Pale Lights

On the second day of his captivity, Tristan woke to the sensation of someone briskly jabbing him in the ribs. He startled awake, eyes stinging, and found a dark-haired woman in a padded brown surcoat staring down at him. The butt of her spear was raised but a few inches above his ribs, ready to strike. Marcella again, joy.

“What do you want?” he groaned out.

"Good morning, Ferrando,” the mercenary brightly said. “Smile, I have good news.”

“You are getting transferred to the opposite end of Asphodel and we will never meet again,” he suggested.

“Now you’re hurting my feelings,” Marcella complained, cocking an eyebrow. “Perhaps I will have to remain silent after all.”

Besides him Fortuna, sprawled on the dirty floor as if it were the most decadent of sofas, let out a long yawn. Purely for effect, considering she did not sleep or tire.

“Do not be a brute, Tristan,” she chided. “Apologize to this lovely lady whose propensity for bothering you has been making this whole imprisonment business marginally less boring for me.”

Alas, flipping off the Lady of Long Odds the finger could not go unnoticed. He’d take petty revenge later by playing cards and calling at the first opportunity every single time, which drove her crazy. It ‘left no place for chance’, which was apparently the metaphysical equivalent of spitting in her soup. Marcella’s gaze, though, he met head on.

“Oh merciful goddess, forgive me my trespass,” Tristan said in his flattest, most lifeless tone. “I was only struck dumb by your magnificence, knowing not the words tumbling out of my mouth.”

“That will do,” she said. “And buckle up, Kassa boy, you got your wish: the Tianxi need helping hands. You’ve half an hour to be at the ladder ready for work.”

“Noted,” he replied, sitting all the way up, then cocked an eyebrow. “Was the spear in the ribs really necessary?”

Marcella smirked.

“No, but it’s been a boring shift,” the mercenary said. “Have to get my entertainment where I can, unless you’ve alternatives to offer.”

He gestured rudely at her, which she laughed off while sauntering away. The Trade Assembly’s hired soldiers were keeping them all prisoner, beneath the paper-thin pretense of this being a ‘training camp’, but as far as captors went these were a cordial lot – likely owing to the fact that the hostages would be fighting at their side during the rising. The prisoners only earned the back of the hand if they made loud trouble or tried to come near the stairs, otherwise the soldiers in brown surcoats left them to their own devices.

Unless they took to you in a different way, which he was not so blind as not to notice Marcella had to him. Her advances were currently limited to petty bothers and verbal hair-pulling, so Tristan had chosen to pretend ignorance. Less risky than turning her down when he knew so little of her character.

Rolling his shoulder, the thief took a quick look around. It was difficult to tell the time in here, though it was probably early in the morning – earlier than seven, since the commotion hadn’t happened yet. No one could sleep through that. Most of the hostages were still asleep, snoring away in their ratty cots, and the few lamps hanging from the ceiling cast weak, flickering light. Low on oil. It is later than I thought, then.

He missed Vanesa’s watch, the cold certainty it represented, but there would have been no good explanation for the likes of ‘Ferrando’ to own such a costly piece. Besides, someone might well have robbed it off him by now.

The mercenaries might be holding off on that sort of thing, but no one was protecting the hostages from each other and Tristan knew better than most what happened when rats were left alone in a box for too long.

And this prison was very much a box. Whatever the Antediluvians had built this place for was now a mystery, as time and men had wrecked the structure but what remained was straightforward enough: a large square stone warehouse with a low ceiling, its walls windowless and the gates to adjoining rooms bricked in long enough ago said bricks were crumbling in places. Two sets of stairs nestled against the walls led to a second level, mirroring each other on opposite sides.

Those stairs and the doors atop them were guarded by rotations of the mercenaries in brown surcoats and the occasional Trade Assembly guards, but there was another way out of the warehouse: the massive span of collapsed floor in the middle of the warehouse.

Something or someone had shattered the stone, about a third of the warehouse floor turned into a ragged hole rimmed by collapsed masonry and the occasional jutting rod of brass. The break was a little to the left of the room, so the right side of the warehouse floor was where most cots had been laid down. Even where the hole came closest to the wall there was a solid ten feet or so of room, though.

Still, fear of rolling over the edge in one’s sleep had about two thirds of the hostages bunking on the right side of the room. That side also happened to hold most of the barrels of water meant for drinking or washing as well as the two rickety tables hostages were meant to eat sitting at – in turns, as there were about a hundred and twenty captives while the tables sat barely thirty.

The left side of the warehouse had thus been assigned half a dozen chamber pots, some of which were even hidden behind a cloth curtain. Tristan had bunked down in the lower-right corner along with the other Kassa worker taken hostage – Damon, the warehouse man – mostly because sticking to the man was the best way not to be slapped around into becoming someone’s minion. Besides, his bedding was close to a stretch of floor that people liked to use for gambling.

He'd overheard quite a bit while pretending to sleep, though nearly everything petty gossip.

Leaning over, Tristan shook the man sleeping besides him awake. Damon of Tratheke was a tall and weedy sort who looked like he shouldn’t have lasted an hour doing back-breaking work in the warehouse of the Kassa family, much less the decade he had worked there. There was a sly strength to him, and surprising endurance.

“Ferrando?” Damon called out, eyes fluttering open.

He had long and delicate eyelashes, the thief thought, which felt as if they had been borrowed from a prettier face. On him they felt odd, like gilding on a spade.

“I have to go,” Tristan told him. “The artillerymen are trying me out, so I’ll be in the pit for who knows how long.”

The fair-haired man passed a hand through his hair, groaning as he pushed back his blanket and swallowed a yawn.

"Feels a mite unfair that I’m made to pay for you wasting your chance at a gun,” Damon groused.

Tristan rolled his eyes. On the first day the hired soldiers of the magnates had taken all the new hostages – there’d already been about seventy in here - below and made them fire five shots with those bulky, ungainly muskets the rebels had entire cratefuls of. Anyone who made three shots out of five was marked for further drilling with guns, everyone else told they would be handed a pike or a club when it was time to fight.

The thief had not wanted eyes on him so he had failed out of the musket drills on purpose, while Damon had qualified. Mind you, Tristan was not sure if he would have been capable of qualifying even if he were trying. The bulky guns the magnates had handed them were nothing like the sleek killing tools of the Watch. Their kickback hit like a mule and the powder used stank like rotten eggs, the latter hinting at an overuse of sulfur in the recipe.

Anyhow, that decision proved a mistake. The stairs were watched too closely by the mercenaries and after thorough investigation Tristan found there was no path through the bricked doors even where they’d crumbled. If he wanted to get out, and he must since there was no telling how long he would be stuck down here otherwise, then the pit downstairs was looking like the best way. Given that he’d passed on the easiest way to get time there it meant he had to go fishing for another opportunity.

To his relief, he hadn’t had to arrange an accident for one of the would-be musketeers as there was a superior alternative.

“I’ll be manning a bigger gun, arguably,” Tristan said.

“For lesser pay, though,” Damon smugly replied.

He’d wondered what the angle would be, when after the cheers died down at the rally the leading magnates had announced that about half of the people attending would need to head out to a hidden camp in Tratheke so they might be ‘trained in the use of muskets’. It was sound notion, given the heavy risks of leaks otherwise, but it had dampened the crowd’s revolutionary enthusiasm noticeably. Anyone not a fool knew such blatant hostage taking when they saw it. How would the rebels make up for it?

By passing the blame, he first thought, as the ringleaders let every crew pick their own ‘recruits’ and thus diluted ire by turning it inwards as well as inwards. Tristan himself knew he’d end up picked whatever happened – Temenos was too important and the twins spoke for the most expensive workers under the Kassa – so he volunteered instead of being told to go. It won him esteem enough that Damon was noticeably friendlier when they were sent to this hideaway, making it easier to stick to his side for protection.

Being ferried here with bags over their heads under the watch of armed criminals had failed to improve morale afterwards, but after that first drill separating the future musketmen from the spares the Trade Assembly revealed its path to earning back loyalty: earnings. A merchant guard speaking for the rebels announced that even while ‘being trained’ pikemen would be earning one silver arbol every five days and musketmen a full gold rama.

That’d rather revived the revolutionary flames, though Tristan suspected that the magnates were counting on casualties keeping the costs in silver down. Dead men were easy to stiff, and sending workshop workers armed with spears and clubs after trained soldiers like the lictors was going to result in more corpses than payouts.

“I’ll be standing further away from the people shooting back,” Tristan noted. “Worth the pay cut, I’d say.”

“Two silvers are a pittance, if you are to stand next to those death traps,” Damon opined.

He wasn’t wrong there. The magnates, perhaps aware that cheap muskets and pikes were not the stuff grand victories were made of, had more to their arsenal. Namely, cannons. The artillerymen handling those kept in this hideout were Tianxi specialists, a clannish band of foreigners who came down once a day to drill just before the scheduled racket then disappeared back into the upper levels of the facility.

Seeing an opportunity there, Tristan made inquiries. As it turned out the Tianxi were meant to train some of the hostages like the mercenaries were doing with muskets but there had been no takers for the job regardless of the bumped pay relative to pikemen: cannons were dangerous, and not only to the people they were pointed at. They had a way of blowing up in one’s face, especially the cheap ones. It did not help that the Tianxi were apparently rather unpleasant with newcomers, the few hostages who’d tried to apprentice driven out quickly.

Almost as if said Tianxi had a financial interest in not being replaced by cheaper local labor. An amusing turnabout, considering the Republics were infamous for flooding small Trebian islands with masses of their cheap workshop goods. Tristan was not expecting his tryout to be a pleasant time, but he would stick it out until he had what he needed. If anything, mistreatment would be a baked-in excuse to stop when he was done.

“There is no guarantee they’ll keep me, anyhow,” Tristan finally shrugged, then pushed up to his feet. “Cards later?”

“I have never seen a man love losing so much,” Damon grinned back, nodding. “I’m sure I will be able to rustle up a few volunteers to lighten your purse.”

The warehouse man was, in fact, very good at that. Even better was that said players tended to be warehouse hands from other trading companies, some of which Damon was already passingly familiar with. The talk that those games led to Tristan’s doorstep was not quite as useful as if they had been traveling men, but it came close: some of the other hostages had been here for more than a month and they were a wealth of knowledge.

Those games were how he’d heard about the Tianxi running out the previous takers, and how he’d gotten an idea of the layout of the rest of the edifice. There was a towering wooden structure built over the second story, apparently. One that lay against the western wall of Tratheke and needed a lift to reach the top of, rather narrowing down the possible locations of this hideout.

Useful knowledge, if he got out.

“Looking forward to it,” Tristan replied, rolling his eyes.

He stopped by a barrel of water to dip in a cup and drink, then by one of the meal tables to help himself to a bowl of the sludge simmering in a cauldron the mercenaries replaced whenever it ran empty. It was porridge, approximately, and hostages were allowed to help themselves to the contents at will – probably because the actual meals served twice a day were not particularly fine or large.

He went to splash his face from one of the washing barrels afterwards, and even took off his shirt long enough to rinse himself off – there was a whistle from what could only be Marcella, and some laughter from other guards. As ready as he would get, Tristan went around the edge of the hole until he reached the two large metal ladders that were fastened to the stone by iron chains nailed to the floor. Marcella was already there, and though she teased him for being early ‘like an eager pup’ she still offered to take him down immediately.

There was no reason to wait, so moments later they were climbing down into the depths. The basement beneath the warehouse floor was not so deep under Tratheke as it appeared, but a cavernous ceiling combined with the low height of the warehouse ceiling above made it seem like some faraway journey. Tristan, counting the distance between the rungs of the ladder instead of trusting his eye, established it to be no more than forty feet below.

The basement was, itself, not much to look at. A large room with a brass floor and a curved stone ceiling. The back bore a large door that must be unlatched by working a wheel, but it did not see use because the rebels had piled a kingdom’s worth of crates in front. Mostly cannon balls and guns, with some powder barrels, but also large boxes that must have been for the cannons themselves. The rest of the room was empty space, leading directly into a large channel of soiled water churning the foulness into a tunnel it filled to the brim.

At the source of that channel lay the likely reason the rebels had chosen this place for a hideout: a large, wheeled machine set into the stone and churning the water along. It erupted into hour-long stretches of the most horrid racket thrice a day at the same hours, all loud thumps and scraping steel. Between the sewage smell and the noise, it was no wonder the magnates figured they could get away with training men in using muskets here.

There were two mercenaries seated on crates near the wall, playing cards as they kept a loose eye on the situation, but his attention went to the three cannons in the middle of the room and the Tianxi tending to them. Three bronze pieces tied to carts, two large enough they would have fit on a warship but the third narrower and longer. Hardly siege cannons, these, or anything like the infamous Viudas Severas – the six massive iron cannons defending the Sanguine Port of Sacromonte, ship-killers one and all.

A dozen Tianxi in loose Asphodelian clothing stood around the cannons, speaking among themselves in their native tongue, and Marcella loudly cleared her throat in their direction. The chatter ceased, eyes turning on her and then Tristan himself.

“Here’s your student,” she said, gesturing at him. “Try not to run him out like the others.”

The dubious looks that followed as they eyed him were just a mite insulting. Quick chatter erupted between the Tianxi, a disparate lot that shared little aside black hair and the Cathayan look, until the tallest among them whistled sharply and gestured for Tristan to head towards the smallest of the three cannons. There were groans from the two Tianxi handling it, an old man with skinny white beard and a middle-aged woman with her hair pulled into a severe bun.

Not the most auspicious of beginnings, but it was on him to turn that around. He found himself preempted for introductions as he approached.

“Ming,” the old man announced, tapping his own chest.

“Ferrando,” Tristan replied, doing the same.

“Feihan Ho,” the old man confidently repeated.

From the amused glint in the woman’s eyes, Tristan guessed he was already being hazed.

“Close enough,” he agreed, squaring his shoulders. “What can I do?”

“Ever touch cannon before?” Ming asked.

The thief leaned forward, touched the bronze piece and then turned a brilliant smile on the old man.

“Once,” he said.

He got rolled eyes in return, from both. They did their level best to run him out with plausible deniability after that, avoiding teaching him anything and instead sending him to constantly fetch and replace tools. Twice they sent him up the ladder to ask the mercenary officer at the stairs an asinine question, which was so transparent the grizzled old veteran actually shot him a pitying look.

Half an hour in, though, the pair realized they had to teach him something or their employers would complain. His repeated admission of ignorance in matters of artillery saw him informed that his lesson would be on loading ammunition, which was not simple as it looked. It was not merely a powder charge and a stone ball, as he’d assumed, but also two different layers of wadding which had to be put in the right order before it was all crammed down securely with a ramrod.

The pair made him drill again and again, using sand instead of powder and nitpicking at every detail. Mostly the woman, for that. Her Antigua was better and Ming seemed to dislike the hazing beyond making sport of the thief with something resembling good humor. The more Tristan spoke with the old man, however, the more something itched at him. As the middle-aged woman – who had yet to introduce herself – inspected his latest work with a critical eye he caught Ming’s attention.

“Caishen?” he asked.

Ming’s eyes widened in surprise, then he grinned toothlessly.

“Caishen,” he agreed, tapping over his heart.

He then added a fast-paced sentence in Cathayan that had Tristan squinting. Had the word for ‘boat’ been in there?

“He praises you for recognizing he is from the greatest city in the world.”

Tristan’s gaze moved to older woman, who had leaned back from the cannon to study him.

“Dandan,” she added almost reluctantly.

“Your name, I assume,” he tried.

She smiled thinly.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

“Where does a Sacromontan like you learn to recognize the Caishen accent?” Dandan brusquely asked.

“I knew a man from there,” Tristan replied. “A veteran from the Long Burn who left for Sacromonte after the war. He’d lost most of his accent but not all.”

The woman’s brow rose and she addressed the old man in Cathayan, who looked surprised and replied in the same.

“Where did he fight?” Dandan asked. “For who?”

“He didn’t talk much about it,” Tristan admitted. “Though he told me he was one of the four thousand militia who charged across the field at Diecai. He fought for Caishen through much of the Burn, as I understand it.”

“Diecai?” Ming repeated, voice rising.

He said something in a scathing tone, then spat on the ground. A Tianxi from the cannon besides them heard the words, repeating Diecai quizzically before getting an explanation from Ming, then spat on the ground as well. The word spread across the room and soon a dozen Tianxi between the age of forty to sixty were repeating the word with disgust and spitting as Tristan watched on in amused astonishment. Dandan cleared her throat.

“Nearly all of us fought in the Long Burn,” she told him. “Most as Caishen militia, a few in the Mazu raiding fleets. Diecai, well, it was a great victory but the militia was reaped like wheat.”

“So I heard,” Tristan replied, thinking of that look in Yong’s eyes when he had spoken of it. It was not the sort of thing you forgot. “Then the mercenaries took the day, nothing to do with the rest.”

“Thrice as many Someshwari died as we did during the rout, but that did not make the dead grow back,” Dandan grunted. “I was part of the army under General Qi as well, though I never made it to the battle.”

His brow rose.

“What happened?” he asked.

“I was with the artillery train and we lagged behind. The cannons Mazu sent us for the offensive were so heavy they kept breaking the cart wheels,” Dandan replied. “We only made it to the field three days after the fighting was finished.”

Tristan was no general, but that struck him as somewhat late to be of use.

“Mazu goodwill,” Ming cut in. “Sanxing? Wang ba da Sanxing.”

Something egg? Sounded like an insult, going by the tone.

“I’m guessing there’s a story there,” he prompted.

The more you talk to me, the more I become someone in your eyes. The harder it becomes to run me out in petty ways. Most people found it uncomfortable to be pricks to others unprompted, when they let themselves think of the other person as being a person instead of just a silhouette.Dandan sighed.

“The Republic of Mazu did not send Caishen the field pieces that were asked to match the ones used by Kuril, but at least the siege guns saw use against forts,” she said. “The Sanxing, however, only sent twenty of their new war machines called the jiu tie pao. Volley guns on wagons. These were… not popular with Caishen artillerymen, for many reasons.”

Ming mimed blowing up with his hands, then pointed down at his feet.

“Nine toe now,” he said. “Bastardos Sanxing.”

“Bastardos Sanxing,” Tristan agreeably replied.

He was slapped enthusiastically on the back, and after that the mood thawed. He was not sent on further pointless errands and they actually took the time to teach him properly. Ming remained much friendlier than Dandan, but she was now rather more willing to translate his enthusiastic tirades in Cathayan and even on occasion elaborate herself.

Tristan’s honest curiosity about how the likes of them had come to be tangled with an Asphodelian rebellion paired well with his professional duty to find out as much about the magnates’ rebellion as he could. Though wary, Dandan seemed to pick up he was genuinely interested in the tale.

“After the Watch forced a peace, Caishen went to the dogs,” the older woman told him. “The entire north was a wasteland and the Izcalli looted the westernmost prefectures down to the bedrock, which was bad enough even before the voting began.”

“Pingmian should all burn,” Ming absent-mindedly noted while he cleaned the inside of the cannon.

Tristan choked at the casual use of the slur. He wasn’t sure what exactly pingmian meant, but whenever Tianxi sailors used it the Izcalli ones drew knives.

“To sit on the general assembly, a citizen must own land or property worth at least five thousand silver taels,” Dandan told him. “With the regions ravaged, the heartlands took advantage and stacked the latest round of Secretariat appointments. Then the Secretariat appointed their friends and kin as prefects over the broken lands and stripped the Ministry of War’s funds to fill prefecture coffers in the name of rebuilding.”

Thus putting those funds in the hands of their friends and kin. It was the same old racket, everywhere in the world. There was a reason Tristan was no friend to nobles but he was no confederales either. Power did not get any cleaner because it was handed down through votes rather than birthright.

“I take it the Ministry of War runs, well, the army?” Tristan asked.

From what he recalled the republics all had the ‘Eight Ministries’ as a functioning government, their ranks filled by those who passed the examinations, but the Secretariat was supposed to have some authority over them to hold them in check. Dandan grunted in agreement.

“Those greedy fucks bled the funds out of the same army that held against Kuril and the Sunflower Lords, saying now was a time for peace, and unceremoniously tossed the soldiers into the streets.”

“So you were out of a job,” Tristan led on.

“There are only so many border fortresses whose cannons need manning,” Dandan unhappily said. “They kept only the most experienced officers and I was younger then. Caishen was full of cashiered soldiers, after the Burn. A lot of them went mercenary, but I have no taste for that life.”

Tristan raised an eyebrow, gesturing meaningfully around them. What was this if not mercenary work?

“We don’t work for the merchants, Ferrando,” Dandan flatly told him. “We work for the Yellow Earth, who loaned us out. I’ve been training yellow sashes for a decade now, this here is no different.”

She paused.

“It’s better than taking pay to shoot cannons at fellow Tianxi under a mercenary banner,” Dandan fervently said. “The things I heard about the borders with Jigong after the Dimming…”

Tristan made a noise of understanding, feigned. He had never bought into sentimentality discouraging violence against one’s countrymen. Sacromonte was a beast that cannibalized its own every hour of every day in a hundred different ways – there was not a soul within those walls that was not, in some way, at war with the rest of those inside.

Dandan was the warier of the pair, so he didn’t prod any further and instead waited until she was distracted to approach Ming for his question.

“When fighting yiwu?” the old man mused, repeating the words. “Soon, merchants say. Days, week?”

Ming shrugged.

“Before month end,” he then added with a toothless grin. “They say no pay next month, cheap bastardos.”

The old Tianxi had evidently fallen in love with that one word in Antigua. He liked to work it into sentences regardless of whether it fit, often with more enthusiasm than skill. Ming had just given him very useful information, though: the magnate coup was to take place before the end of the month.

Considering it was now the fourth, that left twenty-six days. The rebellion was thus imminent, though with a little luck the Thirteenth would be well out of the capital before that fire caught. The difficulty here was that the magnates had been open about their intention to keep the hostages here until it was time to take up arms, which meant Tristan really needed a way out.

Yet despite his earlier hopes, the basement was not looking promising as a means of escape. Trying to get out through the sewage water was certain death, by the look of the churning current and how closely the water kept to the ceiling of the tunnel it disappeared into. He was not desperate enough to roll the dice and hope that the current would carry him to somewhere he might surface to and breathe before he drowned in sewage. Bad way to go, not that there were any good ones.

The back wall behind the channel was marked with impacts and burns from where cannons and muskets were fired at it, but it was solid stone and thick. There would be no punching through. The gate behind the crates might represent a way out if it led into a tunnel, but the sheer number of crates in the way made it effectively impossible to crack open discreetly. Besides, there were always a pair of mercenaries down here during the night. Not particularly watchful ones, but presumably still alert enough to notice an hour’s worth of someone moving around heavy crates.

No, Tristan wouldn’t be able to sneak out on his own. He would need someone else to do it for him. The thief finished the drills, even standing by the smallest cannon while it was fired by Dandan once. It was after that he went fishing again through feigned worry.

“How many times will we be able to practice with live shot before the fighting?” he asked, putting on a troubled look. “Won’t the musketmen eat through the powder stocks with their own drills?”

“We do not use the same barrels,” Dandan told him. “Theirs is local. But it doesn’t matter, they’ll lower more barrels if they have to. It wouldn’t be the first time.”

Tristan made himself snort.

“A shit job for whoever has to strap the empty barrels on their back climbing that ladder,” he opined.

She shot him an amused look.

“You dumb, boy?” Dandan said. “They use ropes to pull them up, same way they lowered it all down.”

“Mercenaries lazy,” Ming added with a smirk. “Always wait until morning, let merchant guard do it.”

Oh? Now that was a useful bit, considering the merchant guards only kept guard until six, to plug a hole in the shifts caused by the relatively small number of brown surcoat mercenaries.

“You should have heard them whine when they had to bring up the broken cannon,” Dandan mocked. “You would think they were being murdered.”

“A cannon had to be changed?” Tristan asked, and now his wariness was not feigned in the slightest.

“Old shit bronze cannon, of course break,” Ming sneered. “They say better when fight, but who believes?”

“No one was hurt,” Dandan assured him. “And they changed it the following day.”

She gave a mean little smirk.

“They had to. It is in our contract we do not have to fight or teach unless properly equipped, you see, which means at least three cannons in fit state. The merchants in charge hate the thought of wasting coin by leaving us to idle, though they don’t hate it enough to send us proper cannons from the homeland.”

“Magnates bastardos,” Ming happily contributed.

Tristan smiled, changed the subject, and silently began nibbling at that little detail.

There was an angle there, he could almost taste it. He just needed a little more before he could make it into a plan.

--

Cards were the easiest way to get information.

Damon liked the Delinos siblings, so all it took was mentioning them in conversation for the warehouse man to decide on roping them in for a round of cards. Phoebe and Pollos were in their early twenties, both tall and stacked strong as befitting their years of work moving heavy crates around for the Delinos family.

Tristan eyed his hand, hiding a wince at the fact that even after two rounds he’d be putting coin on a high card alone if he raised. He habitually ignored Fortuna’s assurances that if he went all in he was sure to bring home the pot. Raising a single copper before drawing his third card, he proved fully justified in his habitual distrust in any promise of the Lady of Long Odds by the addition of a third card of a different suit with a mere valet of Staves for his highest value.

Damon won the round with a pair that narrowly beat Pollos’ own. He caught Phoebe’s eyes and groaned in feigned sympathy, getting a grin out of her.

“Do not put us in the same boat, Kassa,” she said. “I sometimes win more than once a day.”

“Admittedly, at this rate I might leave our captivity broke,” he noted.

“Oh, you just need to slow down a little,” Phoebe told him, the fair-haired woman then pitching her voice low. “Marcos told me there’s some kind of higher-up visiting this week, our… vacation might be ending soon.”

Marcos was the mercenary soldier Phoebe had taken up with, a middle-aged man the younger woman sometimes snuck off with during the night. Tristan was not sure what had drawn her to a man ten years her elder with a slight pot belly and a fierce beard, but admittedly he was no expert on matters of desire. It might have been the muscles. Either way, Phoebe’s lover was not above pillow talk and she in no way above spreading said pillow talk around.

More importantly, by the sound of it they were still involved and Phoebe seemed in no danger of losing interest. The lever that was that entanglement could still be used. Tristan counted the days in his head – Marcos would have the night shift tonight, the one down in the pit, but that was too early. The next time should be in two days. Potentially enough time to get the rest of his affairs in order.

“The honeymoon ends at last,” Pollos drawled. “Whatever will you do parted from dear Marcos?”

“A honeymoon should have a bed,” Phoebe groused. “Or at least more privacy than the dark and a prayer.”

That complaint was not an infrequent one, though that lack of privacy wasn’t stopping her taking the man to bed any more than it did the rest of the couples that’d formed with other guards or between hostages. That complaint was, in fact, the very reason Tristan had wanted her in this game of cards. He didn’t even need to ask about the duty roster, given that it was regular and there were few enough mercenaries it was entirely predictable.

“Another magnate is visiting?” Tristan idly asked, putting on a show of rolling his eyes as he went fishing for the information mostly out of habit. “Gods take pity on a poor Sacromontan, I’m still learning all the names of the other ones.”

“A noble this time,” Phoebe denied. “I think the Anaidon are nobles, anyway. I heard them called a house once.”

Tristan methodically smothered any trace of surprise. House Anaidon, as in the same aristocrats who were hiding troops and arms for the noble coup? Or, he then thought, perhaps this was Hector Anaidon – the suspected member of the cult of the Golden Ram, outed by Song as having some sort of boon. Which in turn would mean the cult had some hand in this place.

That… he’d good as dismissed that possibility, seeing what he had seen. Was this not a Yellow Earth operation, propping up their Trade Assembly allies? Get out first, Tristan reminded himself. Then investigate.

“Why’s a noble on our side?” Damon asked with a frown.

“Must be a traitor,” Pollos opined. “There’s always a few.”

There was some grumbling, but nothing all that strongly worded. Few among even the firebrands of the hostages were truly arguing for every highborn in Asphodel to be shot, and he was hardly sitting with firebrands. Damon was the one with the strongest republican leanings here, on account of his mother having been hanged for poaching, and he claimed no real appetite for corpses beyond those of the sitting members of the Council of Ministers.

“Heavy talk aside, I would have thought your dalliance had time for a bed out of all of them,” Tristan said with measured nonchalance.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Phoebe replied, already half-glaring.

He raised his hands to claim peace.

“Only that he always shares the night shift with Cymone,” the thief said. “Doesn’t she…”

He mimed drinking.

“Oh, she’s a drunk all right,” Phoebe snorted. “But their captain forbade her to buy bottles after she almost fell into the pit, now she has to do with what’s served with meals.”

“Poor Karolos,” Pollos smiled a tad cruelly. “His only shot there is if she gets enough liquor in her belly.”

“Pollos,” Phoebe chided him, but she was smiling.

Karolos, Tristan mused. Karolos. Rolling around the name in his memory eventually yielded a face. Another brown surcoat mercenary, a big man with a face like a bull’s and manners to match. Not liked among the hostages, for he was quicker than most with the back of his hand.

Oh, that would work quite nicely.

“Anyhow, sober dear Cymone remains so there’s no sneaking off to bend me over during the night,” Phoebe sighed mournfully, to the disgusted grimaced of her brother.

Tristan shared in the sentiment but hid it, and paid the price for his maneuver in the form of a veritable tide of bawdy jokes. Ugh. He had what he’d come for, though: the right angles and the right actors. That look in Phoebe’s eye had been considering: her lover would be hearing of the idea when they next met, Tristan would put coin on it. Now he just needed to deliver Marcos that opportunity to sneak off, and for that he would need a borrowed pair of hands.

Thankfully, he knew just where to get them.

--

After the midday musket drill the hostages made their way back upstairs, falling back into the small coteries that’d naturally emerged among them. The warehouse hands, the shop owners, the sailors, the traveling men. Once these settled, gambling sprouted like mushrooms after rain. Perhaps buoyed by his decent luck that morning, Damon had fetched the Delinos siblings again when they sat for cards – but this time Tristan had added someone on his own to the circle.

Her name was Rhea.

The small, twitchy woman sat to his left as they played a seventh round of Cacho. Rhea of Tratheke smiled a lot and she had the sort of guilelessly chubby face that incited trust in most encountering it. Rhea also cheated constantly and relentlessly at every game she played at. She was not even particularly skilled a cheater, Tristan mused, getting away with it mostly on account of being able to tear up at the drop of a hat.

Now there was an impressive skill, though. Crying on command was much harder than people tended to assume. Said cheater slapped down her cards with a triumphant smile.

“Cacho,” Rhea announced, revealing an eight, nine and ten of Cups. “Beat that.”

A groan from Damon, who threw away his valet and knight of Wands flanked by a useless two of Staves, while the Delinos siblings outright cursed and threw their own cards face down. Tristan eyed the smug Rhea with amusement, wondering how she would dig herself out of the hole should he point out he could see another ten of Cups tucked away up her sleeve. Not that he needed to put her down, for tempted as he was to let her win he was running low on funds. Time to refill the coffers a bit.

“Yes,” Fortuna hissed over his shoulder. “Crush them, Tristan, crush them mercilessly. And to think you wanted to fold!”

Clearing his throat, he caught Rhea’s gaze and flipped his three cards one after another. Six of Cups, six of Wands, six of Coins. Three sixes were the single strongest hand, beating her flush even though the ‘Cacho’ she had put down was the hand the game was named after.

“No,” she whimpered. “That was half my savings.”

By which she meant half of what she had cheated her fellow hostages out of, Tristan silently amended.

“I was due some luck,” he shrugged as he picked up the pile of copper coins. “Next round, yes?”

“Please, let us dice for bragging rights instead,” Damon pleaded. “At this rate I won’t be able to afford the bottle of rotgut I sent for.”

“The prices are robbery,” Phoebe conceded.

To most everyone’s side-eye, considering she was sleeping with one of the mercenaries setting those robber prices. As Damon had requested dice replaced cards, but Rhea seemed disinclined to play those and instead approached Tristan with a pitiful look. Ah, good, that spared him the need to approach her. She sat close and leaned in, pitching her voice low.

“I don’t suppose,” she pleaded with a wobbly lip, “that you would trade me your coppers for my arbol? I cannot gamble with one silver, and my only friends here all play cards.”

He squinted at her. The mercenaries guarding them were entirely willing to split arboles into radizes if you ceded a part of the sum to make it worth their while. That made it sound like Rhea was simply trying to avoid that informal three radizes tax by having him change it instead, but that was too simple a racket. She was, after all, a cheat to the bone. There would be more to it.

“Show me the silver,” he said.

She produced a polished silver arbol, the intertwined oaks on the front almost shining. The coin looked new, he thought. Perhaps too new, and he could not help but notice she was showing him only the front.

“And the other side?” he asked.

She turned teary blue eyes on him.

“You really think I would-”

He snatched the silver out of her hand, ignoring her yelp and suddenly tearless eyes. His lips twitched when on the other side was not a stamped griffin a real arbol would have but identical twined oaks.

“Fake coinage?” he asked. “That’s a step past the cards up your sleeve.”

“It’s got the same silver concentration, I swear,” she pouted. “It’s just that the idiot counterfeiter stamped them the same way twice. I got them at a price that was a steal!”

Tristan rolled his eyes at her. He really doubted there was as much silver in it as a genuine arbol, given that the counterfeit coinage rampant across the Trebian Sea tended to see the most use in places where the lack of precious metals or general poverty meant Sacromontan coinage was worth more than it should. There was precious little of it in Asphodel, which was not all that rich an island on precious metals but was well provided in silver by the mines digging into the sides of the Nitari Heights.

“If it truly was good silver, they would have melted and reminted it,” Tristan replied.

The pout deepened.

“Well, I know that. I was just hoping you wouldn’t,” Rhea admitted. “You’re less of a rube than you look.”

“I didn’t say I wouldn’t take it,” Tristan mildly said.

Her eyes lit up.

“No takebacks or I’ll cry,” she threatened.

“I’ll take the silver,” he said, “but my payment will be a favor.”

“That’s open-ended,” she noted, face closing.

“You know what wouldn’t be open-ended, Rhea?” Tristan mused. “Your chances of anyone in here gambling with you again if it comes out you put cards in your sleeve and pass bad coin.”

“A solid counterargument, friend,” Rhea replied immediately. “I am entirely at your disposal.”

Tristan squinted at her again. Too easy, and long years in the company of Fortuna had taught to recognize the scent of utter insincerity when it was in the air.

“You’re going to try to avoid me until we leave,” he guessed.

Her eyes suddenly turned teary again at this ‘most unfair accusation’, which they both knew to be entirely accurate. He still made the trade, of course. A petty crook was exactly what he required and he could be mostly sure she would fold under pressure when the time came. Tristan had his pair of hands.

Now all that remained was the timing, and patience would deliver that right onto his lap.

--

“Consider a box,” Tristan said.

“No,” Fortuna replied without batting an eye.

For all her reflexive contrariness, she still leaned over his shoulder as he traced a square in the dust. She rested her chin against his shoulder, and it was an effort not to lean back into it. It was not real, Tristan reminded himself. And it would be noticed besides.

“That box,” he continued, “has only two exits.”

He marked either side of the square with an X, representing the warehouse stairs and the doors atop them.

“You’re wrong, though,” the Lady of Long Odds smugly said. “There’s two more exits down in the basement, the waterway and the big gate.”

“Which are respectively barred by drowning and at least an hour’s work,” Tristan said. “They are disqualified.”

“You’re disqualified,” Fortuna muttered.

“Those two exits are watched at all times,” Tristan said. “Two guards at each door, two more down in the pit.”

“You can distract two guards,” the goddess reassured him.

“I could,” he agreed, “but those doors are locked – key around the neck of the office running the shift. It might be possible to arrange large enough a distraction to pick the lock before they notice, but I would then be running blind into the rest of the building.”

And while it was only a guess, he believed at least one of those doors led straight to the barracks where the mercenaries bunked. The brown surcoats changed guards for their shifts very quickly, which stood out given that they were not particularly assiduous workers otherwise. Proximity to where the barracks would explain it, and Tristan was a fine sneak but not so fine as to pass unnoticed through a riled up barracks.

“So we’re stuck,” the Lady of Long Odds pouted. “That was a lot of talk, Tristan. You could just have said ‘I’m a disappointment, Fortuna’ and left it at that.”

He flicked a finger at her face, which naturally went through thin air but still had her withdrawing from his shoulder and hissing like an angry cat before taking revenge. The thief was glad no one was asleep right now, for he would have looked like a madman fending off the void with his arms. After a truce was established, at least until Fortuna betrayed it remorselessly, he returned to the matter at hand.

“You are right, at least, that I cannot pass through those doors myself,” the thief said. “Which means I must have someone move me instead.”

“Fake sickness,” Fortuna advised.

“I asked Phoebe earlier,” Tristan replied, “and she said that Abran – the trader with the beard – had a fever on his first week. All the browncoats did was quarantine him on the left side of the floor.”

“Impersonate one of them,” she tried.

“I considered that,” he admitted, “but they’re too small an outfit. Fewer than thirty mercenaries, unless they’re hiding a great many officers upstairs. They all know each other’s faces.”

“The merchant guards?”

“It’s the same six who come every morning,” the thief grunted. “Even worse. No, I need to be smuggled out.”

“Hidden under what, someone’s skirt?” Fortuna laughed. “That Marcella girl might be tempted, but she wears trousers."

“A box,” Tristan said. “I’ll be smuggled out in a box. I even know who will be moving it out of here afterwards. The problem is that I need to get into the box and the damn thing is down in the pit.”

“So how do you get there?” Fortuna asked.

“Night is when there are the least eyes,” he said. “More importantly, it is when they only keep lamps lit around the gates and down in the pit.”

“The pit’s where you need them not to be, though,” she pointed out.

“The lights don’t matter,” he retorted, “if there is no one to watch.”

“And how will you achieve that?” Fortuna asked.

Tristan Abrascal smiled.

“I’m going to give people,” he said, “exactly what they want.”

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