Izel, staring at the distant heights on which the Trench camp was perched, wondered if Ishanvi had realized she'd just joined the Thirteenth.
Ishanvi Kapadia was liked, and to so extent trusted. Her ti in the delve and sticking by the Thirteenth during Morcant's ambush had earned her that. But now there was proof that she was useful, capable of seeing things the rest of them missed, the Soshwari had passed the unspoken threshold that would get Song Ren onboard with her addition to the ranks.
Their captain prized competence above all else, and to figure out the nature of the Trench alone out of every single student in Scholomance was the kind of expertise that was like honey to Song. Their captain wanted to fill the ranks of the Unluckies with those she considered exceptional, and in those silver eyes Ishanvi had just qualified.
If she was right, anyway.
The sound of steel cutting away at air had him glancing back to find Angharad swinging her new blade cautiously, getting used to the weight. The saber was Watch standard issue, and therefore shorter and lighter than the blade she favored – not that one would have guessed, looking at her turning a blow into an intricate spin and thrust.
"You say that Cai Wei's guandao cut into solid steel?" he asked.
She nodded without turning.
"I believe it was forged aether, much like the shell she wears," Angharad added. "Neither could be seen through my contract."
Not that it'd stopped her putting a shot in the deserter's throat, Izel thought. A smooth parry and riposte led into a flourish before she sheathed the blade.
"Though a greater concern is that neither blade nor bullet was capable of harming her," Angharad continued, finally turning his way. "I will have to wield salt munitions on our next encounter, they have proved sowhat effective in the past."
"That will only help so much," Izel said. "A soul has no vitals to hit, a salt shot only burns away part of its whole. Burn away enough and she will co apart, certainly, but she should be able to take quite a bit of punishnt first."
taphysically speaking 'burn' was a misnor for what happened, which in reality was closer to sanding off the stuff of the soul, but the word was the common parlance.
"I lack other ans to harm her," Angharad said, cocking an eyebrow. "Unless you believe Tupoc will allow to borrow that candlesteel spear of his."
Ha!
"I think he'd sooner let you borrow his own lungs," Izel said. "I expect he sleeps embracing the damn thing."
Angharad shot him an amused look, then shook her head.
"An aether spike dispenser might yield results, if I could prevail on you to let wield yours," she suggested.
"Of course, though I'll have to show you how first," Izel imdiately agreed.
And let her pay for the percussion caps, as they were much too expensive for him to keep buying. His tinkering fund was more of a tinkering bottomless hole at the mont. Song had requested he hold off on selling the plans for the device until matters with the Ninth Brigade were settled – it could be a useful bargaining chip, given their twice-expressed interest in it – so the easiest way to refill the coffers was still off the table.
"Mind you, if the Machinist has any sense it will have modified the aether density of its construct after seeing what the dispenser did to its false dantesvara," Izel added. "I would not count on it being a killing blow."
The aether spike used against the false dantesvara had been matched to a precise degree of aether density, a asure he'd not taken for Cai Wei's construct body.
"That is always prudent," Angharad agreed, adjusting the sheathed saber on her belt.
She half-drew, observing the angle, then nodded. Only after did she clear her throat.
"I am aware you have qualms about working on weapons," Angharad said. "But do you think you could have a look at my broken saber and tell if it is salvageable? It was a gift from my uncle, I do not wish to discard it unless there is no other choice."
Izel crossed his arms, biting at the inside of his cheek. His instincts balked, but it was a blind sort of balking. With no real foundation in reason.
"I'll have a look once we're out of this maze," he made himself say.
He would not speak to more than that, even if as the sole tinker of the Unluckies perhaps he should. It would not be making a weapon, only reforging one. But this sort of little compromise was how it began, wasn't it? Technicalities making cracks in the rampart, letting in the Dialectic. Yet Izel found it difficult to believe that Angharad Tredegar would ever use a blade he forged for an evil purpose, so was he being principled or just afraid?
An uncomfortable thought, that the one thing about himself he thought might hold a sliver of courage could be turning into cowardice.
He was spared further thought on the matter by a burst of colored light in the distance. A green flare, Ishanvi's signal that she was ready to begin. Earlier they had received a first flare to signal she had reached the camp, accompanied by those the captains judged least apt to continue the delve – Salvador from the Eleventh and Ergency Rations from the Fourth, both of which had taken significant wounds.
They'd made sure to avoid returning through the scrapyard, since Saran Pillai was likely to be there and utterly furious.
"And now the mont of truth," Angharad muttered.
Song was already calling everyone to the front, Tupoc all too happily serving as her ill-natured sergeant. Izel and Angharad went to join the muster, though once there they parted ways: their crew would now be split into two teams, and they had been assigned to different ones.
The departure was not imdiate, since there were a few halls between the Trench camp and the room with the iron puzzle wall and thus a need for back-and-forth between the positions, but it should not be a long wait either.
Ishanvi, Arthashastra scholar that she was, had missed a detail about the Trench when putting her solution together: the delvers did not actually need to solve one of the puzzles 'ahead' of them in the maze to get rid of the dead ends blocking their way forward. While Scholomance clearly overlapped with the aether in so places, hardly unusual given that it was built over one of largest recorded aether wells, there were observable limits to what this half-state allowed.
The rooms being shuffled along the length and depths of the Trench moved along very real physical rails, and that motion was powered by equally real furnaces. While Izel suspected that when a room disappeared into the walls of the Trench on either side it fell under a solipsistic effect – once unobserved they began to exist only in principle, becoming physical again only when Scholomance decided to shift it back into the maze – the god still clearly had a limited number of rooms to work with and once these were in the Trench they must obey the physical laws of the Material.
aning that if Ishanvi and the others kept solving puzzles, forcing Scholomance to move rooms, it would eventually be forced to move one of the dead ends currently in their way because of the knock-on effect: there were other delving crews out there, aning that that there were rooms that couldn't be moved. By Izel's estimate, after five or six puzzles Scholomance would have no choice but to open a path.
He'd overshot: it ended up only needing two.
A third flare went up in the distance, announcing the beginning of the puzzle-solving, but nothing happened that they could see. Odds were that the room attached to the puzzle in question was too far away in the maze for them to glimpse its movent. The second solved puzzle, though, forced sothing closer to move: not one of the three dead-ends but the chamber just past one, Scholomance first being forced to move it to the side and then beginning a furious reshuffled ahead of them.
Izel counted no fewer than seven shifts as the god tried desperately to move things around so the dead-ends would keep, but it had only so many such chambers to slap into place. Eventually, it put a proper room at the leftmost exit and then began to furiously shuffle behind it to try and fit a dead end to that instead. Ishanvi would have to keep solving puzzles whenever Scholomance tried to block them.
The new room was one of the simplest they'd ever gone through, a grid of pendulum blades with a timing that could shift between two swinging patterns at the whim of the god. Scholomance had just put whatever it had at hand in the way, Izel decided, rather than a difficult obstacle. They were through in minutes without even sabotaging the machinery, simply having Alejandra Torrero check the walls and floor for surprises that turned out not to exist.
They got to the exit before Scholomance could put a dead end in place, but the god had learned its lesson: the next room was a harsh one, to delay them enough it could get its obstacles in place.
Yet their delving crew was, by now, a well-oiled machine. For all that the original cabalists of the Thirteenth all threw constant insults Tupoc Xical's way – not that he was shy in returning them - they worked smoothly with him. The Fourth and the Thirteenth had a fine grasp on each other's abilities, from the way Angharad trusted Tupoc to have her flank to the cordial teamwork of Song and Alejandra. Even Tristan and Cressida moved with a constant awareness of where the other was.
Scholomance had thrown at them a brutal piece of machinery, a rectangle room with eight tal towers inside of different heights that moved about randomly. To remain on the floor was to be crushed between two brass towers, so the only way across was to climb onto one of the lower towers and then hop to one slightly higher when it ca close.
That would have been dangerous enough even if Scholomance hadn't mustered a dozen kobaloi with crossbows and javelins to harass them from the highest towers.
The mixed cabal still made a al of it: Alejandra spotting for Song as Maryam wove spheres of Gloam for Tupoc and Angharad to us as ways to hop onto towers passing outside of leaping range, Tristan and Cressida trailing behind the fighting pair while they drew all the eyes and splitting between towers to spring an ambush on the lemures that was skillfully executed without any open coordination between them.
Izel watched, a fellow Collegial in the form of Bait besides him, as ten dead kobaloi went for the price of a shallow shoulder wound on Tristan. The bolt had been sared with feces so the wound needed careful cleaning afterwards, but in twenty minutes the room was cleared and the machinery shut down. Scholomance had won long enough to put a dead end in place ahead of them, so up went another flare. Well, mostly.
They'd not brought enough of them for how many might need use, so Izel split the charge in three and added blackpowder to compensate. He was no powderman, as the way there was now barely any color to the explosion made clear, but it was enough to serve as a signal.
Ishanvi hamred away at the puzzle wall, and after half an hour Scholomance was cornered into spitting out another path forward for them. Again and again they chased the end of the Trench, rotating between the two teams. Izel and Bait had been assigned to spruce up the Eleventh Brigade, and while that marriage was not so impressively smooth as the other they dutifully plowed on.
Bait was only a diocre shot but he was quick to reload and did not mind doing so for others as they shot, while Imani Langa was impressive with a musket and Thando Fenya probably better with a sword than Song - who was no slouch, despite her preference for guns. Shumise, on the other hand, was harder to place. If Izel had to guess, he would call her a generalist.
She did not have Maryam's strange Izvoric witchcraft that even other Akelarre were unsettled by, or Alejandra's devil-quick hand that could trace twice in the span it took others to do a single Sign. Shumise was decent, if not exceptional, at everything. It was the sort of broad toolbox that shone best when on the offensive, given the breadth of options, so the delve was not her strong suit – but then neither was she ever useless, always having an at least mildly helpful Sign to trace.
It was almost a trance, the drive forward, and they were kept running through a haze of fear, exhaustion and triumph. They crossed falling bridges while being shot with silver darts, wove between spinning pillars of spikes, narrowly avoided being splattered by odd ballistae that shot spheres of aether exploding into sound that thundered against flesh and ears alike. And every ti Scholomance tried to stop them, to surround them with dead-ends like a disease being quarantined, a dull flare went up and Ishanvi Kapadia returned to the puzzle wall to break the deadlock.
By the third ti Song's gaze had grown expectant of success when she looked the way of the cliff, so Izel began considering the shuffle in sleeping quarters that would co of the cottage needing to accommodate a sixth inhabitant.
It all lded together as the hours passed, punctuated by small breaks for water and bandages. Most of their rest ti ca when Ishanvi dueled with the god over paths, but she was getting better at it. Faster, figuring out so of the combinations like a musician learning a tune. Perils lded into one another, blades and bolts and machines scheming death while the ground betrayed them and walls reached like hungry hands.
They were exhausted, all of them, and none more than the signifiers whose sixth sense was being worked to the bone. With success, for though the number of wounds among them was mounting there had yet to be a major one – the worst of the lot was Imani getting a chunk of her hair burned and the flesh beneath seared, which she had to take poppy for.
With every room they got closer to the end of the Trench, the four massive iron boxes serving as 'stairs' to reach the top of the cliff that mirrored the one at the entrance. They could not stop so close, not when they all felt it in their bones that an ending was near.
Izel crouched further under the floor, the hiss of steam above his head getting ever closer, and frowned at the gears. It was an intricate chanism, with several counterweights and unaligned cadences. Clearly inspired by Antediluvian works, though the brass itself was classic Second Empire - Middle Era or later, after the opening of massive mines in the Sierra Gris had made spelter so plentiful that brass grew as cheap as bricks.
"Um, Izel," Bait coughed. "The steam's getting closer. It's, uh, getting a little warm in here."
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Izel ignored him, eyeing the gears. No, not there. The pressure on that gear would yank out anything he inserted. He needed a spot where the power was diluted. The hiss of steam grew ever louder, but Izel barely even sweated. Kukoya might be in the coldest part of the Smoking Mountains, but he was used to forges and Candles. Both burned with fires whose heat clung to the bone. There was a shriek above, a kobalos must have gotten caught in the steam.
"Oof," Bait muttered. "They're a breed that feels pain, the flesh peeling off must be excruciating."
A beat.
"Izel, please save us before our skin peels o-"
There. That counterweight took the edge off the torque, so if he slid the rod of iron right there- there was flat clack as the teeth of the gear pushed the rod against the other set, failing to force it out. It ticked once, twice and on the third tick there was a sharp crack deeper inside the machinery as sothing that should have moved could not. Above them, the jet of steam sputtered and then died.
"I knew you'd finish in ti," Bait lied.
Izel snorted at him, half-rising to peek past the edge of the removed floor panel. Of the lion-shaped statues spitting out jets of boiling steam three had shut down but another three were still going. It wasn't a problem, though, because whoever had built the chanism under the floor had been too in love with their own cleverness. By making all the clockwork interconnected they'd made sure that even a single failure would ripple out through the entire system.
The remaining steam-spitting statues might still be moving but there were stuck going back and forth in straight lines very predictably: the parts of the machinery that would have moved out of the way to make room for different paths were currently stuck.
"This must have been devil work," Izel opined, climbing out of the hole and turning to help up Bait. "I hear they tend to design alone, so no other tinker's around to tell them when a schematic is overbuilt."
"Do people tell Umuthi that?" Bait skeptically asked. "As far as I can tell all you lot have to do is shout more gun at the Conclave and then you're showered in gold."
The nerve of him.
"I'm not taking that from a teratologist," Izel retorted. "If you had your way every different lares plumage variation would requite a ten-volu bestiary with a dedicated printing press."
He'd heard that out in the Soshwar, the Krypteia had needed to intervene to head off a war of assassins between teratologist unions over which of their bestiaries would beco Watch standard issue.
"That plumage bestiary will only tell you which breed is poisonous, you desolant," Bait scoffed. "But who would care about that when you can change the wood your musket stock is made of?"
A cleared throat. They turned to find Imani Langa watching them, arms crossed. The bandage wrapped around the side of her head hid the nasty burns there, but could not quite hide the missing depth of hair.
"Good work," Captain Imani said. "And it seems to that both the projects you mock could have value, depending on the circumstance. We adapt to circumstances."
Izel shared a look with Bait, finding there the exact kinship he had expected. A comradery born of generation after generation of the Enemy sitting on the other side of the table at budget allocation etings.
"The Stripe thinks the Academy should decide where the money goes," Izel drily said. "How surprising."
"Why get actual work done when you could pay for a second committee instead?" Bait agreed.
"I am not without magnanimity, so I will not rise to this bait," Captain Imani inford them.
She walked away, bureaucracy put to flight by the might of temporarily united scholarship.
With the room effectively cleared, the full crew gathered together to cross it. Izel had held back with the rest of the team he had been clearing rooms with, but the sight waiting for them past the gates and hall made that needless: they had reached a second aether furnace, another unmoving room. And there was more to it than that. The only way forward waited just ahead.
They had reached bottom of the cliff, and the infernal furnace's fires were burning in the shadow of the first of the four great iron boxes going up. The sight had him letting out a relieved breath, for surely the captains would not suggest they keep pushing today when their crew had been handed a perfect campsite to stop at. Monts later, those sa captains announced that they would be camping here for the night and there was a ragged cheer.
Joining the Thirteenth again, he set to unpacking. Raising camp sohow made him feel better. Even with the lack of walls around them, laying down bedrolls and putting up lanterns sohow made their resting place feel less exposed. No cooking supplies had been brought, they would have been too heavy to carry for a re luxury, but while every brigade had brought standard Watch rations they'd also brought a wide variety of side dishes and there was enthusiastic trading of them to spruce up the als.
The captains settled the night watch and made the announcents, Izel sighing when he realized he would be sharing the worst shift – the middle of the night – with Bait. At least the man was decently well read, for all his twitchiness. The Akelarre would all be excluded from the rotation, but considering they all looked half-dead with no adow in sight Izel couldn't find it in himself to gripe about it. Even Hooks looked tired, which he had not known was possible.
When Thando Fenya let out a strangled sound he half-assud the man had choked on the truly vile fish Tariac fish sauce that Cressida cursedly put on everything, only to find the Malani was on his feet with his pistol in hand and pointed behind them. Behind them, where a stately Tianxi and a tall Malani were standing. They had faces, so even in the mont Izel knew them not to be revenants, and he put nas to those faces in the sa breath: Sicong Ling and Fikile Ironhound.
Both were First Brigade, and standing at the head of a large group of students until they were gently eased aside to make room for a smiling man.
"Good evening, friends," Captain Vivek Lahiri of the First Brigade amiably called out. "I see you've staked out a campsite."
Song and Tupoc were moving to face him in monts, and while it was normally Angharad's job to loom threateningly by their captain's side, this ti she was on the wrong side of the camp so Izel fell in besides Song as she passed by him just as Cressida did besides Tupoc. Imani Langa, to his surprise, did not move to join them. But then for all that she put herself as an equal partner when making decisions inside the Trench she'd kept silent when confronting Colonel Cao as well, hadn't she?
She was leaving the other two trees grow taller, the better to draw the lightning strikes.
Sicong and Fikile moved to stand on their side of their captain as Izel approached with Song and the others, but sothing felt... odd about it all. It took him a mont to put a finger on it. It's because Cressida and I are here. Tozi had favored neither of them, preferring Kiran as an informal second, so for both of them to serve as even temporary lieutenants felt unusual.
"Good evening, Captain Lahiri," Song replied with a sharp nod.
"We're out of rations, so you can't have any," Tupoc told the leading captain of Scholomance, before biting into his rations.
He even made a point of chewing the salted pork loudly. Tupoc Xical was like looking a slightly crooked mirror, Izel thought. He recognized the pieces of what the man did: the warrior society jostling for position by constantly giving insult and thus tacitly inviting a duel, the tlanixucatl practice of giving recruits a mocking sobriquet they must bear until they had survived three battles, but these had been twisted. Warped into sothing even darker.
Like the Leopard Society was dressing up their brutality in more respected clothes.
"We have brought our own," Vivek Lahiri replied, unruffled. "It is a defensible campsite we seem to be short of."
If the First's crew stayed the night in a room Scholomance would not be able to move it while they were inside, but it would be able to move everything around it. The aether furnace, on the other hand, only had one way in and one way out. Much more feasible for a night watch to keep an eye on.
"We're out of those too," Tupoc replied without batting an eye.
Vivek Lahiri's smile did not waver and he looked at Tupoc like they were in the joke together, instead of him being prodded at.
"Captain Ren?" he asked.
Song cocked her head to the side. She must be seeing the sa thing Izel did: if it ca to a fight, they would not win. Not only was Lahiri's crew larger than theirs, its mbers were lighter on wounds. Which seed absurd considering how many more people their own push had started with, but then they'd been the vanguard hadn't they? They'd soaked up the worst of what the Trench could offer, leaving Vivek Lahiri free to trail in their wake. And if Scholomance spent all her ti trying to corner us, she might have handed them an easy path through by default.
"Welcoming you here would co at a cost," Song said. "Naly, a truce that would be extended to tomorrow's delve as well."
Izel almost grunted in approval. Yes, that was the right call. Leveraging now to ensure that the other delving crew did not turn on them tomorrow.
"I am anable," Vivek Lahiri said. "Shall we talk terms, then?"
The haggling that ensued, Izel thought, was of little import. The basic principle would hold. The other crew was allowed to camp near them, though closer to the entrance, and the announcent of a truce saw an uneasy standoff forming. Given that Izel's crew had dumped wounded on the First a re half-day ago, that wasn't without reason. While we're all miffed at the idea that they rode our hard work all the way here.
That was a problem for Stripes and Masks, though. Izel, instead, took the opportunity their early pace had robbed him of: he went to have a closer look at the aether furnace. Infernal machinery like this was not usually a focus of Umuthi classes: they'd only barely touched on it this year, and not at all the last. The works of devils tended to be difficult to reproduce and careless with the damage they caused around them, which made them unpopular among Watch tinkers.
There was no denying, however, that their machines were the finest anyone had made since the days of the Antediluvians.
Lacking interest in the furnace itself – the way these burned aether for power was well docunted and largely impossible to improve on without exotic materials – Izel instead went to study the pistons, where they connected to the machinery below through great gashes in the floor. The clockwork had been running for centuries without a tinker at hand to repair it, so either it was simple enough to be repaired by kobaloi labor or it was durable enough not to require that upkeep.
Either way, it was sothing worth learning from.
"It's impressive engineering."
Izel started, getting his head out of the hole in the floor to take a look behind him. The Tianxi who'd addressed him was on the shorter side, with a thick face and fra that was just barely too young to look matronly. Twin buns kept her dark hair bundled up and off her face, over barely-there eyebrows.
Monchou Ma was a halfway familiar sight: she too was Deuteronomicon track, so they shared several classes. They ran in different enough circles they were only nodding acquaintances, but Monchou was known in the way that the leading lights of a class tended to be. Her aether tripwire alarm last year had been widely lauded for good reason, and silenced the few rumors that she'd coasted into a Scholomance recomndation on account of being one of those Ma. The sa family that owned and ran one of the foremost aether weaponry workshops in the Republics, and arguably all of Vesper.
"The heat managent is sloppy," he opined. "But the durability of the system is absurd."
"Pandemonium is at least a century ahead of us in tallurgy," Monchou said looking him straight in the eye. "And I do not an their mastery of unusual materials: they can mass-produce steel in their foundries using thods we can only envy."
She had been holding his gaze straight the entire ti she talked, but then looked entirely away from it and fixated on his chin instead.
"All this fine work to build a deathtrap for Lucifer's student-eater," she unhappily said. "It is a waste."
"Is that what you think Scholomance is?" he asked.
She blinked at him, rubbing her thumb against the hem of her sleeve.
"Do you not?" Monchou said. "It seems obvious that the god in the walls is just a monster the Lightbringer chained to this aether well so the Watch would not be able to make real use of it."
"There are other aether wells in the world that nothing was built over," he pointed out.
"None as powerful as this one," she insisted, shifting her stance so she could rub at the hem of other sleeve with the opposite thumb. "Or as likely to end up in the Watch's hand. He feared that the Umuthi Society could make in a forge set over an aether well."
Monchou reddened.
"A foundry set up where this school stands could increase the order's supply of aether-forged steel tenfold."
"That sort of strategy seems unlike the tales of the Morningstar I have heard," Izel said.
Though Lucifer had never held much interest in Izcalli, if the histories were to be believed. There were old tales about him having whispered ambition into the ear of Xochil Pinedo, the imperial governess that began the Rule of Jaguars by declaring the return of the long-gone Kingdom of Tariac shortly after Liergan fell – and thus opening the floodgates for the other governors and every client king to declare their own independence – but that was more likely to be vilification of her mory than truth.
The King of Hell largely showed up in Izcalli chronicles as a warlord leading armies of devils and hollows, ravaging parts of the kingdom before being driven off.
"Tenfold," Monchou insisted.
Shaking her head, she tugged both her sleeves back down in place and put both her hands on her belt before looking him straight in the eyes again. She is yolcualli, Izel realized with a start of surprise. What Lierganen would call a contadora, a state of the mind prone to literal speech and fixations.
"Is your crew going to turn on us tomorrow?" she suddenly, and bluntly, asked.
Izel paused.
"Is that a serious question?" he asked.
"Of course it is," Monchou said, seeming offended. "Xical's so sort of Izcalli assassin, Imani Langa is generally spineless and Song Ren acts so boldly that Julian says it's like she thinks she shits warships and pisses ard battalions."
No elaboration as to who this Julian was or why his opinion mattered followed.
"No," Izel replied, "they will not."
Monchou Ma eyed him skeptically, then shrugged. She was not genuinely curious, he decided. She'd been told to ask this. Lahiri put her up to it.
"Your blastcap schematics," she then asked instead. "How much?"
He frowned.
"You could make one without trouble yourself," he said. "I've seen you do similar work."
"Seeing how you did it is worth paying coin for," Monchou said. "You're a Coyac, and word is you were raised in close to a Candle, so I want to see how you make things."
His lips thinned.
"I have been asked to hold off on selling the plans for a little while still," he said.
"That sounds foolish," she told him. "Vivek is good at that, he takes care of everything. You should get a better captain."
"That would require to find one, first," Izel coldly replied.
Monchou looked confused but pressed on. She'd not ant it as an insult, he told himself. Still.
"You should start selling soon," she said. "Other tinkers are holding off on imitations out of respect, but if you keep sitting on your work soone will take the money."
She walked off rather abruptly after that, though she then stopped and turned.
"If you don't think this place is a death trap, then what do you think it is?"
"Good night, Mistress Ma," Izel evenly replied.
"That's not what I asked," she complained, then shook her head and resud walking away.
She was not what he had expected out of the scion of one of the most celebrated aether weapon workshops in the Republics, but not in a bad way. One of the ways to translate yolcualli in Antigua was 'sincere heart', and the deanor was held in so respect back in Izcalli. It had been custom among Grasshopper Kings of the House of Toxtle to keep at least one yolcualli advisor in their court, to rely on their frankness to contrast courtier flattery.
And her question was an apt one: what did he think Scholomance was?
Not a simple rat trap, the way Monchou thought of it. But before setting foot in the Trench he had thought of it as a device of sorts, a clock ticking on for so unseen purpose. Only the longer he spent in the guts of the beast, the less he believed that. This place, it wasn't... precise the way a clock would be. Not dispassionate enough. When the god struggled against them it was raw, personal.
It had fought Ishanvi for paths like there were real stakes to it, like it ant sothing.
Izel had been thinking of Scholomance as an aether machine whose purpose he had yet to grasp, but it occurred to him now that this might be the Umuthi blinders speaking. He saw moving parts, aether furnaces, and began looking for a clockwork purpose because that was what he knew. Only for all that there was machinery inside Scholomance that wasn't really what the school was, was it?
What did Izel think this place was?
An altar.
Lord Asher had called attending Scholomance a wager of survival but Izel knew that jargon, that cant. It was the myth of the Night King having his foot devoured as he slew the primordial monster Cipactli, making Izcalli out of its corpse and thus setting the foundation of the Dialectic of Night: an act violence making a kingdom out of a monster, making truth out of a dream.
Asher Modai could dress it up however he liked, but Izel had been raised to bloody prayers. He knew their cadence. Scolomancia was a god of death and defeat and every student walking its halls was a prayer to that end. Every ti a student was driven out or slain, the god fed and grew another fang to bite with. The Trench was not so crucial piece of clockwork that Scholomance needed to function, despite the aether furnaces laid along its spine.
Izel had seen them and wondered what all that power was truly ant for, what intention the god had twisted this machinery away from, but that was tinker thinking and it was not a tinker that had built this place.
The Trench was a ceremony, a festival. A ga, even, as Ishanvi had put it: the furnaces were there so that the iron puzzle wall might make rooms move, and the iron wall was there because the true purpose of the Trench was for Scolomancia to contest with students. To kill and defeat them, or in turn be slain and defeated. That was why the length of the Trench ended in a temple instead of so grand rotary clockwork machine: the trial led to a final act of consecration. He was not looking at Lucifer's grand machine, the stairs ahead were just the bloody steps of the temple-pyramids of Teskatlan. And Izel Coyac knew those steps.
His feet were still red from walking up them, and then down.
Footsteps shook him out of his trance, the machinery he had been staring at with an empty gaze. It was Maryam.
"Izel?" Maryam said, frowning. "Is everything all right? Song wants to talk to you, but it's not urgent."
"I think," Izel said, "that I have figured out a tool to use against Scholomance."
She shot him a skeptical look.
"You're going to build sothing?"
He bared his teeth at the god waiting in the walls.
"Worse," Izel Coyac said. "I'm going to pray."
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