While we were waiting for Ash’s mother to analyze the Ascendent blood sample, more arcane shenanigans popped up. The last time we saw Nyryx, she’d told Ash that his fragment of the Gates of Death had reached the city already and just needed to be smuggled through the lightning barrier. Now she sent a follow-up message alerting him that it had arrived, and Ash invited Faith and me to go retrieve it with him.

Since I would have gone regardless – with or without his knowledge – I gave a noncommittal grunt, but Faith cried, “I can’t be left behind when we’re talking to my dearest friend!” and flung on her pinkest cloak.

At least she looked like someone who might frequent Catcrawl Alley.

As we walked north to the Docks, Faith hummed to herself and ignored the two of us, and Ash finally officially presented his pet project to me. He prefaced it with, “One big problem is that when ghosts possess a Hollow, they can still be detected via attunement. Obviously, the Church is wary of this, so they search for it specifically. I’ve been learning a ritual to hide the possessing ghost, which will be extremely useful for us, but there is a cost….”

Much of this exposition I’d already inferred from bits and pieces of conversations I’d overheard, but I played along. “Hmmm, that does seem helpful,” I agreed. “What is the cost?”

“Well, obviously, the ritual itself is very stressful, but it also has to be performed near a spirit well.”

That piece of jargon was new. “A ‘spirit well’?”

“A location with an unusually high concentration of spectral activity,” Ash explained, which I translated as “somewhere with even more ghosts than usual for Doskvol.” Which was really saying something. Switching into the didactic mode that I recognized from his classes, he lectured, “No one is sure why spirit wells occur. They just do, frequently at the intersections of canals, so one of the Gondoliers’ primary missions is to find and destroy them.”

That, I hadn’t known. Sifting through my memories of the city’s canals, I couldn’t identify any specific incident that hinted at the boat operators’ Whisper-y extracurriculars.

I didn’t like that.

Having imparted his Useful Life Lesson of the Day, Ash returned to his customary stream-of-consciousness patter. “In any case, that person we killed, I don’t remember the name – ”

“Which one?” I inquired, very drily.

Faith’s tuneless humming cut out, suggesting that we’d piqued her interest at last.

“The Church person.” Ash waved his hand up and down his front, conveying the impression of clerical robes (or possibly nudity?). “That high-ranking one. The one who was our precursor to disrupting the Ascension ritual?”

At that, Faith and I stopped short with matching incredulous stares.

“You mean Kender Morland?” I asked for both of us.

If the curate of Charhallow counted as high ranking, then Preceptor Dunvil might as well be perched on the moon at its apex, and we should give up any designs against him right this instant, because they were doomed to fall very, very short.

Ash rolled his eyes, dismissing reality (or maybe the shabbiness of Charhallow’s church). “Yes, anyway.” He started walking again, and after a half-beat, Faith and I followed suit. “There are many people through whom we could learn an awful lot if we replaced them.” He indulged in a brief fantasy: “Who knows? Maybe we could replace the entire Church hierarchy with Hollows….” Shaking his head to get himself back on track, he pronounced, “In any case, we need the fragment, and then we need a target.”

“You mean a target ghost to test whether your ritual works?” I asked, trying to puzzle out where he was going with this.

“Nyryx is finding one of those, unless you have a friend.” Ash’s tone suggested that he already knew the answer was an emphatic “No.” “I meant someone to replace.”

“Oh. Is there anyone we hate?” was my intelligent response.

“Sooo many,” he snorted.

That was indeed true, so I narrowed it down a bit: “Whom do we really hate?”

With profound regret, Ash sighed, “It’s probably impossible to Hollow an Ascendent….”

My mind shied away from all this talk of Hollowing. As I glanced around to distract myself, I caught a glimpse of the Crow’s Nest in the distance and suddenly remembered something. “Wait,” I demanded, “does the target have to be Hollowed?”

After all, it was perfectly possible – and commonplace – for ghosts to possess living humans. Faith funneled ghosts into people all the time. She’d even let Cricket take over her body briefly. I myself had gotten possessed during the Lyssa score, and Faith certainly hadn’t Hollowed me first.

From Ash’s expression, he’d never even considered alternatives to Hollowing. “Oh, right, that’s true.” He looked to his mentor for confirmation, but she’d gotten bored and wandered off towards Captain Rye’s Menagerie, so he worked out the logic himself. “The target does have to be possessed, and we can’t allow the underlying will to assert itself…so we’d have to find a way to subdue the underlying consciousness. Hollowing is easier,” he concluded with more confidence. “Or maybe not easier, but it has the advantage of being irreversible.”

Before I could formulate a coherent counterargument, Nyryx sashayed out of Catcrawl Alley and draped herself against a stack of crates. “Looking for a good time, dearies?” she hailed us.

In a flash, Faith was back. “Why, of course!” she sang. “I’m always looking for a good time!”

Worming her way between Ash and me, she looped her arms through ours and tugged us towards Nyryx, who winked at a passing sailor and called in a throaty voice, “Come back in a bit, dearie. Go have a pint or two. Or three.”

He guffawed, looked the three of us up and down, and shouted back a suggestion about what she could do in the meantime that delighted Faith. I just kept my head down and hoped I didn’t run into anyone Bazso, Sigmund, or I knew.

As soon as we passed behind the stack of crates, though, Nyryx’s entire demeanor changed. In a businesslike manner, she announced, “We’ve got it. Sort of. Enough.”

That was…definitive?

“That’s not wholly specific,” Ash commented, seconding my thoughts, “but if we have it, we have it.”

“We have it,” the Reconciled confirmed. “It’s in the back corner of Rye’s Menagerie, by the water tanks. You can pick it up whenever you need.”

That was good enough for Ash. “Impressive,” he praised. “We’ll also need a ghost who’s willing to help out.”

“Yeah,” sighed Nyryx, who obviously hated the idea of sacrificing a friend – or just a fellow spectral citizen – to his fanaticism. “I know a couple who might be….”

Missing (or maybe just ignoring) her reluctance, Ash told her, “Let us know. We have the power to do a lot of damage to the Church. They appear to assume that this is impossible.”

Nyryx was silent for a long moment. Her eyes drifted past him to Faith, but she found no quarter there. At last, she said haltingly, “No, I agree. It’s just….” She groped for the words to make him understand: “We’re not cultists, Ash. All of us got into this because we had things we were hoping for. Mostly for ourselves.”

She failed to convey her point clearly enough, and Ash only chuckled with incomprehension. “I assure you that we’re all in it for ourselves.” He began to turn away, eager to see and hold a fragment of the Gates of Death.

Before Faith could follow him, Nyryx hastily warned, “You’re going to want to keep your little buddy away from it.”

Mildly interested, Faith observed, “I think I can manage to do that. Although, out of curiosity, what would happen?”

Acting oddly embarrassed for a prostitute who worked the Docks, Nyryx gestured helplessly. “I mean, it just – ” She darted a glance at Faith, hoping the Whisper could fill in the blanks herself.

Faith just waited, a pleasant smile on her face.

“It’s just – it calls to us.” Yearning filled Nyryx’s voice, and for a moment she stared sightlessly in the direction of the Menagerie and began to drift out of her body, straining towards the final end that none of us could have. Then the wind whipped the ribbons on Faith’s cloak, and the Reconciled snapped back into herself. More pragmatically, she said, “I don’t know if you’d be able to get her to do much else besides stare at it constantly and, like, press against it….”

“Huh,” was Faith’s very reassuring comment.

Personally, I thought Nyryx’s warning would have the opposite effect, and Faith would introduce Cricket to the fragment just to see for herself. Perhaps Nyryx came to the same conclusion, because she said nothing more.

We found a brown-butcher-paper-wrapped parcel in the back corner of the Menagerie by the water tanks, which was presumably the promised fragment, because we then had a very disconcerting walk back to Strathmill House. Feral ghosts kept floating towards us, but even though their fear of Whispers kept them at a safe distance, my skin crawled the whole time. To distract myself, I tossed out a joke about ghost catnip, but Faith, who could generate clouds of angry ghosts at will, was unimpressed.

After she and Ash stowed the fragment of the Gates of Death somewhere secure (hopefully where none of the orphans would stumble across it), Faith headed off to the Sanctorium to indulge her vice and chat with her other “dearest friend.” Ash immediately cornered me in our private sanctum.

“Isha, Isha, Isha, we should talk about Faith.”

I already knew I wasn’t going to like it any more than I liked his ghost-concealment plans. “Uh huh?” I asked warily.

Propping one hip against conference table, he said with deliberate casualness, “So, Faith has been teaching me about souls and such, and many other useful things, mostly involving lightning hooks – and how not to wield them.”

Had she, really? But I said, “I’ve noticed.”

“So, remember how my mother warned us that Faith’s soul is falling apart?”

Of course I remembered that conversation, which had taken place right after Faith called in a favor that knocked Zamira Slane completely off-kilter. When you were steeling yourself to mend a disintegrating soul, you generally weren’t expecting to don furry cat ears instead.

“So I looked in a little more detail…. Ah. I don’t know if there’s an easy way to put this. Faith’s soul is like….” Bracing himself, Ash divulged in a rush, “It’s like a piece of lace wrapped around a cancerous demon tumor.”

I reacted about as well as he’d expected. “Wait – what?”

He shrugged without quite meeting my eyes. “That’s honestly the easiest way to put it.”

What a terrible accusation to make against anyone – even Faith! “What makes you say that?” I demanded.

“Well, I looked at it,” he replied, growing defensive. “By, you know, attuning? Not terribly subtle.”

“Uhhhhhh, when did you do this? How did you do this without her stopping you?”

“Aaaah, well….”

In the absence of any concrete information and any way of obtaining it, Ash had hypothesized that Faith’s soul frayed a little every time she tortured someone. Hence, after they brought Marne Booker back to our railcar for interrogation, he’d watched Faith closely throughout that extremely long night.

“Maybe torturing people is normal for Faith, or maybe it’s a normal demonic thing…but I feel like it can’t be good for her,” he said now.

I absolutely agreed. “I can’t see how it would be good for anyone!”

While Faith was distracted, so to speak, Ash had attuned surreptitiously and discovered that her soul resembled a piece of tattered lace wrapped around a tumor. The tattered, frayed part was the part that seemed human.

“The tumor did not,” he told me with a meaningful look. “Unfortunately, some of her essence got on me, so I’m going to ‘smell’ like her to any demon who’s hunting her for a while.”

One crisis at a time. “So you think Faith is really a demon?”

Ash shook his head emphatically. “No. I think Faith is the lace.” A pause. “I like to think Faith is the lace. I wouldn’t say it’s pink, but…we can go with that.”

Now I had a horrible vision of a pulsing, oozing, gelatinous, black mass straining to burst out of a pastel-pink lace sachet, the kind you used for dried lavender. “Can we get the tumor out of her?” Surely Zamira Slane, with her infirmary full of part-demon healers, could perform that operation.

At once, Ash warned, “Oh, I don’t think Faith would like that.”

“Are you sure? Generally, when you have a tumor, you want to get rid of it.”

“Weeeeell, I don’t know exactly, but speaking as a Tycherosi, I don’t want my demonic nature torn out of me, and I think Faith would be similar.” (Probably because neither of them knew any better.) “I think that Faith is…this nice, happy, cheerful person who found herself torn out of her body, and distilled out of her soul, and then interwoven with a crazy demon, and the way that she chooses to express herself and her happiness and her essence is through – ”

“Tormenting others?”

“ – Jovial pranking,” Ash said at the same time. As if it were totally obvious, he finished, “And that’s how she forgets that she is actually, at her core, powered by demon essence.”

Slowly, reluctantly, I forced myself towards the only possible logical conclusion. “She once said that she was an acolyte in the Church of Ecstasy….” I could not go any further. “Uh….”

Ash, naturally, had no such compunctions. “Yeees?” he nudged. When I remained stubbornly silent, he said, “There are lots of things we could infer from that. But we could also let her choose to tell us about her past, instead of prying and sneaking around in our friends’ desks.”

Which made absolutely no sense at all coming from someone who’d just confessed to prying and sneaking around in his friend’s soul.

Non-soul.

Whatever.

“Uuuuuhhhh….”

“She’s made great progress at fixing her lace,” Ash informed me, as if that were the crucial point here. “And I’m certain that if we harvest more blood from more Ascendent, that will help.”

I could barely process this information overload. “Is she Ascended?”

Ash looked mildly annoyed that I was still prying into Faith’s past when he’d literally just told me to respect her personal space and privacy. “I don’t – ”

I overrode him, my voice going loud and shrill. “She’s Ascended, isn’t she?”

“That’s quite presumptuous – ”

“She’s just like the people Nyryx and them hired us to kill!”

“I don’t think she’s exactly the same as an Ascendent – ”

“What’s the difference?” I shrieked. “What you’re describing is exactly like what she described to us!”

“Well, lots of people can use demon essence – ”

“No, I meant her flowchart!” I waved my arms around, suggesting a blackboard. “I mean, minus the bits about demon mousse or mochi or whatever she was talking about – I don’t even know what mochi is – ”

“Probably some Dagger Isles thing, but yes, it’s clearly related to that, and has something to do with Faith’s past!” Ash’s voice rose too, until any passing orphans could hear us – but I couldn’t think about that just now. “But the point is that she’s making progress on it, and if we get more demon essence, well, Ascendent essence, then – ”

“Who is she?” I cried. “Who is she, really?”

“Evidently, she was a high-ranking member of the Church!” Ash sounded like he was on the verge of losing his temper.

“So high ranking that they made her an Ascendent?” All along, this entire time we were plotting to kill demon-human hybrids as abominations against nature, my own crewmate had been one of them? “And then she just, what, left?”

Ash threw up his hands. “Like I told you, I haven’t gone to great lengths to dive into Faith’s past! It’s strange, yes, but only almost as strange as being friends with a high-ranking member of a house of assassins!”

How dare he turn this back against me. “That’s not true!”

He rolled his eyes. “Yes, yes, I’m sure.”

“It really isn’t!” I snapped. Did I need to get Sigmund to tell him that we weren’t a house of assassins? Would his Slide hero’s words carry more weight that his crewmate’s?

“Yes, well, then it’s a useful cover story to hide your House’s real activities, isn’t it?” Ash retorted.

That stopped me short – because it was actually true. Oh, we’re just a house of assassins, don’t worry about us. Just ignore our shadowy networks that span the length and breadth of the Imperium….

Into the silence, Ash said, “Still. The important thing is that Faith has it under control.”

Marveling at how obstinately I’d blinded myself to the truth when it had been skipping around in front of me this whole time, I said quietly, mostly to myself, “No wonder. That explains why she hates the Church so much.”

“Yes,” Ash affirmed. “And that’s why we’re going to burn it to the ground. And all the other Ascendent with it.”

I was only half-listening. “What did they do to her? To make her so angry and disillusioned?”

Ash snorted, “She probably learned what the Church is really like.”

“She must have learned it before she Ascended.” Presumably demon-hood wasn’t something the you simply thrust on people.

Ash conceded, “I suppose that’s something we should get more information from her about, given that we’re about to murder all the others in her circle, and she probably knows quite a bit about them. At least, I hope she knows quite a bit about them. The point is: Faith has it under control, we need to harvest more Ascendent blood so she can keep it under control, but since we were going to harvest more Ascendent blood already anyway – ”

At that, a new worry reared its head. “What happens after we run out of Ascendent?” I pressed. “After we kill them all? What happens to Faith then?”

Since Ash didn’t know the answer any more than I did, he shrugged. “I’m sure that if Faith doesn’t overdo her demon-ness, she can hold it in check for a while. There are also other beings we can harvest – this isn’t exactly a peaceful world. Maybe if she gets all the other Ascendents’ blood, she can fix herself and make it into a, I don’t know, a lace skirt or something.”

“A lace skirt…,” I repeated dubiously, trying to picture whether that would work any better.

“I don’t know!” exclaimed Ash. “It’s a metaphor, Isha!”

No, I didn’t think a lace skirt could contain the tumor any better than a lace sachet, given that they were both made of lace. “Ummmm.”

At my expression, Ash tried again. “Or a hoop skirt with a pink – ” His knowledge of female fashion failed him. “I don’t know!”

I took pity on him and struggled to pull myself together. “Ummmm, okay. Ummmm.” Steeling myself, I forced out the offer, “Did you need anything from me for this?”

Ash immediately rejected the need for my (presumably grudging and inept) assistance. “No, I just wanted to let you know that I looked into the situation that my mother warned us about, and Faith took care of it without any help from any of us, but we should make sure that we harvest the blood of the next Ascendent.”

That would be Admiral Strangford, retired Imperial Navy officer, City Council member – and demon hybrid. “Okay. Okay.” Think of it as an assassination, Isha, just another assassination. An assassination – even an assassination with demonic blood collection at the end of it – I could deal with. “Okay,” I repeated.

Ash regarded me with some concern. “Are you sure that you don’t want – ”

“To become a demon?” I asked, completely calm and collected and polite. “No thank you.”

“No! I didn’t say that!”

I looked back at him with no interest whatsoever in what he did want to say.

Refusing to take the hint, he persisted, “Are you sure that the Iruvians wouldn’t be better off subjugating your demons too?”

Yep, I was right that I did not want to know what he was thinking. “No, we’d be better off without them.”

“Well. That seems difficult,” he countered, which was regrettably true given that the Demon Princes were encased in crystal spires so massive that they required a leviathan hunter and specialized cranes to transport them. “You’d be pretty weak without them, right?”

I glared down at Grandfather, which I’d been carrying around lately to keep it safe.

Ash followed my gaze down to the sword hilt. “Doesn’t Iruvia kind of need the Demon Princes?” he reminded me in a needling sort of way. “Otherwise you’d just be conquered by your enemies, whom you have a lot of?”

I scowled at Grandfather some more.

It gleamed, brightly.

“Anyway.” Ash tore his gaze from the sword. “The Church does plan to bring in the pillars so they can get another Ascendent from the Demon Princes.”

I forced myself to speak coolly. “I would assume four. One for each of them?”

“Even one would be terrifying. I can’t imagine that the Ascendents don’t scale in power with their demons, but this is a conversation for the future with Faith, who knows a lot more about this than we do – ”

I interrupted, “And who’s not going to tell us anything useful because it’s Faith! And she never tells us anything useful!”

“Faith tells us all sorts of useful things,” Ash defended his mentor. “You just have to listen to her the right way.”

Given that his attunement skills did seem to be improving, I supposed that must be true. “I’ll leave that to you then.” Resentment flared, and I couldn’t help accusing him, “Since the two of you seem to be getting along so well lately!”

He willfully misinterpreted my words. “Well, Faith also has a soft spot for the orphans. Regardless, about the ritual – ” (“Which one?” I almost asked before I figured out that he meant the ghost concealment one) – “I’m sure Faith will tell us what we need to know.”

I shrugged, just wanting this conversation to be over. “Sure.” Today was third day, wasn’t it? Meaning that Bazso should be at the Leaky Bucket’s Happy Hour. Happy Hour at the Leaky Bucket sounded good. I really needed to spend some time around some perfectly normal people for a change.

I started to edge towards the door.

“Faith has it under control,” Ash soothed me, then undermined himself by adding, “But we’ll keep an eye on her.”

I had my hand on the doorknob already. “That’s good to know.”

“And if you happen to see her drinking blood, she’s just keeping up her health.”

I stopped trying to turn the doorknob. “And I suppose you’re the one responsible for stealing the bottle I took?”

“What? No. I know nothing about your sample.”

I eyed him suspiciously: His mother’s crew was literally called the Blood Traders. However, his surprise did seem genuine, and we did, after all, live in an orphanage full of tiny thieves.

Oh gods, I was going to have to find a way to quash this behavior without damaging the children’s initiative and self-esteem, wasn’t I? How did I land myself in these messes again?

With the best of intentions, my mind whispered.

Yep, definitely time to carouse and drink with a bunch of straightforward thugs who liked their fistfights and their whiskey – and didn’t have a single connection to any kind of arcane nonsense whatsoever.