place for them, except that one time she was putting one together in a szel-cave and it activated a bit early and crashed into the ceiling and woke everyone up and they all had to join forces to stab it back to death. Or not-death, since it had never been alive in the first place. Whatever. Point is, they’re not really a good comparison.
Second! When you’re talking about actual people-skeletons, deciding whether it’s okay or not feels like it’s about - Eko hesitates for a moment, her gestures becoming incoherent as she grasps for the concepts she’s trying to convey - it feels like it’s about respect, kinda. Like, the whole reason people bury their dead and treat them well, the reason a corpse should be left well alone, is ‘cause it’s not going unused. Part of the person’s still in it - and sometimes that part hangs around for ages, like the Lunar one mama fought in her past life’s tomb! It’s not just that an angry yidak is a nasty thing to have to deal with - it’s that if yidak get mad when someone mistreats their bones, that’s obviously ‘cause they don’t want people doing it. So if you ignore that by binding the yidak to service or waiting until it dissipates and then digging its grave up, you’re being a jerk. If the person was totally fine with their body being used after they died, that might be different, but it doesn’t feel like the shahbanu cares about that sorta thing.
“What about turning bodies into wind and inhaling them?” Yuu points out. “Or stealing from people who’re still alive? Aren’t they both being a jerk too?”
Nuh uh, that’s totally different, Eko denies immediately. Inhaling bodies severs the fetters that chain a soul to existence-in-death and let it move on and return to the energy of the world - and Eko doesn’t keep the body afterwards and use it to dredge the river, she breaks it down into invigorating breath. That’s basically being cruel to be kind, cutting away the anchor around a stagnating po-soul’s ankles so it’s no longer weighed down. And stealing from people - especially rich people - is also fine, ‘cause possessions are just transitory things that you shouldn’t over-identify with or stake your self-conception on, and by cutting them away she teaches the proud and the complacent to accept the ever-changing nature of the world and find meaning within themselves and junk. But your body is something more intrinsic, so taking that away is like slavery, which is ick.
But the most important point is the third, she emphasises, waving all three fingers in front of Yuu. Which is that Yuu’s last question is the best one, and the answer is no: this isn’t actually their problem and the answer doesn’t make a difference. They’re here as mercenaries, not natives of Taira. Once this fight’s wrapped up, they’ll be stealing Ney and leaving. It might be mama’s homeland, but the stuff going on between those who would be shah won’t affect the highlanders much, and they’re the only ones Eko really cares about - and even that’s mostly just nostalgia for her origins. Whether the shahbanu is a good boss or a bad one, whether she should be allowed to raise the Tairan dead or whether it’s an abomination - those are questions for people who are planning to stick around. For Eko and Yuu, this is a job, not the rest of their lives. Neither side is unambiguously morally better than the other in a clear way, and the naib’s the one who’s hired them (by proxy), so they’ll help kill the shahbanu and that’ll be that.
“Yeah, but what if the naib is a worse guy than the bad guy shahbanu?” Yuu’s shoulders hunch in. “We know he really wants the throne, and what, like, if he was the one who had the shahbanu murdered in the first place so he could get it? It kinda sucks if he gets to win from all that bullshit, yeah-yeah?”
Eko grimaces. Yuu’s not wrong. But then again - is he winning? They’re about to steal the commander-in-chief of his elite forces (along with all of the elite forces themselves, for that matter), and Ney’s had a lot to say about how he’s the only one in Malra who’s any good at warfare; that’s why the naib hired him in the first place. And now Orange Blossom has her hooks into the place. She might let the naib stay officially in charge, but Yuu knows how the Devil-Tiger works. She’ll eat him up with debts and bargains, bit by bit, until she owns him and everything he lays claim to.
Yuu looks around, clearly keeping an eye out for where Ney is. She still lowers her voice, on the well-considered and factually grounded position that just because you can’t see Ney doesn’t mean Ney isn’t listening right here and now. “Yeah, you ain’t wrong-wrong there. Stealin’ Ney from the naib is gonna make the world better, ‘cause a world where the naib is givin’ all these orders to Ney probs ain’t gonna go well.”
Slamming a fist into her palm, Eko nods firmly. That’s super-definitely true. Which means they need to make sure this goes well, so the naib’s all happy and distracted with his victory and won’t be paying attention to them sneaking off in the night.
She waves a finger at her best friend to emphasise her point, then drops it to grip her wrist with near-bruising strength. Yuu had better not do anything silly like getting hurt, she insists. She’s Eko’s only duchess! And the chief war-aristocrat of the Ruin, and Second Spear of the Five Winds Cartel! She’s not allowed to fall here, even if she’d be super-cute as she spent a year regenerating!
Yuu half turns, and familiarly rests her hand on Eko’s shoulder. “I know you need me safe-safe more than you need me to keep you safe,” she says, a mocking grin on her lips. “So, y’know, if it looks like you’re in trouble I’ll run away back home and call in your mama, howsabout that? A way to really make sure we’re all safe, yeah-yeah?”
Eko nods gratefully, abandoning even the pretence of theatrics or insincerity as she leans into the touch. For all that she’s - she cocks her head in a wan attempt at smug arrogance - totally going to kick Lady One-Eye’s butt if her nemesis turns out to be there, that fight back in Malra was no joke; there’s very real danger here. And for all that Taira has been interesting and fun, she’s tired of it and all its pointless civil war and death. One last risky fight, and then they can take their winnings and go home.
The land rolls down from the mountains that dominate western Taira, down into the hot and humid depression that holds the Alesian sea. The soil here is thicker and richer than the soil of the uplands, and it was once the breadbasket of Taira, where wheat and barley and chickpeas grow away from the muggy jungles of Perswha. They made fine pottery here. They wove brightly coloured cloth.
Now it has changed, and even newcomers like Eko and Yuu can tell that things are not as they once were. There is something dead about the heat compared to the mountains, something which lays thick and heavy on the land. The clouds come more often the closer they get to the Alesian Sea and they are thick and dark clouds that blot out the sun, but when the rain comes it is cold and visions and hard, slashing down at the dry earth with a cold and bitter rage. The villages they pass in the night are wary places, and Eko can hear the things that move in the dark. Their graveyards are empty, because the dead walk the earth. The bones of the long dead are paid in place of the grain-tax, and the still-living will consider themselves lucky for it.
There are fortresses at every river crossing and every pass, squat and heavy and new. The dead-eyed soldiers who man the ramparts are like the other hardened killers that Eko has fought. They are better than mortals should be, much like Ney’s Blades. But the Blades are not dead inside, unlike these men and women who serve along the long dead and obey the orders of creaky-voiced remnants of Taira’s imperial past bound into ancient armour.
At the heart of the growing pallor is Zamash, which only sees the sun a few times a year. The once-gleaming spires of the imperial capital are dirty from soot and the walls are pitted and scarred from the last siege, when the prophetess of Pershwa unleashed her infernal slaves on the city. The stepped gardens have been dug up and replaced with fields and the grand academies now focus on war-magics and darker arts. The magic lights wrought by the ancient Dragon Kings glow day and night in the gloom, and along the road to the main gates strange pale pomegranates and poppies grow in the body-less scars of the battles.
“It’s grown even more boding than last time I saw it,” Ney says with a lop-sided grin. “It was already well past foreboding. I think it’s up to eight or nine.”
Stepping up beside him, Eko shakes her head grimly, studying the city with the eyes - and ears - of a sorceress. Closer to an eleven, she indicates with a flash of all ten fingers and an extra tap of her ear. She’s not joking. Ney can’t hear the awful ephemeral silence that hangs over Zamash; a silence that is both like and unlike that which is dreaded by all the teeming multitude of Hell. The quiet of Adorjan means death as well, but this isn’t even a moving, laughing quietness like hers. This is the deepening, stagnating hush of the grave.
Ney huddles down in her shabby disguise as a mourning peasant, a single patch of purple tied to the sleeve of her dusty overcoat and the lines thick and heavy on her valleys-pale face. “Well, then,” she addresses her similarly disguised Blades, “let’s go meet up with the others with their corpse-coffin cargo. I want everyone looking sad and conflicted. We need to get past the gates preparing to pay the bone-tax, and part of that means that we can’t let those dead-eyed fuckers realise who we are. And we’ve got Mashy in one of those coffins, so we really don’t want them opening it up. As for you...”
“Me an’ Eko, yeah-yeah. We know we’re going in our own way, and you tol’ me all where to meet you.”
“La la, you, so impatient. Just remember, if you get caught, make it look like you’re regular hellish demons working for Pershwa.”
“Do I tell your big sis how to stab toads?” Yuu demands. “Don’t underestimate our prowess as actresses.”
Eko nods soundly, tapping a high-heeled boot on the ground for emphasis. They’re not a pair of kids still trying to sort out their knives from their ribbons. Yuu’ll hide in her compass-sanctum, and Eko will don a role as an unimportant peasant to sneak in as the kind of nameless background character nobody pays attention to. They won’t even need plan B. Though yes, yes, she remembers the murdered Pershwan general whatshisface they’re supposedly here to avenge in the very unlikely case that they do.
“Uh,” Yuu says, tilting her head. “Remember, Eko? That was the original plan, but then Ney talked about those hunter-seeker ghosties that watch all the main ways into the city, and we weren’t sure whether your blood disguises could fool them? We were going to put our cool-cool heads together and come up with a cunning plan and you said you’d definitely have that ready by the time it came up again? Also, also, remember what happened last time we opened the door to the compass. Took ages to squeeze everything back in, an' I don't reckon we got that kinda time even if I did fit. Which I ain't sure I would.”
Eko pauses, finger frozen mid-wag. After a moment she coughs theatrically (and silently), tosses her hair and assumes a posture similar to a kat denying any knowledge of how the collapsed meat-drying rack got that way or why all the toad jerky is now floating sadly and unappetisingly in the laundry tub next to it.
Right, yes, she continues fluidly. What she meant to say was that she’d considered that plan and then taken the new information into account and come up with several cunning plans to cover every possible contingency, and had eventually decided to garb herself as a weasel and sneak in backstage through a tiny gap in the wall somewhere instead, in some place less well-monitored, since they probably aren’t watching literally every inch of the walls with their best hunter-seeker ghosts.
(And if it turns out they are, a remote part of the wall that doesn’t see much traffic and is easily defensible will make it easier for her to stab any watching ghosts to double-death before they can alert anyone and then sneak in through the gap.)
“Sure you did, Eksy.”
Ney languidly flaps her hand in Eko’s direction. “Of course. Given I can’t tell when you lie, I suppose I just have to assume that you’re telling the truth. And given we’re pretty damn close to midday, I’d say you girls should be off, just like we need to be. Gotta get in while the sun’s,” she looked up at the thick clouds, “... somewhere up there. Ahlat bless us, if this goes to plan I’ll cut the throat of a whole herd of cows in his name.”
Eko and Yuu separate from the main group, making their way across the war-torn landscape where farmers still eke out an existence, taking advantage of their speed and the fact that the rough terrain doesn’t impede them. There are skulls at every crossroad, and Eko can feel the presences within them, fragments of a spirit shattered a hundred times connected by spiderweb-thin strands of ephemera, and in the shrines beside the roads she can hear the dead things that slumber uneasily there while the sun is still in the sky. There are shambling corpses wrapped in funerary bandages reaping pale corn in the fields, watched over by tight-faced living overseers.
The outer wall of Zamash is battle-scarred and pitted. It has clearly seen assault after assault in the fierce fighting of the civil war. But Eko can also see that the scars are aged. They have been weathered since they were inflicted. To her and Yuu, therefore, that indicates that the fighting has not been near Zamash in... a while.
“At least five years, I reckon,” Yuu says softly as they pause survey the wall. “If Sabah-lady is like Queenie, she’ll have gotten good fast. You sure you gonna be okay as a weasel thing? Sure you ain’t gonna be weasily identified?”
Pfah, Eko scoffs with a wave of her hand. It’ll be fine. Who’d suspect a cute little mouse-javelin? Not even an evil ghost could be so heartless.
“If you say so. A'right, I'll head back to Ney and wait a bit, then boss-step to you once you're inside. Or when Mister Strategic Cleverclogs gets a feelin' I should from his super-smart calculations 'bout stuff he can't see happening. Look after yourself 'till then, yeah?”
Yes yes, obviously, Eko flaps a hand at her. She'll be fine. Now, shoo. She waves Yuu off, adjusts Örömi's sheath, and checks that the hellgate compass is settled securely in an inner pocket.
Then she unweaves herself.
Eko was born as a wind, and she’s a wind still, in heart if not in body. She condensed herself with the stagnancy of Elloge, turned the light-hearted gale within her into a slow-flowing river of blood and scar tissue, solidified her gusts and ribbons into flesh and bone. But she still remembers how to reverse the change. Not permanently, not entirely - she’s pretty sure that she can no longer shuck her humanity and become a wind for good like the Four Winds of Hell did. But for a short time? Pfft. Easy. Keris’s passions sometimes overflow what physicality can contain and turn her into a wind of rapturous scarlet, but she can only do that because Eko lived it first.
Lilunu’s clothes dissolve with her flesh, attuned perfectly to her essence. In an instant, Eko becomes blood-rich vapour, a circling breeze so dense with gore that it looks like whirling scarlet mist. The barest hints of form coalesce within it, suggestions of lithe limbs and a laughing smile - but then they are gone, as the blood-wind spirals in on itself. It becomes an eddying whirlwind, spinning tighter and tighter, smaller and smaller, denser and denser, drawing inward and down towards a central point. Bone sews itself out of jade dust borne on the breeze. Mist and vapour resolidify as flesh.
A shape emerges; a long and slender body, short-legged, soft-furred; its upper coat russet-red, its belly and chin pure white. Nose twitching, ears pricked, it looks around in quick, sinuous movements of its long neck, then leaps up onto a rock for Yuu's appraisal. Under its five-toed paws, dirt becomes dust and wood turns to powder. When it opens its mouth, tiny fangs flash in a fierce grin.
Least weasels are well-named, Eko thinks as she surveys the suddenly-much-larger world around her. From the tip of her nose to the end of her tail, she is perhaps fifteen centimetres long. She could hide behind a moderately sized leaf.
“Cute,” Yuu comments. "Kay kay, I'll be off back to His Nibbs. See you soon.” She speeds off in one direction, and Eko follows suit in the other. Her little claws dig into stone, and for all her lack of size she is still very fast. She sets off like an arrow loosed from a bow, bounding towards the damaged walls and scaling them to wriggle in through a crack caused by some sorcery which melted sandstone and left it solidified and shiny like boiled sugar.
What she sees on the other side gives her pause, because the space between the outer curtain wall and inner walls has been filled with a necropolis. A city of the dead which also serves as a city of the Dead. At this hour of day, it is as quiet as midnight, with only living caretakers with pale pinched faces seeing to the pyramidal mausoleums that are fresh-built with rough sandstone and interring new bodies. Eko suspects that this is, for Sabah II, like a cache of weapons. Or possibly a barracks. Because the dead of generations of inhabitants of Zamash - and possibly the dead from all the empty graveyards in the villages they saw - have been dug up and re-interred here. She can hear them, cold and dark in the places hidden from the sun. The living population of Zamash might well have fallen, but the number of spirits here is far greater than it ever was.
She shivers. The movement ripples along her little body from nape to tail, making the white tip sway from side to side. This explains why the wall is fairly unguarded, then. Only a fool would try to sneak in this way.
A fool, or someone very clever indeed. Because this is an entrance route nobody inside the city will expect.
In a flash of movement, her little body crosses the space from the wall to the nearest tomb. So tiny is she that there are plenty of cracks and crevices she can tuck herself into that completely conceal her from view. Her feet leave tiny pawprints a few millimetres deep in the alcove behind a jutting spur of sandstone while she waits for an attendant to pass, then in another blur of movement she’s a few metres further on, crouching to slink along the base of a pomegranate tree.
The shrubby, red-flowering, red-fruiting trees are seemingly everywhere in the necropolis. But they’re subtly unnerving, compared to the pomegranates Eko has seen elsewhere. The sculpturally twisted bark on the more mature specimens evokes skeletal shapes; the many trunks stab upwards at the sky like bony fingers. The fruit and flowers aren’t the right shade of reddish-purple; they look like clotting, rotting blood.
Eko presses herself into the shadow of the roots, and tries to avoid touching the wood. Not because she doesn’t want to harm the tree. She just isn’t sure what doing so might rouse.
The heat hangs heavy and close to the ground, so she swelters as she skulks around. It is worse than the far reaches of the Meadows. Eko is more and more convinced that this heat hates her and her nature. But staying still would just mean time runs slower for her, so she darts along the dusty ground, between memorial sites and groves of these twisted pomegranates, taking cover while she can as she approaches the towering presence of the looming inner city walls.
Eko pauses in the heavy shadows of a memorial arch, taking time to plan her approach for the main gates. And then she pauses. She can feel a cold nearby. Specifically right above her. She tilts her head up, seeing the half-real spectral presence of the gaunt spectre whose legs she’s just run between. This shaded area is a nook where this ghostly watcher is waiting. And the bony feet are either side of Eko, and those eyes are so large and so dark.
She doesn’t freeze. First, because freezing would make this moment drag out longer, and it’s already uncomfortable enough. Second, because freezing would give this thing more time to look at her, and even a momentary glance is a moment too long. Third, because as long as she’s here, she’s within grabbing range, and that’s a bad place to be. And fourth, because an actual weasel would bolt in this situation, whether it knew the spectre was there or not.
She bolts. Her back arches, her hind legs tense, and she leaps forward twice her own bodylength, then leaps again, and again, and again, bounding in a rapid series of hops to the cover of a convenient rock. It’s a good rock. Skull-sized. Sturdy.
... she takes a second to check that it isn’t an actual skull. Nope, solid sandstone. Good. She puts it between her and the spectre, waits for a moment, then cocks an ear to see if it’s doing anything alarming. Like coming after her. Or screaming.
Somehow, impossibly - well, clearly not impossibly, it just happened, probably because Eko was so skilled and talented - it didn’t notice her.
And her heart is pounding a million beats a minute and clenching in her chest but fortunately Yuu is hidden away and no one saw anything happen by definition given the ghost missed her so in a very real sense nothing actually happened. It’s not like she stepped on a cat’s tail, hah!
Anyway, after that happened Eko takes more care and takes things a little more slowly. As it so happens scaling the inner wall is easy enough, and Eko drops down into the inner city. Things are more alive here, both metaphorically and literally, but the high-built narrow streets here crammed close to the city walls on one side and the harbour on the other are still half-abandoned. Tairan peasants in sombre blacks and pale linens do what peasants everywhere do, with the street-facing fronts of buildings serving as workshops and workrooms. She leaves the narrow streets and finds the wider streets built to a much larger scale than these ones, the living stone of the Dragon Kings still present and still just above alive.
But the death that haunts this place is still very real. Most prominently are the undead servants and servitors here. There are hand-carts on the major roads pulled by death-masked zombies, pulling them in place of horses. There are beautiful dead men and women dressed in lovely archaic Tairan fashions on skeletal horses, overseeing matters here, and the dull-eyed soldiers in the royal uniform patrolling in well-drained ranks. Both war and death are much more real, much more present here than in Malra.
Eko shivers again and nervously combs her whiskers with her paws. Right. She’s in. Now, what had Ney’s orders been? Ah, right right. Meet up at the place which she can’t remember the details of right at this exact moment (but it’ll probably be obvious when she sees it and anyway Yuu can remind her once she finds a good place to stop and let her out), because they’re here to kill important people in the shahbanu’s army while everyone’s all distracted by the naib’s approach. And maybe also the shahbanu herself if they get a chance.
And that means she needs to spot some important army people on the way to the meet-up spot. Especially Lady One-Eye, who the laws of narrative convergence say will definitely be here because Eko needs a second shot at killing her nemesis and also taunting her with the fact that her precious oar thing is gone forever.
The inner city of Zamash when seen from ground level is clearly a city of two eras. The ancient stone laid down by the Dragon Kings is clear under Eko’s claws, because it is much harder and tougher for her to get a grip on. The newer sandstone that most of the city is built on is soft and easy for her weasel-form to scurry up. And maybe there’s a third era, one that’s just coming about, because some of the newest stone in the newly built areas where the buildings lean outwards to nearly completely obscure the sky is cold to the touch and not at all alive. They are building part of a new Zamash, the streets hidden by cavernous buildings and tunnels that pass through them. They are excavating into the old stepped pyramids to remake them.
And Eko isn’t much of an architect - though she is a better one than Haneyl, not that that’s hard because people with no skill at all are better than her cutely-delusional little sister - but she’s pretty sure that the new buildings are built and planned out real well. Real, real well. Like, Malra-level well, even if the aesthetic intent is entirely opposite. Malra wants sprawling plazas and planned open districts under the light of the sun. Zamash’s new construction is rooted in Tairan sensibilities, but it also hides from the skies. And in these sunless streets that duck underground or through buildings, there are no shortage of ghosts; some clad in flesh, others wandering around all lewdly. They wear the styles of Taira, wrought in a deathly mien. There, a man with stitch-marks around his neck leans against a wall; there a woman in antiquated cataphract chain and a sword through her chest swaggers down the street, a living man on each arm.
In Zamash, the ancestors seem to have returned to treat their descendents as their servants.
Quickly and quietly, the little weasel makes her way through the half-dead city’s streets, paying close attention to the things she passes by. She cocks an ear to conversations and spies upon soliloquies; she overhears harried heartbeats and eavesdrops on essence-songs. She can’t dilly-dally, so it’s hard to pick out the exact strength of each silent undead soul, but she can group the ghosts into those weaker than her and those who feel more like peers. She can’t remember every little snatch of dialogue along each street, but she can make a note of things that sound significant; fancy titles that introduce important characters or military-sounding orders that foreshadow certain figures as having some rank of high command.
At a rough guess, Eko is pretty sure she’s seeing three hundred and fifty years of the flower of Tairan nobility. The older ones are more clear, because they have to have someone younger - whether living or more recently dead - to help translate them to the living servants. She recognises one, Lady Rouha Neshat, a glorious and famed heroine of the cataphract cavalry during the initial conquest of Zamash by the horse-lords of the north, but the only reason Eko knows her name or anything she did is that said lady is overseeing a renovation of a time-worn statue of herself, and the statue had a plaque which provided the information. The woman still has a little of the looks that were recorded in stone, but now she is twice the height she once was, riding astride a horse skeleton that burns with pyreflame and her chainmail is on closer inspection not separate to her body. It grows out of her skin, as pale as porcelain, and delicately drapes her withered frame.
Assuming such patterns hold true, the stuff Ney said about how Sabah II is pulling the dead heroes of Tairan history into her service is exactly what’s happening. She’d probably know more about these people and recognise more dead heroes if she knew anything about Tairan history, but the history textbooks had been so boooring and hadn’t had a good through-line narrative or junk like that so she’d gotten kind of-
Eko immediately loses her chain of thought because she recognises the famed warrior-poet Sadik Forsi, and she’d loved his Collections on the Wind and the Grass Beneath Me. Of all the 7th century collections of verse, she’d definitely put him at the top! Sure, some of his more mainstream verses were just dull things about how cool Taira is and how glorious the shah at the time was, yadda yadda, but his Collections was the work of a man who really understood how good it feels to travel fast through a barren land, which he wrote as an emissary to the Vakotan lands where the ancestors of the horse-lords came from.
With a heroic effort of will, Eko forces herself not to scurry over to the brilliant but unfortunately rather smelly poet and latch onto his ankle. If he survives the coming attack, maybe she can interrogate him for more verses before she cuts him free from the fetters that bind him to a stagnant existence of unchanging decay and lifelessness. Right now, she bounds off in another series of quick, agile little hops, contorting her flexible little body through a hole in a fence and then flashing along a gutter, up a wall and onto a ceiling. The meeting point with Ney was somewhere around... hereish? Probably hereish. Maybe hereish.
Hmm. Might be time to check in with Yuu, if nobody shows up soon. Ney might’ve done something silly like accidentally told Yuu to go to the wrong place and then also gone there herself, instead of the clearly correct place where Eko is waiting for her now.
“Your self-delusions are being a bit strong even for you, ‘Ko,” Yuu says, when her bestie-right-until-she-went-and-said-that boss-steps to her as she pauses on a rooftop. “You don’t need to be quite so much like that. I’m freaked out too, y’know. I don’t like how the air tastes here, and I sure as fuck don’t like that there’s all these ghosts practically walking around in the day who’re as strong-as or more than me.”
Eko grimaces. Yeah, okay, that one was overdone; she knew it even as she said it. But gosh darn it, she needs something to distract herself from how disgusting this place is. Yuu and Ney don’t get it. They can’t hear the pollution and spiritual defilement putrifying and dispoliarating beneath their very feet.
The resentments and regrets of the dead have lingered here. Rather than being washed away by Lethe, they’ve instead been deposited by the sluggish currents of life stalled in death, and have congealed together into an impure mass that’s built up like silt on a riverbed or stalactites on a cave ceiling. It’s liquifying beneath the skin of the world, becoming something that almost has a will of its own - not a consciousness, but an oozing, seeping purpose that infuses everything it touches. Can’t Yuu sense it? Listen to what it’s doing to the world!
Yuu freezes for a moment, then inches closer to wrap an arm around Eko’s shoulders. “You know your hearing’s better than mine is, yeah-yeah. But like I said, the air tastes wrong here. Like food that’s going manky.”
Eko shudders, but leans gratefully into the touch. Ugh, she shakes her head angrily. Ney oughtta just hurry up and get here so they can get to the stabbing and then leave.
Ney’s people made it through, and with their new base of operations ensconced within the poor district of Vermillion Lion they proceed with their bloody work. For all the personal power of Sabah II, there are people she needs to keep her empire running, and removing those people are what the Blades are there for. Most of Ney’s trained underlings here are to gather information and identify locations - do the foot work, in other words. But some are special, and then there’s Ney and Eko.
She informs him of her discoveries, of course - both the mundane stuff like the location and features of the parts of the necropolis she explored and the age range of the ghosts she overheard on the way in, and also the more occult observations he’s less suited to making about how the kegare of the Underworld is building up underneath the city and saturating the landscape with necrotic pollution. He’s a genius commander and war leader; he can probably work out what to do with that information.
What she is to him is someone who can kill that which is already dead. Well, and a lot of other things, but her ability to double-kill things is something she brings to the table that his Blades can’t do. Only Ney can make sure the Dead are laid to rest, though she does have to say that his glowy-golden way of getting rid of them is quicker than her way which involves all their attachment-holdy feelings bleeding out through the cuts she leaves as she slashes them to ribbons. It’s probably less comfortable for them her way, but really they’re the ones holding onto things they should have let go so they kind of have it coming.
Once she takes a little time to see a grand speech from Sabah II. Okay, actually she’s there to murder someone in the crowd, but she also wants to see her enemy. Sabah II is a slight woman, wrapped in funereal robes of velvet black and regal gold, and her hair is as black as midnight. She’s paler than Keris, but her eyes are the same as Keris’s - and Eko’s own. It’s a Tairan thing, it’s natural, it’s just a coincidence.
Except, no. The colour is a coincidence. But that’s not why the eyes resemble mama’s. Those eyes feel like they’re watching everyone in the crowd at the same time. They feel like they’re listing how they might murder everyone they land on as reflexively as blinking. They’re the eyes of a killer so accustomed to dealing death that it’s become a tool of banal convenience. Eko can feel their weight on her. She pulls out and abandons the job, no hesitation. She can get her target later. She does get the target later. But trying something like that, under Sabah II’s terrible gaze…
… she doesn’t want to admit it, but she gets the same kind of danger-murder-death vibes off the shahbanu as she gets off her mothers. Both of them. And her spiritual presence is an awful void in the landscape. She’s very, very powerful. At least as powerful as Keris.
Eko kills by day. It’s the inverse of how she usually works, a quiet and unseen demon flitting through the night. But in this city, the dead come alive after dark, and many ghosts instead return to their graves or their exhumed remains to sleep away the hours of sunlight, even when it is hidden by clouds. They are not prepared for a silent masked killer to pass all their human guards and drive Adorjan’s gift into their corpus, inhaling ephemera and bones all together.
Though one evening she does show up as an uninvited guest to a party. Everyone there is masked and dressed in fine silks, so she just has to be there, darling. That is definitely her look. Now, admittedly, she isn’t there for very long, but she’s definitely the life of the party, and takes it with her when she goes.
“Back already?” Ney asks laconically, sprawled out on the rooftop of their hideout in the docks and doodling idly on one of Akhmi’s stolen stories. The pyramidal skyline of the wealthier parts of the old city sit jagged under the moonlight. Despite the fact that Ney barely seems to be doing work, everything seems to be going to plan.
Eko proudly rests her hand on her chest. She ran through and stabbed everyone at the long table in one pass, she reports. None of them were very important; they were just a bunch of bureaucrat-y people and minor officers and other nameless extras. No memorable character designs or interesting personality traits or anything. Barely fit to be background characters, really.
“So cutting.”
And stabbing, she agrees cheerfully.
“We’ve gotten pretty far down the list of Mister Ney’s targets, ain’t we?” Yuu says, tilting her head back to look snootily down at Eko. She’s been playing the role of a dragon aide, mostly because she doesn’t entirely trust Ney’s orders, but also so she can boss-step to Eko if Ney desperately needs her for something. “Or at least the ones he’s told us about.”
“Don’t you trust me?”
“I don’t trust the naib, and neither does ‘Ko. When’s that big battle going to happen, huh?”
“Soon, if the rumours that the shabanu’s gonna be calling up the cataphracts soon is true. And I think it is.” Ney flipped to his feet, and tossed a scrumpled up page at Eko. “Here.”
Eko tilts her head. A first person narration about how awful it is to be a ghost?
“Nah, that’s Akhmi’s scribbling. Turn it over.”
Oh, Eko understands now. There’s a big spooky necromantic academy, and Ney’s written all the guard schedules and who’s in attendance and who’s vulnerable and where they keep all their blasphemous books written in very flammable paper. So why’s she gotta do it?
“Because I’m going after the cataphracts tonight, with Mashy too. And if you can fuck things up for the necromancers, Taym’s own sorcerers will have much more free reign. I wanted to do things ahead of time, but her royal darkness is getting things done faster than I hoped. She’s gotten even better.” He pulls a face. “Not as good as me, but within a hair.”
“He sounds a lot like you, ‘Ko, when you’re being cocky,” Yuu says unhelpfully and treacherously.
“I do not,” Ney says, entirely correctly, and Eko agrees.
The ivy-green dress robes sit heavy and stiff on Zanyira’s shoulders. She has a little box hat pinned on top of her hair, a green chrysanthemum on her lapel, and a staff of office which will serve more than adequately as a cudgel if necessary. She takes a breath, and steps onto the gravel path that leads up to the mansion of Oba Jun, the First Undersecretary of the Office of Lesser Seas. Her investigations and NECINT passed along from the Convention on the Underworld has revealed that BuNat intel has been passed along to Zamash to aid it in the pursuit of its war against Pershwa, and Oba Jun’s name has come up more than once. But the reason they’re acting against Oba Jun now is that she now has sworn testimonials from sources in Zamash that they’ve been instructed by major figures under Sabah II to direct prayer to Oba Jun in particular.
Right now she’s wrapped up in the destiny of a minor goddess from the House of the Key — a petty functionary without any real authority, but who might be able to call on further backup if stonewalled. It’s best to talk to her. And so the door does open when she knocks, and the head maid looks down her nose at “Junior Agent Third Grade Argent Magpie”, but she’s still shown in to speak to the master.
Oba Jun is large — not fat exactly, just built to an oversized scale — and so his lake-blue robes of office are practically a sail and each of his thighs are the same size as her torso. “You’re the woman from BuDest, yes?”
“Yes, sir,” she says, bowing the correct amount for a goddess of her position and a little bit more. “Muh-my office should have sent you a note about this visit?”
“Yes, they did. Though you Forbidding Manse spooks are always so cryptic. What’s all this about, then?”
She spins a tale for him about investigations producing a possible leak from his office, and sees who he throws under the bus. It’s interesting to see who he blames and just as much who he tries to protect. And it’s just as interesting that she can see that crimes weigh heavy on his conscience.
“Thank you very much, sir,” she says as the interview concludes, offering her hand, and he takes it. He has a solid, strong hand-shake. But she plucks his dreams from him, without him noticing, and walks out with them tucked into a pocket.
That evening, her sifu finds her in a dark room, stretching the dreams out on a line to examine them.
“Anything interesting?” Patricia asks Zanyi.
“I’m still sorting through them, but already — he’s scared.”
“He knows we’re onto him?”
“No. No, I don’t think so.” Zanyi traces the silvery, always shifting images hanging from the line. “This one is Sabah II. He’s scared of her, but not of her by name, if you get me. There’s other faces in here.” She gestures up at the others.
“I know that one,” Patricia says, her voice soft yet taut.
Zanyi starts. “Which one?”
“The veiled man. He’s one of the black sun princes. The Abyssal Exalted. An agent of the Black Heron. I fought him in Sijan when assisting the Green Lady on a classified matter.” She scowls. “He got away.”
“Sijan? But that’s nowhere near Taira.” She peers at the dream-image of the veiled man, his fine yet cruel features hidden by a thin silken shroud. “That looks like the Alesian Sea, though.”
“So he’s operating in Taira now. How many different faces have you seen in Oba Jun’s dreams?”
“... six, including Sabah II,” Zanyira says, feeling the sinking cold dread sink into her stomach. “Merciful Venus. Are all those Abyssal Exalted who Oba Jun has met in his treachery?”
“Wrong question. The right question is: does this mean Sabah II’s sworn to the Black Heron?” Patricia considers. “We’ve never been able to identify her Deathlord. But this is a connection the Convention on the Underworld will need to know about.”
“It’s a trap,” Zanyi breathes, her mind whirring. “This is a trap set for Taym Matah. She’s been hiding her power — her allies! — all along. She’s baited him into it. All for the sake of revenge.”
“Now you’re jumping to conclusions. First, we take this to the Green Lady.” Patricia pauses. “But you’re good at intuitive leaps. You might well be right.”
Zanyi can’t say it. She doesn’t really care about Taym Matah, save that she believes the world would be better off with him dead and it’s a shame that he’s the lesser of two evils. That slave-taking, family ruining fuck. But she does care about her niece and she even sort of cares about that reprobate Ney Adami for reasons more than he’s clearly a stabilising influence on Keris. And they’re right in the centre of this trap.
Eko slips silently over the walls that ring the necromantic academy. It’s built into an old Dragon King stepped pyramid which from what Eko has seen of her mother’s findings about them was probably an old gladiatorial area. Sort of like the one that nasty mean one made Vali fight in. As a school of learning, the old arena forms the central courtyard, with the modern structures built up and upon the wide plazas of the inhumanly-sized stands. The towers are tall and bite up to the sky like teeth, and the old crystal lights glow an eerie blue.
They’re on the fritz around the inner courtyard, blinking on and off. The necrotic energies swirling in the air aren’t good for them.
The flickering lights do not properly illuminate the figures in the centre of the courtyard, but Eko doesn’t need something as basic and mainstream as sight to tell what they are. One is boring, barely worth her time, but the other - oh ho ho, she knows that one. She would know Lady One-Eye anywhere. Of course her necromancer nemesis would be waiting for her at the grand necromantic academy on her mission to destroy necromancy stuff. That just makes sense. Well foreshadowed, even, by Akhmi’s scribbled reminder that being a ghost is horrible and Eko would be doing Lady One-Eye a favour by freeing her from her wretched existence.
She passes the threshold, moving soundlessly and light, but something still notices her. And worse yet, she feels a tug she hadn’t even noticed stop. Something had been pulling her here. Luring her here. Calling to her.
As she freezes, she runs through the facts in her head, and in a drawn-out instant comes to the conclusion that blood calls to blood therefore the traces of her blood left on Lady One-Eye’s chains she must not have got them all with her purification no she got them all but some of them must not have been blood anymore they must have been processed and sublimated into a resonating lure that her ritual didn’t affect, something to pull her in and then invert so that rather than pulling something outside a boundary in it’ll resist something inside the boundary getting out which means oopsie it’s going to be hard to leave she just knows it and they set this up for her it’s a trap.
Well, shit.
Lady One-Eye unfolds from her sitting position. She doesn’t have a cauldron, at least, but well that’s probably because Eko stole her stirry-thing. Which she is probably extremely nettled about.
“Hush now, hush now, don’t you flee,
“Your blood has led you to me,” she croons, directly to Eko.
“Suffer and sigh, my darling deep.
“Guide the thief to her endless sleep.”
Definitely nettled.
In fairness, Eko gestures flippantly, she isn’t sorry, would do it again, and the silly one-eyed rhyming lady is never going to see her magic stirring rod again. She stretches out her arms and hair, feeling her heart race. Two on one. Can she take them? Lady One-Eye won’t have spectres backing her up this time, but she’ll also be going all-out from the start. And she knows what Eko can do, but Eko hasn’t really seen her fight unhampered and with a clear head.
“You can come out, you know. We may as well talk in the manner of reputable people.” This is the other one talking, the one Eko had dismissed as not-a-threat, and now she listens more closely she can hear the cold falsehood falling away into, uh, much more of a threat. It’s close, but she’s pretty sure this one is more powerful than Lady One-Eye. It’s a woman, a young one, barely more than a girl, and her grasp of the Tairan dialect is stilted and stiff and archaic. Eko suspects she learned it from one of the older ghosts, and from the way she speaks it Eko is pretty sure she speaks a Firetongue language.
Either way, Eko decides to play along for now, and steps out of the shadows, letting them see her. Her boots come first; high-heeled and pointed, with corset-laced sides that show the bright red beneath the black. They end at the knee, where her loose pants of scarlet linen narrow to fit under them. Her high-collared, arrow-sleeved top is tucked in neatly, with a necklace of fangs hanging about her neck, and over it all hangs the wide-sleeved, heavy black haori, criss-crossed with thin red arcs like bloodspray and belted with a white silk cord.
Eko essays a little wave, the slight upwards nod of her head made readable by the curving beak of her demonic bird-skull mask. The feathers that sweep back over her hair in a silvery crest rustle with the movement. Hiya, her motion conveys. She could say she loves what they’ve done with the place, but she’d be lying.
“This is the demon who stole from you?” Lady One-Eye nods to that. “This clown, devoid of dignity? Should you not have resolved this yourself?”
That’s interesting. Lady One-Eye doesn’t retort. She hunches back slightly, almost… almost like a powerful woman who hates having to ask for a favour.
She probably should deal with it herself, Eko nods hastily. It’s almost certainly not worth the time of this lovely lady with the beautiful black cloak and what sounds like a very pretty dress under it. Also, she adds with a raised finger, speaking as a clown who knows all about entertainment and dignity (and the lack thereof), it might even be amusing for her ladyship to watch the fight between the silly, clumsy Lady One-Eye and Eko the Magnificent. And the lovely lady doesn’t need to talk in Tairan if she doesn’t need to. Eko understands basically all the languages. Not to brag, but she’s sort of a super genius.
The woman laughs, and it comes out as a sudden cackle that cuts off just as suddenly. “Lady One-Eye? I like that. And,” she drops into Firetongue, “it’d be like so much easier to talk like this,” and returns to her stilted Tairan, “but I am here as a sworn knight of my lady, and she places value on manners.” She pauses. “And on success. So, begging your pardon, but I have been instructed to return with some trophy from the demon lord this nephwrack reported stole from her.”
She raises one hand, crocking her fingers in a clear gesture of ‘come on’.
“And I do not intend to fail her.”