Darkdawn

dripdrip

dripdrip

on the stone/glass/ice at their feet, like blood from an open wrist.

Her mother’s gown was black as sin as night as death, strung with a billion tiny points of light. They shone from within, out through the shroud of her gown, like pinpricks in a curtain drawn against the sun. She was beautiful. Terrible. Her eyes were as black as her dress, deeper than oceans. Her skin was pale and bright as stars.

She had Alinne Corvere’s face. But Mia knew, in that dreaming, knowing kind of way, that this wasn’t her real face. Because the Night had no face at all.

And across the infinite gray, he waited for them.

Her father.

He was clad all in white, so bright and sharp it hurt Mia’s eyes to look at him. But she looked all the same. He stared back as she and her mother approached, three eyes fixed on her, red and yellow and blue. He was handsome, she had to admit—almost painfully so. Black curls dusted with just the faintest hints of gray at his temples. Shoulders broad, bronze skin contrasting sharply with the snow white of his robes.

He had Julius Scaeva’s face. But Mia knew, in that dreaming, knowing kind of way, that this wasn’t his real face, either.

Four young women stood about him. One wreathed in flame and another shrouded in waves and the third wearing only the wind. The fourth was sleeping on the floor, clad in autumn leaves. The wakeful trio stared at Mia with bitter, unveiled malice.

“Husband,” her mother said.

“Wife,” her father replied.

They stood there in silence, the six of them, and Mia could have heard her heart thumping in her chest, if only she’ d had one.

“I missed you,” her mother finally sighed.

The silence grew so complete, it was deafening.

“This is he?” her father asked.

“You know it is,” her mother replied.

And Mia wanted to speak then, to say she wasn’t a he but a she. But looking down, the child saw the strangest thing reflected in the mirrored stone/glass/ice at her feet.

She saw herself, as she saw herself—pale skin and long dark hair draped over thin shoulders and eyes of burning white. But looming at her back, she saw a figure cut from the darkness, black as her mother’s gown.

It peered at her with its not-eyes, its form shivering and shifting like lightless flame. Tongues of dark fire rippled from its shoulders, the top of its crown, as if it were a candle burning. On its forehead, a silver circle was scribed. And like a looking glass, that circle caught the light from her father’s robes and reflected it back, the radiance as pale and bright as Mia’s eyes.

And looking into that single, perfect circle, Mia understood what moonlight was.

“I will never forgive you for this,” her father said.

“I will never ask you to,” her mother replied.

“I will suffer no rival.”

“And I no threats.”

“I am greater.”

“But I was first. And I trust your hollow victory will keep you warm in the night.”

Her father looked down at her, his smile dark as bruises.

“Would you like to know what keeps me warm in the night, little one?”

Mia looked down at her reflection again. Watched the pale circle at her brow shatter into a thousand glittering shards. The shadow at her feet splintered, splayed in every direction, maddening patterns surging, seething, the night-thing shapes of cats and wolves and serpents and crows and the shapes of nothing at all. Ink-black tendrils sprouted from her back like wings, razors of darkness from every fingertip. She could hear screaming, growing louder and louder.

Realizing at last that the voice was her own.

“The many were one,” her mother said. “And will be again.”

But her father shook his head.

“In every possible sense, you are my daughter.”

He held up a black pawn on his burning palm.

“And you are going to die.”

BOOK 2

CHAPTER 10

INFIDELITY

Mia woke with a gasp, almost falling from her hammock.

The portholes were shuttered as they’d been for the past two turns. The cabin was shrouded in the same gloom that had filled it since they put out from the Nethers, rocking to the gentle motion of the open sea. Almost three turns after the magni, Mia was still aching in places she never knew she had, and still in need of about seven more nevernights’ worth of sleep.

Genuine sleep, that is.

Dreams. Dreams of blood and fire. Dreams of endless gray. Dreams of her mother and her father, or things wearing their faces. Dreams of Furian, dead at her hand. Dreams of her shadow, growing darker and darker at her feet until she slipped down into it and felt it flow up and over her lips and down into her lungs. Dreams of laying on her back and staring into a blinding sky, her ribs flayed apart, tiny people crawling through her entrails like maggots on a corpse.

“MORE NIGHTMARES?”

The voice made her shiver, then feel guilty for doing so. She cast a furtive glance at Ashlinn, asleep in the hammock beside hers. Then back to the deadboy, sitting in that corner as he’d done since they put out to the Sea of Silence. Tric’s hood was drawn back and he sat with legs crossed, gravebone swords in his lap, black hands resting flat upon the blades.

Goddess, but he was still beautiful. Not the rugged, earthen beauty he’d been before, no. There was a dark beauty to him now. Carved of alabaster and ebony. Black eyes and pale skin and a voice so deep she could feel it between her legs when he spoke. A princely beauty, wrapped in a robe of night and serpents. A crown of darkling stars on his brow.

“Apologies, did I wake you?”

“I DON’T SLEEP, MIA.”

She blinked. “Ever?”

“NEVER.”

Mia dragged her hair back from her face, swinging her legs off the side of her hammock quiet as she could. As she sat up straight, her wounds pulled and her bandages tugged at her scabs and she couldn’t help but wince with the pain of it all. Conscious of those pitch-black eyes following her every move.

She was dying for a cigarillo. For fresh air. For a fucking bath. They’d been stuck in here together for two turns straight now, and the strain was wearing on all of them.

Jonnen was a knot of fury and indignity, kept in check only by Eclipse’s constant presence in his shadow. He sat for hours, pouting and sullen, ripping up tendrils of his own shadow and throwing it at the far wall, just as he’d done at Mia’s eyes in the necropolis. Eclipse would pounce upon the ball of shadowstuff like a puppy and Jonnen would smile, but the smile would disappear as soon as he caught Mia looking at him.

She could feel his anger at her. His hate and his confusion.

She couldn’t blame him for any of it.

Ashlinn and Tric were another source of concern—the tension between them thick enough to slice up and serve with the alleged “stew” they ate each evemeal. Mia could feel the storm clouds building to a thunderhead that would black out the suns. And truth told, she had no idea what to do. She might’ve spoken to Tric about it once, you see. But he wasn’t the same.

She hadn’t known what to feel when she’d first laid eyes on him. The joy and guilt, the bliss and sorrow. Yet after a few turns in his company, she could see he was drawn with the same outline, but not filled in with entirely the same colors. She could feel a darkness to him, now—the same darkness she felt inside her own skin. Beckoning. And aye, even with Mister Kindly in her shadow, perhaps frightening.

Mia bowed her head, rivers of long black hair draping either side of her face. Silence between them thick as fog.

“I’m sorry,” she finally murmured.

The deadboy tilted his head, saltlocks moving like dreaming snakes.

“FOR WHAT?”

Mia sucked her lip, searching for the pale and feeble words that would somehow make this all right. But people were the puzzle she’d never managed to solve. She’d always been better at cutting things apart than putting them back together.

“I thought you were dead.”

“I TOLD YOU,” he replied. “I AM.”

“But … I thought I’d not see you again. I thought you were gone forever.”

“NOT THE MOST FOOLISH OF ASSUMPTIONS. SHE STABBED ME THREE TIMES IN THE HEART AND PUSHED ME OFF THE SIDE OF A MOUNTAIN, AFTER ALL.”

Mia looked over her shoulder at Ashlinn. Freckled cheek resting upon her hands, knees curled up, long lashes fluttering as she dreamed.

Lover.

Liar.

Murderer.

“I kept my promise to you,” she told him. “Your grandfather died screaming.”

Tric inclined his head. “MY THANKS, PALE DAUGHTER.”

“Don’t …”

She shook her head, her voice failing as the lump rose in her throat.

“… Please don’t call me that.”

He turned his eyes to Ashlinn. Putting one black, night-stained hand to his chest and pawing there, as if remembering the feel of her blade.

“WHAT HAPPENED TO OSRIK, BY THE BY?”

“Adonai killed him,” Mia replied. “Drowned him in the blood pool.”

“DID HE SCREAM, TOO?”

Mia pictured Ashlinn’s brother as he disappeared beneath that flood of red the turn the Luminatii invaded the Mountain. Eyes wide with terror. Mouth filling with crimson.

“He tried to,” she finally said.

Tric nodded.

“You must think me a heartless cunt,” she sighed.

“YOU’D ONLY CONSIDER IT A COMPLIMENT.”

Mia looked up at that, thinking him angry. But she found his lips curled in a thin, pale smile, the shadow of a dimple creasing his cheek. It reminded her so much of what he’d been for a moment. So much of what they’d had together. She looked into his bloodless face and ink-black eyes and saw the beautiful, broken boy he’d been beneath, and her heart was like lead in her chest.

“DO YOU LOVE HER?” he asked.

Mia looked to Ashlinn again. Remembering the feel of her, the smell of her, the taste of her. The face she showed the world, vicious and hard, the tenderness she showed only to Mia, alone in her arms. Melting in her mouth. Poetry on her tongue. Each a dark reflection of the other, both of them driven by vengeance to be and do and want things most wouldn’t dare dream.

Wonderful things.

Awful things.

“It’s …”

“… COMPLICATED?”

She nodded slow. “But life always is, neh?”

A mirthless chuckle slipped over his lips. “TRY DYING.”

“I’d rather not, if I can help it.”

“DEATH IS THE PROMISE WE ALL MUST KEEP. SOONER OR LATER.”

“I’ll take later, if it please you.”

He met her eyes then. Black to black.

“IT WOULD.”

The clanging of heavy bells cut their conversation off at the knees, and both Tric and Mia looked to the Maid’s decks above. She heard muffled shouts, running boots upon the timbers, notes of vague alarm. Ashlinn woke from her slumber with a jolt, sitting up and dragging her forearm across her face. “Wassat?”

Mia was standing now, narrowed eyes on the boards above their heads.

“Doesn’t sound good, whatever it is.”

A second burst of bells. A rolling string of faint and shockingly imaginative curses. Mia stepped lightly over to the porthole and opened the wooden shutter, letting in a blinding shear of truelight. Jonnen lifted his head from his hammock, squinted around the cabin with bleary eyes. Mister Kindly cursed from his spot atop the door.

Mia blinked hard in the painful glare, joined by Ashlinn at the porthole once their eyes adjusted. Over the rolling waves beyond the glass, Mia could see sails on the distant horizon, stitched with golden thread.

“That’s an Itreyan warship …,” Ashlinn muttered.

Mia glanced upward. “Our hosts don’t seem too excited about seeing it.”

“… ON THE CONTRARY, THEY SOUND VERY EXCITED TO ME …”

“… o, bravo, been practicing our banter, have we …?”

“… SOME OF US HAVE NO NEED OF PRACTICE, MOGGY. WE ARE SERVED BY WIT INSTEAD …”

Ashlinn dunked her face in their barrel of washwater to clear away the sleep, tied her hair back in a loose braid.

“I’ll head topside for a chat.”

“You’d best go with her, Brother Tric,” Mia said. “I’ll stay here with Jonnen.”

The deadboy stood slowly. Looking at Ashlinn with bottomless eyes as he sheathed his gravebone blades beneath his robes and drew his hood up over his face.

“AFTER YOU, SISTER.”

Ash dragged on the boots she’d been wearing since infiltrating the Godsgrave Arena, strapped her shortsword to her leg. Hauling her sorority habit over her head and pulling on her coif, she headed for the door.

“Be careful, neh?” Mia warned.

Ash smiled lopsided, leaned over, and kissed Mia’s lips.

“You know what they say. What doesn’t kill me had better fucking run.”

The Vaanian girl slipped out the cabin door in a flurry of white robes.

Mia avoided Tric’s eyes as he followed.

Well,” Cloud Corleone sighed. “As my dear old tutor Dona Elyse said the year I turned sixteen, ‘Fuck me very gently, then fuck me very hard.’”

Kael Three Eyes leaned out from the Crow’s Nest. “They’re signaling, Cap’n!”

“Aye, I can see that!” he called, waving his spyglass. “Thank you!”

“Arse-grubbing shit queens are gaining on us, too,” BigJon grunted from the railing beside him.

The captain waved his spyglass in BigJon’s face. “This thing works, you know.”

“Captain?” came a voice.

Cloud glanced over his shoulder, saw Her Not-So-Holiness on the deck behind him, and her six-foot attack dog looming behind her. The truelight air felt a little colder, and an involuntary shiver tickled his skin.

“Best get back down below, Sister,” he said. “Safer there.”

“Meaning it’s not safe up here?”

“I wouldn’t—”

The sister reached out and snatched Cloud’s spyglass from his hand, pressed it to her eye and turned to the horizon.

“That’s not regular Itreyan navy,” she said. “It’s a Luminatii ship.”

“Well spotted, Sister.”

“And it looks like they’re armed with arkemical cannons.”

“Again, aye, my spyglass works, thank you.”

The sister lowered the glass, met his eye. “What do they want?”

Cloud pointed to the red flare the ship had sent sizzling into the sky.

“They want us to stop.”

“Why?” the big bodyguard asked.

The good captain blinked. “… Look, how are you doing that with your voice?”

The sister handed back his glass. “Do the Luminatii usually stop random ships in the middle of the ocean for no apparent reason?”

“Well.” Cloud scuffed the deck with his bootheel. “Not usually, no.”

The sister and her bodyguard exchanged uneasy glances.

BigJon whispered from the side of his mouth, “Antolini tipped them off, maybe?”

“He wouldn’t do that to me, would he?” Cloud muttered.

“You plowed his wife, Cap’n.”

“Only because she asked me nicely.”

“That kidfiddler Flavius promised to kill you if he saw you again,” the littleman mused, sucking on the stem of his drakebone pipe. “Maybe he got creative?”

“So I owe him a little coin. That’s no reason to sing about me to the Luminatii.”

“You owe him a little fortune. And you plowed his wife, too.”

Cloud Corleone raised an eyebrow. “Do you not have things to do?”

The littleman looked around the hive of activity that were the main and foredecks, the masts above. He shrugged and showed his silvered grin.

“Not particularly.”

“Still gaining, Cap’n!” Kael called above.

Cloud held his spyglass aloft. “Four Daughters, this thing fucking works!”

“Captain,” the sister began. “I’m afraid I have to insist—”

“I’m sorry, Sister,” the privateer sighed. “But we’re not stopping.”

“… We aren’t?”

“That’s a Luminatii warship, Cap’n,” BigJon pointed out. “Not sure the Maid has it in her to outrun it.”

“O, ye of little faith,” Cloud said. “Give the order.”

“Aye, aye,” the littleman sighed.

BigJon turned from the rails, roared at the crew. “Right, you jizz-gargling fuckbuckets! We’re doing a runner! Hoist every inch of sail we’ve got! If you own a shitrag or a spunk-stained kerchief, I want it lashed to a mast somewhere, go, go!”

“Captain …,” the sister began.

“Rest easy, Sister,” Cloud smiled. “I know my oceans, and I know my ship. We’re sitting in the swift stream, and the nevernight winds are about to start kissing our sails the way I kissed Don Antolini’s wife.”

The captain lifted his spyglass with a small smile.

“These god-botherers won’t lay a damned finger on us.”

The first cannon shot skimmed across the water a hundred feet shy of their prow. The second one twenty feet short of their stern, close enough to scorch the paint. And the third flew past close enough that Cloud could have shaved with it.

The Luminatii warship was running parallel to the Maid, her gold-threaded sails gleaming. Cloud could see her name written in bold, flowing script down her prow.

Faithful.

Her cannons were ready to unleash another blast of arkemical fire—the three earlier bursts had been warning shots, and Cloud didn’t fancy his chances of a fourth. Besides, considering what the Maid had hidden in her belly, one good kiss from old Faithful here would be all they needed.

“All stop,” the captain spat. “Hoist the white flag.”

“Stop, you useless shitwizards!” BigJon roared from the quarterdeck. “All stop!”

“O, aye,” Sister Ashlinn muttered from the railing beside him. “You know the oceans and your ship all right, Captain …”

“You know,” Cloud replied, turning to look at her, “my first impressions of you were quite favorable, good Sister, but I have to say, the more I get to know you, the less fond of you I grow.”

Her bodyguard folded his arms and scoffed.

“WE SHOULD HAVE A DRINK SOMETIME …”

The ocean was too deep for the Maid to drop anchor, so once the sails were stowed and their head turned to the wind, there was little for the crew to do except stand about and wait for the Faithful to make berth alongside. Cloud watched the massive warship cruise closer, his belly sinking lower all the while. Her flanks were bristling with arkemical cannons from the workshops of the Iron Collegium, and her decks packed with Itreyan marines.

The men were dressed in chain mail and leather armor, each embossed with the sigil of the three suns on his chest. They carried shortswords and light wooden shields, ideal for close-quarter fighting on the decks of enemy ships. And they outnumbered the Maid ’s crew two to one.

Up on the aft deck, Cloud could see a half-dozen Luminatii in gravebone armor, their cloaks blood-red, feathered plumes of the same hue on their helms, fluttering in the sea breeze. Their leader was a tall centurion with a pointed beard, piercing gray eyes, and the expression of a fellow in desperate need of a professional wristjob.[1]

“Damned god-botherers,” the captain grumbled.

“Aye,” BigJon said, stepping up beside him. “Lady Trelene drown them all.”

“We’ll be fine,” Cloud muttered, more to himself than his first mate. “It’s well hidden. They’d have to rip the hull apart to find it.”

“Unless they know exactly where to look for it.”

Cloud looked at his first mate with widening eyes. “They wouldn’t have …?”

The littleman lit his drakebone pipe with a flintbox and puffed thoughtfully. “I told you not to plow Antolini’s wife, Cap’n.”

“And I told you she asked nicely.” Cloud lowered his voice. “Very nicely, in fact.”

“You think these Luminatii boys are going to be as sweet?” BigJon scoffed, watching them prepare to board. “Because they’re settling in to fuck us, sure and true.”

Cloud winced as the grapples were thrown, sinking into the Maid ’s railing and splintering the wood. Faithful’s crew slung heavy hay-stuffed bags along her flanks to cushion the impact as the Maid was hauled closer by mekwerk winches, and the two ships finally came together with a heavy thump. Lines were lashed tight, and a gangplank extended from conqueror to conquered.

Centurion Wristjob glowered down from the Faithful ’s aftercastle.

“I am Centurion Ovidius Varinius Falco, second century, third cohort of the Luminatii Legion,” he called. “By order of Imperator Scaeva, I am authorized to board your vessel in search of contraband. Your cooperation is—”

“Aye, aye, come on over, mates.” Cloud flashed his four-bastard smile, doffing his tricorn with a low bow. “Nothing to hide here! Just wipe your feet first, neh?”

The privateer muttered over his shoulder.

“You’d best head below to your cabin, Sister. Things will …”

Cloud looked to BigJon, blinking hard at the empty space where the girl and her bodyguard had stood a few moments before.

“… Where the ’byss did they go?”

CHAPTER 11

INCENDIARY

Luminatii crawled over the Maid like fleas in a Liisian grandmother’s chest hair.

The search was cordoned and meticulous, and Centurion Falco had obviously dealt with smugglers before—he found all three of Cloud’s dummy stash spots easily. Thankfully, and despite BigJon’s conspiracy theories, the boarders hadn’t come close to finding the real ones, and Cloud’s hidden cargo remained safe as houses. But accompanying Falco in his search and answering his questions as politely as he could, the privateer quickly came to a rather disturbing realization.

The god-botherers weren’t actually interested in contraband at all—what they were looking for was people. And, acutely aware the nun he was carrying was likely no more a nun than he was a priest, the privateer was worried his sinking belly might actually start leaking out through his boots.

“And these are your only passengers?” Falco asked.

“Aye,” Cloud replied, raising a fist to knock on the cabin door. “We’re not usually in the business of transporting livestock.”

“They came aboard where and when?”

“Godsgrave. A few turns back. Booked passage all the way to Ashkah.”

The centurion gave a curt nod, and Cloud knocked loudly.

“Sister?” he sang. “Are you decent? There’s a few fellow servants of the Blessed Light here who’d like to ask you some questions.”

“Enter,” came the reply.

Cloud opened the door and found the Vaanian girl already standing politely to one side, back against the bulkhead, hands before her like a penitent.

“Forgiveness, Sister—” Cloud began.

“Step aside, plebian,” Falco said, forcing his way into the cabin.

The centurion dragged off his plumed helmet, smoothed down his sweaty mop of hair, and gave the sister a respectful bow. His steel-gray eyes flitted to the bodyguard in the corner, the muscles in his jaw tensing. The big fellow made no sound.

“Forgive me, good Sister,” he said to the nun. “I am Centurion Ovidius Varinius Falco, commander of the warship Faithful. By order of our imperator, Julius Scaeva, I must conduct a search of this ship, and thus, your cabin.”