Nevernight

CHAPTER 5

COMPLIMENTS

The little girl had dashed through narrow streets, over bridge and under stair, red crusting on her hands. The something had followed her, puddled in the dark at her feet as they beat hard on the cracking flagstones. She’d no idea what it might be or want – only that it had helped her, and without that help, she’d be as dead as her father was.

eyes open

legs kicking

guh-guh-guh

Mia willed the tears away, curled her hands into fists, and ran. She could hear the puppy-choker and his friend behind her, shouting, cursing. But she was nimble and quick and desperately afraid, fear giving her wings. Running down dogleg squeezeways and over choked canals until finally, she slithered down an alley wall, clutching the stitch in her side.

Safe. For now.

Slumped with legs folded beneath her, she tried to push the tears down like her mother had taught her. But they were so much bigger than her, shoving back until she could stave them off no more. Hiccupping and shaking, snotty face pushed into red, red hands.

Her father was hanged as a traitor beneath the gaze of the high cardinal himself. Her mother in chains. The Familia Corvere estates given to that awful Justicus Remus who’d broken Captain Puddles’s neck. And Julius Scaeva, consul of the Itreyan Senate, had ordered her drowned in the canals like some unwanted kitten.

Her whole world undone in a single turn.

‘Daughters save me …’ she breathed.

Mia saw the shadow beneath her move. Ripple, as if it were water, and she a stone dropped into it. She was strangely unafraid, the fear in her draining away as if through punctures in the soles of her feet. She felt no sense of menace, no childish fears of unspeakables under the bed left to make her shiver. But she felt that presence again – or closer, a lack of any presence at all – coiled in her shadow on the stone beneath her.

‘Hello again,’ she whispered.

She felt the thing that was nothing. In her head. In her chest. She knew it was smiling at her – a friendly smile that might have reached all the way to its eyes, if only it had some. She reached into her sleeve, found the bloodstained stiletto it had given her.

The gift that had saved her life.

‘What are you?’ she whispered to the black at her feet.

No answer.

‘Do you have a name?’

It shivered.

Waiting.

Wait

ing.

‘You’re nice,’ she declared. ‘Your name should be nice too.’

Another smile. Black and eager.

Mia smiled also.

Decided.

‘Mister Kindly,’ she said.

According to the plaque above his stable, the stallion’s name was ‘Chivalry’, but Mia would come to know him simply as ‘Bastard’.

To say she wasn’t fond of horses is to say geldings aren’t fond of knives. Growing up in Godsgrave, she’d had little need for the beasts, and truthfully, they’re an unpleasant way to travel despite what your poets might say. The smell is akin to a solid right hook into an already broken nose, the toll on the rider’s tenders is measured more often in blisters than bruises, and travelling by hoof isn’t much quicker than travelling by foot. And all these issues are compounded if a horse has a sense of its own importance. Which, sadly, poor Chivalry did.

The stallion belonged to the garrison centurion, a marrowborn member of the Luminatii legion named Vincenzo Garibaldi. He was a thoroughbred, black as a chimney sweep’s lungs.fn1 Treated (and fed) better than most of Garibaldi’s men, Chivalry was tolerant of none but his master’s hand. And so, confronted with a strange girl in his stable as the watch sounded, he neighed in irritation and set about voiding his bladder over as many square feet as possible.

Having spent years living near the Rose River, the stench of stallion piss came as no real shock to Mia, who promptly slapped a bit into the horse’s mouth to shut him up. Hateful as she found the beasts, she’d endured a three-week stint on a mainland horse farm at Old Mercurio’s ‘request’, and at least knew enough not to place the bridle on the beast’s arse-end.fn2 However, when Mia hoisted the saddle blanket, Chivalry began thrashing in his pen, and it was only through a hasty leap onto the doorframe that the girl avoided growing considerably thinner.

‘Trelene’s heaving funbags, keep him quiet!’ Tric hissed from the stable door.

‘… Did you honestly just swear by a goddess’s “funbags”?’

‘Forget that, shut him up!’

‘I told you horses don’t like me! And blaspheming about the Lady of the Ocean’s baps isn’t going to help matters any. In fact, it’ll probably get you drowned, you nonce.’

‘I’ll no doubt have long years locked in whatever stinking outhouse passes for the jail in this cesspool to repent my sins.’

‘Keep your underskirts on,’ Mia whispered. ‘The outhouse will be occupied for a while.’

Tric wondered what the girl was on about. But as she slipped into Chivalry’s pen for another saddling attempt, he heard wails within the garrison tower, pleas to the Everseeing, and a burst of profanity so colourful you could fling it into the air and call it a rainbow. A stench was rising on the wind, harsh enough to make his eyes water. And so, as Mia rained whispered curses down on Chivalry’s head, the boy decided to see what all the fuss was about.

Mister Kindly sat on the stable roof, trying his best to copy the curiosity found in real cats. He watched as the boy moved quietly to the tower, scaled the wall. Tric peered through the sandblasted window into the room beyond, his face turning greenish beneath his artless tattoos. Without a sound, he dropped to the ground, creeping back to the stable in time to see Mia wrangle the saddle onto Chivalry’s back with the aid of several stolen sugar cubes.

The boy helped Mia handle the snorting stallion through the stable doors. She was short, and the thoroughbred twenty hands high, so it took her a running leap to make the saddle. As she struggled up, she noticed the green pallor on Tric’s face.

‘Something wrong?’ she asked.

‘What the ’byss is going on in that tower?’ Tric whispered.

‘Mishap,’ Mia replied.

‘… What?’

‘Three dried buds of Liisian loganberry, a third of a cup of molasses essence, and a pinch of dried cordwood root.’ She shrugged. ‘Mishap. You might know it as “Plumber’s Bane”.’

Tric blinked. ‘You poisoned the entire garrison?’

‘Well, technically Fat Daniio poisoned them. He served the evemeal. I just added the spice.’ Mia smiled. ‘It’s not lethal. They’re just suffering a touch of … intestinal distress.’

‘A touch?’ The boy cast one haunted look back to the tower, the smeared and groaning horrors therein. ‘Look, don’t be offended if I do all the cooking out there, aye?’

‘Suit yourself.’

Mia set her sights on the wastes beyond Last Hope, and with a doffed hat towards the watchtower, kicked Chivalry’s flanks. Sadly, instead of a dashing gallop off towards the horizon, the girl found herself bucked into the air, her brief flight ending in a crumpled heap on the road. She rolled in the dirt, rubbing her rump, glaring at the now whinnying stallion.

‘Bastard …’ she hissed.

She looked to Mister Kindly, sitting on the road beside her.

‘Not. A. Fucking. Word.’

‘… meow …’ he said.

With a sharp bang, the watchtower door burst open. A befouled Centurion Vincenzo Garibaldi staggered into the street, one hand clutching his unbuckled britches.

‘Thieves!’ he moaned.

With a half-hearted flourish, the Luminatii centurion drew his longsword. The steel flared brighter than the suns overhead. At a word, tongues of fire uncurled along the edge of the blade and the man stumbled forward, face twisted with righteous fury.

‘Stop in the name of the Light!’

‘Trelene’s sugarplums, come on!’

Tric leaped into Chivalry’s saddle, dragging Mia over the pommel like a sack of cursing potatoes. And with another sharp boot to the stallion’s flanks, the pair galloped off in the direction of their certain doom.fn3

The pair stopped off long enough to retrieve Tric’s own stallion – a looming chestnut inexplicably named ‘Flowers’ – before fleeing into the wastes. The Plumber’s Bane had done its work, however, and pursuit by Last Hope’s garrison was short-lived and largely messy. Mia and Tric soon found themselves slowing to a brisk canter, no pursuers in sight.

The Whisperwastes, as they were called, were a desolation grimmer than any Mia had seen. The horizon was crusted like a beggar’s lips, scoured by winds laden with voices just beyond hearing. The second sun kissing the horizon was usually the sign for Itreya’s brutal winters to begin, but out here, the heat was still blistering. Mister Kindly was coiled in Mia’s shadow, just as miserable as she. Propping a (stolen and paid-for) tricorn upon her head, Mia surveyed the horizon.

‘I’d guess the churchmen nest on high,’ Tric ventured. ‘I suggest we start with those mountains to the north, then swing east. After that, we’ll probably have been drained lifeless by dustwraiths or eaten by sand kraken, so our bones won’t mind where they get shit out.’

Mia cursed as Bastard gave a small buck. Her thighs ached from the saddle, her rump was preparing to wave the white flag. She pointed to a lonely digit of broken stone ten miles distant.

‘There.’

‘All respect, Pale Daughter, but I doubt the greatest enclave of assassins in the known world would set up headquarters within smelling distance of Last Hope’s pig farms.’

‘Agreed. But that’s where I think we should set camp. Looks to be a spring there. And we’ll have a good view of Last Hope from up top, and all the wastes around, I’d wager.’

‘… I thought we were following my nose?’

‘I only suggested that for the sake of whoever might be listening.’

‘Listening?’

‘We agree this is a trial, aye? That the Red Church is testing us?’

‘Aye,’ the boy nodded slow. ‘But that shouldn’t come as any shock. Surely your Shahiid tested you in preparation for the trials we’ll face?’

Mia jerked the reins as Bastard tried to turn back for the fifth time in as many minutes.

‘Old Mercurio loved his testings,’ she nodded. ‘Never a moment that couldn’t be some trial in disguise.fn4 Thing is, he never gave me a test I couldn’t beat. And the Church shouldn’t be any different. So what’s the one clue we’ve been given? What’s the only piece of this puzzle we have in common?’

‘… Last Hope.’

‘Exactly. I’m thinking the Church can’t be self-sustaining. Even if they grow their own food, they’d need other supplies. I was poking around the Beau’s hold and I saw goods the inbreds in Last Hope would have no use for. I’m thinking the Church has a disciple there. Maybe watching for novices, but more important, to trek those goods back to their stronghold. So all we need to do is watch for a laden caravan heading out into the wastes. Then we follow it.’

Tric looked the girl up and down, smiling faintly. ‘Wisdom, Pale Daughter.’

‘Have no fear, Don Tric. I won’t let it go—’

The boy held up a hand, pulled Flowers to a sudden stop. He squinted at the badlands around them, nose wrinkled, sniffing the whispering desert air.

‘What is it?’ Mia’s hand drifted to her gravebone dagger.

Tric shook his head, eyes closed as he inhaled.

‘Never smelled the like before. Reminds me of … old leather and dea—’

Bastard snorted, rearing up. Mia clutched his saddle, cursing as the red sand exploded around them and a dozen tentacles burst from beneath the ground. Twenty feet long, studded with grasping, serrated hooks, they looked as dry as the innards of an inkfiend’s needle.

Bastard whinnied in terror as one leathery appendage snaked around his foreleg, another cinching his throat in a hangman’s grip. The stallion fought, snotting and bucking like a wild thing. Mia found herself airborne again, bounced over Bastard’s head and tumbling towards the tentacles’ owner, now dragging itself from the earth and opening a hideous beaked maw. The air rang with a chittering, guttural hisssssssssssssssssss.

‘Sand kraken!’ Tric roared, a little needlessly.fn5

Mia drew her gravebone dagger, lashing out at a tentacle whipping her way. Oily blood spurted, a chuddering roar shivering the earth as Mia tumbled between two more of the dreadful limbs, ducking a third and rolling up into a panting crouch. Mister Kindly unfurled from her shadow, peering at the horror and not-breathing a small, soft sigh.

‘… pretty …’

Tric drew his scimitar, leaped from his stallion’s back, and hacked at the tentacle clutching Bastard’s leg. With the snapping whip of salted cord, the appendage split, another roar spilling from the beast, eyes wide as dinner plates, dusty gills flaring. Its severed limb flailed about, spraying Tric with reeking ichor. Bastard whinnied again in terror, blood spilling from his neck where the tentacle was wrapped and squeezing.

‘Let him go!’ Mia shouted, stabbing at another tentacle.

‘Back off!’ Tric roared to her.

‘Back off? Are you mad?’

‘Are you?’ Tric gestured at her dagger. ‘You plan on killing a sand kraken with that damned toothpick? Let it have the stallion!’

‘To the ’byss with that! I just stole that fucking horse!’

Feinting low, Mia lashed out at another hooked limb, drawing a fresh gout of blood. A flailing backswing saw Tric splayed in the dust, cursing. Mia curled her fingers, wrapping a hasty handful of shadows around herself so she might avoid a similar blow. Those hooks looked vicious enough to gut a War Walker.fn6

Though inconvenienced by the little sacks of meat and their sharp sticks, the kraken seemed mostly intent on dragging its thoroughbred meal – who no doubt begrudged his theft now more than ever – below the sands. But as Mia pulled the darkness to her, the monstrosity spat a shuddering roar and exploded back out from the earth, limbs flailing. Almost as if it were angry at her.

Tric spat a mouthful of red sand and shouted warning, hacking at another limb. The shadowcloak seemed to do Mia no good – she was near blind beneath it, and the beast seemed to be able to see her regardless. And so she let it fall from her shoulders, dived towards the wailing horse, tumbling across the dust. She moved between the forest of hooks and flails, feeling the breeze of the almost-blows narrowly missing her face and throat, the whistling hiss of the tentacles in the air. There was no real fear in her amid that storm. Simply the sway and the feint, the slide and the roll. The dance she’d been taught by Mercurio. The dance she’d lived with almost every turn since her father took his long plunge from his short rope.

A dusty tumble, a backwards flip, skipping between tentacles like a child amid a dozen jump ropes. She glanced to the beast’s open beak, snapping and snarling above Bastard’s screams, the scrape of its bulk as it dragged itself farther from the sand. The smell of wet death and salted leather, dust scratching her lungs. A smile played on her lips as a thought seized her, and with a brief dash, a skipping leap off one and two and three of the flailing limbs, Mia hurled herself up onto Bastard’s back.

‘Maw’s teeth, she is mad …’ Tric breathed.

The horse bucked again, Mia clinging on with thighs and fingernails and sheer bloody-mindedness. Reaching into the saddlebags, she seized a heavy jar of bright red powder within. And with a sigh, she hauled it back and flung it into the kraken’s mouth.

The jar shattered on the creature’s beak, broken glass and fine red powder spraying deep into the horror’s gullet. Mia rolled off Bastard’s back to avoid another blow, scrabbling across the dust as an agonised shriek split the air. The kraken released the stallion, pawing, scratching, scraping at its mouth. Tric gave another half-hearted stab, but the beast had forgotten its quarry entirely, great eyes rolling as it flipped over and over, dragging its bulk back below the sand, howling like a dog who’s just returned home from a hard turn’s work to find another hound in his kennel, smoking his cigarillos and in bed with his wife.

Mia dragged herself to her feet, sand churning as the kraken burrowed away. Flipping the sweat-soaked bangs from her eyes, she grinned like a madwoman. Tric stood slack-jawed, bloody scimitar dangling from his hand, face caked in dust.

‘What was that?’ he breathed.

‘Well, technically they’re not cephalopods—’

‘I mean what did you throw in its mouth?’

Mia shrugged. ‘A jar of Fat Daniio’s widowmaker.’

Tric blinked. Several times.

‘… You just thrashed a horror of the Whisperwastes with a jar of chilli powder?’

Mia nodded. ‘Shame, really. It’s good stuff. I only stole the one jar.’

A moment of incredulous silence rang across the wastes, filled with the off-key song of maddening winds. And then the boy began laughing, a dimpled, bone-white grin gleaming in a filthy face. Wiping at his eyes, he flicked a sluice of dark blood from his blade and wandered off to fetch Flowers. Mia turned to her stolen stallion, pulling himself up from the sands, bloodied at his throat and forelegs. She spoke in calming tones, tongue caked in dust, hoping to still him.

‘You all in one piece, boy?’

Mia approached slowly, hand outstretched. The beast was shaken, but with a few turns’ rest at their lookout, he’d be mending, and hopefully more kindly disposed to her now she’d saved his life. Mia smoothed his flanks with steady hands, reached into the saddlebags for her—

‘Ow, fuck!’

Mia shrieked as the stallion bit her arm, hard enough to leave a bloody bruise. The horse threw back his head with what sounded an awful lot like snickering.fn7 And tossing his mane, he began a limping canter back towards Last Hope, bloody hoofprints in his wake.

‘Wait!’ Mia cried. ‘Wait!’

‘He really doesn’t like you,’ Tric said.

‘My thanks, Don Tric. When you’re done singing your Ode to the Obvious, perhaps you’ll do me the honour of riding down the horse escaping with all my bloody gear on his back?’

Tric grinned, vaulted onto Flowers’s saddle, and galloped off in pursuit. Mia clutched her bruised arm, listening to the faint laughter of a cat who was not a cat echoing on the wind.

She spat into the dust, eyes on the fleeing stallion.

‘Bastard …’ she hissed.

Tric returned a half-hour later, a limping Bastard in tow. Reunited, he and Mia trekked overland to the thin spur of rock that’d serve as their lookout. They were on constant watch for disturbances beneath the sand, Tric sniffing the air like a bloodhound, but no more horrors reared any tentacles (or other appendages) to impede progress.

Bastard and Flowers were allowed to graze on the thin grass surrounding the spire – Flowers partook happily, while Bastard fixed Mia in the withering stare of a beast used to fresh oats for every meal, refusing to eat a thing. He tried to bite Mia twice more as she tied him up, so the girl made a show of patting Flowers (despite not really liking him much either) and gifted the chestnut with some sugar cubes from her saddlebags. The stolen stallion’s only gift was the rudest hand gesture Mia could conjure.fn8

‘Why do you call your horse Flowers?’ Mia asked, as she and Tric prepared to climb.

‘… What’s wrong with Flowers?’

‘Well, most men name their horses something a little more … manly, is all.’

‘Legend or Prince or suchlike.’

‘I met a horse named Thunderhoof once.’ She raised a hand. ‘Light’s truth.’

‘Seems a silly thing to me,’ the boy sniffed. ‘Giving out that kind of knowing for free.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, you call your horse Legend, you’re letting people know you think you’re some hero in a storybook. You call your horse Thunderhoof … Daughters, you might as well hang a sign about your neck saying, “I have a peanut for a penis”.’

Mia smiled. ‘I’ll take your word on that.’

‘It’s like these fellows who name their swords “Skullbane” or “Souldrinker” or somesuch.’ Tric tied his saltlocks into a matted knot atop his head. ‘Tossers, all.’

‘If I were going to name my blade,’ Mia said thoughtfully, ‘I’d call it “Fluffy”.’

Tric snorted with laughter. ‘Fluffy?’

‘’Byss, yes,’ the girl nodded. ‘Think of the terror you’d instil. Being bested by a foe wielding a sword called Souldrinker … that you could live with. Imagine the shame of having the piss smacked out of you by a blade called Fluffy.’

‘Well, that’s my point. Names speak to the namer as much as the named. Maybe I don’t want folks knowing who I am. Maybe I like being underestimated.’

The boy shrugged.

‘Or maybe I just like flowers …’

Mia found herself smiling as the pair scaled the broken cliff face. Both climbed without pitons or rope – the kind of foolishness common among the young and seemingly immortal. Their lookout loomed a hundred feet high, and the pair were breathless when they reached the top. But, as Mia predicted, the spur offered a magnificent vantage; all the wastes spread out before them. Saan’s red glare was merciless, and Mia wondered how brutal the heat would be during truelight, when all three suns burned the sky white.

‘Good view,’ Tric nodded. ‘Anything sneezes in Last Hope, we’ll ken it for certain.’

Mia kicked a pebble off the cliff, watched it tumble into the void. She sat on a boulder, boot propped on the stone opposite in a pose the Dona Corvere would have shuddered to see. From her belt, she withdrew a thin silver box engraved with the crow and crossed swords of the Familia Corvere. Propping a cigarillo on her lips, she offered the box to Tric. The boy took it as he sat opposite, wrinkling his nose and squinting at the inscription on the back.

‘Neh diis lus’a, lus diis’a,’ he muttered. ‘My Liisian is woeful. Something about blood?’

‘When all is blood, blood is all.’ Mia lit her cigarillo with her flintbox, breathed a contented sigh. ‘Familia saying.’

‘This is familia?’ Tric thumbed the crest. ‘I’d have bet you’d stolen it.’

‘I don’t strike you as the marrowborn type?’

‘I’m not sure what type you strike me. But some snotty spine-hugger’s child? Not at all.’

‘You need to work on your compliments, Don Tric.’

The boy prodded her shadow with his boot, eyes unreadable. He glanced at the not-cat lurking near her shoulder. Mister Kindly stared back without a sound. When Tric spoke, it was with obvious trepidation.

‘I’ve heard tell of your kind. Never met one before, though. Never thought to.’

‘My kind?’

‘Darkin.’

Mia exhaled grey, eyes narrowed. She reached out to Mister Kindly as if to pet him, fingers passing through him as if he were smoke. In all truth, there were few who’d seen her work her gift and lived to tell the tale. Folk of the Republic feared what they didn’t understand, and hated what they feared. And yet this boy seemed more intrigued than afraid. Looking him up and down – this half-pint Dweymeri with his islander tattoos and mainlander’s name – she realised he was an outsider too. And it briefly dawned on her, how glad she was to find herself in his company on this strange and dusty road.

‘And what do you know about the darkin, Don Tric?’