Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk

Published by HarperVoyager

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 2016

Copyright © Jay Kristoff 2016

Cover design by Cherie Chapman © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017

Cover illustration © Kerby Rosanes

All other images © Shutterstock.com (sun texture)

Jay Kristoff asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008179991

Ebook Edition © 2016 ISBN: 9780008180010

Version: 2019-10-21

Dedication

for my sisters

light and dark and all that is beautiful between

Epigraph

No shadow without light,

Ever day follows night,

Between black and white,

There is gray.

—ANCIENT ASHKAHI PROVERB

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Maps

Caveat Emptor

Book 1: When All Is Blood

Chapter 1: Firsts

Chapter 2: Music

Chapter 3: Hopeless

Chapter 4: Kindness

Chapter 5: Compliments

Chapter 6: Dust

Chapter 7: Introductions

Chapter 8: Salvation

Chapter 9: Dark

Book 2: Iron Or Glass

Chapter 10: Song

Chapter 11: Remade

Chapter 12: Questions

Chapter 13: Lesson

Chapter 14: Masks

Chapter 15: Truth

Chapter 16: Walk

Chapter 17: Steel

Chapter 18: Scourge

Chapter 19: Masquerade

Chapter 20: Faces

Chapter 21: Words

Chapter 22: Power

Chapter 23: Switch

Chapter 24: Friction

Chapter 25: Skin

Chapter 26: Hundred

Chapter 27: Truedark

Book 3: Black Runs Red

Chapter 28: Venom

Chapter 29: Severance

Chapter 30: Favors

Chapter 31: Becoming

Chapter 32: Blood

Chapter 33: Steps

Chapter 34: Pursuit

Chapter 35: Karma

Chapter 36: Sunsset

Epilogue

Dicta Ultima

An extract from GODSGRAVE

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Also by Jay Kristoff

About the Author

About the Publisher

Maps

CAVEAT EMPTOR

People often shit themselves when they die.

Their muscles slack and their souls flutter free and everything else just … slips out. For all their audience’s love of death, the playwrights seldom mention it. When our hero breathes his last in his heroine’s arms, they call no attention to the stain leaking across his tights, or how the stink makes her eyes water as she leans in for her farewell kiss.

I mention this by way of warning, O, my gentlefriends, that your narrator shares no such restraint. And if the unpleasant realities of bloodshed turn your insides to water, be advised now that the pages in your hands speak of a girl who was to murder as maestros are to music. Who did to happy ever afters what a sawblade does to skin.

She’s dead herself, now – words both the wicked and the just would give an eyeteeth smile to hear. A republic in ashes behind her. A city of bridges and bones laid at the bottom of the sea by her hand. And yet I’m sure she’d still find a way to kill me if she knew I put these words to paper. Open me up and leave me for the hungry Dark. But I think someone should at least try to separate her from the lies told about her. Through her. By her.

Someone who knew her true.

A girl some called Pale Daughter. Or Kingmaker. Or Crow. But most often, nothing at all. A killer of killers, whose tally of endings only the goddess and I truly know. And was she famous or infamous for it at the end? All this death? I confess I could never see the difference. But then, I’ve never seen things the way you have.

Never truly lived in the world you call your own.

Nor did she, really.

I think that’s why I loved her.

CHAPTER 1
FIRSTS

The boy was beautiful.

Caramel-smooth skin, honeydew-sweet smile. Black curls on the right side of unruly. Strong hands and hard muscle and his eyes, O, Daughters, his eyes. Five thousand fathoms deep. Pulling you in to laugh even as he drowned you.

His lips brushed hers, warm and curling soft. They’d stood entwined on the Bridge of Whispers, a purple blush pressing against the curves of the sky. His hands had roamed her back, current tingling on her skin. The feather-light brush of his tongue against hers set her shivering, heart racing, insides aching with want.

They’d drifted apart like dancers before the music stopped, vibration still thrumming along their strings. She’d opened her eyes, found him staring back in the smoky light. A canal murmured beneath them, its sluggish flow bleeding out into the ocean. Just as she wished to. Just as she must. Praying she wouldn’t drown.

Her last nevernight in this city. A part of her didn’t want to say goodbye. But before she left, she’d wanted to know. She owed herself that, at least.

‘Are you sure?’ he asked.

She’d looked up into his eyes, then.

Took him by the hand.

‘I’m sure,’ she whispered.

The man was repugnant.

Sclerosis skin, a shallow chin lost in folds of stubbled fat. A sheen of spittle at his mouth, whisky’s kiss scrawled across cheeks and nose, and his eyes, O, Daughters, his eyes. Blue as the sunsburned sky. Glittering like stars in the still of truedark.

His lips were on the tankard, draining the dregs as the music and laughter swelled about him. He swayed in the taverna’s heart a moment longer, then tossed a coin on the ironwood bar and stumbled into the sunslight. His eyes roamed the cobbles ahead, bleary with drink. The streets were growing crowded, and he forced his way through the crush, intent only on home and a dreamless sleep. He didn’t look up. Didn’t spy the figure crouched atop a stone gargoyle on a roof opposite, clothed in plaster white and mortar grey.

The girl watched him limp away across the Bridge of Brothers. Lifting her harlequin’s mask to drag on her cigarillo, clove-scented smoke trailing through the air. The sight of his carrion smile and rope-raw hands set her shivering, heart racing, insides aching with want.

Her last nevernight in this city. A part of her still didn’t want to say goodbye. But before she left, she’d wanted him to know. She owed him that, at least.

A shadow wearing the shape of a cat sat on the roof beside her. It was paper-flat and semitranslucent, black as death. Its tail curled around her ankle, almost possessively. Cool waters seeped out through the city’s veins and into the ocean. Just as she wished to. Just as she must. Still praying she wouldn’t drown.

‘… are you sure …?’ the cat who was shadows asked.

The girl watched her mark slink towards his bed.

Nodded slow.

‘I’m sure,’ she whispered.

The room had been small, sparse, all she could afford. But she’d set out rosejoy candles and a bouquet of water lilies on clean white sheets, corners turned down as if to invite him in, and the boy had smiled at the sugar-floss sweetness of it all.

Walking to the window, she’d stared at the grand old city of Godsgrave. At white marble and ochre brick and graceful spires kissing the sunsburned sky. To the north, the Ribs rose hundreds of feet into the ruddy heavens, tiny windows staring out from apartments carved within the ancient bone. Canals ran out from the hollow Spine, their patterns crisscrossing the city’s skin like the webs of mad spiders. Long shadows draped the crowded pavements as the light of the second sun dimmed – the first sun long since vanished – leaving their third, sullen red sibling to stand watch through the perils of nevernight.

O, if only it had been truedark.

If it were, he wouldn’t see her.

She wasn’t sure she wanted him to see her through this.

The boy padded up behind her, wreathed in fresh sweat and tobacco. Slipping his hands about her waist, fingers running like ice and flame along the divots at her hips. She breathed heavier, tingling somewhere deep and old. Lashes fluttered like butterfly wings against her cheeks as his hands traced the cusp of her navel, dancing across her ribs, up, up to cup her breasts. Goosebumps prickled on her skin as he breathed into her hair. Arching her spine, pressing back against the hardness at his crotch, one hand snagged in his unruly locks. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t speak. She didn’t want this to begin or to end.

Turning, sighing as their lips met again, she fumbled with the cufflinks in his ruffled sleeves, all thumbs and sweat and shakes. Pulling their shirts off, she crushed her lips to his, sinking down onto the bed. Just she and he, now. Skin to skin. Her moans or his, she could no longer tell.

The ache was unbearable, soaking her through, hands shaking as they explored the wax-smooth swells of his chest, the hard V-shaped line of flesh leading down into his britches. She slipped her fingers inside and brushed pulsing heat, heavy as iron. Terrifying. Dizzying. He groaned, quivering like a newborn colt as she stroked him, sighing around his tongue.

She’d never been so afraid.

Never once in all her sixteen years.

‘Fuck me …’ she’d breathed.

The room was plush, the kind only the wealthiest might afford. Yet there were empty bottles on the bureau and dead flowers on the nightstand, wilted in the stale smell of misery. The girl took solace in seeing this man she hated so well-to-do and so totally alone. She watched him through the window as he hung up his frock coat, propped a battered tricorn on a dry carafe. Trying to convince herself she could do this. That she was hard and sharp as steel.

Perched on the rooftop opposite, she looked down on the city of Godsgrave; on bloodstained cobbles and hidden tunnels and towering cathedrals of gleaming bone. The Ribs stabbing the sky above her, twisted canals flowing out from the crooked Spine. Long shadows draping the crowded pavements as the second sun grew dimmer still – the first sun long since vanished – leaving their third, sullen red sibling to stand watch through the perils of nevernight.

O, if only it were truedark.

If it were, he wouldn’t see her.

She wasn’t sure she wanted him to see her in this.

Reaching out with clever fingers, she pulled the shadows to her. Weaving and twisting the black gossamer threads until they flowed across her shoulders like a cloak. She faded from the world’s view, became almost translucent, like a smudge on a portrait of the city’s skyline. Leaping across the void to his windowsill, she hauled herself up onto the ledge. And swiftly unlocking the glass, she slipped through to the room beyond, soundless as the cat made of shadows following behind. Sliding a stiletto from her belt, she breathed heavier, tingling somewhere deep and old. Crouched unseen in a corner, lashes fluttering like butterfly wings against her cheeks, she watched him filling a cup with quavering hands.

She was breathing too loudly, her lessons all a-tumble in her head. But he was too numbed to notice – lost somewhere in the remembered creaks of a thousand stretched necks, a thousand pairs of feet dancing to the nooseman’s tune. Her knuckles turned white on the dagger’s hilt as she watched from the gloom. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t speak. She didn’t want this to begin or to end.

He sighed as he drank from the cup, fumbling with cufflinks on ruffled sleeves, all thumbs and sweat and shakes. Pulling his shirt off, he limped across the boards and sank down onto the bed. Just she and he now, breath for breath. Her end or his, she could no longer tell.

The pause was unbearable, sweat soaking her through as the darkness shivered. Remembering who she was, what this man had taken, all that would unravel if she failed. And steeling herself, she threw off her cloak of shadows and stepped out to meet him.

He gasped, starting like a newborn colt as she walked into the red sunslight, a harlequin’s smile in place of her own.

She’d never seen anyone so afraid.

Not once in all her sixteen years.

‘Fuck me …’ he breathed.

He’d climbed atop her, britches around his ankles. His lips on her neck and her heart in her throat. An age passed, somewhere between wanting and fearing and loving and hating, and then she’d felt him, hot and so astonishingly hard, pressing against the softness between her legs. She drew breath, perhaps to speak (but what would she say?) and then there was pain, pain, O, Daughters, it hurt. He was inside her – it was inside her – so hard and real she couldn’t help but cry out, biting her lip to muffle the flood.

He’d been heedless, careless, weight pressed down on her as he thrust again and again. Nothing like the sweet imaginings she’d filled this moment with. Her legs splayed and her stomach knotted, kicking against the mattress and wanting him to stop. To wait.

Was this the way it should feel?

Was this the way it should be?

If all went awry later, this would be her last nevernight in this world. And she’d known the first was usually the worst. She’d thought herself ready; soft enough, wet enough, wanting enough. That everything the other street girls had said between the giggles and the knowing glances wouldn’t be true for her.

‘Close your eyes,’ they’d counselled. ‘It’ll be over soon enough.’

But he was so heavy, and she was trying not to cry, and she wished this wasn’t the way it had to be. She’d dreamed of this, hoped it would be some kind of special. But now she was here, she thought it a stumbling, clumsy affair. No magik or fireworks or bliss by the handful. Just the press of him on her chest, the ache of him thrusting away, her eyes closed as she gasped and winced and waited for him to be done.

He pressed his lips to hers, fingers cupping her cheek. And in that moment there was a flicker of it – a sweetness to set her tingling again, despite the awkwardness and breathlessness and hurtingness of it all. She kissed him back and there was heat inside her, flooding and filling as his every muscle went taut. And he pressed his face into her hair and shuddered through his little death, finally collapsing atop her, soft and damp and boneless.

Lying there, she breathed deep. Licked his sweat from her lips. Sighed.

He rolled away, crumpled on the sheets beside her. Reaching between her legs, she found wetness, aching. Smeared on fingertips and thighs. On clean white linen with the corners turned down as if to invite him in.

Blood.

‘Why didn’t you tell me this was your first?’ he asked.

She said nothing. Staring at the red gleaming at her fingertips.

‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered.

She looked at him, then.

Looked away just as quickly.

‘You’ve nothing to be sorry for.’

She was atop him, knees pinning him down. His hand on her wrist and her stiletto at his throat. An age passed, somewhere between struggling and hissing and biting and begging, and finally the blade sank home, sharp and so astonishingly hard, sinking through his neck and scraping his spine. He drew sucking breath, perhaps to speak (but what could he say?) and she could see it in his eyes – pain, pain, O, Daughters, it hurt. It was inside him – she was inside him – stabbing hard as he tried to cry out, her hand over his mouth to muffle the flood.

He was panicked, desperate, scrabbling at her mask as she twisted the blade. Nothing like the dreadful imaginings she’d filled this moment with. His legs splayed and his neck gushing, kicking against the mattress and wanting her to stop. To wait.

Is this the way it should feel?

Is this the way it should be?

If all had gone awry, this would have been her last nevernight in this world. And she knew the first was usually the worst. She’d thought she wasn’t ready; not strong enough, not cold enough, that Old Mercurio’s reassurances wouldn’t be true for her.

‘Remember to breathe,’ he’d counselled. ‘It’ll be over soon enough.’

He was thrashing, and she was holding him still, and everything about her wondered if this was the way it would always be. She’d imagined this moment might feel like some kind of evil. A tithe to be paid, not a moment to be savoured. But now she was here, she thought it a beautiful, balletic affair. His spine arching beneath her. The fear in his eyes as he tore her mask aside. The gleam of the blade she’d thrust home, hand over his mouth as she nodded and shushed with a mother’s voice, waiting for him to be done.

He clawed her cheek, the vile reek of his breath and shit filling the room. And in that moment there was a flicker of it – a horror giving birth to mercy, despite the fact that he deserved this ending and a hundred more. Drawing back her blade, she buried it in his chest, and there was heat on her hands, flooding and sluicing as his every muscle went taut. And he grasped her knuckles and sighed through his death, deflating beneath her, soft and damp and boneless.

Sitting atop him, she breathed deep. Tasted salt and scarlet. Sighed.

She rolled away, crumpled sheets around her. Touching her face, she found wetness, warmth. Smeared on her hands and lips.

Blood.

‘Hear me, Niah,’ she whispered. ‘Hear me, Mother. This flesh your feast. This blood your wine. This life, this end, my gift to you. Hold him close.’

The cat who was shadows watched from its perch on the bedhead. Watched her the way only the eyeless can. It said not a word.

It didn’t need to.

Muted sunslight on her skin. Raven hair, damp with sweat and hanging in her eyes. She pulled up leather britches, tossed a mortar-grey shirt over her head, tugging on wolfskin boots. Sore. Stained. But glad in it, somehow. Somewhere near content.

‘The room is paid up for the nevernight,’ she’d said. ‘If you want it.’

The sweetboy had watched from the other side of the bed, head on his elbow.

‘And my coin?’

She motioned to a purse beside the looking glass.

‘You’re younger than my usuals,’ he’d said. ‘I don’t get many firsts.’

She looked at herself in the mirror then – pale skin and dark eyes. Younger than her years. And though evidence to the contrary lay drying on her skin, for a moment, she still found it hard to think of herself as anything more than a girl. Something weak and shivering, something sixteen years in this city had never managed to temper.

She’d pushed her shirt back into her britches. Checked the harlequin mask in her cloak. The stiletto at her belt. Gleaming and sharp.

The hangman would be leaving the taverna soon.

‘I have to go,’ she’d said.

‘May I ask you something, Mi Dona?’

‘… Ask then.’

‘Why me? Why now?’

‘Why not?’

‘That’s no kind of answer.’

‘You think I should have saved myself, is that it? That I’m some gift to be given? Now for ever spoiled?’

The boy said nothing, watching her with those fathom-deep eyes. Pretty as a picture. The girl drew a cigarillo from a silver case. Lit it on one of the candles. Breathing deep.

‘I just wanted to know what it was like,’ she finally said. ‘In case I die.’

She shrugged, exhaled grey.

‘Now I know.’

And into the shadows, she walked.

Muted sunslight on her skin. Mortar-grey cloak flowing down her shoulders, rendering her a shadow in the sullen light. She stood beneath a marble arch in the Beggar King’s Piazza, the third sun hanging faceless in the sky. Memories of the hangman’s end drying in the bloodstains on her hands. Memories of the sweetboy’s lips drying with the stains on her britches. Sore. Sighing. But still glad in it, somehow. Still somewhere near content.

‘Didn’t die, I see.’

Old Mercurio watched her from the other side of the arch, tricorn pulled low, cigarillo at his lips. He seemed smaller somehow. Thinner. Older.

‘Not for lack of trying,’ the girl replied.

She looked at him then – stained hands and fading eyes. Old beyond his years. And though evidence to the contrary was crusting on her skin, for a moment, she found it hard to think of herself as anything more than a girl. Something weak and shivering, something six years in his tutelage had never managed to temper.

‘I won’t see you for a long time, will I?’ she asked. ‘I might never see you again.’

‘You knew this,’ he said. ‘You chose this.’

‘I’m not sure there was ever a choice,’ she said.

She opened her fist, a sheepskin purse in her palm. The old man took the offering, counting the contents with one ink-stained finger. Clinking. Bloodstained. Twenty-seven teeth.

‘Seems the hangman lost a few before I got to him,’ she explained.

‘They’ll understand.’ Mercurio tossed the teeth back to the girl. ‘Be at the seventeenth pier by six bells. A Dweymeri brigantine called Trelene’s Beau. She’s a freeship, not flying under Itreyan colours. She’ll bear you hence.’

‘Nowhere you can follow.’

‘I’ve trained you well. This is for you alone. Cross the Red Church threshold before the first turn of Septimus, or you’ll never cross it at all.’

‘… I understand.’

Affection gleamed in rheumy eyes. ‘You’re the greatest pupil I’ve ever sent into the Mother’s service. You’ll spread your wings in that place and fly. And you will see me again.’

She drew the stiletto from her belt. Proffered it on her forearm, head bowed. The blade was crafted of gravebone, gleaming white and hard as steel, its hilt carved like a crow in flight. Red amber eyes gleamed in the scarlet sunslight.

‘Keep it.’ The old man sniffed. ‘It’s yours again. You earned it. At last.’

She looked the knife over, this way and that.

‘Should I give it a name?’

‘You could, I suppose. But what’s the point?’

‘It’s this bit.’ She touched the blade’s tip. ‘The part you stick them with.’

‘O, bravo. Mind you don’t cut yourself on a wit that sharp.’

‘All great blades have names. It’s just how it’s done.’

‘Bollocks.’ Mercurio took back the dagger, held it up between them. ‘Naming your blade is the sort of faff reserved for heroes, girl. Men who have songs sung about them, histories spun for them, brats named after them. It’s the shadow road for you and me. And you dance it right, no one will ever know your name, let alone the pig-sticker in your belt.

‘You’ll be a rumour. A whisper. The thought that wakes the bastards of this world sweating in the nevernight. The last thing you will ever be in this world, girl, is someone’s hero.’

Mercurio handed back the blade.

‘But you will be a girl heroes fear.’

She smiled. Suddenly and terribly sad. She hovered a moment. Leaned in close. Gifted sandpaper cheeks with a gentle kiss.

‘I’ll miss you,’ she said.

And into the shadows, she walked.

CHAPTER 2
MUSIC

The sky was crying.

Or so it had seemed to her. The little girl knew the water tumbling from the charcoal-coloured smudge above was called rain – she’d been barely ten years old, but she was old enough to know that. Yet she’d still fancied tears falling from that grey sugar-floss face. So cold compared to her own. No salt or sting inside them. But yes, the sky was certainly crying.

What else could it have done at a moment like this?

She’d stood on the Spine above the forum, gleaming gravebone at her feet, cold wind in her hair. People were gathered in the piazza below, all open mouths and closed fists. They’d seethed against the scaffold in the forum’s heart, and the girl wondered if they pushed it over, would the prisoners standing atop it be allowed to go home again?

O, wouldn’t that be wonderful?

She’d never seen so many people. Men and women of different shapes and sizes, children not much older than she. They wore ugly clothes and their howls had made her frightened, and she’d reached up and took her mother’s hand, squeezing tight.

Her mother didn’t seem to notice. Her eyes had been fixed on the scaffold, just like the rest. But Mother didn’t spit at the men standing before the nooses, didn’t throw rotten food or hiss ‘traitor’ through clenched teeth. The Dona Corvere had simply stood, black gown sodden with the sky’s tears, like a statue above a tomb not yet filled.

Not yet. But soon.

The girl had wanted to ask why her mother didn’t weep. She didn’t know what ‘traitor’ meant, and wanted to ask that, too. And yet, somehow she knew this was a place where words had no place. And so she’d stood in silence.

Watching instead.

Six men stood on the scaffold below. One in a hangman’s hood, black as truedark. Another in a priest’s gown, white as a dove’s feathers. The four others wore ropes at their wrists and rebellion in their eyes. But as the hooded man had slipped a noose around each neck, the girl saw the defiance draining from their cheeks along with the blood. In years to follow, she’d be told time and again how brave her father was. But looking down on him then, at the end of the row of four, she knew he was afraid.

Only a child of ten, and already she knew the colour of fear.

The priest had stepped forward, beating his staff on the boards. He had a beard like a hedgerow and shoulders like an ox, looking more like a brigand who’d murdered a holy man and stolen his clothes than a holy man himself. The three suns hanging on a chain about his throat tried to gleam, but the clouds in the crying sky told them no.

His voice was thick as toffee, sweet and dark. But it spoke of crimes against the Itreyan Republic. Of treachery and treason. The holy brigand called upon the Light to bear witness (she wondered if It had a choice), naming each man in time.

‘Senator Claudius Valente.’

‘Senator Marconius Albari.’

‘General Gaius Maxinius Antonius.’

‘Justicus Darius Corvere.’

Her father’s name, like the last note in the saddest song she’d ever heard. Tears welled in her eyes, blurring the world shapeless. How small and pale he’d looked down there in that howling sea. How alone. She remembered him as he’d been, not so long ago; tall and proud and O, so very strong. His gravebone armour white as wintersdeep, his cloak spilling like crimson rivers over his shoulders. His eyes, blue and bright, creased at the corners when he smiled.

Armour and cloak were gone now, replaced by rags of dirty hessian and bruises like fat, purpling berries all over his face. His right eye was swollen shut, his other fixed at his feet. She’d wanted him to look at her so badly. She wanted him to come home.

‘Traitor!’ the mob called. ‘Make him dance!’

The girl didn’t know what they’d meant. She could hear no music. fn1

The holy brigand had looked to the battlements, to the marrowborn and politicos gathered above. The entire Senate seemed to have turned out for the show, near a hundred men gathered in their purple-trimmed robes, staring down at the scaffold with pitiless eyes.

To the Senate’s right stood a cluster of men in white armour. Blood-red cloaks. Swords wreathed in rippling flame unsheathed in their hands. Luminatii, they were called, the girl knew that well. They’d been her father’s brothers-in-arms before the traitoring – such was, she’d presumed, what traitors did.

It’d all been so noisy.

In the midst of the senators stood a beautiful dark-haired man, with eyes of piercing black. He wore fine robes dyed with deepest purple – consul’s garb. And the girl who knew O, so little knew at least here was a man of station. Far above priests or soldiers or the mob bellowing for dancing when there was no tune. If he were to speak it, the crowd would let her father go. If he were to speak it, the Spine would shatter and the Ribs shiver into dust, and Aa, the God of Light himself, would close his three eyes and bring blessed dark to this awful parade.

The consul had stepped forward. The mob below fell silent. And as the beautiful man spoke, the girl squeezed her mother’s hand with the kind of hope only children know.

‘Here in the city of Godsgrave, in the Light of Aa the Everseeing and by unanimous word of the Itreyan Senate, I, Consul Julius Scaeva, proclaim these accused guilty of insurrection against our glorious Republic. There can be but one sentence for those who betray the citizenry of Itreya. One sentence for those who would once more shackle this great nation beneath the yoke of kings.’

Her breath had stilled.

Heart fluttered.

‘… Death.’

A roar. Washing over the girl like the rain. And she’d looked wide-eyed from the beautiful consul to the holy brigand to her mother – dearest Mother, make them stop – but Mother’s eyes were affixed on the man below. Only the tremor in her bottom lip betraying her agony. And the little girl could stand no more, and the scream roared up inside her and spilled over her lips

nonono

and the shadows all across the forum shivered at her fury. The black at every man’s feet, every maid and every child, the darkness cast by the light of the hidden suns, pale and thin though it was – make no mistake, O, gentlefriend. Those shadows trembled.

But not one person noticed. Not one person cared. fn2

The Dona Corvere’s eyes didn’t leave her husband as she took hold of the little girl, hugged her close. One arm across her breast. One hand at her neck. So tight the girl couldn’t move. Couldn’t turn. Couldn’t breathe.

You picture her now; a mother with her daughter’s face pressed to her skirts. The she-wolf with hackles raised, shielding her cub from the murder unfolding below. You’d be forgiven for imagining it so. Forgiven and mistaken. Because the dona held her daughter pinned looking outwards. Outwards so she could taste it all. Every morsel of this bitter meal. Every crumb.

The girl had watched as the hangman tested each noose, one by one by one. He’d limped to a lever at the scaffold’s edge and lifted his hood to spit. The girl glimpsed his face – yellow teeth grey stubble harelip gone. Something inside her screamed Don’t look, don’t look, and she’d closed her eyes. And her mother’s grip had tightened, her whisper sharp as razors.

‘Never flinch,’ she breathed. ‘Never fear.’

The girl felt the words in her chest. In the deepest, darkest place, where the hope children breathe and adults mourn withered and fell away, floating like ashes on the wind.

And she’d opened her eyes.

He’d looked up then. Her father. Just a glance through the rain. She’d often wonder what he was thinking at that moment, in nevernights to come. But there were no words to cross that hissing veil. Only tears. Only the crying sky. And the hangman pulled his lever, and the floor fell away. And to her horror, she finally understood. Finally heard it.

Music.

The dirge of the jeering crowd. The whip-crack of taut rope. The guh-guh-guh of throttled men cut through with the applause of the holy brigand and the beautiful consul and the world gone wrong and rotten. And to the swell of that horrid tune, legs kicking, face purpling, her father had begun dancing.

Daddy …

‘Never flinch.’ A cold whisper in her ear. ‘Never fear. And never, ever forget.’

The girl nodded slowly.

Exhaled the hope inside.

And she’d watched her father die.

She stood on the deck of Trelene’s Beau, watching the city of Godsgrave growing smaller and smaller still. The capital’s bridges and cathedrals faded until only the Ribs remained; sixteen bone arches jutting hundreds of feet into the air. But as she watched, minutes melting into hours, even those titanic spires sank below the horizon’s lip and vanished in the haze.fn3

Her hands were pressed to salt-bleached railing, dry blood crusted under her nails. A gravebone stiletto at her belt, a hangman’s teeth in her purse. Dark eyes reflecting the moody red sun overhead, the echo of its smaller, bluer sibling still rippling in western skies.

The cat who was shadows was there with her. Puddled in the dark at her feet while it wasn’t needed. Cooler there, you see. A clever fellow might’ve noticed the girl’s shadow was a touch darker than others. A clever fellow might’ve noticed it was dark enough for two.

Fortunately, clever fellows were in short supply aboard the Beau.

She wasn’t a pretty thing. O, the tales you’ve heard about the assassin who destroyed the Itreyan Republic no doubt described her beauty as otherworldly; all milk-white skin and slender curves and bow-shaped lips. And she was possessed of these qualities, true, but the composition seemed … a little off. ‘Milk-white’ is just pretty talk for ‘pasty,’ after all. ‘Slender’ is a poet’s way of saying ‘starved.’

Her skin was pale and her cheeks hollow, lending her a hungry, wasted look. Crow-black hair reached to her ribs, save for a self-inflicted and crooked fringe. Her lips and the flesh beneath her eyes seemed perpetually bruised, and her nose had been broken at least once.

If her face were a puzzle, most would put it back in the box, unfinished.

Moreover, she was short. Stick-thin. Barely enough arse for her britches to cling to. Not a beauty that lovers would die for, armies would march for, heroes might slay a god or daemon for. All in contrast to what you’ve been told by your poets, I’m sure. But she wasn’t without her charm, gentlefriends. And all your poets are full of shit.

Trelene’s Beau was a two-mast brigantine crewed by mariners from the isles of Dweym, their throats adorned with draketooth necklaces in homage to their goddess, Trelene.fn4 Conquered by the Itreyan Republic a century previous, the Dweymeri were dark of skin, most standing head and shoulders above the average Itreyan. Legend had it they were descended from the daughters of giants who lay with silver-tongued men, but the logistics of this legend fail under any real scrutiny.fn5 Simply said, as a people, they were big as bulls and hard as coffin nails, and tendencies to adorn their faces with leviathan ink tattoos didn’t help with first impressions.

Fearsome appearances aside, Dweymeri treat their passengers less as guests and more as sacred charges. And so, despite the presence of a sixteen-year-old girl aboard – travelling alone and armed with only a sliver of sharpened gravebone – making trouble for her couldn’t have been further from most of the sailors’ minds. Sadly, there were several recruits aboard the Beau not born of Dweym. And to one among them, this lonely girl seemed worthy of sport.

It’s truth to say in all save solitude – and in some sad cases, even then – you can always count on the company of fools.

He was a rakish sort. A smooth-chested Itreyan buck with a smile handsome enough to earn a few bedpost notches, his felt cap adorned with a peacock’s quill. It’d be seven weeks before the Beau set ashore in Ashkah, and for some, seven weeks is a long wait with only a hand for company. And so he leaned against the railing beside her and offered a feather-down smile.

‘You’re a pretty thing,’ he said.fn6

She glanced long enough to measure, then turned those coal-black eyes back to the sea.

‘I’ve no business with you, sir.’

‘O, come now, don’t be like that, pretty. I’m only being friendly.’

‘I’ve friends enough, thank you, sir. Please leave me be.’

‘You look friendless enough to me, lass.’

He reached out one too-gentle hand, brushed a hair from her cheek. She turned, stepped closer with the smile that, in truth, was her prettiest part. And as she spoke, she drew her stiletto and pressed it against the source of most men’s woes, her smile widening along with his eyes.

‘Lay hand upon me again, sir, and I’ll feed your jewels to the fucking drakes.’

The peacock squeaked as she pressed harder at the heart of his problems – no doubt a smaller problem than it’d been a moment before. Paling, he stepped back before any of his fellows witnessed his indiscretion. And giving his very best bow, he slunk off to convince himself his hand might be better company after all.

The girl turned back to the sea. Slipped the dagger back into her belt.

Not without her charms, as I said.

Seeking no more attention, she kept herself mostly to herself, emerging only at mealtimes or to take some air in the still of nevernight. Hammock-bound in her cabin, studying the tomes Old Mercurio had given her, she was content enough. Her eyes strained with the Ashkahi script, but the cat who was shadows helped her with the most difficult passages – curled within the folds of her hair and watching over her shoulder as she studied Hypaciah’s Arkemical Truths and a dust-dry copy of Plienes’s Theories of the Maw.fn7

She was bent over Theories now, smooth brow marred by a scowl.

‘… try again …’ the cat whispered.

The girl rubbed her temples, wincing. ‘It’s giving me a headache.’

‘… o, poor girl, shall i kiss it better …’

‘This is children’s lore. Any knee-high tadpole gets taught this.’

‘… it was not written with itreyan audiences in mind …’

The girl turned back to the spidery script. Clearing her throat, she read aloud:

‘The skies above the Itreyan Republic are illuminated by three suns – commonly believed to be the eyes of Aa, the God of Light. It is no coincidence Aa is often referred to as the Everseeing by the unwashed.’

She raised an eyebrow, glanced at the shadowcat. ‘I wash plenty.’

‘… plienes was an elitist …’

‘You mean a tosser.’

‘… continue …’

A sigh. ‘The largest of the three suns is a furious red globe called Saan. The Seer. Shuffling across the heavens like a brigand with nothing better to do, Saan hangs in the skies for near one hundred weeks at a time. The second sun is named Saai. The Knower. A smallish blue-faced fellow, rising and setting quicker than its brother—’

‘… sibling …’ the cat corrected. ‘… old ashkahi does not gender nouns …’

‘… quicker than its sibling, it visits for perhaps fourteen weeks at a stretch, near twice that spent beyond the horizon. The third sun is Shiih. The Watcher. A dim yellow giant, Shiih takes almost as long as Saan in its wanderings across the sky.’

‘… very good …’

‘Between the three suns’ plodding travells, Itreyan citizens know actual nighttime – which they call truedark – for only a brief spell every two and a half years. For all other eves – all the eves Itreyan citizens long for a moment of darkness in which to drink with their comrades, make love to their sweethearts …’

The girl paused.

‘What does oshk mean? Mercurio never taught me that word.’

‘… unsurprising …’

‘It’s something to do with sex, then.’

The cat shifted across to her other shoulder without disturbing a single lock of hair.

‘… it means “to make love where there is no love” …’

‘Right.’ The girl nodded. ‘… make love to their sweethearts, fuck their whores, or any other combination thereof – they must endure the constant light of so-called nevernight, lit by one or more of Aa’s eyes in the heavens.

‘Almost three years at a stretch, sometimes, without a drop of real darkness.’

The girl closed the book with a thump.

‘… excellent …’

‘My head is splitting.’

‘… ashkahi script was not meant for weaker minds …’

‘Well, thank you very much.’

‘… that is not what i meant …’

‘No doubt.’ She stood and stretched, rubbed her eyes. ‘Let’s take some air.’

‘… you know i do not breathe …’

‘I’ll breathe. You watch.’

‘… as it please you …’

The pair stole up onto the deck. Her footsteps were less than whispers, and the cat’s, nothing at all. The roaring winds that marked the turn to nevernight waited above – Saai’s blue memory fading slowly on the horizon, leaving only Saan to cast its sullen red glow.

The Beau’s deck was almost empty. A huge, crook-faced helmsman stood at the wheel, two lookouts in the crow’s nests, a cabin boy (still almost a foot taller than she) snoozing on his mop handle and dreaming of his maid’s arms. The ship was fifteen turnings into the Sea of Swords, the snaggletooth coastline of Liis to the south. The girl could see another ship in the distance, blurred in Saan’s light. A heavy dreadnought, flying the triple suns of the Itreyan navy, cutting the waves like a gravebone dagger through an old nooseman’s throat.

The bloody ending she’d gifted the hangman hung heavy in her chest. Heavier than the memory of the sweetboy’s smooth hardness, the sweat he’d left drying on her skin. Though this sapling would bloom into a killer whom other killers rightly feared, right now she was a maid fresh-plucked, and memories of the hangman’s expression as she cut his throat left her … conflicted. It’s quite a thing, to watch a person slip from the potential of life into the finality of death. It’s another thing entirely to be the one who pushed. And for all Mercurio’s teachings, she was still a sixteen-year-old girl who’d just committed her first act of murder.

Her first premeditated act, at any rate.

‘Hello, pretty.’

The voice pulled her from her reverie, and she cursed herself for a novice. What had Mercurio taught her? Never leave your back to the room. And though she might’ve protested her recent bloodlettings constituted worthy distraction, or that a ship’s deck wasn’t even a room, she could almost hear the willow switch the old assassin would have raised in answer.

‘Twice up the stairs!’ he’d have barked. ‘There and back again!’

She turned and saw the young sailor with his peacock-feather cap and his bed-notch smile. Beside him stood another man, broad as bridges, muscles stretching his shirtsleeves like walnuts stuffed into poorly tailored bags. An Itreyan also by the look, tanned and blue-eyed, the dull gleam of Godsgrave streets etched in his gaze.

‘I was hoping I’d see you again,’ Peacock said.

‘The ship isn’t large enough for me to hope otherwise, sir.’

‘Sir, is it? Last we spoke, you voiced threat of removing parts most treasured and feeding them to the fish.’

She was looking at the boy. Watching the stuffed walnut bag from beneath her lashes.

‘No threat, sir.’

‘Just boasting, then? Thin talk for which apology is owed, I’d wager.’

‘And you’d accept apology, sir?’

‘Belowdecks, doubtless.’

Her shadow rippled, like millpond water as rain kissed the surface. But the peacock was intent on his indignity, and the walnut thug on the lovely hurtings he might bestow if given a few minutes with her in a cabin without windows.

‘I only need to scream, you realise,’ she said.

‘And how much scream could you give voice,’ Peacock smiled, ‘before we tossed your scrawny arse over the side?’

She glanced to the pilot’s deck. To the crow’s nests. A tumble into the ocean would be a death sentence – even if the Beau came about, she could swim only a trifle better than its anchor, and the Sea of Swords teemed with drakes like a dockside sweetboy crawled with crabs.

‘Not much of a scream at all,’ she agreed.

‘… pardon me, gentlefriends …’

The thugs started at the voice – they’d heard nobody approach. Both turned, Peacock puffing up and scowling to hide his sudden fright. And there on the deck behind them, they saw the cat made of shadows, licking at its paw.

It was thin as old vellum. A shape cut from a ribbon of darkness, not quite solid enough that they couldn’t see the deck behind it. Its voice was the murmur of satin sheets on cold skin.

‘… i fear you picked the wrong girl to dance with …’ it said.

A chill stole over them, whisper-light and shivering. Movement drew Peacock’s eyes to the deck, and he realised with growing horror that the girl’s shadow was much larger than it should, or indeed could have been. And worse, it was moving.

Peacock’s mouth opened as she introduced her boot to his partner’s groin, kicking him hard enough to cripple his unborn children. She seized the walnut thug’s arm as he doubled up, flipping him over the railing and into the sea. Peacock cursed as she moved behind him, but he found he couldn’t shift footing to match her – as if his boots were glued in the girl’s shadow on the deck. She kicked him hard in his backside and he toppled face-first into the rails, spreading his nose across his cheeks like bloodberry jam. The girl spun him, knife to throat, pushing him against the railing with his spine cruelly bent.

‘I beg pardon, miss,’ he gasped. ‘Aa’s truth, I meant no offence.’

‘What is your name, sir?’

‘Maxinius,’ he whispered. ‘Maxinius, if it please you.’

‘Do you know what I am, Maxinius-If-It-Please-You?’

‘… D-da …’

His voice trembled. His gaze flickering to shadows shifting at her feet.

‘Darkin.’

In his next breath, Peacock saw his little life stacked before his eyes. All the wrongs and the rights. All the failures and triumphs and in-betweens. The girl felt a familiar shape at her shoulder – a flicker of sadness. The cat who was not a cat, perched now on her clavicle, just as it had perched on the hangman’s bedhead as she delivered him to the Maw. And though it had no eyes, she could tell it watched the lifetime in Peacock’s pupils, enraptured like a child before a puppet show.

Now understand; she could have spared this boy. And your narrator could just as easily lie to you at this juncture – some charlatan’s ruse to cast our girl in a sympathetic light.fn8 But the truth is, gentlefriends, she didn’t spare him. Yet, perhaps you’ll take solace in the fact that at least she paused. Not to gloat. Not to savour.

To pray.

‘Hear me, Niah,’ she whispered. ‘Hear me, Mother. This flesh your feast. This blood your wine. This life, this end, my gift to you. Hold him close.’

A gentle shove, sending him over into the gnashing swell. As the peacock’s feather sank beneath the water, she began shouting over the roaring winds, loud as devils in the Maw. Man overboard! She screamed. Man overboard! And soon the bells were all a-ringing. But by the time the Beau turned about, no sign of Peacock or the walnut bag could be found among the waves.

And as simple as that, our girl’s tally of endings had multiplied threefold.

Pebbles to avalanches.

The Beau’s captain was a Dweymeri named Wolfeater, seven feet tall with dark locks knotted by salt. The good captain was understandably put out by his crewmen’s early disembarkation, and keen on hows and whys. But when questioned in his cabin, the small, pale girl who sounded the alarm only mumbled of a struggle between the Itreyans, ending in a tumble of knuckles and curses sending both overboard to sailor’s graves. The odds that two seadogs – even Itreyan fools – had tussled themselves into the drink were slim. But thinner still were the chances this girlchild had gifted both to Trelene all by her lonesome.

The captain towered over her; this waif in grey and white, wreathed in the scent of burned cloves. He knew neither who she was nor why she journeyed to Ashkah. But as he propped a drakebone pipe on his lips and struck a flintbox to light his tar, he found himself glancing at the deck. At the shadow coiled about this strange girl’s feet.

‘Best be keeping yourself to yourself ’til trip’s end, lass.’ He exhaled into the gloom between them. ‘I’ll have meals sent to your room.’

The girl looked him over, eyes black as the Maw. She glanced down at her shadow, dark enough for two. And she agreed with the Wolfeater’s assessment, her smile sweet as honeydew.

Captains are usually clever fellows, after all.

CHAPTER 3
HOPELESS

Something had followed her from that place. The place above the music where her father died. Something hungry. A blind, grub consciousness, dreaming of shoulders crowned with translucent wings. And she, who would gift them.

The little girl had slumped on a palatial bed in her mother’s chambers, cheeks wet with tears. Her brother lay beside her, wrapped in swaddling and blinking with his big black eyes. The babe understood none of what was going on about him. Too young to know his father had ended, and all the world beside him.

The little girl envied him.

Their apartments sat high within the hollow of the second Rib, ornate friezes carved into walls of ancient gravebone. Looking out the leadlight window, she could see the third and fifth Ribs opposite, looming above the Spine hundreds of feet below. Nevernight winds howled about the petrified towers, bringing cool in from the waters of the bay.

Opulence dripped on the floor; all crushed red velvet and artistry from the four corners of the Itreyan Republic. Moving mekwerk sculpture from the Iron Collegium. Million-stitch tapestries woven by the blind propheteers of Vaan. A chandelier of pure Dweymeri crystal. Servants moved in a storm of soft dresses and drying tears, and at the eye stood the Dona Corvere, bidding them move, move, for the love of Aa, move.

The little girl had sat on the bed beside her brother. A black tomcat was pressed to her chest, purring softly. But he’d puffed up and spat when he saw a deeper shadow at the curtain’s feet. Claws dug into his girl’s hands and she’d dropped him into the path of an oncoming maidservant, who fell with a shriek. Dona Corvere turned on her daughter, regal and furious.

‘Mia Corvere, keep that wretched animal out from underfoot or we’ll leave it behind!’

And as simple as that, we have her name.

Mia.

‘Captain Puddles isn’t filthy,’ Mia had said, almost to herself. fn1

A boy in his middling teens entered the room, red-faced from his dash up the stairs. Heraldry of the Familia Corvere was embroidered on his doublet; a black crow in flight against a red sky, crossed swords below.

‘Mi Dona, forgive me. Consul Scaeva has demanded—’

Heavy footfalls stilled his tongue. The doors swept aside and the room filled with men in snow-white armour, crimson plumes on their helms; Luminatii they were called, you may recall. They reminded little Mia of her father. The biggest man she’d ever seen led them, a trimmed beard framing wolfish features, animal cunning twinkling in his gaze.

Among the Luminatii stood the beautiful consul with his black eyes and purple robes – the man who’d spoken ‘… Death’ and smiled as the floor fell away beneath her father’s feet. Servants faded into the background, leaving Mia’s mother as a solitary figure amid that sea of snow and blood. Tall and beautiful and utterly alone.

Mia climbed off the bed, slipped to her mother’s side, and took her hand.

‘Dona Corvere.’ The consul covered his heart with ring-studded fingers. ‘I offer condolences in this time of trial. May the Everseeing keep you always in the Light.’

‘Your generosity humbles me, Consul Scaeva. Aa bless you for your kindness.’

‘I am truly grieved, Mi Dona. Your Darius served the Republic with distinction before his fall from grace. A public execution is always a tawdry affair. But what else is to be done with a general who marches against his own capital? Or the justicus who’d have placed a crown upon that general’s head?’

The consul looked around the room, took in the servants, the luggage, the disarray.

‘You are leaving us?’

‘I take my husband’s body to be buried at Crow’s Nest, in the crypt of his familia.’

‘Have you asked permission of Justicus Remus?’

‘I congratulate our new justicus on his promotion.’ A glance at the wolfish one. ‘My husband’s cloak fits him well. But why would I need him to grant my passage?’

‘Not permission to leave the city, Mi Dona. Permission to bury your Darius. I am unsure if Justicus Remus wishes a traitor’s corpse rotting in his basement.’

Realization dawned in the Dona’s face. ‘You would not dare …’

‘I?’ The consul raised one sculpted eyebrow. ‘This is the will of the Senate, Dona Corvere. Justicus Remus has been rewarded your late husband’s estates for uncovering his heinous plot against the Republic. Any loyal citizen would see it fitting tithe.’

Murder gleamed in the Dona’s eyes. She glanced at the loitering servants.

‘Leave us.’

The girls scuttled from the room. Glancing at the Luminatii, Dona Corvere aimed a pointed stare at the consul. It seemed to Mia the man wavered in his certainty, yet finally, he nodded to the wolfish one.

‘Await me outside, Justicus.’

The hulking Luminatii glanced at her mother. Down to the girl. Hands large enough to envelop her entire head twitched. The girl stared back.

Never flinch. Never fear.

‘Luminus Invicta, Consul.’ Remus nodded to his men, and amid the synchronised tromp tromp of heavy boots, the room found itself emptied of all but three people.fn2

The Dona Corvere’s voice was a fresh-sharpened knife into overripe fruit.

‘What do you want, Julius?’

‘You know it full well, Alinne. I want what is mine.’

‘You have what is yours. Your hollow victory. Your precious Republic. I trust it keeps you warm at night.’

Consul Julius looked down at Mia, his smile dark as bruises. ‘Would you like to know what keeps me warm at night, little one?’

‘Do not look at her. Do not speak to—’

His slap whipped her head to one side, dark hair flowing like tattered ribbons. And before Mia could blink, her mother had drawn a long, gravebone blade from her sleeve, its hilt crafted like a crow with red amber eyes. Quick as silver, she pressed it to the consul’s throat, his handprint on her face twisting as she snarled.

‘Touch me again and I’ll cut your fucking throat, whoreson.’

Scaeva didn’t flinch.

‘You can drag the girl from the gutter, but never the gutter from the girl.’ He smiled with perfect teeth, glanced at Mia. ‘But you know the price your loved ones would pay if you pressed that blade any deeper. Your political allies have abandoned you. Romero. Juliannus. Gracius. Even Florenti himself has fled Godsgrave. You are alone, my beauty.’

‘I am not your—’

Scaeva slapped the stiletto away, sent it skittering across the floor to the shadow beneath the curtain. Stepping closer, his eyes narrowed.

‘You should envy your dear Darius, Alinne. I showed him a mercy. There will be no hangman’s gift for you. Just an oubliette in the Philosopher’s Stone, and dark a lifetime long. And as you go blind in the black, sweet Mother Time will lay claim your beauty, and your will, and your thin conviction you were anything more than Liisian shit wrapped in Itreyan silk.’

Their lips were so close they almost touched. Eyes searching hers.

‘But I will spare your family, Alinne. I will spare them if you plead me for it.’

‘She’s ten years old, Julius. You wouldn’t—’

‘Would I not? Know me so well, do you?’

Mia looked up at her mother. Tears welling in her eyes.

‘What is it you told me, Alinne? “Neh diis lus’a, lus diis’a”?’

‘… Mother?’ Mia said.

‘One word and your daughter will be safe. I swear it.’

‘Mother?’

‘Julius …’

‘Yes?’

‘I …’

There is a breed of arachnid in Vaan known as the wellspring spider.

The females are black as truedark, and possessed of the most astonishing maternal instinct in the animal republic. Once impregnated, a female builds a larder, stocks it with corpses, then seals herself inside. If the nest is set ablaze, she’ll burn to death rather than abandon it. If beset by a predator, she’ll die defending her clutch. But so fierce is her refusal to leave her young, once her eggs are laid, she won’t move, even to hunt. And herein lies the wellspring’s claim to the title of fiercest mother in the Republic. For once she’s devoured all the stores within her larder, the female begins devouring herself.

One leg at a time.

Plucking her limbs from her thorax. Eating only enough to sustain her vigil. Ripping and chewing until only one leg remains, clinging to the silken treasure trove swelling beneath her. And when her babies hatch, spilling from the strands she so lovingly wrapped them inside, they partake, there and then, of their very first meal.

The mother who bore them.

I tell you now, gentlefriend, and I vow it true, the fiercest wellspring spider in all the Republic had nothing – I say nothing – on Alinne Corvere.

There in that O, so tiny room, Mia felt her mother’s fists clench.

Pride tightening her jaw.

Agony brightening her eyes.

‘Please,’ the Dona finally hissed, as if the very word burned her. ‘Spare her, Julius.’

A victorious smile, bright as all three suns. The beautiful consul backed away, black eyes never leaving her mother’s. He called as he reached the doorway, robes flowing about him like smoke. And without a word, the Luminatii marched back into the room. The wolfish one tore Mia from her mother’s skirts. Captain Puddles mreowled protest. Mia clutched the tom tightly, tears burning her eyes.

‘Stop it! Don’t touch my mother!’

‘Dona Corvere, I bind you by book and chain for crimes of conspiracy and treason against the Itreyan Republic. You will accompany us to the Philosopher’s Stone.’

Irons were slapped around the dona’s wrists, screwed tight enough to make her wince. The wolfish one turned to the consul, glanced at Mia with a question in his eyes.

‘The children?’

The consul glanced to little Jonnen, still wrapped in his swaddling on the bed.

‘The babe is still at the breast. He can accompany his mother to the Stone.’

‘And the girl?’

‘You promised, Julius!’ Dona Corvere struggled in the Luminatii’s grip. ‘You swore!’

Scaeva acted as if the woman had never spoken. He looked down at Mia, sobbing at the foot of the bed, Captain Puddles clutched to her thin chest.

‘Did your mother ever teach you to swim, little one?’

Trelene’s Beau spat Mia onto a miserable pier, jutting from the nethers of a ruined port known as Last Hope. Buildings littered the ocean’s edge like a prizefighter’s teeth, a stone garrison tower and outlying farms completed the oil painting. The populace consisted of fishermen, farmers, a particularly foolish brand of fortune hunter who earned a living raiding old Ashkahi ruins, and a slightly more intelligent variant who made their coin looting the corpses of colleagues.

As she stepped onto the jetty, Mia saw three bent fishermen lurking around a rod and a bottle of green ginger wine. The men looked at her the way maggots eye rotten meat. The girl stared at each in turn, waiting to see if any would offer to dance.fn3

Wolfeater clomped down the gangplank, several crew in tow. The captain noted the hungry stares fixed on the girl – sixteen years old, alone, armed only with a pig-sticker. Propping one boot on a jetty stump, the big Dweymeri lit his pipe, wiped sweat from tattooed cheeks.

‘It’s the smallest spiders that have the darkest poison, lads,’ he warned the fishermen.

Wolfeater’s word seemed to carry some weight among the scoundrels, as they turned back to the water, slurping and bubbling against the jetty’s legs.

Mildly disappointed, the girl offered the captain her hand.

‘My thanks for your hospitality, sir.’

Wolfeater stared at her outstretched fingers, exhaled a lungful of pale grey.

‘Few enough reasons folk come to old Ashkah, lass. Fewer still a girl like you would brave parts this grim. And I’ve no wish to cause offence. But I’ll not touch your hand.’

‘And why is that, sir?’

‘Because I know the name of the ones who touched it first.’ He glanced at her shadow, fingering the draketooth necklace at his throat. ‘If such things have names. I know for damned sure they have memories, and I’ll not have them remember mine.’

The girl smiled soft. Put her hand back to her belt.

‘Trelene watch over you, then, Captain.’

‘Blue below and blue above you, girl.’

She turned and stalked down the pier, the glare of a single sun in her eyes, looking for the building Mercurio had named for her. With heart in throat, she found it soon enough – a dishevelled little establishment at the water’s crust. A creaking sign above the doorway identified it as the Old Imperial. A sign in one filthy window informed Mia ‘Help’ was, in fact, ‘Wonted.’

It was a bucktoothed little shithole, and no mistake. Not the most miserable building in all creation.fn4 But if the inn were a man and you stumbled on him in a bar, you’d be forgiven for assuming he had – after agreeing enthusiastically to his wife’s request to bring another woman into their marriage bed – discovered his bride making up a pallet for him in the guest room.

The girl padded up to the bar, her back as close to the wall as she could get it. A dozen or so folk had escaped the turn’s heat inside – a few locals and a handful of well-armed tomb-raiders. All in the room stopped to stare as she entered; if anyone had been manning the old harpsichord in the corner, they’d surely have hit a wrong note for dramatic effect, but alas, the beast hadn’t uttered a squeak in years.fn5

The Imperial’s proprietor seemed a harmless fellow – almost out of place in this town on the edge of the abyss. His eyes were a little too close together, and he reeked of rotten fish, but considering the stories Mia had heard about the Ashkahi Whisperwastes, she was just glad the fellow didn’t have tentacles. He was propped behind the bar in a grubby apron (bloodstains?) cleaning a dirty mug with a dirtier rag. Mia noticed one of his eyes moved slightly before the other, like a child leading a slow cousin by the hand.

‘Good turning to you, sir,’ she said, keeping her voice steady. ‘Aa bless and keep you.’

‘Come in wiv Wolfeater’s mob, didjer?’

‘Well spotted, sir.’

‘Pay’s four beggars weekly, but yer get board onna top.fn6 Twenty per cent of anyfing you make turning trick onna side comes to me direct. And I’ll need a sample a’fore yer hired. Fair?’

Mia’s smile dragged the proprietor’s behind the bar and quietly strangled it.

It made very little sound as it died.

‘I’m afraid you misunderstand, sir,’ she said. ‘I am not here to apply for employ within your’ – a glance about her – ‘no doubt fine establishment.’

A sniff. ‘Whya ’ere then?’

She placed the sheepskin purse atop the bar. The treasure within clinked with a tune nothing like gold. If you were in the business of dentistry, you might have recognised that the tiny orchestra inside the bag was comprised entirely of human teeth.

It took her a moment to speak. To find the words she’d practised until she dreamed them.

‘My tithe for the Maw.’

The man looked at her, expression unreadable. Mia tried to keep the tremors from her breath, her hands. Six years it had taken her to come this far. Six years of rooftops and alleys and sleepless nevernights. Of dusty tomes and bleeding fingers and noxious gloom. But at last, she stood on the threshold, a small nod away from the vaunted halls of the Red—

‘What’s me maw got tado wivvit?’ the proprietor blinked.

Mia kept her face as stone, despite the dreadful flips her insides were undertaking. She glanced around the room. The tomb-raiders were bent over their map. A handful of local wags were playing ‘spank’ with a pack of mouldy cards. A woman in desert-coloured robes and a veil was drawing spiral patterns on a tabletop with what looked like blood.

‘The Maw,’ Mia repeated. ‘This is my tithe.’

‘Maw’s dead,’ the barman frowned.

‘… What?’

‘Been dead nigh on four truedarks now.’

‘The Maw,’ she scowled. ‘Dead. Are you mad?’

‘You’re the one bringing my old dead mum presents, lass.’

Realization tapped her on the shoulder, danced a funny little jig.

Ta-da.

‘I’m not talking about your mother, you fucki—’

Mia caught her temper by the collar, gave it a good hard shake. Clearing her throat, she brushed her crooked fringe from her eyes.

‘I do not refer to your mother, sir. I mean the Maw. Niah. The Goddess of Night. Our Lady of Blessed Murder. Sisterwife to Aa, and mother to the hungry Dark within us all.’

‘O, you mean the Maw.’

‘Yes.’ The word was a rock, hurled right between the barman’s eyes. ‘The Maw.’

‘Sorry,’ the man said sheepishly. ‘It’s just the accent, y’know.’

Mia glared.

The barman cleared his throat. ‘There’s no church to the Maw ’round ’ere, lass. Worship of ’er kind’s outlawed, even onna fringe. Got no business wiv Muvvers of Night and someandsuch in this particular place of business. Bad for the grub.’

‘You are Fat Daniio, proprietor of the Old Imperial?’

‘I’m not fat—’

Mia slapped the bartop. Several of the spank players turned to stare.

‘But your name is Daniio?’ she hissed.

A pause. Brow creased in thought. The gaze of Daniio’s slow cousin eye seemed to be wandering off, as if distracted by pretty flowers, or perhaps a rainbow.fn7

‘Aye,’ Daniio finally said.

‘I was told – specifically told, mind you – to come to the Old Imperial on the coast of Ashkah and give Fat Daniio my tithe.’ Mia pushed the purse across the counter. ‘So take it.’

‘What’s in it?’

‘Trophy of a killer, killed in kind.’

‘Eh?’

‘The teeth of Augustus Scipio, high executioner of the Itreyan Senate.’

‘Is he comin’ ’ere to get them?’

Mia bit her lip. Closed her eyes.

‘… No.’

‘How the ’byss did he lose his—’

‘He didn’t lose them,’ Mia leaned farther forward, smell be damned. ‘I tore them out of his skull after I cut his miserable throat.’

Fat Daniio fell silent. An almost thoughtful expression crossed his face. He leaned in close, wreathed in the stench of rotten fish, tears springing unbidden to Mia’s eyes.

‘’Scuse me then, lass. But what am I s’posed to do with some dead tosser’s teeth?’

The door creaked open, and the Wolfeater ducked below the frame, stepping into the Old Imperial as if he owned a part share in it.fn8 A dozen crewmen followed, cramming into dingy booths and leaning against the creaking bar. With an apologetic shrug, Fat Daniio set to serving the Dweymeri sailors. Mia caught his sleeve as he headed towards the booths.

‘Do you have rooms here, sir?’

‘Aye, we do. One beggar a week, mornmeal extra.’

Mia pushed an iron coin into Fat Daniio’s paw.

‘Please let me know when that runs out.’

A week with no sign, no word, no whisper save the winds off the wastes.

The crew of Trelene’s Beau stayed aboard their ship while they resupplied, availing themselves of the town’s amenities frequently. A typical nevernight would commence with grub at the Old Imperial, a sally forth into the arms of Dona Amile and her ‘dancers’ at the appropriately named Seven Flavours,fn9 before returning to the Imperial for a session of liquor, song, and the occasional friendly knife fight. Only one finger was removed during the entirety of their stay. Its owner took its loss with good humour.

Mia sat in a gloomy corner with the hangman’s teeth pouched up on the wood before her. Eyes on the door every time it creaked. Eating the occasional bowl of astonishingly hot (and she had to admit, delicious) bowls of Fat Daniio’s ‘widowmaker’ chilli, her frown growing darker as the turning of the Beau’s departure drew ever closer.

Could Mercurio have been wrong? It’d been years since he’d sent an apprentice to the Red Church. Maybe the place had been swallowed by the wastes? Maybe the Luminatii had finally laid them to rest, as Justicus Remus had vowed to do after the Truedark Massacre?

And maybe this is all a test. To see if you’ll run like a frightened child …

She’d poke around the town at the turn of each nevernight, listening in doorways, almost invisible beneath her cloak of shadows. She came to know Last Hope’s residents all too well. The seer who augured for the town’s womenfolk, interpreting signs from a withered tome of Ashkahi script she couldn’t actually read. The slaveboy from Seven Flavours, plotting to murder his madam and flee into the wastes.

The Luminatii legionaries stationed in the garrison tower were the most miserable soldiers Mia had ever come across. Two dozen men at civilization’s end, a few sunsteel blades between them and the horrors of the Ashkahi Whisperwastes. The winds blowing off the old empire’s ruins were said to drive men mad, but Mia was sure boredom would do for the legionaries long before the whisperwinds did. They spoke constantly of home, of women, of whatever sins they’d committed to be stationed in the Republic’s arse-end.fn10 After a week, Mia was sick of all of them. And not a single one spoke a word of the Red Church.

Seven turns after she’d arrived in Last Hope, Mia sat watching the Beau’s crew seal their holds, their calls rough with grog. Part of her wanted little more than to skulk aboard as they put out to the blue. Run back home to Mercurio. But truth was, she’d come too far to give up now. If the Church expected her to tuck tail at the first obstacle, they knew her not at all.

Sitting atop the Old Imperial’s roof, she watched the Beau sail from the bay, a clove cigarillo at her lips. The whisperwinds rolled off the wastes behind her, shapeless as dreams. She glanced at the cat who wasn’t a cat, sitting in the long shadow the suns cast for her. Its voice was the kiss of velvet on a baby’s skin.

‘… you fear …’

‘That should please you.’

‘… mercurio would not have sent you here needlessly …’

‘The Luminatii have been trying to take down the Church for years. The Truedark Massacre changed the game.’

‘… if ill befell them, there would still be traces …’

‘You suggest we go out into the Whisperwastes and look?’

‘… that, wait here, or return home …’

‘None of those options hold much appeal.’

‘… fat daniio’s job offer still stands, i am sure …’

Her smile was thin and pale. She turned back to the sea, watching the sunslight glint and catch upon the gnashing waves. Dragging deep on her smoke and exhaling plumes of grey.

‘… mia …?’

‘Yes?’

‘… there is no need to be afraid …’

‘I’m not.’

A pause, filled with whispering wind.

‘… no need to lie, either …’

Mia ended up stealing most of her supplies.

Waterskins, rations, and a tent from Last Hope General Supplies and Fine Undertakers. Blankets, whisky, and candles from the Old Imperial. She’d already marked the finest stallion in the garrison stable for stealing, despite being as much at home in the saddle as a nun in a brothel.

She told herself the thievery would keep her sharp, and sneaking back into the robbed stores to deposit compensation on the countertops afterwards struck her as good sport.fn11 Seated at the Imperial’s hearth, she enjoyed a final bowl of widowmaker chilli and waited for the nevernight winds to begin, bringing blessed cool after a turn of red heat.

Mia glanced up as the front door creaked open, admitting curling fingers of dust.

The boy who entered looked Dweymeri – leviathan ink facial tattoos (of terrible quality), salt-kissed locks bound in matted knots. But his skin was olive rather than brown, and he was too short to be an islander; barely a head taller than Mia, truth told. Dressed in dark leathers, carrying a scimitar in a battered scabbard, smelling of horse and a long road. When he prowled into the room, he checked every corner with hazel eyes. As his stare roamed the alcoves, Mia pulled the shadows about herself, and faded like a watermark into the gloom.

The boy turned to Fat Daniio, polishing that same grubby cup with the same grubby cloth. Eyeing the man over, the boy spoke with a voice soft as velvet.

‘Blessings to you, sir.’

‘A’right,’ Fat Daniio replied. ‘What’ll you ’ave?’

‘I have this.’

The boy placed a small wooden box upon the counter. Mia’s eyes narrowed as it rattled. The boy looked around the room again, then spoke in a tight whisper.

‘My tithe. For the Maw.’fn12

CHAPTER 4
KINDNESS

Captain Puddles had loved his Mia.

He’d known her since he was a kitten, after all. Before he’d forgotten the warm press of his siblings around him, she’d cradled him in her arms and kissed him on his little pink nose and he’d known she’d always be the centre of his world.

And so when Justicus Remus had stooped to seize the girl’s wrist at his consul’s command, Captain Puddles spat a yellow-tooth hiss, reached out with a paw full of claws, and tore the justicus’s face from eyehole to lip. Roaring, the big man seized the brave captain’s head with one hand, his shoulders with the other, and with an almost practised ease, he twisted.

The sound was like wet sticks snapping, too loud to be drowned by Mia’s scream. And at the end of those dreadful damp pops, a black shape hung limp in the justicus’s hand; a warm, soft, purring shape Mia had fallen asleep beside every nevernight, now purring no more.

She lost herself then. Howling, clawing, scratching. Dimly aware of being seized by another Luminatii and slung over his shoulder. The justicus clutched his bleeding face and drew his sword, fire uncurling down its length, the steel glowing with painful, blinding light.

‘Not here, Remus,’ Scaeva said. ‘Your hands must be clean.’

The justicus bellowed at his men, and her mother had screamed and kicked. Mia called for her, but a sharp blow struck her head, and it was all she could do to not fall into the black beneath her feet as the Dona Corvere’s cries faded into nothing.

Servants’ stairs, spiralling down. A passageway through the Spine – not the wondrous halls of polished white gravebone and crystal chandeliers and marrowbornfn1 in all their finery. A dim and claustrophobic little tunnel, leading out into the grounds beyond. Mia had squinted up – the Ribs arching into storm-washed skies, the great council buildings and libraries and observatories – before the men threw her into an empty barrel, slammed the lid, and tossed it into a horse-drawn cart.

She felt the cart whipped into motion, the trundle of wheels across cobbles. Men rode in the tray beside her, but she couldn’t make out their words, stricken by the memory of Captain Puddles lying twisted on the floor, her mother in chains. She understood none of it. The barrel rasped against her skin, splinters plucking at her dress. She felt them cross bridge after bridge, the haze of semiconsciousness thin enough now for her to start crying, hiccupping and heaving. A fist slammed hard against the barrel’s flank.

‘Shut up, you little shit, or I’ll give you something to wail about.’

They’re going to kill me, she thought.

A chill stole over her. Not at the thought of dying, mind you; in truth, no child thinks of herself as anything less than immortal. The chill was a physical sensation, spilling from the darkness inside the barrel, coiling around her feet, cold as ice water. She felt a presence – or closer, a lack of one. Like the feeling of empty at an embrace’s end. And she knew, sure and certain, that something was in that barrel with her.

Watching her.

Waiting.

‘Hello?’ she whispered.

A ripple in the black. A silent, ink-spot earthquake. And where there had been nothing a moment before, something gleamed at her feet, caught by the tiny chinks of sunslight spilling through the barrel’s lid. Something long and wicked-sharp as only gravebone can be, its hilt crafted to resemble a crow in flight. Last seen skittering beneath the curtain as Consul Scaeva slapped her mother’s hand away and spoke of pleading and promises.

Dona Corvere’s gravebone stiletto.

Mia reached towards it. For the briefest moment, she swore she could see lights at her feet, glittering like diamonds in an ocean of nothing. She felt an emptiness so vast she thought she was falling – down, down into some hungry dark. And then her fingers closed on the dagger’s hilt and she clutched it tight, so cold it almost burned.

She felt the something in the dark around her.

The copper-tang of blood.

The pulsing rush of rage.

The cart bounced along the road, her stomach curdling until at last they drew to a halt. She felt the barrel lifted, slung, crashing to the ground with a bang that made her almost bite her tongue clean through. She heard voices again, loud enough to ken the words.

‘I’m sick to my guts on this, Alberius.’

‘Orders are orders. Luminus Invicta, aye?’ fn2

‘Sod off.’

‘You want to trifle with Remus? With Scaeva? The saviours of the bloody Republic?’

‘Saviours my arsehole. You ever wonder how they did it? Captured Corvere and Antonius right in the middle of an armed camp?’

‘No, I bloody don’t. Help me with this.’

‘I heard it was magiks. Black arkemy. Scaeva’s in truck—’

‘Get staunch, you bloody maid. Who cares how they did it? Corvere was a fucking traitor, and this is traitor’s get.’

The barrel lid was torn away. Mia squinted up at two men, dark cloaks thrown over white armour. The first was a man with arms like tree trunks and hands like dinner plates. The second had pretty blue eyes and the smile of a fellow who choked puppies for sport.

‘Maw’s teeth,’ breathed the first. ‘She can’t be more than ten.’

‘Never to see eleven.’ A shrug. ‘Hold still, girl. This won’t hurt long.’

The puppy-choker clutched Mia’s throat, drew a long, sharp knife from his belt. And there in the reflection on that polished steel, the little girl saw her death. It would’ve been easy then, to close her eyes and wait. She was ten years old, after all. Alone and helpless and afraid. But here is truth, gentlefriends, no matter the number of suns in your sky. At the heart of it, two kinds of people live in this world or any other: those who flee and those who fight. Your kind has many terms for the latter sort. Berserker. Killer instinct. More balls than brains.

And it shouldn’t surprise you, knowing what little you know already, that in the face of this thug and his blade, and laden with memory of her father’s execution

never flinch

never fear

instead of wailing or breaking as another ten-year-old might have, young Mia gripped the stiletto she’d fished from the darkness, and slipped it straight up into the puppy-choker’s eye.

The man screamed and fell backwards, blood gushing between his fingers. Mia rolled from the barrel, the sunslight impossibly bright after the darkness within. She felt the something come with her, coiled in her shadow, pushing at her heels. She saw they’d brought her to some mongrel bridge, a little canal choked with filth, boarded windows all around.

The dinner plate man’s eyes grew wide as his friend went down screaming. He drew a sunsteel sword and stepped towards the girl, flame rippling down its edge. But movement at his feet drew his eyes to the stone, and looking down, he saw the girl’s shadow begin to move. Clawing and twisting as if alive, reaching out towards him like hungry hands.

‘Light save me,’ he breathed.

The blade wavered in the thug’s grip. Mia backed away across the bridge, bloody knife in one trembling fist, the something still pressing at her heels. And as the puppy-choker clawed back to his feet with his face painted blood, the little girl did what anyone would have done in her position – ratio of balls to brains be damned.

‘… run …!’ said a tiny voice.

And run she did.

The Dweymeri boy underwent much the same exchange with Fat Daniio as Mia,fn3 although he suffered it with silent dignity.

The innkeeper informed him a girl had been asking the same questions, gestured to her booth – or at least, the booth she’d been sitting at. Mia had stolen up the stairwell by that point and was listening just out of sight, silent as an Itreyan Ironpriest.fn4

After muttering thanks, the Dweymeri boy asked if there were rooms available, paying coin from a malnourished purse. He was headed up the stairs when one of the local card players, a gent named Scupps, spoke.

‘Yer one of Wolfeater’s mob?’

The boy replied with a deep, soft voice. ‘I know no Wolfeater.’

‘He’s no crewman off the Beau.’ Mia recognised this second voice as Scupps’s brother, Lem. ‘Look at the size of ’im. He’s barely tall enough to reach Wolfeater’s balls.’

Laughter.

‘Mebbe that’s the point?’

More laughter.

The Dweymeri boy waited to ensure there was no more hilarity forthcoming, then continued up the stairs. Mia had slipped into her room, watching from the keyhole as the boy padded to his own door. His feet made barely a whisper, though Mia knew the boards squeaked like a family of murdered mice. The boy glanced over his shoulder towards her door, sniffed once, then slipped inside.

The girl sat in her room, considering whether to approach him or simply leave Last Hope at turn’s end as she planned.fn5 He was obviously looking for the same thing she was, but he was likely a cold-blooded psychopath. She doubted many novices seeking the Red Church had motives as altruistic as her own.

As soon as the town bells rang in nevernight, she heard the boy head downstairs, soft as velvet. She felt her shadow stir and stretch, insubstantial claws digging at the floorboards.

‘… if i do not return by the morrow, tell mother i love her …’

The girl snorted as the not-cat slipped beneath her door. She waited hours, reading by candlelight rather than open her shutters to the sun. If she was leaving this turn, she’d need do it at twelve bells, when the watchtower changed shifts. Easier to steal the stallion then. The knowledge she could have just bought some old nag raised its hand at the back of the lesson hall, and was shushed by the thought she shouldn’t be heading out into the wastes on anything but the finest horse this town had to offer.fn6

She felt a rippling chill, a sense of loss, and the cat who was shadows hopped up onto the bed beside her. Blinked with eyes that weren’t there. Tried to purr and failed.

‘Well?’

‘… he ate a sparing meal, watched the ones who insulted him between mouthfuls, and followed them home when they left …’

‘Did he kill them?’

‘… pissed in their water barrel …’

‘Not too bloodthirsty, then. And afterwards?’

‘… climbed up on the stable roof. he has been watching your window ever since …’

A nod. ‘I thought he marked me when he first entered.’

‘… a clever one …’

‘Let’s see how clever.’

Mia packed her things, books bound in a small oilskin satchel on her back. She’d hoped she might slip out unnoticed, but now this Dweymeri boy watched her, it was no longer a question of if she’d deal with him. Only how.

She snuck out from her room, across the squeaky floorboards, making no squeak at all. Sliding up to an empty room opposite, she slipped two lockpicks from a thin wallet, setting to work and hearing a small click a few minutes later. Slipping from the window, flitting across the roof, she felt sunslight burning the windblown sky, adrenaline tingling her fingertips. It was good to be moving again. Tested again.

Dashing across the alley between the Imperial and the bakery next door, boots less than a whisper on the road. The not-cat prowled in front, watching with his not-eyes.

Just as she’d done outside Augustus’s window, Mia reached out and took hold of the shadows about her. Thread by thread, she drew the darkness to her with clever fingers, like a seamstress weaving a cloak – a cloak over which unwary eyes might lose their way.

A cloak of shadows.

Call it what you will, gentlefriends. Thaumaturgy. Arkemy. Werking. Magik. Like all power, it comes with a tithe. As Mia pulled her shadows about her, the light grew dimmer in her eyes. As ever, it became harder for her to see past her veil of darkness, just as she was harder to see inside it. The world beyond was blurred, muddied, shrouded in black – she had to walk slow, lest she trip or stumble. But wrapped inside her shadows, she crept on, on through the nevernight glare, just a watercolour impression on the canvas of the world.

Up to the stable’s flank, climbing the downspout by feel. Crawling onto the roof, she squinted in her gloom, spotted the Dweymeri in the chimney’s shadow, watching her bedroom window. Mia padded across the tiles, imagining she was back in Old Mercurio’s warehouse; dead leaves scattered across the floor, a three-turn thirst burning in her throat, four wild dogs asleep around a decanter of crystal-clear water.

Motivation had been the old man’s watchword, sure and true.

Closer now. Uncertain whether to speak or act, begin or end. Perhaps twenty paces away, she saw the boy tense, turn his head. And then she was rolling beneath the fistful of knives he hurled, three in quick succession, gleaming in the light of that cursed sun. If this were truedark she would’ve had him. If this were truedark—

Don’t look.

She snapped to her feet, stiletto drawn, her shadow writhing across the tiles towards him. The Dweymeri boy had drawn his scimitar, two more throwing knives poised in his other hand. Dark saltlocks of matted hair swayed over his eyes. The tattoos on his face were the ugliest Mia had ever seen, looking like they’d been scrawled by a blind man in the midst of a seizure. Yet the face beneath …

The pair stood watching each other, still as statues, moments ticking by like hours as the gale howled about them.

‘You have very good ears, sir,’ she finally said.

‘You have better feet, Pale Daughter. I heard nothing.’

‘Then how?’

The boy offered a dimpled smile. ‘You stink of cigarillo smoke. Cloves, I think.’

‘That’s impossible. I’m upwind from you.’

The boy glanced at the shadows moving like snakes around his feet.

‘Seems to be raining impossible in these parts.’

She stared at him. Hard and sharp and lean and quick. A rapier in a world of broadswords. Mercurio was better at reading folk than any person she’d known, and he’d taught her to sum others up in a blinking. Whoever this boy was, whatever his reasons for seeking the Church, he was no psychopath. Not one who killed for killing’s sake.

Interesting.

‘You seek the Red Church,’ she said.

‘The fat man wouldn’t take my tithe.’

‘Nor mine. We’re being tested, I think.’

‘I thought the same.’

‘It’s possible they’re no longer here. I was heading into the wastes to look.’

‘If it’s death you seek, there are easier ways to find it.’ The boy gestured beyond Last Hope’s walls. ‘Where would you even start?’

‘I was planning on following my nose,’ Mia smiled. ‘But something tells me I’d do better following yours.’

The boy stared long and hard. Hazel eyes roaming her body, cool and narrowed. The blade in her hand. The shadows at his feet. The whispering wastes behind him.

‘My name is Tric,’ he said, sheathing the scimitar at his back.

‘… Tric? Are you certain?’

‘Certain about my own name? Aye, that I am.’

‘I mean no disrespect, sir,’ Mia said. ‘But if we’re to travell the Whisperwastes together, we should at least be honest enough to use our own names. And your name can’t be Tric.’

‘… Do you call me liar, girl?’

‘I called you nothing, sir. And I’ll thank you not to call me “girl” again, as if the word were kin to something you found on the bottom of your boot.’

‘You have a strange way of making friends, Pale Daughter.’

Mia sighed. Took her temper by the earlobe and pulled it to heel.

‘I’ve read the Dweymeri cleave to ritualised naming rites. Your names follow a set pattern. Noun then verb. Dweymeri have names like “Spinesmasher”. “Wolfeater”. “Pigfiddler”.’

‘… Pigfiddler?’

Mia blinked. ‘Pigfiddler was one of the most infamous Dweymeri pirates who ever lived. Surely you’ve heard of him?’

‘I was never one for history. What was he infamous for?’

‘Fiddling with pigs.fn7 He terrorised farmers from Stormwatch to Dawnspear for almost ten years. Had a three-hundred-iron bounty on him in the end. No hog was safe.’

‘… What happened to him?’

‘The Luminatii. Their swords did to his face what he did to the pigs.’

‘Ah.’

‘So. Your name cannot be Tric.’

The boy stared her up and down, expression clouded. But when he spoke, there was iron in his voice. Indignity. A well-nursed and lifelong anger.

‘My name,’ he said, ‘is Tric.’

The girl looked him over, dark eyes narrowed. A puzzle, this one. And sure and certain, our girl had ever the weakness for puzzles.

‘Mia,’ she finally said.

The boy walked slow and steady across the tiles, paying no attention to the black beneath him. Extending one hand. Calloused fingers, one silver ring – the long, serpentine forms of three seadrakes, intertwined – on his index finger. Mia looked the boy over, the scars and ugly facial tattoos, olive skin, lean and broad-shouldered. She licked her lips, tasted sweat.

The shadows rippled at her feet.

‘A pleasure to meet you, Dona Mia,’ he said.

‘And you, Don Tric.’

And with a smile, she shook his hand.

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?’

‘Folklore. Bullshit. You steal babies from their cribs and deflower virgins where you walk and other rot.’ The boy shrugged. ‘I heard tell darkin attacked the Basilica Grande a few years back. Killed a whole mess of Luminatii legionaries.’

‘Ah.’ Mia smiled around her smoke. ‘The Truedark Massacre.’

‘Probably more horseshit they cooked up to raise taxes or suchlike.’

‘Probably.’ Mia waved to her shadow. ‘Still, you don’t seem unnerved by it.’

‘I knew a seer who could ken the future by rummaging in animal guts. I met an arkemist who could make fire from dust and kill a man just by breathing on him. Messing about with the dark seems just another kind of huckster thaumaturgy to me.’ He glanced up to the cloudless sky. ‘And I can’t see much use for it in a place where the suns almost never set.’

‘… the brighter the light, the deeper the shadows …’

Tric looked to the not-cat, obviously surprised to hear it speak. He watched it carefully for a moment, as if it might sprout a few new heads or breathe black flame. With no show of multiple heads forthcoming, the boy turned his eyes back to Mia.

‘Where do you get the gift from?’ he asked. ‘Your ma? Your da?’

‘… I don’t know where I got it. And I’ve never met another like myself to ask. My Shahiid said I was touched by the Mother. Whatever that means. He surely didn’t seem to know.’

The boy shrugged, ran his thumb over the sigil on the cigarillo box.

‘If memory serves, Familia Corvere was involved in some trouble a few truedarks back. Something about kingmaking?’

‘Never flinch. Never fear,’ Mia sighed. ‘And never, ever forget.’

‘So. The puzzle begins to make sense. The last daughter of a disgraced familia. Headed to the finest school of killers in all the Republic. Planning on settling scores after graduation?’

‘You’re not about to regale me with some wisdom on the futility of revenge, are you, Don Tric? Because I was just starting to like you.’

‘O, no,’ Tric smiled. ‘Vengeance I understand. But given the wrong you’re set on righting, I’m fancying your targets are going to be tricky to hit?’

‘One mark is already in the ledger.’ She patted her purse of teeth. ‘Three more to come.’

‘These walking corpses have names?’

‘The first is Francesco Duomo.’

‘… The Francesco Duomo? Grand cardinal of the Church of the Light?’

‘That’d be him.’

‘’Byss and blood …’

‘The second is Marcus Remus. Justicus of the Luminatii Legion.’

‘… And the third?’

Saan’s light gleamed in Mia’s eyes, wisps of long black hair caught at the edges of her mouth. The shadows around her swayed like oceans, rippling near Tric’s toes. Twice as dark as they should have been. Almost as dark as her mood had become.

‘Consul Julius Scaeva.’

‘Four Daughters,’ Tric breathed. ‘That’s why you seek training at the Church.’

Mia nodded. ‘A sharp knife might clip Duomo or Remus with a lot of luck. But it’s not going to be some guttersnipe with a shiv that ends Scaeva. Not after the Massacre. He doesn’t climb into bed without a cadre of Luminatii there to check between the sheets first.’

‘Thrice-elected consul of the Itreyan Senate,’ Tric sighed. ‘Master arkemist. The most powerful man in the entire Republic.’ The boy shook his head. ‘You know how to make it hard on yourself, Pale Daughter.’

‘O, aye. He’s as dangerous as a sack of blackmark vipers,’ Mia nodded. ‘A right cunt and no mistake.’

The boy raised his eyebrows, mouth slightly agape.

Mia met his stare, scowling. ‘What?’

‘… My mother said that’s a filthy word,’ Tric frowned. ‘The filthiest. She told me never to say it. Especially in front of a dona.’

‘O, really.’ The girl took another pull on her cigarillo, eyes narrowed. ‘And why’s that?’

‘I don’t know.’ Tric found himself mumbling. ‘It’s just what she said.’

Mia shook her head, crooked bangs swaying before her eyes.

‘You know, I’ve never understood that. How being named for a woman’s nethers is somehow more grievous than any other insult. Seems to me calling someone after a man’s privates is worse. I mean, what do you picture when you hear a fellow called a cock?’

Tric shrugged, befuddled at the strange turn in conversation.

‘You imagine an oaf, don’t you?’ Mia continued. ‘Someone so full of wank there’s no room for wits. A slow-minded bastard who struts about full of spunk and piss, completely ignorant of how he looks to others.’

An exhalation of clove-sweet grey into the air between them.

‘Cock is just another word for “fool”. But you call someone a cunt, well …’ The girl smiled. ‘You’re implying a sense of malice there. An intent. Malevolent and self-aware. Don’t think I name Consul Scaeva a cunt to gift him insult. Cunts have brains, Don Tric. Cunts have teeth. Someone calls you a cunt, you take it as a compliment. As a sign that folk believe you’re not to be lightly fucked with.’ A shrug. ‘I think they call that irony.’

Mia sniffed, staring at the wastes laid out below them.

‘Truth is, there’s no difference between your nethers and mine. Aside from the obvious, of course. But one doesn’t carry any more weight than the other. Why should what’s between my legs be considered any smarter or stupider, any worse or better? It’s all just meat, Don Tric. In the end, it’s all just food for worms. Just like Duomo, Remus, and Scaeva will be.’

One last drag, long and deep, as if drawing the very life from her smoke.

‘But I’d still rather be called a cunt than a cock any turn.’

The girl sighed grey, crushed her cigarillo out with her boot heel.

Spat into the wind.

And just like that, young Tric was in love.

CHAPTER 6
DUST

Mia’s mother had given her a puzzle box when she was five years old – a wooden cube with shifting faces that, when correctly aligned, would reveal the true gift inside. It was the best Great Tithe gift she could ever remember receiving. fn1

Mia had thought it cruel at the time. When all the other marrowborn children were playing with new dolls or wooden swords, she was stuck with this wretched box that simply refused to open. She bashed it against the wall, to no avail. She cried to her father it wasn’t fair, and he simply smiled. And when Mia stomped before the Dona Corvere and demanded to know why she hadn’t simply given her a pretty ribbon for her hair or a new dress instead of this wretched thing, her mother had knelt and looked her daughter in the eye.

‘Your mind will serve you better than any trinket under the suns,’ she’d said. ‘It is a weapon, Mia. And like any weapon, you need practise to be any good at wielding it.’

‘But, mother—’

‘No, Mia Corvere. Beauty you’re born with, but brains you earn.’

So Mia had taken the box and sat with it. Scowled at it. Stared at it until she dreamed about it. Twisting and turning and cursing it by all the swears she’d heard her father ever use. But after two months of frustration, she twisted a final piece and heard a wonderful sound.

Click.

The lid opened, and inside, she’d found a brooch – a crow with tiny amber eyes. The sigil of her Familia. The crow of Corvere. She wore it to mornmeal the next turn. Her mother had smiled and never said a word. She’d kept the box; in all the Great Tithes since, all the puzzles her parents had given her thereafter, it remained her favourite. After her father’s execution and mother’s arrest, she’d left the box and something of the little girl who loved it behind.

But the brooch itself, she’d brought with her. That, and her gift for puzzles.

She’d woken beneath a pile of refuse in a lonely alley, somewhere in the Godsgrave backstreets. As she pawed the sleep from her eyes, her stomach had growled. She knew the consul’s men might still be chasing her – that he might send more if he knew they’d failed to drown her. She had nowhere to stay. No friends. No money. No food.

She was aching and alone and afraid. She missed her mother. Little Jonnen, her baby brother. Her soft bed and her warm clothes and her cat. The memory of him lying broken on the floor flooded her eyes with tears, the thought of the man who’d killed him filled her heart with hate.

‘Poor Captain Puddles …’

‘… meow …’ said a voice.

The little girl glanced up at the sound, dragging dark hair from damp lashes. And there on the cobbles, amid the weeds and the rot and the filth, she saw a cat.

Not her cat, to be sure. O, it was black as truedark, just like the good captain had been. But it was thin as paper and translucent, as if someone had cut a cat’s shape out of shadowstuff itself. And despite the fact that he now wore a shape instead of no shape at all, she still recognised her friend. The one who’d helped her when no one else in the world could.

‘Mister Kindly?’ she asked.

‘… meow …’ he said.

She reached towards the creature as if to pet him, but her hand passed through him as it might a wisp of smoke. Looking into his darkness, she felt that same sensation – her fear leaching away like poison from a wound, leaving her hard and unafraid. And she realised though she had no brother, no mother, no father, no familia, she wasn’t entirely alone.

‘All right,’ she nodded.

Food first. She had no money, but she had her stiletto, and her brooch pinned to her (increasingly dishevelled) dress. A gravebone blade would be worth a fortune, but she was loath to give up her only weapon. However, she knew there were folk who’d give her money for the jewellery. Coin could buy her food and a room to lay low so she could think about what to do next. Ten years old, her mother in chains, her –

‘… meow …’ said Mister Kindly.

‘Right,’ she nodded. ‘One puzzle at a time.’

She didn’t even know what part of Godsgrave she was in. She’d spent her entire life in the Spine. But her father had kept maps of the city in his study, hung on the walls with his swords and his wreaths, and she remembered the layout of the metropolis roughly enough. She was best-off staying away from the marrowborn quarter, hiding as low and deep as she could until she was sure the consul’s men had given up the chase.

As she stood, Mister Kindly flowed like water into the black around her feet, her shadow darkening as he did so. Though she knew she should probably be frightened at the sight, instead Mia took a deep breath, combed her fingers through her hair, and stepped out of the alley, right into a sloppy pile of what she hoped was mud. fn2

Cursing in a most improper fashion and scraping her soles on the cobbles, she saw people of all kinds pushing along the cramped thoroughfare. Fair-haired Vaanians and blue-eyed Itreyans and tall Dweymeri with leviathan ink tattoos, dozens of slaves with arkemical marks of sale burned on their cheeks. But Mia soon realised the folk were mostly Liisian; olive of skin and dark of hair. Storefronts were marked with a sigil Mia recognised from her lessons with Brother Crassus and truedark masses inside the great cathedrals – three burning circles, intertwined. A mirror of the three suns that roamed the skies overhead. The eyes of Aa himself.

The Trinity. fn3

Mia realised she must be in the Liisian quarter – Little Liis, she’d heard it called. Squalid and overcrowded, poverty written in crumbling stonework. The canal waters ran high here, consuming the lower floors of the buildings around. Palazzos of unadorned brick, rusting to a dark brown at the water’s edge. Above the water’s reek, she could smell spiced breads and clove smoke, hear songs in a language she couldn’t quite comprehend but almost recognised.

She stepped into the flow of people, jostled and bumped. The crush might have been frightening for a girl who’d grown her whole life in the shelter of the Spine, but again, Mia found herself unafraid. She was pushed along until the street spilled into a broad piazza, lined on all sides by stalls and stores. Climbing up a pile of empty crates, Mia realised she was in the marketplace, the air filled with the bustle and murmur of hundreds of folk, the harsh glare of two suns burning overhead, and the most extraordinary smell she’d ever encountered in her life.

Mia couldn’t describe it as a stench – although a stench was certainly wrapped up in the incomparable perfume. Little Liis sat on the southwest of Godsgrave, below the Hips near the Bay of Butchers, and was skirted by Godsgrave’s abattoirs and various sewer outflows. The bay’s reek has been compared to a burst belly covered in horseshit and burning human hair, three turns rotten in the heat of truelight.

However, masking this stench was the perfume of the marketplace itself. The toast-warm aroma of fresh-baked breads, tarts, and sugardoughs. The buoyant scents of rooftop gardens. Mia found herself half-drooling, half-sickened – part of her wishing to eat everything in sight, the other part wondering if she’d ever eat again.

Thumbing the brooch at her breast, she looked about for a vendor. There were plenty of trinket stalls, but most looked like two-copper affairs. On the market’s edge, she saw an old building, crouched like a beggar at the corner of two crooked roads. A sign swung on a squeaking hinge above its sad little door.

MERCURIO’S CURIOS – ODDITIES, RARITIES & The FYNEST ANTIQUITIES.

A door placard informed her, ‘No time-wasters, rabble, or religious sorts welcome.’

She squinted across the way, looked down at the too-dark shadow around her feet.

‘Well?’ she asked.

‘… meow …’ said Mister Kindly.

‘I think so too.’

And Mia hopped off her crates, and headed towards the store.

Blood gushed across the wagon’s floor, thick and crusted on Mia’s hands. Dust clawing her eyes, rising in a storm from the camels’ hooves. There was no need for Mia to whip them; the beasts were running just fine on their own. And so she concentrated on quieting the headache splitting her brow and stilling the now familiar urge to stab Tric repeatedly in the face.

The boy was stood on the wagon’s tail, banging away at what might have been a xylophone, if xylophones were crafted from iron tubes and made a noise like donkeys rutting in a belfry. The boy was drenched in blood and dust too; gritted teeth of perfect white in a mask of filthy red and shitty tattoos.

‘Tric, shut that racket up!’ Mia roared.

‘It scares off the krakens!’

‘Scares off the krakens …’ moaned Naev, from a puddle of her own blood.

‘No, it bloody doesn’t!’ yelled Mia.

She glanced over her shoulder, just in case the ungodly racket had indeed scared off the monstrosities chasing them, but alas, the four runnels of churning earth were still in close pursuit. Bastard galloped alongside the wagon, tethered by his reins. The stallion was glaring at Mia, occasionally spitting an accusing whinny in her direction.

‘O, shut up!’ she yelled at the horse.

‘… he really does not like you …’ whispered Mister Kindly.

‘You’re not helping!’

‘… and what would help …?’

‘Explain to me how we got into this stew!’

The cat who was shadows tilted his head, as if thinking. A chuddering growl from the behemoths behind shivered the wagon in its rivets, but the bouncing across the dunes moved him not at all. He looked at the rolling Whisperwastes, the jagged horizon drawing nearer, his mistress above him. And he spoke with the voice of one unveiling an ugly but necessary truth.

‘… it is basically your fault …’

Two weeks had passed atop their lookout, and both Mia and Tric had begun losing faith in her theory. The first turn of Septimus was fast approaching – if they didn’t cross the Church threshold before then, there’d be no chance to be accepted among this year’s flock. They watched in turns, one climbing the spire to relieve the other, pausing to chat awhile between shifts. They’d swap tales of their time as apprentices, or tricks of the trade. Mia seldom mentioned her familia. Tric never mentioned his. And yet he always lingered – even if he had nothing to say, he’d simply sit and watch her read for a spell.

Bastard had eventually taken to eating the grass around the spire’s roots, though he did it with obvious disdain. Mia often caught him looking at her as if he wanted to eat her instead.

Around nevernight’s falling on what was probably the thirteenth turn, she and Tric were sitting atop the stone, staring over the wastes. Mia was down to her last forty-two cigarillos and already wishing she’d brought more.

‘I tried to quit once,’ she said, peering at Black Dorian’sfn4 watermark on the fine, hand-rolled smoke. ‘Lasted fourteen turns.’

‘Missed it too much?’

‘Withdrawals. Mercurio made me take it back up. He said me acting like a bear with a hangover three turns a month was bad enough.’

‘Three turns a … ah.’

‘Ah.’

‘… You’re not that bad are you?’

‘You can tell me in a turn or so,’ she chuckled.

‘I had no sisters.’ Tric began retying his hair, a habit Mia had noted he indulged when uncomfortable. ‘I am unversed in …’ – vague handwaving – ‘… women’s ways.’

‘Well then, you’re in for a treat.’

He stopped in mid-knot, looking at Mia strangely. ‘You are unlike any girl I have ev—’

The boy fell silent, slipped off his rock into a crouch. He took out an old captain’s spyglass, engraved with the same three seadrakes as his ring, and pressed it to his eye.

Mia crouched next to him, peering towards Last Hope. ‘See something?’

‘Caravan.’

‘Fortune hunters?’fn5

‘Don’t think so.’ Tric spat on the spyglass lens, rubbed away the dust. ‘Two laden wagons. Four men. Camels leading, so they’re in for a deep trek.’

‘I’ve never ridden a camel before.’

‘Nor me. I hear they stink. And spit.’

‘Still sounds a step up from Bastard.’

‘A whitedrake wearing a saddle is a step up from Bastard.’

They watched the caravan roll across the blood-red sand for an hour, pondering what lay ahead if the group were indeed from the Red Church. And when the caravan was almost a dot on the horizon, the pair clambered down from their throne, and followed across the wastes.

They kept distance at first, Flowers and Bastard plodding slowly. Mia was sure she could hear a strange tune on the wind. Not the maddening whispers – which she’d still not become accustomed to – but something like off-key bells, stacked all atop one another and pounded with an iron flail. She’d no idea what to make of it.

The pair weren’t outfitted for a trek into the deep desert, and they resolved to ride up to the caravan when it stopped to rest. There was no creeping up on it – the stone outcroppings and broken monuments studding the wastes weren’t enough to conceal approach, and Mia’s cloak of shadows was only big enough for one. Besides, she reasoned, if these were servants of the Lady of Blessed Murder, they may not take kindly to being crept up on as they stopped to piss.

Sadly, the caravan folk seemed happy enough to go as they went, so to speak. The pair were gaining ground, but after two full turns in the saddle, with Bastard nipping her legs and occasionally trying to buck her into the dust, Mia could take no more. Pulling the stallion up near a circle of weathered statues, she didn’t so much lose her temper as drop-kick it across the sand.

‘Stop, stop,’ she spat. ‘Fuck this. Right in the earhole.’

Tric raised an eyebrow. ‘What?’

‘There’s more bruises in my britches than there is bottom. It needs a breather.’

‘Are we playing alliteration and you didn’t tell me, or …’

‘Fuck off. I need a rest.’

Tric frowned at the horizon. ‘We might lose them.’

‘They’re led by a dozen camels, Tric. A noseless dog could follow this trail of shit in the middle of truedark. If they suddenly start trekking faster than a forty-a-turn smoker with an armload of drunken prostitutes, I think we can find them again.’

‘What do drunken prostit—’

‘I don’t need a foot massage. Don’t want a back rub. I just want to sit on something that isn’t moving for an hour.’ Mia slipped off the saddle with a wince, waved her stiletto at Bastard. ‘And if you bite me again, I swear to the Maw I’ll make you a gelding.’

Bastard snorted, Mia sinking down against a smooth stone with a sigh. She pressed one hand to her cramping innards, rubbed her backside with the other.

‘I can help with that,’ Tric offered. ‘If you need it.’

The boy grinned as Mia raised the knuckles. Tethering the horses, he sat opposite Mia as she fished a cigarillo from her case, struck her flintbox, and breathed deep.

‘Your Shahiid was a wise man,’ Tric said.

‘What makes you say that?’

‘Three turns of this a month is plenty.’

The girl scoffed, kicked a toeful of dust at him as he rolled away, laughing. Pulling her tricorn down over her eyes, she rested her head against the rock, cigarillo hanging from her lips. Tric watched her, peering about for some sign of Mister Kindly. Finding none.

He looked around them, studying the stonework. The statues were all similar; vaguely humanoid figures with feline heads, blasted by winds and time. Standing up on the outcropping, he squinted through his spyglass, watching the camel caravan trekking away. Mia was right – they moved at a plodding pace, and even with a few hours’ rest, they’d make up the lost ground. He wasn’t as grass-green around horses as Mia was, but after two turns saddlebound, he was aching in a few of the wrong places. And so sitting in the shade for a spell, he tried his best not to watch her as she slept.

He only closed his eyes for a second.

‘Naev counsels him to be silent.’

A slurred whisper in his ear, sharp as the blade against his throat. Tric opened his eyes, smelled leather, steel, something rank he supposed might be camel. A woman’s voice, thick with spittle, accent he couldn’t place. Behind him.

Tric said not a word.

‘Why does he follow Naev?’

Tric glanced around, saw Bastard and Flowers still tied up. Footprints in the dust. No sign of Mia. The knife pressed harder against his throat.

‘Speak.’

‘You told me to be silent,’ he whispered.

‘Clever boy.’ A smile behind the words. ‘Too clever?’

Tric reached down to his belt, wincing as the blade twitched. Slowly, slowly, he produced a small wooden box, shook it softly, the faint rattle of teeth therein.

‘My tithe,’ he said. ‘For the Maw.’

The box was snatched from his hand. ‘Maw’s dead.’

‘O, Goddess, not again—’

‘She’s playing with you, Don Tric.’

Tric smiled to hear Mia’s voice, grinned as the knifewoman hissed in surprise.

‘I’ve a better game we can play, though,’ Mia said brightly. ‘It’s called drop your blade and let him go before I cut your hands off.’

‘Naev will slit his throat.’

‘Then your head will join your fingers on the sand, Mi Dona.’

Tric wondered if Mia was bluffing. Wondered what it would be like to feel the blade swish from one ear to the other. To die before he’d even begun. The pressure at his neck eased, and he flinched as something small and sharp nicked his skin.

‘Ow.’

Dark stars collided in his eyes, the taste of dusty flowers on his tongue. He rolled aside, blinking, only dimly aware of the struggle behind him. Whispering blades slicing the air, feet scuffing across blood-red sand. He glimpsed their attacker through blurring eyes – a small, wiry woman, face veiled, wrapped in cloth the colour of desert sand. Carrying two curved, double-edged knives and dancing like someone who knew the steps.

Tric pawed the scrape on his neck, fingertips wet. He tried to stand but couldn’t, staring at his hand as his brain caught up. His mind was his own, but his body …

‘Poisoned …’ he breathed.

Mia and the stranger were circling each other, blades clutched in knife-fighter grips. They moved like first-time lovers – hesitant at first, drifting closer until finally they fell into each other’s arms, fists and elbows and knees, block and counters and strikes. The sigh of steel in the air. The wet percussion of flesh and bone. Having never really seen her matched against a human opponent, Tric slowly realised Mia was no slouch with a blade – well honed and seemingly fearless. She fought left-handed, her fighting style unorthodox, moving swift. But for all Mia’s skill, the thin woman seemed her match. Her every strike was foiled. Every advance countered.

After a few minutes of spectating, the feeling was returning to Tric’s feet. Mia was panting with exertion, crow-black hair clinging to her skin like weed. The stranger wasn’t pressing the attack; simply defending silently. Mia was circling, trying to get the sun behind her, but her foe was clever enough to avoid getting Saan in her eyes. And so at last, with a small sigh as if admitting defeat, Mia moved her shadow so the stranger would be ankle-deep in it anyway.

The woman hissed in alarm, trying to sidestep, but the shadows moved quick as silver. Tric watched her fall still, as if her feet were glued to the spot. Mia stepped up and struck at the woman’s throat, blade whistling as it came. But instead of dying, the stranger tangled up Mia’s forearm, twisted her knife free, and flipped the girl onto her bruised backside, swift as a just soul flying to the Hearth.fn6

Mia’s blade quivered in the sand between Tric’s legs, two inches shy of a very unhappy accident. The boy blinked at the gravebone, trying to focus. He felt as if he should give it back – that seemed important – but the warmth at his neck bid him sit awhile longer.

Mia rolled to her feet, red-faced with fury. Snatching the knife from the sand, she turned back to the woman, teeth bared in a snarl.

‘Let’s try that again, shall we?’ the girl wheezed.

‘Darkin,’ said the strange woman, only slightly out of breath. ‘Darkin fool.’

‘… What?’

‘She calls the Dark here? In the deep wastes?’

‘… Who are you?’

‘Naev,’ she slurred. ‘Only Naev.’

‘That’s an Ashkahi word. It means “nothing”.’

‘A learned fool, then.’

Mia motioned to Tric. ‘What did you do to my friend?’

‘Ink.’ The woman displayed a barbed ring on her finger. ‘A small dose.’fn7

‘Why did you attack us?’

‘If Naev had attacked her, the sands would be redder. Naev asked why they followed her. And now Naev knows. Naev wonders at the girl’s skill. And now Naev sees.’ The veiled woman looked back and forth between them, made a slurping sound. ‘Sees a pair of fools.’

Tric rose on wobbly feet, leaning against the stone at his back. His head was clearing, anger replacing the haze. He drew his scimitar and glared at the three little women blurred before him, his pride stung to bleeding.

‘Who are you calling fool, shorty?’

The woman glanced in his direction. ‘The boy whose throat Naev could have cut.’

‘You crept up on me while I was sleeping.’

‘The boy who sleeps when he should be watching.’

‘How about you watch while I hand you your—’

‘Tric,’ Mia said. ‘Calm down.’

‘Mia, this skinny streak of shit had a knife to my throat.’

‘She’s testing you. Testing us. Everything she says and does. Look at her.’

Naev still held Mia’s gaze, eyes like black lamps burning in her skull. Mia had seen a stare like that before – the stare of a person who’d looked the end in the face so many times she considered death a friend. Old Mercurio had the same look in his eyes. And at last she knew the stranger for what she was.

The moment was nothing like she’d practised in the mirror. And yet Mia still felt a sense of relief as she took the purse of teeth from her belt and tossed it to the thin woman. As if six years had been lifted from her chest.

‘My tithe,’ she said. ‘For the Maw.’

The woman hefted the bag in her hand. ‘Naev has no need of it.’

‘But you’re from the Red Church …’

‘It is Naev’s honour to serve in the House of Our Lady of Blessed Murder, yes. For the next few minutes at least.’

‘Few minutes? What do you—’

The ground beneath them trembled. A faint tremor at first, felt at the small of her back. Rising every second.

‘… Is that what I think it is?’ Tric asked.

‘Kraken,’ Naev sighed. ‘They hear when she calls the Dark. A fool, as I said.’

Mia and Tric glanced at each other, spoke simultaneously. ‘O, shit …’

‘Didn’t you know that?’ Tric asked.

‘Four Daughters, how was I supposed to know that? I’ve never been to Ashkah!’

‘The kraken who attacked us before lost its bottle when you did your cloaky thing!’

‘“Cloaky thing”’? Are you five years old?’

‘Well, whatever it’s called, maybe you should stop it?’ Tric pointed to the shadows around Naev’s feet. ‘Before it brings more?’

Mia’s shadow slithered back across the dust, took up its regular shape again. She kept a wary eye on Naev, but the woman simply sheathed her blade, head tilted.

‘There are two,’ she slurped. ‘Very large.’

‘What do we do?’ Mia asked.

‘Run?’ Naev shrugged. ‘Die?’

‘Running sounds grand to me. Tric?’

Tric was already on Flowers’s back, the horse rearing to go. ‘Waiting on you, now.’

Mia vaulted into the saddle, offered a hand to the thin woman. ‘Ride with me.’

Naev hesitated a moment, tilting her head and fixing Mia in that black stare.

‘Look, you’re welcome to stay here if you like …’

Naev stepped closer and the ground trembled. Bastard raised up on his hind legs, kicking at the air. Mia glanced behind to see a trail of churning earth approaching – as if something massive swum beneath the sand.

Right towards them.

As the stallion set his hooves back on the ground, she called the shadows again, fixing him in place long enough for Naev to scramble up behind her. A bellowing roar sounded under the earth, as if the things were also answering her summons. As Naev put her arms around Mia’s waist, she caught a whiff of spice and smoke. Something rotten beneath.

‘She is making them angry,’ the woman said.

‘Let’s go!’ Tric shouted.

Mia released Bastard’s hooves and kicked hard, the stallion bolting into a fast gallop. The ground behind exploded, tentacles bursting from the sand and cracking like hooked bullwhips. Mia heard a gut-watering bellow, glimpsed a beak that could swallow Bastard whole. She saw a second runnel rumbling towards them from the west. Thundering hooves and roars filled her ears.

‘Two of them, just like you said!’ Mia yelled.

The veiled woman pointed north. ‘Ride for the wagons. We have ironsong to keep the kraken at bay.’

‘What’s ironsong?’

‘Ride!’

And so they did. A furious gallop over an ocean of blood-red sand. Glancing behind, she saw the two runnels converging, closing swift. She wondered how the beasts were tracking her. How they knew it was her who’d called the Dark. A tentacle broke the surface, two storeys tall, set with hooks of blackened bone. Angry roars filled the air as it slammed back down to earth.

Dust whipping her eyes. Bastard snorting beneath her, hoof beats thudding in her chest. Mia held the reins hard, riding harder, grateful that though the stallion hated her like poison, he seemed to hate the thought of being eaten even more.

‘Look out!’ cried Tric.

Mia looked ahead, saw another runnel approaching from the north. Bigger, moving faster, shaking the earth beneath her. Flowers let out a terrified whinny.

‘It seems there are three,’ Naev said. ‘Apologies …’

Tentacles unfurled from the ground like the petals of some murderous flower. Mia looked into the beast’s maw, all snapping beak and hooked bone. As Flowers cut east to avoid the behemoth, Bastard finally came to the realization that he’d run much faster without two riders on his back. And so he started bucking.

Mia had the benefit of stirrups. Reins. A saddle. But Naev was riding on Bastard’s hindparts with nothing but Mia’s waist to keep her anchored. Bastard bucked again, whipping them about like rag dolls. And without a whisper, Naev sailed off the horse’s back.

Mia cut east to follow Tric, roaring at the boy over the chaos.

‘We lost Naev!’

The Dweymeri glanced over his shoulder. ‘Maybe they’ll stop to eat her?’

‘We have to go back!’

‘When did you grow altruism? It’s suicide to go back there!’

‘It’s not just altruism, you knob, I gave her my tithe!’

‘O, shit,’ Tric felt about his waist. ‘She took mine, too!’

‘You get Naev,’ she decided. ‘I’ll distract them!’

‘… mia …’ said the cat in her shadow. ‘… this is foolish …’

‘We have to save her!’

‘… the boy’s stallion will not take him back there …’

‘Because he’s afraid! And you can fix that!’

‘… if i drink him, i cannot drink you …’

‘I’ll deal with my own fear! You just deal with Flowers!’

A hollow sigh.

‘… as it please you …’

Red earth, torn and wounded, shaking beneath them. Dust in her eyes. Heart in her throat. She felt Mister Kindly flit across the sand and coil inside Flowers’s shadow, feasting on the stallion’s terror. She felt her own rise up in a flood – an ice-cold swell in her belly, so long forgotten she was almost overcome. So many years since she’d had to face it. So many years with Mister Kindly beside her, drinking every drop so she could always be brave.

Fear.

Mia jerked on the reins, bringing Bastard to a halt. The stallion snorted but obeyed the steel in his mouth, stamping and snotting. Bringing him about, Mia saw Naev was on her feet, clutching her ribs as she ran across the churning sand.

‘Tric, go!’ Mia roared. ‘I’ll meet you at the wagon!’

Tric still looked a touch befuddled from the ink. But he nodded, charging back towards the fallen woman and the approaching kraken. Flowers ran fast as a hurricane towards the monstrosity, completely fearless with the eyeless cat clinging to his shadow.

The first kraken erupted behind Naev, tentacles the size of longboats cutting the air. The thin woman rolled and swayed, slipping between a half-dozen blows. Sadly, it was the seventh that caught her – hooks tearing her chest and gut as the tentacle snatched her up. And even in that awful grip, the woman refused to cry out, drawing her blade and hacking at the limb instead.

Terror filled Mia’s veins, fingertips tingling, eyes wide. The sensation was so unfamiliar, it was all she could do not to sink beneath it. Yet the fear of failing was stronger than the thought of dying in a kraken’s arms, memories of her mother’s words on her father’s hanging turn still carved in her bones. And so she reached inside herself, and did what had to be done.

She wrapped her shadow about herself, fading from view on the stallion’s back. The kraken holding Naev paused, tremors running its length. And with a howl that shivered her bones, the beast dropped its prey onto the sand, and turned towards Mia with its two cousins swimming fast behind.

The girl turned and rode for her life.

Teeth gritted, glancing over her shoulder as massive shapes breached the earth, diving back below like seadrakes on the hunt. Beyond the horrors, she saw Tric at full gallop, snatching Naev up and dragging the wounded woman over his pommel. Naev was drenched in blood, but Mia could see she was still moving. Still alive.

She turned Bastard north, galloping towards the caravan. The churchmen were no fools – their camel train was already tearing away across the dust. The kraken kept pace with Bastard, one slamming into the sand just thirty feet behind, the stallion stumbling as the ground shuddered. Great roars and the hiss of their bodies piercing the earth filled her ears. Wondering how they could sense her, Mia rode towards a stretch of rocky badlands, praying the ground was something approaching solid.

About forty eroded stone spires thrust up through the desert’s face; a small garden of rock in the endless nothing. Throwing aside her shadowcloak, Mia wove between them, heard frustrated roars behind. She gained a short lead, galloping out the other side as the kraken circled around. Slick with sweat. Heart pounding. She was closing on the camel train, inch by inch, foot by foot. Tric had reached it, one of the wagonmen reaching for Naev’s bloody body, another manning a pivot-mounted crossbow loaded with bolts as big as broom handles.

She could hear that same metallic song on the wind – realised some strange contraption was strapped to the rear wagon beside the crossbow. It looked like a large xylophone made from iron pipes. One of the wagonmen was hitting it like it had insulted his mother, filling the air with noise.

Ironsong, she realised.

But beneath the cacophony, she could hear the kraken behind, the earth being torn apart by horrors big as houses. Her thighs ached, muscles groaned, and she rode for all she was worth. The fear was swelling in her – a living, breathing thing, clawing at her insides and clouding thought and sight. Hand shaking, lips quivering, please, Mother, take it away …

At last she drew alongside the rearmost wagon, wincing at the racket. Tric was yelling, holding out his hand. Her heart was thundering in her breast. Teeth chattering in her skull. And with Bastard’s reins in her fist, she drew herself up on unsteady legs and leapt towards him.

The boy caught her, pulled her against his chest, hard as mahogany and drenched in blood. Shaking in his arms, she looked up into hazel eyes, noted the way he was staring at her – relief and admiration and something yet besides. Something …

She felt Mister Kindly slink back into her shadow, overwhelmed for a moment by the terror in her veins. And then he drank, and sighed, and nothing of it remained but fading memory. Herself again. Strong again. Needing no one. Needing nothing.

Muttering thanks, she pushed herself from Tric’s grip and stooped to tie Bastard to the wagon’s flank. Tric knelt beside Naev’s bleeding body to check if she still lived. The churchman in the pilot’s chair roared over the xylophone.

‘Black Mother, what did you—’

A tentacle burst from the earth in front of them, whistling as it came. It tore through the driver’s midriff, ripping him and one of his fellows clean in half, guts and blood spraying as the wagon roofs were torn away like paper. Mia dived to the deck, hooks sweeping mere inches over her head as the wagon rocked sideways, Tric roaring and Bastard screaming and the newly arrived kraken bellowing in fury. The crossbow and its marksmen were smashed loose from the tray, sailing off into the dust. The camels swerved in a panic, sending the wagon train up on four wheels. Mia lunged for the abandoned reins, bringing the train down with a shuddering jolt. She dragged herself into the pilot’s seat and cursed, glancing over her shoulder at the four beasts now pursuing them, shouting over the bedlam to Mister Kindly.

‘Remind me never to call the Dark in this desert again!’

‘… have no fear of that …’

The churchman manning the xylophone had been knocked clear when the kraken struck, now wailing as one of the monsters dragged him to his death. Tric snatched up the man’s fallen club and started beating on the contraption as Mia roared at Naev.

‘Which way is the Red Church from here?’

The woman moaned in reply, clutching the ragged wounds in her chest and gut. Mia could see entrails glistening in the worst of it, Naev’s clothes soaked with gore.

‘Naev, listen to me! Which way do we ride?’

‘North,’ the woman bubbled. ‘The mountains.’

‘Which mountains? There are dozens!’

‘Not the tallest … nor the shortest. Nor the … scowling face or the sad old man or the broken wall.’ A ragged, spit-thick sigh. ‘The simplest mountain of them all.’

The woman groaned, curling in upon herself. The ironsong was near deafening, and Mia’s headache bounced around the inside of her skull with joyful abandon.

‘Tric, shut that racket up!’ Mia roared.

‘It scares off the krakens!’ Tric bellowed.

‘Scares off the krakens …’ moaned Naev.

‘No, it bloody doesn’t!’ yelled Mia.

She glanced over her shoulder, just in case the ungodly racket had indeed scared off the monstrosities chasing them, but alas, they were still in close pursuit. Bastard galloped alongside, glaring at Mia, occasionally spitting an accusing whinny in her direction.

‘O, shut up!’

‘… he really does not like you …’

‘You’re not helping!’

‘… and what would help …?’

‘Explain to me how we got into this stew!’

The cat who was shadows tilted his head, as if thinking. He looked at the rolling Whisperwastes, the jagged horizon drawing nearer, his mistress above him. And he spoke with the voice of one unveiling an ugly but necessary truth.

‘… it is basically your fault …’

CHAPTER 7
INTRODUCTIONS

Mia pushed open the door to Mercurio’s Curios, a tiny bell above the frame chiming her arrival. The store was dark and dusty, sprawling off in every direction. Shutters were drawn against the sunslight. Mia recalled the sign outside – ‘Oddities, Rarities & the Fynest Antiquities’. Looking at the shelves, she saw plenty of the former. The latter parts of the equation were up for debate.

Truth be told, the shop looked filled to bursting with junk. Mia could’ve sworn it was also bigger inside than out, though she put that down to her lack of mornmeal. As if to remind her of its neglect, her belly growled a sternly worded complaint.

Mia made her way through the flotsam and jetsam until she arrived at a counter. And there, behind a mahogany desk carved with a twisting spiral pattern that made her eyes hurt to look at, she found the greatest oddity inside Mercurio’s Curios – the proprietor himself.

His face was the kind that seemed born to scowl, set atop with a short shock of light grey hair. Blue eyes were narrowed behind wire-rimmed spectacles that had seen better turns. A statue of an elegant woman with a lion’s head crouched on the desk beside him, an arkemical globe held in its upturned palm. The old man was reading from a book as big as Mia. A cigarillo hung from his mouth, smelling faintly of cloves. It bobbed on his lips when he mumbled.

‘Help ya w’somthn?’

‘Good turn to you, sir. Almighty Aa bless and keep you—’

The old man tapped the small brass placard on the countertop – a repeat of the warning outside his door. ‘No time-wasters, rabble, or religious sorts welcome.’

‘Forgive me, sir. May the Four Daughters—’

The old man tapped the placard more insistently, shifting his scowl to Mia.

The girl fell silent. The old man turned back to his book.

‘Help ya w’somthn?’ he repeated.

The girl cleared her throat. ‘I wish to sell you a piece of jewellery, sir.’

‘Just wishing about it won’t get it done, girl.’

Mia hovered uncertainly, chewing her lip. The old man began tapping the placard again until she finally got the message, unpinning her brooch and placing it on the wood. The little crow stared back at her with its red amber eyes, as if wounded at the thought she might hock it to such a grumpy old bastard. She shrugged apology.

‘Where’d y’steal that?’ the old man mumbled.

‘I did not steal it, sir.’

Mercurio pulled the cigarillo from his lips, turned his full attention to Mia.

‘That’s the sigil of the Familia Corvere.’

‘Well spotted, sir.’

‘Darius Corvere died a traitor’s death yesterturn by order of the Itreyan Senate. And rumour has it his entire household have been locked in the Philosopher’s Stone.’ fn1

The little girl had no kerchief, so she wiped her nose on her sleeve and said nothing.

‘How old are you, sprat?’

‘… Ten, sir.’

‘You got a name?’

Mia blinked. Who did this old man think he was? She was Mia Corvere, daughter of the justicus of the Luminatii Legion. Marrowborn of a noble familia, one of the great twelve houses of the Republic. She’d not be interrogated by a mere shopkeep. Especially when offering a prize worth more than the rest of the junk in this squalid hole put together.

‘My name is none of your business, sir.’ Mia folded her arms and tried her best to impersonate her mother when dealing with an unruly servant.

‘Noneofyourbusiness?’ One grey eyebrow rose. ‘Strange name for a girl, innit?’

‘Do you want the brooch or no?’

The old man put his cigarillo back on his lips and turned back to his book.

‘No,’ he said.

Mia blinked. ‘It is finest Itreyan silver. Th—’

‘Fuck off,’ the man said, without looking up. ‘And take your trouble with you when you off with the fuck, Miss Noneofyourbusiness.’

Mia’s cheeks burned pink with fury. She snatched the brooch up and pinned it back to her dress, tossed her hair over one shoulder and spun on her heel.

‘Word of advice,’ said the old man, still not looking up. ‘Corvere and his cronies got off light with that hanging. Their commonborn troops have been crucified along the banks of the Choir. Rumour is they’re going to pave the Senate House streets with their skulls. A lot of those soldiers had familia ’round here. So, I’d not walk about with a traitor’s mark pinned to my tits were I you.’

The words struck Mia like a rock in the back of her head. She turned back to the old man, teeth bared in a snarl.

‘My father was no traitor,’ she spat.

As she stormed out the door, her shadow unfurled along the pavement and slammed it behind her. The girl was so angry she didn’t even notice.

Back out in the marketplace, she stood on the stoop, fury curling her hands into fists. How dare he talk about her father like that? She was of half a mind to stomp back inside and demand apology, but her stomach was growling and she needed coin.

She was stepping down into the crush looking for a jewellery stall, when a boy a little older than her came careering out of the throng. His arms were laden with a basket of pastries, and before Mia could step aside, with a curse and a small explosion of powdered sugar, the boy ploughed straight into her.

Mia cried out as she was sent sprawling, her dress powdered white. The boy was likewise knocked onto his backside, pastries strewn in the filth.

‘Why don’t you watch where you’re going?’ Mia demanded.

‘O, Daughters, a thousand pardons, miss. Please forgive me …’

The boy climbed to his feet, offered a hand, and helped Mia up. He brushed the white powder off her dress as best he could, mumbling apologies all the while. Then, leaning down to the fallen pastries, he stuffed them back into his basket. With an apologetic smile, he plucked one of the less dirty tarts off the pile and offered it to Mia with a bow.

‘Please accept this by way of apology, Mi Dona.’

Mia’s anger slowed to a simmer as her belly growled, and, with a pout, she took the pastry from the boy’s grubby hand.

‘Thank you, Mi Don.’

‘I’d best be off. The good father gets in a frightful mood if I’m late to almsgiving.’ He smiled again at Mia, doffed an imaginary hat. ‘Apologies again, miss.’

Mia gave a curtsey, and scowled a little less. ‘Aa bless and keep you.’

The boy hurried off into the crowd. Mia watched him go, anger slowly dissipating. She looked at the sweet tart in her hand, and smiled at her fortune. Free mornmeal!

She found an alley away from the press, lifted the tart and took a big bite. Her smile curdled at the edges, eyes growing wide. With a curse, she spat her mouthful into the muck, throwing the rest of the tart with it. The pastry was hard as wood, the filling utterly rancid. She grimaced, wiping her lips on her sleeve.

‘Four Daughters,’ she spat. ‘Why would—’

Mia blinked. Looked down at her dress, still faintly powdered with sugar. Remembering the boy’s hands patting her down, cursing herself a fool and realizing, at last, what his game had been.

Her brooch was missing.

The ironsong did eventually scare off the krakens.

Or so Tric insisted, at any rate. He’d spent four hours beating the xylophone as if it owed him coin, and Mia supposed he needed some kind of vindication. As the pursuers dropped off one by one, Mister Kindly suggested the ground was growing harder as the caravan galloped closer to the mountains. Mia was reasonably certain the beasts simply grew bored and pissed off to eat someone easier. Naev ventured no opinion at all, instead lying in a pool of coagulating blood and doing her best not to die.

Truthfully, Mia wasn’t certain she’d pull it off.

Tric took the reins at her insistence. In the merciful quiet after the boy abandoned his percussionist duties, Mia knelt beside the unconscious woman and wondered where to begin.

Naev’s guts had been minced by kraken hooks, and the reek of bowel and vomit hung in the air – Four Daughters only knew how Tric was handling it with that knife-keen nose of his. Knowing the smell of shit and death well enough, Mia simply tried to make the woman comfortable. There was nothing she could really do; sepsis would finish the job if blood loss didn’t. Knowing the end awaiting Naev, Mia realised it’d be a mercy to end her.

Peeling the cloth back from Naev’s ravaged belly, Mia looked for something to bind the wounds with, settling at last on the fabric about the woman’s face. And as she peeled the veil from Naev’s head, she felt Mister Kindly swell and sigh, drinking the surge of sickening terror that would’ve otherwise made her scream.

Even still, it was a close thing.

‘’Byss and blood …’ she breathed.

‘What?’ Tric glanced over his shoulder, almost falling off the driver’s seat. ‘Black Mother of Night … her face …’

Daughters, such a face …

To call her disfigured would be to call a knife to the heart ‘mildly inconvenient’. Naev’s flesh was stretched and twisted into a knot in the place her nose might have been. Her bottom lip sagged like a beaten stepchild, top lip snarled back from her teeth. Five deep runnels were carved into her flesh – as if her face were clay, and someone had grabbed a fistful and squeezed. And yet the hideousness was framed by beautiful curls of strawberry blonde.

‘What could have done that?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘Love,’ the woman whispered, spit dribbling over mangled lips. ‘Only love.’

‘Naev …’ Mia began. ‘Your wounds …’

‘Bad.’

‘It’s a far cry from good.’

‘Get Naev to the Church. She has much to do before she meets her Blessed Lady.’

‘We’re two turns from the mountains,’ Tric said. ‘Maybe more. Even if we get there, you’re in no condition to climb.’

The woman slurped, coughed blood. Reaching to her neck, she snapped a leather cord, drew out a silver phial. She tried sitting up, groaned in agony. Mia pushed her back down.

‘You mustn’t—’

‘Get off her!’ Naev snarled. ‘Help her up. Drag her.’ She waved to the back of the wagon. ‘Out of this blood, where the wood is clean.’

Mia had no idea what the woman was about, but she obeyed, hauling Naev through the congealing puddle to the wagon’s rear. And there the woman pulled out the phial’s stopper with her teeth and upended the contents onto the unfinished boards.

More blood.

Bright red, as if from a fresh-cut wound. Mia frowned as Mister Kindly coiled up on her shoulder, peering through her curtain of hair. And as Naev dragged her fingers through the puddle, the cat who was shadows did his best to purr, sending a shiver down Mia’s spine.

‘… interesting …’

Naev was writing, Mia realised. As if the puddle were a tablet and her finger the brush. The letters were Ashkahi – she recognised them from her studies, but the ritual itself …

‘That’s blood sorcery,’ she breathed.

But that was impossible. The magik of the Ashkahi had been extinguished when the empire fell. Nobody had seen real bloodwerking in …

‘How do you know how to do that? Those arts have been dead for a hundred years.’

‘Not all the dead truly die,’ Naev rasped. ‘The Mother keeps … only what she needs.’

The woman rolled onto her back, clutching her butchered belly.

‘Ride for the mountains … the simplest of them all.’ Mia swore she could see tears in the woman’s eyes. ‘Do not end her, girl. Set mercy aside. If the Blessed Lady … takes her, so be it. But do not help Naev on her way. Does she hear?’

‘… I hear you.’

Naev clutched her hand. Squeezed. And then she slipped back into darkness.

Mia bound the wounds as best she could, wrist-deep in gore, fetching her cloak from Bastard’s saddlebag (he tried to bite her) and rolling it beneath Naev’s head. Joining Tric on the driver’s seat, she peered at the mountains ahead. A range of great black spurs stretched north and south, a few high enough to be tipped with snow. One looked almost like a scowling face, just as Naev described. Another long range might’ve been the broken wall she mentioned. And nestled beside a spur resembling a sad old man, Mia saw a peak that fitted the bill.

It was entirely average, as far as mighty spires of prehistoric granite went. Not quite high enough to be frost-clad, not really conjuring any comparisons to faces or figures. Just a regular lump of ancient rock out here in this blood-red desert. The kind you wouldn’t look twice at.

‘There,’ Tric said, pointing to the spur.

‘Aye.’

‘You think they’d have picked something a touch more dramatic.’

‘I think that’s the point. Anyone looking for a nest of assassins isn’t likely to start at the most boring mountain in all creation.’

Tric nodded. Gifted her a smile. ‘Wisdom, Pale Daughter.’

‘Fear not, Don Tric.’ She smiled back. ‘I won’t let it go to my head.’

They rode another two turns, with Tric in the driver’s seat and Mia by Naev’s side. She wet a cloth, moistened those malformed lips, wondering who or what could have mutilated the woman’s face like that. Naev talked as if in a fever, speaking to some phantom, asking it to wait. She reached out to thin air once, as if to caress it. And as she did so, those lips twisted into a hideous parody of a smile. Mister Kindly sat beside her the entire time.

Purring.

Flowers and Bastard were both exhausted, and Mia feared either might go lame at any moment. It seemed cruel (even to Bastard) to make them run beside the wagon needlessly. Tric and Mia had passed the point of no return; they’d either make the Red Church or die now. She’d seen wild horses roaming the broken foothills, supposed there must be water somewhere near. And so, reluctantly, she suggested they let the pair go.

Tric seemed saddened, but he saw the wisdom of it. They pulled the wagon to a stop and the boy untied Flowers, letting the stallion drink deep from his waterskin. He ran a fond hand over the horse’s neck, whispering softly.

‘You were a loyal friend. I’ll trust you’ll find another. Watch out for the kraken.’

He slapped the horse on its hindquarters, and the beast galloped east along the range. Mia untied Bastard, the stallion glaring even as she emptied an entire waterskin into his gullet. She reached into her saddlebag, offered him the last sugar cube on an upturned palm.

‘You’ve earned it. I suppose you can head back to Last Hope now if you like.’

The stallion lowered his head, gently nibbled the cube from her palm. He nickered, tossing his mane, nuzzling his nose to her shoulder. And, as Mia smiled and patted his cheek, Bastard opened his mouth and bit her hard just above the left breast.

‘You son of a motherless—’

The stallion bolted across the wastes as Mia hopped about, clutching her chest and cursing the horse by the Three Suns and Four Daughters and anyone else who happened to be listening. Bastard followed Flowers east, disappearing into the dusty haze.

‘I can kiss that better if you like,’ Tric smiled.

‘O, fuck off!’ Mia spat, rolling into the wagon and flopping about on the floor. There was blood on her fingers where she touched the bite, the skin already bruising as she glanced inside her shirt. Thanking the Daughters she wasn’t a bigger girl for the first time in her life, she hissed under her breath as Mister Kindly laughed from her shadow.

‘He was such a bastard …’

Naev was fading swift, and they could afford no more stops – Mia feared the woman wouldn’t last another turn, and the First of Septimus was the morrow. If they didn’t find the Church soon, there’d be no point finding it at all. They were in the foothills now, mountains curving about them like a lover’s arms. She’d read dustwraiths often made their home where the winds howled worst, and her ears strained for telltale laughter over the whispering breeze.

Blood had thickened over the wagon floor, crusted in flies. She did her best to keep them off Naev’s belly, despite knowing she was already a dead woman. Naev’s resolve had broken – when unconscious, she moaned constantly, and when awake, she simply screamed until she passed out again. She was in the midst of a howling fit as Tric brought the wagon to a halt. Mia looked up at the absence of motion after turns of riding, fatigue thick in her voice.

‘Why’ve we stopped?’

‘Unless you can fix these spit-machines’ wings’ – Tric pointed to the snarling camels – ‘we’ve gone as far as we’re going to.’

The simplest mountain rose up before the camel train in sheer cliffs, broken and tumbled all about. Mia looked around, saw nothing and no one out of the ordinary. She leaned down and clutched Naev’s shoulder, shouting above her cries.

‘Where do we go from here?’

The woman curled over and babbled nonsense, clawing at her rancid belly. Tric climbed down from the reins and stood beside Mia, face grim. The reek of human waste and rotten blood was overpowering. The agony on display too much to bear.

‘Mia …’

‘I need a smoke,’ the girl growled.

She rolled out of the wagon, Tric hopping down beside her as she lit a cigarillo. The wind snatched at her fringe as she sucked down a lungful. Her fingers were crusted with blood. Naev was laughing, bashing the back of her head against the wagon floor.

‘We should end it,’ Tric said. ‘It’s a mercy.’

‘She told us not to.’

‘She’s in agony, Mia. Black Mother, listen to her.’

‘I know! I’d have done it yesterturn but she asked me not to.’

‘So you’re happy to just let her die screaming?’

‘Do I look fucking happy to you?’

‘Well, what do we do now? This is the simplest mountain for miles, far as I can see. I don’t see any steeple, do you? We just ride around until we drop of thirst?’

‘I don’t know any more than you do. But Naev told us to ride in this direction. That blood werking wasn’t just for shits and giggles. Someone knows we’re here.’

‘Aye, the fucking dustwraiths! They’ll hear her screaming miles away!’

‘So is it mercy or fear ruling you, Don Tric?’

‘I fear nothing,’ he growled.

‘Mister Kindly can smell it on you. And so can I.’

‘Maw take you,’ he hissed, drawing his knife. ‘I’m ending this now.’

‘Stop.’ Mia clutched his arm. ‘Don’t.’

‘Get off me!’ Tric slapped her fingers away.

Mia’s hand went to her stiletto, Tric’s hand to his scimitar. The shadows about her flared, long tendrils reaching out from the stones and swaying as if to music only they could hear.

‘She’s our only way to find the Church,’ Mia said. ‘It’s my fault those kraken got her in the first place. And she asked me not to kill her.’

‘She couldn’t find her britches for a piss, the state she’s in. And I didn’t promise her a thing.’

‘Don’t draw that sword, Don Tric. Things will end badly for both of us.’

‘I picked you for a cold one, Mia Corvere.’ He shook his head. ‘I just never knew how much. Where do you keep the heart that’s supposed to be inside your chest?’

‘Keep it up and I’ll feed you yours, bastard.’

‘Bastard I might be,’ Tric spat. ‘But you’re the one who decides to be a cunt every turn of your life.’

Mia had her knife out, smiling.

‘That’s the sweetest thing you’ve ever said to me.’

Tric drew his scimitar, those pretty hazel eyes locked on hers. Confusion and rage boiling behind her stare. A soup of it, thick in her head, silencing the common sense shouting at the back of the room. She wanted to kill this boy, she realised. Cut him belly to throat and wash her hands inside him. Soak herself to the elbows and paint her lips and breasts with his blood. Her thighs ached at the thought. Breath coming faster as she pressed one hand between her legs, murder and lust all a-tumble in her head as Mister Kindly whispered from her shadow.

‘… this is not you …’

‘Away,’ she hissed. ‘To the Maw with you, daemon.’

‘… these thoughts are not your own …’

Tric was advancing, eyes narrowed to knife-cuts, veins standing taut in his throat. He was breathing heavily, pupils dilated. Mia glanced below his waist and realised he was hard, britches bulging, the thought making her breath quicken. She blinked sweat from her eyes and pictured her blade slipping in and out of his chest, his into hers, tasting copper on his tongue …

‘This isn’t right …’ she breathed.

Tric lunged, a sweeping blow passing over her head as she swayed. She aimed a kick for his groin, blocked by his knee and tempted for a second to simply drop to her own. She stabbed at his exposed belly, knowing this was wrong, this was wrong, pulling the blow at the last moment and rolling aside as he swung again at her head. He was grinning like a lunatic, and the thought struck her funny as well. Trying not to laugh, trying to think beyond her desire to kill him, fuck him, both at once, lying with him inside her as they stabbed and bit and bled to their endings on the sand.

‘Tric, stop it,’ she gasped.

‘Come here …’

Chest heaving, hand outstretched even as she moved closer. Panting. Wanting.

‘Something is wrong. This is wrong.’

‘Come here,’ he said, stalking her across the sand, swords raised.

‘… this is not real …’

She shook her head, blinking the sting from her eyes.

‘… you are mia corvere …’ said Mister Kindly. ‘… remember …’

She held out her hand and her shadow trembled, stretching out from her feet and engulfing the boy’s. He stuck fast in the sand and she backed away, arms up as if to ward off a blow. The knife was heavy in her grip, drawing her back, mind flooded with the thought of plunging it inside him as he plunged inside her but no, NO, that wasn’t her (this isn’t me) and with a desperate cry, she hurled her blade away.

She fell to her knees, flopped onto her belly, eyes screwed shut. Sand in her teeth as she shook her head, pushed the lust and the murder down, focused on the thought Mister Kindly had gifted her, clinging to it like a drowning man at straw.

‘I am Mia Corvere,’ she breathed. ‘I am Mia Corvere …’

Slow clapping.

Mia lifted her head at the sombre sound, echoing inside her head. She saw figures around her, clad in desert red, faces covered. A dozen, gathered about a slight man with a curved sword at his waist. The hilt was fashioned in the likeness of human figures with feline heads – male and female, naked and intertwined. The blade was Ashkahi blacksteel.fn2

‘Mia?’ Tric said, his voice now his own.

Mia looked the clapping man over from her cradle in the dust. He was well built, handsome as a fistful of devils. His hair was curled, dark, peppered with grey. His face was of a man in his early thirties, but deep, cocoa-brown eyes spoke of years far deeper. A half-smile loitered at the corners of his lips as if it was planning to steal the silverware.

‘Bravo,’ he said. ‘I’ve not seen anyone resist the Discord so well since Lord Cassius.’

As the man stepped forward, the others about him broke as if on cue. They began unloading the caravan, unhitching the exhausted camels. Four of them lifted Naev into a sling, carrying her towards the cliff. Mia could see no rope. Could see no—

‘What is your name?’

‘Mia, master. Mia Corvere.’

‘And who is your Shahiid?’

‘Mercurio of Godsgrave.’

‘Ah, Mercurio at last musters the courage to send another lamb to the Church of Slaughter?’ The man held out his hand. ‘Interesting.’

She took the offered hand, and he pulled her up from the dust. Her mouth was dry, heart thudding. Echoes of murder and desire thrumming in her veins.

‘You are Tric.’ The man turned to the boy with a smile. ‘Who carries the blood and not the name of the Threedrake clan. Adiira’s student.’

Tric nodded slowly, dragged his locks from his eyes. ‘Aye.’

‘My name is Mouser, servant of Our Lady of Blessed Murder and Shahiid of Pockets in her Red Church.’ A small bow. ‘I believe you have something for us.’

The question hung like a sword above Mia’s head. A thousand turns. Sleepless nevernights and bloody fingers and poison dripping from her hands. Broken bones and burning tears and lies upon lies. Everything she’d done, everything she’d lost – all of it came to this.

Mia reached for the pouch of teeth at her belt.

Her belly turned to ice.

‘… No,’ she breathed.

Feeling about her waist, her tunic, eyes widening in a panic as she realised—

‘My tithe! It’s gone!’

‘O, dear,’ said Mouser.

‘But I just had it!’

Mia searched the sands about her, fearing she’d lost it in the struggle with Tric. Scrabbling in the dust, tears in her eyes. Mister Kindly swelled and rolled inside her shadow’s dark, but even he couldn’t keep her terror completely at bay – the thought that everything had been for nothing … Crawling in the dirt, hair tangled across her eyes, chewing her lip and—

Clink, clink.

She looked up. Saw a familiar sheepskin purse held in supple fingers.

Mouser’s smile.

‘You should be more careful, little lamb. Shahiid of Pockets, as I said.’

Mia stood and snatched the purse with a snarl. Opening the bag, she counted the teeth therein, clutched it in a bloodless fist. She looked the man over, rage engulfing her terror for a moment. She had to resist the urge to add his teeth to her collection.

‘That was heartless,’ she said.

The man smiled wider, sadness lingering at the corners of those old eyes.

‘Welcome to the Red Church,’ he said.

CHAPTER 8
SALVATION

‘Two irons and twelve coppers,’ the boy crowed. ‘Tonight we eat like kings. Or queens. As the case may be.’

‘What,’ scoffed the grubby girl beside him. ‘You mean crucified in Tyrant’s Row? I’d rather eat like a consul if it’s all the same to you.’

‘Girls can’t be consuls, sis.’

‘Doesn’t mean I can’t eat like one.’

Three urchins were crouched in an alley not too far off the market’s crush, a basket of stale pastries beside them. The first, the quick-fingered lad who’d bumped into Mia in the marketplace. The second, a girl with grubby blonde hair and bare feet. The third was a slightly older boy, gutter-thin and mean. They were dressed in threadbare clothes, though the bigger boy wore a fine belt of knives at his waist. The proceeds of their morning’s work were laid before them; a handful of coins and a silver crow with amber eyes.

‘That’s mine,’ Mia said from behind them.

The trio stood quickly, turned to face their accuser. Mia stood at the alley mouth, fists on hips. The bigger boy pulled a knife from his belt.

‘You give that back right now,’ said Mia.

‘Or what?’ the boy said, raising his blade.

‘Or I yell for the Luminatii. They’ll cut off your hands and dump you in the Choir if you’re lucky. Throw you in the Philosopher’s Stone if not.’

The trio gifted her a round of mocking laughter.

The black at Mia’s feet rippled. The fear inside her became nothing at all. And folding her arms, she puffed out her chest, narrowed her eyes, and spoke with a voice she didn’t quite recognise as her own.

‘Give. It. Back.’

‘Fuck off, you little whore,’ the big one said.

A scowl darkened Mia’s brow. ‘… Whore?’

‘Cut her, Shivs,’ the younger boy said. ‘Cut her a new hole.’

Cheeks reddening, Mia peered at the first boy.

‘Your name is Shivs? O, because you carry knives, aye?’ She glanced at the younger boy. ‘You’d be Fleas then?’ To the girl. ‘Let me guess, Worms?’ fn1

‘Clever,’ said the blonde. And stepping lightly to Mia’s side, she drew back a fist and buried it in Mia’s stomach.

The breath left her lungs with a wet cough as she fell to her knees. Blinking and blinded, Mia clutched her belly, trying not to retch. Astonishment inside her. Astonishment and rage.

Nobody had hit her before.

Nobody had dared.

She’d seen her mother fence wits countless times in the Spine. She’d seen men reduced to stuttering lumps by the Dona Corvere, women driven to tears. And Mia had studied well. But the rules said the aggrieved was supposed to riposte with some barb of their own, not haul off and punch her like some lowborn thug in an alley scra—

‘O …’ Mia wheezed. ‘Right.’

Shivs strode across the alley and slammed a boot into her ribs. The blonde (who in Mia’s mind would ever after be thought of as Worms) smiled cheerfully as Mia vomited on an empty stomach. Turning to the younger boy, Shivs pointed at their loot.

‘Pick that up and let’s be off. I’ve got—’

Shivs felt something sharp and deathly cold dig into his britches. He glanced down to the stiletto poking his privates, the little fist clutching it tight. Mia had wrapped herself around his waist, pressing her mother’s dagger into the boy’s crotch, the crow on the pommel glaring at Shivs with two amber eyes. Her whisper was soft and deadly.

‘Whore, am I?’

Now, if this were a storybook tale, gentlefriend, and Mia the hero within it, Shivs would’ve seen some shadow of the killer she’d become and backed away all a-tremble. But the truth is, the boy stood two feet taller than Mia, and outweighed her by eighty pounds. And looking down at the girl around his waist, he didn’t see the most feared assassin in all the Republic – just a sprat with no real idea how to hold a knife, her face so close to his elbow one good twitch would send her sprawling.

So Shivs twitched. And Mia wasn’t sent sprawling so much as flying.

She fell into the mud, clutching a broken nose, blinded by agonised tears. The younger boy (ever after thought of as Fleas) picked up Dona Corvere’s fallen dagger, eyes wide.

‘Daughters, lookit this!’

‘Toss it here.’

The boy flipped it hilt first. Shivs snatched the knife from the air, admired the craftsmanship with greedy eyes.

‘Aa’s cock, this is real gravebone …’

Fleas kicked Mia hard in the ribs. ‘Where did a trollop like you get—’

A wrinkled hand landed on the lad’s shoulder, slamming him against the wall. A knee said hello to his groin, a gnarled walking stick invited his jaw to dance.fn2 A double-handed strike to the back of his head left him bleeding in the dirt.

Old Mercurio stood above him, clad in a long greatcoat of beaten leather, a walking stick in one bony hand. His ice-blue eyes were narrowed, taking in the scene, the girl sprawled bloody on the ground. He looked at Shivs, lips peeled back in a sneer.

‘That’s your game is it? Kickball?’ He aimed a savage boot into the ribs of young Fleas, rewarded with a sickening crack. ‘Mind if I join?’

Shivs glared at the old man, down at his bleeding comrade. And with a black curse, he hefted the Dona Corvere’s stiletto and hurled it at Mercurio’s head.

It was a fine throw. Right between the eyes. But instead of dying, the old man snatched the blade from midair, quick as the stink on the banks of the Rose.fn3 Tucking the stiletto inside his greatcoat, Mercurio took hold of his walking stick, and with a crisp ring, drew a long, gravebone blade hidden within the shaft. He advanced on Shivs and Worms, brandishing the sword.

‘O, Liisian rules, aye? Old school? Fair enough, then.’

Shivs and Worms glanced at each other, panic in their eyes. And without a word, the pair turned and bolted down the alley, leaving poor Fleas unconscious in the muck.

Mia was on her hands and knees. Cheeks stained with tears and blood. Her nose felt raw and swollen, throbbing red. She couldn’t see properly. Couldn’t think.

‘Told you that brooch would be naught but trouble,’ Mercurio growled. ‘You’d have done better listening, girl.’

Mia felt a heat in her chest. Stinging at her eyes. Another child might have bawled for her mother, then. Cried the world wasn’t fair. But instead, all the rage, all the indignity, the memory of her father’s death, her mother’s arrest, the brutality and attempted murder, stacked afresh now with robbery and an alley scrap she’d been on the wrong side of winning – all of it piled up inside her like tinder on a bonfire and bursting into bright, furious flame.

‘Don’t call me “girl”.’ Mia spat, pawing the tears from her eyes. She pulled herself halfway up the wall, slumped back down again. ‘I am the daughter of a justicus. Firstchild of one of the twelve noble houses. I’m Mia Corvere, damn you!’

‘O, I know who you are,’ said the old man. ‘Question is, who else does?’

‘… What?’

‘Who else knows you’re the Kingmaker’s sprog, missy?’

‘No one,’ she snarled. ‘I’ve told no one. And don’t call me “missy”, either.’

A sniff. ‘Not as stupid as I thought, then.’

The old man looked down the alley. Back at the marketplace. Finally, to the bleeding girl at his feet. And with something close to a sigh, he offered his hand.

‘Come on, little Crow. Let’s get your beak straightened out.’

Mia wiped her fist across her lips, brought it away bloody.

‘I know you not at all, sir,’ she said. ‘And I trust you even less.’

‘Well, those’re the first sensible words I’ve heard you hatch. But if I wanted you dead, I’d just leave you to it. Because alone out here, you’ll be dead by nevernight.’

Mia stayed where she was, distrust plain in her eyes.

‘I’ve got tea,’ Mercurio sighed. ‘And cake.’

The girl covered her growling belly with both palms.

‘… What kind of cake?’

‘The free kind.’

Mia pouted. Licked her lips and tasted blood.

‘My favourite.’

And she took the old man’s hand.

‘And I said I’m not wearing that!’ Tric bellowed.

‘Apologies,’ said Mouser. ‘Did I give the impression I was asking?’

At the simplest mountain’s foot, Mia was doing her best to keep a level head. The churchmen were gathered by the cliff face, each with an armload of gear or a weary camel in tow. Mouser was holding out blindfolds, which he’d insisted Mia and Tric wear. For some inexplicable reason, Tric had grown furious at the suggestion. Mia could practically see the hackles rising down the Dweymeri boy’s back.

Though she felt no remnants of the strange cocktail of rage and lust that had filled her earlier, Mia thought perhaps her friend might still be under the influence. She turned to Mouser.

‘Shahiid, our minds weren’t our own when we arrived …’

‘The Discord. A werking placed on the Quiet Mountain in ages past.’

‘It’s still affecting him.’

‘No. It discourages those who arrive at the Church without … invitation. You are now welcome here. If you wear blindfolds.’

‘We saved her life.’ Tric gestured to Naev. ‘And you still don’t trust us?’

Mouser tucked his thumbs into his belt and smiled his silverware smile. His voice was as rich as Twelve Cask goldwine.fn4

‘You still live, don’t you?’

‘Tric, what difference does it make?’ Mia asked. ‘Just put it on.’

‘I’m not wearing any blindfold.’

‘But we’ve come so far …’

‘And you will go no farther,’ Mouser added. ‘Not with eyes to see.’

Tric folded his arms and glowered. ‘No.’

Mia sighed, dragged her hand through her fringe. ‘Shahiid Mouser. I’d like a moment to confer with my learned colleague?’

‘Be swift,’ the Shahiid said. ‘If Naev dies on the very doorstep, Speaker Adonai will be none pleased. On your heads be it should Our Lady take her.’

Mia wondered what the Shahiid meant – the kraken wounds were fatal, and Naev was already a dead woman. But still, she took Tric’s hand, dragged him across the crumbling foothills. Out of earshot, she turned on the boy, infamous temper slowly rising.

‘Maw’s teeth, what’s wrong with you?’

‘I won’t do it. I’d rather cut my own throat.’

‘They’ll do that for you if you keep this up!’

‘Let them try.’

‘This is the way they do things, so this is the way it’s done! Do you understand what we add up to, here? We’re acolytes! Bottom of the pile! We do it, or they do us.’

‘I’m not wearing a blindfold.’

‘Then you won’t get inside the Church.’

‘Maw take the Church!’

Mia rocked back on her heels, frown darkening her brow.

‘… he fears …’ whispered Mister Kindly from her shadow.

‘Shut up, you black-hearted little shit,’ Tric snapped.

‘Tric, what are you afraid of?’

Mister Kindly sniffed with his not-nose, blinked with his not-eyes.

‘… the dark …’

‘Shut up!’ Tric roared.

Mia blinked, incredulity slapped all over her face. ‘You can’t be serious …’

‘… apologies, i was uninformed i’d been relegated to the role of comic relief …’

Mia tried to catch Tric’s stare, but the boy was frowning at his feet.

‘Tric, are you honestly telling me you’ve come to train among the most feared assassins in the Republic and you’re afraid of the bloody dark?’

Tric was set to yell again, but the words died on his tongue. Gritted teeth, hands curling into fists, those artless tattoos twisting as he grimaced.

‘… It’s not the damned dark.’ A quiet sigh. ‘Just … not being able to see. I …’

He slumped down on his backside, kicked a toeful of shale down the slope.

‘O, sod it …’

Guilt welled up in Mia’s chest, drowning the anger beneath. She knelt beside the Dweymeri with a sigh, put a comforting hand on his arm.

‘I’m sorry, Tric. What happened?’

‘Bad things.’ Tric pawed at his eyes. ‘Just … bad things.’

She took his hand and squeezed, acutely aware of how much she was growing to like this strange boy. To see him like this, shivering like a child …

‘I can take it away,’ she offered.

‘… Take what away?’

‘Your fear. Well, Mister Kindly can, anyway. For a little while. He drinks it. Breathes it. It’s what keeps him here. Makes him grow.’

Tric frowned at the shadow-creature, revulsion in his eyes.

‘… Fear?’

Mia nodded. ‘He’s been drinking mine for years. Not enough to make me forget common sense, mind. But enough to make me stand tall in a knife-fight or snatch-job. He makes me strong.’

‘That makes no sense,’ Tric scowled. ‘If he’s eating your fear, you never learn how to deal with it yourself. That’s not strength, that’s a crutch …’

‘Well, it’s a crutch I’m willing to loan you, Don Tric.’ Mia glared. ‘So instead of lecturing me on my faults, I’d rather you said “thank you, Pale Daughter”, and got your sorry arse inside the Church before they slit our throats and leave us for the kraken.’

The boy stared down at their clasped hands. Nodded slowly.

‘… Thank you, Pale Daughter.’

She stood, pulled him to his feet. Mister Kindly didn’t need to be asked – simply flowed across the join where their shadows intersected. Anxiety began eating Mia’s insides immediately, cold worms gnawing at her belly. But she did her best to stomp on them with her boots, as Tric marched her across the broken ground towards Mouser.

‘You’re ready then?’ the Shahiid asked.

‘We’re ready,’ Tric said.

Mia smiled to hear his voice, almost a full octave deeper. He squeezed her fingers and closed his eyes, allowing Mouser to tie the blindfold. Tying Mia’s, the Shahiid grasped their hands, led them across the broken ground. She heard a word spoken – something ancient and humming with power. And then she heard stone; the great cracking and rumbling of stone. The ground shuddered beneath her, dust rising in a choking pall. She felt a rushing wind, smelled a greasy arkemical tang in the air.

Hands took her own, led her forward, across broken ground and onto smooth rock. The temperature dropped suddenly, the light beyond her eyelids dying slow. They were somewhere dark now; inside the mountain’s belly, she supposed. Mouser leading her by the hand, they reached stairs, climbing up, up in an ever-widening spiral. Twisting and turning, a soft vertigo filling her mind, all track of the direction she’d come from or the direction they were headed fading. Up. Down. Left. Right. Concepts with no meaning. No memory. She felt an almost overwhelming desire to call Mister Kindly back, to feel that familiar touch she no longer quite knew how to live without.

At last, after what seemed like hours, Mouser released his grip. For a moment she faltered. Imagining she stood at the mountain’s peak, nothing about her but a straight fall to her death. Arms outstretched to keep her balance. Breathing hard.

‘Come back,’ she whispered.

She felt the not-cat rush back in a flood, pouncing on the butterflies in her belly and dismembering them one by one. The blindfold was removed and she blinked, saw an enormous hall, bigger than the belly of the grandest cathedral. Walls and floor of dark granite, smooth as river stones. Soft arkemical light shone from within beautiful windows of stained glass, giving the impression of the sunslight outside – though in truth they could be miles within the mountain by now. Tric stood beside her, gazing about the room. Vast pointed archways and enormous stone pillars were arranged in a circle, soaring stone gables seemingly carved in the core of the mountain itself.

‘Trelene’s great … soft …’

Word failed as the boy looked towards the room’s heart. Mia followed his gaze, saw the statue of a woman, jewels hung like stars on her ebony robe. The figure was colossal, towering forty feet above their heads, carved of gleaming black stone. Small iron rings were embedded in the rock, about head height. In her hands she held a scale and a massive, wicked sword, broad as tree trunks, sharp as obsidian. Her face was beautiful. Terrible and cold. Mia felt a chill trickle down her spine, the statue’s eyes following as she walked closer.

‘Welcome to the Hall of Eulogies,’ Mouser said.

‘Who is she?’

‘The Mother.’ Mouser touched his eyes, then his lips, then his chest. ‘The Maw. Our Lady of Blessed Murder. Almighty Niah.’

‘But … she’s beautiful,’ Mia breathed. ‘In the pictures I’ve seen, she’s a monstrosity.’

‘The Light is full of lies, Acolyte. The Suns serve only to blind us.’

Mia wandered the mighty hall, running her hands over the spiral patterns in the stone. The walls were set with hundreds of small doors, two feet square, stacked one upon another as if tombs in some great mausoleum. Her footfalls rang like bells in the vast space. The only sound was the tune of what might have been a choir, hanging disembodied in the air. The hymn was beautiful, wordless, endless. The place had a feeling unlike any other she’d visited. There were no altars nor golden trim, but for the first time in her life, she felt as if she were somewhere … sanctified.

Mister Kindly whispered in her ear.

‘… i like it here …’

‘What are these names, Shahiid?’ Tric asked.

Mia blinked, realised the floor beneath them was engraved with names. Hundreds. Thousands. Etched in tiny letters on polished black stone.

‘The names of every life claimed by this Church for the Mother.’ The man bowed to the statue above. ‘Here we honour those taken. The Hall of Eulogies, as I said.’

‘And the tombs?’ Mia asked, nodding to the walls.

‘They house the bodies of servants of the Mother, gone to her side. Along with those we have taken, here we also honour those fallen.’

‘But there are no names carved on these tombs, Shahiid.’

Mouser stared at Mia, the ghostly choir singing in the dark.

‘The Mother knows their names,’ he finally said. ‘No other matters.’

Mia blinked. Glancing up at the statue looming above her head. The goddess to whom this Church belonged. Terrible and beautiful. Unknowable and powerful.

‘Come,’ said Shahiid Mouser. ‘Your chambers await.’

He led them from the grand hall, through one of the vast pointed arches. A great flight of steps spiralled up into the black. Mia remembered Old Mercurio’s willow switch, the accursed library stairs he’d made her run up and down so many times she’d lost count. She smiled at the memory, even as she thanked the old man for the exercise, climbing in long, easy strides.

They ascended, the Shahiid of Pockets behind them, silent as the plague.

‘Black Mother,’ Tric panted. ‘They should have named it the Red Stairwell …’

‘Are you well?’ she whispered. ‘Mister Kindly helped?’

‘Aye. It was …’ The boy shook his head. ‘To look inside and find only steel … I’ve never felt anything like it. Crutch be damned. Being darkin must be a grand thing.’

They trudged up the stairs into a long corridor. Arches stretching away into lightless black, spiral patterns on every wall. Shahiid Mouser stopped outside a wooden door, pushed it open. Mia looked in on a large room, furnished with beautiful dark wood and a huge bed covered in lush grey fur. Her body ached at the sight. It’d been at least two nevernights since she slept …

‘Your chambers, Acolyte Mia,’ Mouser said.

‘Where do I stay?’ Tric asked.

‘Down the hall. The other acolytes are already settled. You two are the last to arrive.’

‘How many are there?’ Mia asked.

‘Almost thirty. I look forward to seeing which are iron and which are glass.’

Tric nodded in farewell and followed Mouser down the corridor. Mia stepped inside and dropped her pack by the door. Habit forced her to search every corner, drawer, and keyhole. She finished by peering under the bed before collapsing atop it. Contemplating untying her boots, she decided she was too exhausted to bother. And dropping back into the pillows, she crashed into a sleep deeper than she’d ever known.

A cat made of shadows perched on the bedhead, watching her dreams.

She woke to Mister Kindly’s cold whisper in her ear.

‘… someone comes …’

Her eyes flashed open and she sat up as a soft rapping sounded at her door. Mia drew her dagger, clawed the hair from sand-crusted eyes. Forgetting where she was for a moment. Back in her old room above Mercurio’s shop? Back in the Ribs, her baby brother asleep beside her, parents in the next room …

No.

Don’t look …

She spoke uncertainly. ‘Come in?’

The door opened softly and a figure swathed in black robes entered, crossing the room to halt at the foot of the bed. Mia raised her gravebone blade warily.

‘You either picked the wrong room or the wrong girl …’

The intruder raised her hands. She pulled back her hood, and Mia saw strawberry-blonde curls, familiar eyes peering out between veils of black cloth.

‘Naev …?’

But that was impossible. The woman’s guts had been torn to ribbons by those kraken hooks. After two turns rotting in the sun, her blood would’ve been swimming with poison. How in the Maw’s name was she even alive, let alone walking and talking?

‘You should be dead …’

‘Should be. But is not.’ The thin woman bowed. ‘Thanks to her.’

Mia shook her head. ‘You don’t owe me thanks.’

‘More than thanks. She risked her life to save Naev. Naev will not forget.’

Mia shuffled back as Naev produced a hidden blade from within her sleeve, Mister Kindly puffing up in her shadow. But Naev drew the knife along the heel of her own hand, blood welling from the cut and spattering on the floor.

‘She saved Naev’s life,’ the woman said. ‘So now, Naev owes it. On her blood, in the sight of Mother Night, Naev vows it.’

‘You don’t need to do this …’

‘It is done.’

Naev leaned down and began unlacing Mia’s boots. Mia yelped, tucked them underneath her. The woman reached for the ties on Mia’s shirt, and Mia slapped her hands away, backing off across the bed with her own hands raised.

‘Now, look here …’

‘She must undress.’

‘You really picked the wrong girl. And most people offer a drink first.’

Naev put her hands on her hips. ‘She must bathe before she meets the Ministry. If Naev may speak plain, she reeks of horse and excrement, her hair is greasier than a Liisian sweetbread, and she is painted in dried blood. If she wishes to attend her baptism into the Blessed Lady’s congregation looking like a Dweymeri savage, Naev suggests she saves herself the pain and simply steps off the Sky Altar now.’

‘Wait …’ Mia blinked. ‘Did you say bath?’

‘… Naev did.’

‘With water?’ Mia was up on her knees, hands clutched at her breast. ‘And soap?’

The woman nodded. ‘Five kinds.’

‘Maw’s teeth,’ Mia said, unlacing her shirt. ‘You picked the right girl after all.’

Dark figures gathered in the gaze of a stone goddess, bathed with colourless light.

It had been twelve hours since Mia arrived at the Quiet Mountain. Four since she woke. Twenty-seven minutes since she’d dragged herself from her bath and down to the Hall of Eulogies, leaving a scum of blood and grime on the water’s surface that could’ve walked away by itself if given a few more turns to gestate.

The robe was soft against her skin, her hair bound in a damp braid. Soap scent drifted about her when she turned to look among the other acolytes – twenty-eight in all, dressed in toneless grey. A brutish Itreyan boy with fists like sledgehammers. A wiry lass with bobbed red hair, eyes filled with wolf cunning. A towering Dweymeri, with ornate facial tattoos and shoulders you could rest the world on. Two blond and freckled Vaanians – brother and sister, by the look. A thin boy with ice-blue eyes, standing near Tric at the end of the row, so still she almost missed him. All of them around her age. All of them hard and hungry and silent.

Naev stood close by Mia, swathed in shadows. Other quiet figures in black robes stood at the edge of the darkness, men and women, fingers entwined like penitents in a cathedral.

‘Hands,’ Naev had whispered. ‘She will find two kinds in the Red Church. The ones who take vocations, make offerings … what commonfolk call assassins, yes? We call them Blades.’

Mia nodded. ‘Mercurio told me such.’

‘The second are called Hands,’ Naev continued. ‘There are twenty Hands for every Blade. They keep her House in order. Manage affairs. Make supply runs, like Naev. No more than four acolytes in every flock become Blades. Those who survive the year but fail to pass the grade will become Hands. Other folk simply come here to serve the goddess as they can. Not everyone is suited to do murder in her name.’

So. Only four of us can make the cut.

Mia nodded, watching the black-robed figures. Squinting in the dark, she could see the arkemical scar of slavery on a few cheeks. After the acolytes had finished assembling beneath the statue’s gaze, the Hands spoke a scrap of scripture, Naev along with them, each speaking by rote.

‘She who is all and nothing,

First and last and always,

A perfect black, a Hungry Dark,

Maid and Mother and Matriarch,

Now, and at the moment of our deaths,

Pray for us.’

A bell rang, soft, somewhere in the gloom. Mia felt Mister Kindly curled about her feet, drinking deep. She heard footsteps, saw a figure approaching from the shadows. The Hands raised their voices in unison.

‘Mouser, Shahiid of Pockets, pray for us.’

A familiar figure stepped onto the dais around the statue’s base. Handsome face and old eyes – the man who’d met Mia and Tric outside the Mountain. He was robed in grey, his blacksteel sword the only embellishment. He took his place, faced the acolytes, and with a grin that could easily make off with the silverware and the candelabras, too, he spoke.

‘Twenty-six.’

Mia heard more footsteps, and the Hands spoke again.

‘Spiderkiller, Shahiid of Truths, pray for us.’

A Dweymeri woman stalked from the gloom, tall and stately, her back as straight as the pillars around them. Long hair in neat, knotted locks, streaming down her back like rope. Her skin was dark like all her people, but she wore no facial tattoos. She seemed a moving statue, carved of mahogany. Clasped hands were stained with what might have been ink. Her lips were painted black. A collection of glass phials hung at her belt beside three curved daggers.

She took her place on the dais, spoke with a strong, proud voice.

‘Twenty-nine.’

Mia watched on in silence, gnawing at her lip. And though Mercurio had schooled Mia well in the subtle art of patience, curiosity finally got the best of her.fn5

‘What are they doing?’ Mia whispered to Naev. ‘What do the numbers mean?’

‘Their tally for the goddess. The number of offerings they have wrought in her name.’

‘Solis, Shahiid of Songs, pray for us.’

Mia watched a man stride from the shadows, also clad in grey. He was a huge lump of a thing, biceps big as her thighs. His head was shaved to stubble, so blond it was almost white, scalp lined with scars. His beard was set in four spikes at his chin. He wore a sword belt, but his scabbard was empty. As he took his place, Mia looked into his eyes and realised he was blind.

‘Thirty-six,’ he said.

Thirty-six murders? At the hands of a blind man?

‘Aalea, Shahiid of Masks, pray for us.’

Another woman padded into the soft light, swaying as she came, all curves and alabaster skin. Mia found her jaw agape – the newcomer was easily the most beautiful woman she’d laid eyes on. Thick black hair cascading to her waist, dark eyes smeared with kohl, lips painted bloody red. She was unarmed. Apparently.

‘Thirty-nine,’ she said, with a voice like sweet smoke.

‘Revered Mother Drusilla, pray for us.’

A woman slipped out of the darkness, soundless as cot death. She was elderly, curling grey hair bound in braids. An obsidian key hung about her throat on a silver chain. She seemed a kindly old thing, eyes twinkling as she looked over the group. Mia would’ve expected to find her in a rocking chair beside a happy hearth, grandchildren on her knee and a cup of tea by her elbow. This couldn’t be the chief minister of the deadliest band of—

‘Eighty-three,’ the old woman said, taking her place on the dais.

Maw take me, eighty-three …

The Revered Mother looked over the group, a gentle smile on her lips.

‘I bid you welcome to the Red Church, children,’ she said. ‘You have travelled miles and years to be here. You have miles and years to go. But at journey’s end, you will be Blades, wielded for the glory of the goddess in the most sacred of sacraments.

‘Those who survive, of course.’

The old woman gestured to the four figures around her.

‘Heed the words of your Shahiid. Know that everything you were prior to this moment is dead. That once you pledge yourself to the Maw, you are hers and hers alone.’ A robed figure with a silver bowl stepped up beside the Revered Mother, and she beckoned Mia. ‘Bring forth your tithe. The remnants of a killer, killed in turn and offered to Our Lady of Blessed Murder in this, the hour of your baptism.’

Mia stepped forward, purse in hand. Her stomach was turning flips, but her hands were steady as stone. She took her place before the old woman and her gentle smile, looked deep into pale blue eyes. Felt herself being weighed. Wondered if she’d been found wanting.

‘My tithe,’ she managed to say. ‘For the Maw.’

‘I accept it in her name with her thanks upon my lips.’

Mia sighed as she heard the response, almost falling to her knees as the Revered Mother embraced her, kissed one cheek after another with ice-cold lips. She squeezed Mia tight as the girl breathed deep, blinking back hot tears. And turning to the silver bowl, the old woman dipped one stick-thin hand inside and drew it back, dripping red.

Blood.

‘Speak your name.’

‘Mia Corvere.’

‘Do you vow to serve the Mother of Night? Will you learn death in all its colours, bring it to the deserving and undeserving in her name? Will you become an Acolyte of Niah, and an earthly instrument of the dark between the stars?’

Mia found herself struggling to inhale.

The deep breath before the plunge.

‘I will.’

The Revered Mother pressed her palm to Mia’s cheek, smearing the blood down her skin. It was still warm, the scent of salt and copper filling the girl’s lungs. The old woman marked one cheek, then the other, finally smudging a long streak down Mia’s lips and chin. The girl felt the gravity of that moment in her bones, dragging her belly to her boots. The Mother nodded and Mia backed away, hugging herself, licking the blood from her lips, near weeping, laughing. One step closer to avenging her familia. One step closer to standing on Scaeva’s tomb.

She was here, she realised.

I’m here.

The ritual was repeated, each acolyte bringing forth their tithes one by one. Some brought teeth, others eyes – the tall boy with the sledgehammer hands brought a rotting heart, wrapped in black velvet. Mia realised there wasn’t a single one of them who wasn’t a murderer. That of all the rooms in the Republic there was probably none more dangerous than the one she stood in, right at that moment.fn6

‘Your studies begin on the morrow,’ the Revered Mother said. ‘Evemeal will be served in the Sky Altar in a half-hour.’ She indicated the row of robed figures. ‘Hands will be available should you need guidance, and I would suggest you avail yourselves until you find your bearings. The Mountain can be difficult to navigate at first, and getting lost within these halls can have … unfortunate consequences.’ Blue eyes glittered in the dark. ‘Walk softly. Learn well. May Our Lady be late when she finds you. And when she does, may she greet you with a kiss.’

The old woman bowed, stepped back into the gloom. The other Ministry members left one by one. Tric wandered over to Mia, greeted her with a smile, his cheeks red with blood. He’d been bathed and scrubbed, and even his saltlocks looked a little less sentient.

‘You shaved,’ she smirked.

‘Don’t get used to it. Happens twice a year.’ He squinted at Naev, recognition slowly widening in his eyes. ‘How in the name of the Lady …’

‘We meet again.’ The thin woman bowed low. ‘Naev gives thanks for his assistance in the deep desert. The debt shall not be forgot.’

‘How are you still walking and breathing?’

‘Secrets within secrets in this place,’ Mia said.

‘Corvere?’ said a soft voice behind her.

Mia turned to the speaker. It was the girl she’d noted; the pretty one with a jagged red bob and green, hunter’s eyes. She was studying Mia intently, head tilted. The tall Itreyan boy with sledgehammer hands loomed beside her like an angry shadow.

‘In the ceremony,’ the girl said. ‘You said your name was Corvere?’

‘Aye,’ Mia said.

‘Are you by chance related to Darius Corvere? The former justicus?’

Mia weighed up the girl in her mind. Fit. Fast. Hard as wood. But whoever she was, Mia was certain Scaeva and his cronies would have no allies within these walls; Remus and his Luminatii had vowed to do away with the Red Church since the Truedark Massacre, after all. Even so, Mercurio had urged Mia to leave her name behind when she crossed this threshold. It was one of the few things they’d argued about. Stupid perhaps. But her father’s death was the whole reason she’d begun walking this road. The name Corvere had been erased from the histories by Scaeva and his lackeys – she’d not leave it behind in the dust, no matter what it cost her.

‘I’m Darius Corvere’s daughter,’ Mia finally replied. ‘And you are?’

‘Jessamine, daughter of Marcinus Gratianus.’

‘Apologies. Is that someone I should have heard of?’

‘First centurion of the Luminatii Legion,’ the girl scowled. ‘Executed by order of the Itreyan Senate after the Kingmaker Rebellion.’

Mia’s frown softened. Black Mother, this was the daughter of one of her father’s centurions. A girl just like her – orphaned by Consul Scaeva and Justicus Remus and the rest of those bastards. Someone who knew the taste of injustice as well as she did.

Mia offered her hand. ‘Well met, sister. My—’

Jessamine slapped the hand away, eyes flashing. ‘You’re no sister to me, bitch.’

Mia felt Tric bristle beside her, Mister Kindly’s hackles rise in the shadow at her feet. She rubbed her slapped knuckles, speaking carefully.

‘I grieve your loss. Truly, I do. My fath—’

‘Your father was a fucking traitor,’ Jessamine snarled. ‘His men died because they honoured their oaths to a fool justicus, and their skulls now pave the steps to the Senate House. Because of the mighty Darius Corvere.’

‘My father was loyal to General Antonius,’ Mia said. ‘He had oaths to honour too.’

‘Your father was a fucking lapdog,’ Jessamine spat. ‘Everyone knows why he followed Antonius, and it had nothing to do with honour. My father and brother were crucified because of him. My mother dead of grief in Godsgrave Asylum. All of them, unavenged.’ The girl stepped closer, eyes narrowed. ‘But not much longer. You’d best grow some eyes in the back of your head, Corvere. You’d best start sleeping light.’

Mia stared the girl down, unblinking, Mister Kindly swelling beneath her feet. Naev drifted closer to the red-headed girl, lisping in her ear.

‘She will step away. Or she will be stepped upon.’

Jessamine glanced at the woman, jaw clenched. After a staring contest that stretched for miles, the girl spun on her heel and stalked off, the big Itreyan boy trailing behind. Mia realised her nails were cutting her palms.

‘You surely do know how to make friends, Pale Daughter.’

Mia turned to Tric, found him smiling, though his hand was also up his sleeve. She relaxed a touch, allowed herself a smile too. Bad as she was at making them, at least she had one friend within these walls.

‘Come on,’ the boy said. ‘We going to evemeal or not?’

Mia looked after the retreating Jessamine. Glanced around at the other acolytes. The reality of where she was sank home deeper. A school of killers. Surrounded by novices or masters in the art of murder. She was here. This was it.

Time to get to work.

‘Evemeal sounds good,’ she nodded. ‘I can’t think of a better place to start scouting.’

‘Scouting? For what?’

‘You’ve heard the saying the quickest way to a man’s heart is through his stomach?’

‘I always wondered about that,’ Tric frowned. ‘Ribcage seems much quicker to me.’

‘True enough. But still, you can learn a lot about animals. Watching them eat.’

‘… You’re a little frightening sometimes, Pale Daughter.’

She gave him a wry smile. ‘Only a little?’

‘Well, most times, you’re just plain terrifying.’

‘Come on,’ she said, slapping his arm. ‘I’ll buy you a drink.’

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