Nevernight

‘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.