by Jay Kristoff
“Reading about all this,” he said. “It doesn’t feel right … It feels…”
“Too big?” Aelius asked.
“Aye.”
“A little like being a god, maybe?”
Mercurio folded kindling-thin arms across his thinner chest. He couldn’t remember feeling as old in all his life. “Fucking gods…”
“You have a role to play in this,” the dead man said. “The Mother brought you here for a reason. She had me find these books, show them to you, for a reason.”
“Seems a slender fucking thread to put so much weight upon.”
“It’s all she can do from where she is,” Aelius sighed. “A push here. A nudge there. Using what little power she gains from what little faith folk hold for her. And it’s harder for her now. Once, the folk running this place actually believed. To the faithful who created it centuries back, it truly meant something. She had real power here. But now?”
“Hollow words,” Mercurio muttered. “Walls painted gold, not red.”
“The Mother does what little she can with what little she has. But the balance between Light and Night won’t be restored by the hands of the divinities.” The chronicler pointed at Mercurio’s own gnarled, ink-stained hands. “It’ll just be those.”
“I’ll not lift a damned finger if it means hastening Mia’s ending.”
Aelius puffed on his smoke, regarding Mercurio thoughtfully.
“First things last, young’un,” he said. “You don’t need to read her whole biography to know where she’ll be headed now.”
“Aye,” Mercurio said. “Face-first into a world of flaming shit.”
“So when she arrives, we’d best be ready.” Aelius shrugged. “We’ll not need to worry how her story ends otherwise. It’ll end right here. In the halls of this mountain.”
“So what can we do?” Mercurio growled, rubbing his aching arm. “I’m halfway to dead, and you’re dead all the way. You can’t even leave the fucking library. Between the two of us, what good can we do her?”
Aelius leaned over to the second “BOOK” sitting on his desk. Sky-blue edges, wolf on the cover, leather so black light just seemed to fall into it. He licked his thumb and began leafing through the pages. Finally stopping at the place he wanted, he spun the tome toward Mercurio, tapped at the text.
The old man squinted at the words, heartbeat coming quicker.
He looked down at his wizened old hands.
Such a slender thread …
“Righto,” he sighed. “I’ll go talk to them.”
* * *
The room stank of blood.
Ancient and cracked to tiny black flakes, so many years between it and bleeding that its scent was just a broken promise. Old and dark, hardened to a rind in the cracks between the flagstones. A few sour splashes here and there, curled and separated like bad cream, wreathed with the stink of rot. But above it all, iron-thick and laced with salt, wafting through the open doors in invisible skeins until it permeated the entire level?
Fresh, new, ripe blood.
The pool was triangular, set deep in the stone, the red within it swaying and rolling like the surface of a tempest sea. Sorcerii glyphs were daubed in crimson on the wall, alongside maps of the major metropolises of the Republic—Godsgrave, Galante, Carrion Hall, Farrow, Elai. Old Mercurio could see other cities there, too. Cities ground by the heel of time into ruin and dust. Cities so old, there were few who even remembered their names. But Speaker Adonai remembered.
He was at the apex of the triangle, down on his knees. Bone-pale skin, tousled white hair, a thin red robe tossed carelessly over his smooth torso. Leather britches riding dangerously low. Barefoot.
A girl stood before him, legs slightly parted, bending backward like a sapling in a storm. Small sighs of pleasure slipped over her lips, her kohled lashes fluttering. She was dressed in a black Hand’s robe, open at the front, plastered to her skin with her own blood. The ruby red spilled from a dark slice between her bare breasts, flowing down her naked belly and then lower still. She held a bloodstained knife in one hand. Her other was wrapped in his hair.
Speaker Adonai was knelt in front of her, hands clutching her buttocks, his face pressed between her thighs. Groans of bliss rose right up from the core of him as he lapped and sucked and licked. His clever tongue flickered, his smooth chest heaved, his lithe body shook. Eyes rolling back so only the pink-not-white showed. His throat moved with every deep swallow, every shivering, red mouthful. Mercurio had seen starving wolves tear apart a lamb when he was a boy. The sounds they made as they killed and the sounds coming from the speaker as he drank were much alike.
Weaver Marielle sat in the corner of the room, watching her brother feed. Dark robes draped over her hunched frame, hood pulled low over her hideous features. Wisps of bone-blond hair spilled from the shadows of her cowl, along with a thin ribbon of drool from her misshapen lips. One twisted hand was pressed to her throat. The other between her legs.
Adonai dragged his mouth away from the girl’s blood-slick petals, gasping like a man near drowned. His face and teeth were smeared with crimson, red rivulets running down his throat. The girl shivered, bloody fingertips caressing Adonai’s face with all the reverence of a priestess before her god. Asking no forgiveness for her sins. Preferring punishment instead.
“More,” she moaned, pulling him back in.
“Am I interrupting?” Mercurio asked.
Adonai’s eyes found a muzzy sort of focus, and he let out a gasping chuckle. Still shaking, swaying as if drunk, he swiveled his head like a blindworm toward the light. Finding Mercurio in the doorway, the smile fell away from his bloody lips. His gaze became a glower, a long spool of ruby spit swinging from his chin.
“Yes,” he and Marielle said.
“Shouldn’t have left the fucking door open, then, I s’pose,” the old man replied.
He hobbled into the room, walking stick beating crisp on the moist black stone. It was uncomfortably warm down here in the sorcerii’s part of the Mountain, and he knew climbing back up those stairs on his shitty knees was going to be agony. He was sweating like an inkfiend with a needle three turns dry. His legs ached like a pair of bastards. His left arm ached even worse.
“Away with you, lass,” he told the bleeding, breathless girl.
Dragging her sodden robe partway closed, the Hand managed to glare at Mercurio despite looking ready to pass out from the blood loss.
“Go on,” he said, waving his cane at the door. “Off with the fuck. There’s at least three more of your fellows skulking on my heels. Maybe one of them has a suggestion about how better to spend your time than in the company of these fucking perverts.”
The girl glanced at Adonai, and the speaker gave a small nod.
“Here, child,” Marielle whispered, beckoning with twisted fingers.
The girl walked toward the weaver, a little unsteady on her feet. As she drew close, Marielle raised one misshapen hand, swayed it in the air before the girl’s bleeding chest. The girl shivered. Sighed. And as she turned, Mercurio saw the bone-deep knife wound had closed as if it’d never been.
He sucked his lip, forced to admire the woman’s handiwork. Despite being unable to manipulate her own hideous flesh, Marielle could mold others’ like a potter with clay. There wasn’t a mark on the Hand’s body.
The weaver knows her work.
“Regain thy strength, sweet child,” Marielle lisped through split and bleeding lips. “Then visit us anon.”
With one last poison glare for the bishop of Godsgrave, the lass pulled her soaking robe closed and made her way from the room. Adonai reached out to her as she walked by, too blood-drunk to say his farewells.
Mercurio looked down the hallway she left by, saw two of the Hands that Drusilla had trailing him lurking in the gloom. Close enough to let him know they were watching. That the Lady of Blades was watching. But not quite brave enough to enter the speaker’s chamber without invitation.
A fellow had to
be quite stupid for that.
He raised the knuckles at his shadows, then slammed the door in their faces.
Adonai stood, dragging one bloody hand back through his hair and pulling his head up with it, as if it was too heavy for his neck. His robe had slipped off his shoulders, and Mercurio could see the troughs and valleys of muscle beneath. He looked a statue on a plinth outside the Senate House. Chiseled out of stone by the hands of the Everseeing himself. But Mercurio knew it was his sister’s hands, not Aa’s, that bestowed the blood speaker’s impossible perfection. And despite the power the siblings wielded, he found that thought just about as fucked up as he’d always done.
Adonai finally rediscovered his powers of speech, eyes glinting red. “Desperate thy plight or absent thy wits must be, Bishop, to interrupt a blood speaker at his meal.”
Mercurio stood at the base of the triangle, staring across the blood at Adonai.
“Well?” the speaker demanded. “Nothing to say, hast thou?”
Mercurio waved his cane in the direction of the speaker’s crotch. “Just waiting for the tumescence to diminish a bit. The bulge is impressive, but a touch distracting.”
“Seek ye quarrel with us, good Mercurio?” Marielle rose from her chair and stood beside her brother. “So weary of life’s burden, art thou? For I swear it sure and true, more weary could I make thee afore I lifted burden from thy shoulders.”
“Already thou hast ire well-earned from the Lady of Blades,” Adonai said. “So common are thine enemies, thou art in need of quality? ’Pon the blood of the aged I may sup to fuel my magiks, as easily as upon the young. And I am still hungry, old man.”
“Maw’s teeth, you two talk a lot of shit,” Mercurio growled.
Adonai curled his fingers. The pool surged, and bloody tendrils of liquid gore rose up from the surface, slick and gleaming scarlet. They were pointed like spears, semisolid, sharp as needles. They snaked slowly around the bishop of Godsgrave, blood-stink thick in the air, quivering with anticipation.
“Blood is owed thee, little Crow,” Mercurio said. “And blood shall be repaid.”
The tendrils fell still, poised a few inches from the old man’s skin.
Adonai’s red eyes narrowed to razor cuts in his beautiful face.
“Speak ye those words again?”
“You fucking heard me,” Mercurio said. “That’s what you told Mia, isn’t it? Last time you saw her here in the Mountain? ‘Two lives ye saved, the turn the Luminatii pressed their sunsteel to the Mountain’s throat. Mine, and my sister love’s. Know this, in nevernights to come. As deep and dark as the waters ye swim might turn, on matters of blood, count upon a speaker’s vow, ye may.’”
Adonai glanced at his sister. Back to Mercurio.
“Such words spake I for her ear alone,” he breathed, enraged.
“None were in my chambers when troth was pledged,” the weaver said. “Save I, my brother love, the darkin, and her passengers. How come ye to speak them by rote, good Mercurio, as if thou were sixth among five alone?”
“Doesn’t matter how I know,” Mercurio said. “But I do. You owe her a debt, Adonai. You owe her your miserable, twisted little life. You made a vow. And the water she swims now is deep and dark as it’s ever been.”
“Well do we know it,” Marielle said.
“How?” Mercurio demanded, pupils narrowing to pinpricks.
Adonai gave a lazy shrug. “Scaeva sent a blood missive ordering the Lady of Blades to unleash every chapel in the Republic upon our little darkin’s trail. A son stolen, desired returned. And for she who stole him…”
“Every chapel,” the old man whispered.
Mercurio’s belly sank, thinking about the sheer number of Blades that would now be hunting Mia. Even after the Luminatii purge and Ashlinn Järnheim’s betrayal, it’d still be dozens. All schooled in the arts of death by the finest killers in the world.
“How the fuck can Scaeva afford that?”
“Poor Mercurio,” Marielle cooed. “So silent thy turns must ring in thy room alone.”
“Title of imperator, Scaeva hath claimed,” Adonai said. “And all the coin in the Republic’s war chests besides. ’Pon a pillow of gold, Drusilla soon shall lay her head.”
The old man clenched his jaw. “That conniving bitch…”
“Not through kindness doth a single Blade become Lady of many, old man.”
Mercurio rubbed at his left arm. His chest was aching abominably.
Mia’s in deeper shit than I ever imagined …
“So,” he finally said, meeting Adonai’s scarlet stare. “Mia has the whole Church against her now. Every Blade the Ministry can find. Question is, were your words just that? Or something more? How far does your loyalty to the Church extend, Adonai? In a house of thieves and liars and murderers, how much weight does a promise carry?”
“We are no thieves,” Adonai spat. “Earned, our magiks be. Dredged from the sands of Ashkah Old, verily, and paid for again in anguish, turn by bloody turn.”
“Liars, neither,” Marielle lisped, slipping her hand around her brother’s waist. “Though killers, aye. That we be. Name us the former, find truth in the latter, good Mercurio. Slow and painful truth.”
“As for loyalty, who can say.” The sorcerii placed his arm around his sister, wiping at the gore on his mouth. “Ours be not bought with coin, that much be certain. And these walls place much stock in that since Cassius fell. But there is much danger in crossing the Ministry, Mercurio. And a vow to thy little darkin shall only carry me so far.”
“And I, not at all,” Marielle smiled. “My debt to thy ward be already repaid.”
“We did not drag ourselves through blood and fire to wrest the secrets of the Moon from the dust of Old Ashkah, only see them thrown away on—”
“Wait, wait,” Mercurio frowned. “What the fuck did you just say?”
Adonai’s eyes narrowed. “Blood and fire were—”
“The Moon, you perverted fuck. The part about the Moon.”
“’Twas he who taught the Ashkahi sorcery,” Adonai said, head tilted, eyes glittering in the gloom. “A god dead, ages past, and all magik in this world with him.”
“Our arts are but fragments of larger truths,” Marielle lisped. “Forever taken from this world. Gleaned from scraps long buried beneath the sands of Old Ashkah.”
The old man looked between them, his heart racing. “What if I told you Mia has something to do with this damned Moon thing? Darkin. Her passengers. What if I told you she knows the way to its crown?”
“… What madness is this?” Marielle asked.
“Aye, mad it might just be,” the old man said. “But I swear by the Black Mother, the Everseeing, and all four of their holy daughters that Ashlinn Järnheim has a map to the Moon’s crown branded in arkemical ink on her back. Ink that will fade in the event she gets murdered. Say, for example, while she’s protecting Mia.”
The siblings looked at each other. Back to Mercurio. Red eyes glittering in the low light. The pool of blood at Adonai’s back began swaying like the sea in a storm. Marielle’s breath had grown so thick, she seemed almost to be wheezing.
“What do you say?” Mercurio offered his hand. “You two want to help me keep that pair alive? You’ve still a vow to keep, after all.”
Adonai looked at the man’s upturned palm. Took a deep, shivering breath. But without another word, he grasped Mercurio’s hand in his, fingers slicked with gore. With no hesitation, Marielle placed her hand atop her brother’s, warped and leaking pus.
The old man looked at the sorcerii and nodded.
“All right, then. Seems we’ve got ourselves a conspiracy.”
CHAPTER 14
REUNIONS
“It’s a rancid shithole,” Sidonius declared.
“It’s not that bad,” Bladesinger said.
“It is that bad,” Sidonius scowled. “The rats are big as dogs, the timbers are rife with mites, and one stray cigarillo and the whole shithouse will go up in
flames.”
“Brother,” the Dweymeri woman sighed. “Considering you were locked in a piss-stained cell beneath Godsgrave Arena facing your own execution a week ago, you think you’d be more kindly disposed to the feel of the free wind upon your face.”
“We’re inside, ’Singer,” Sidonius said, pointing to the various holes in the theater’s walls. “We’re not supposed to feel the fucking wind.”
Wavewaker pushed aside a pair of moldy curtains and stomped out onto the stage. His foot went through one of the rotten timbers and he stumbled, dragging his boot free and staring at his comrades with mad joy upon his tattooed, bearded face.
“Isn’t it grand?” he breathed.
Sidonius sighed. It seemed a lifetime ago he’d been locked under the ’Grave’s Arena, not just a week as Bladesinger said. Looking back on the events of the past few months, it all felt like a dream—one he might wake from at any moment, realizing he was still gladiatii, still in chains, still a slave.
When he’d been sold to the Remus Collegium alongside Mia Corvere, he’d had no idea how that girl was set to change his life. He’d served under her father, Darius, in the Luminatii Legion, and out on the burning sands he’d sought to protect her life with his own. But in the end, Mia had been the one who saved him, and the other Falcons of Remus besides, hatching a plan that not only saw her avenged against the men who’d destroyed her familia but also freed her fellow gladiatii from their servitude.
Sid’s cheek still itched from his visit to Whitekeep’s Iron Collegium four turns back, where he and the other Falcons had handed over the redsheets provided to them by the slaver Teardrinker. The wizened old arkemist in the hall had poured over the chartum liberii for an insufferable age, and Butcher looked close to shitting his britches. But Teardrinker had owed a lifedebt to Mia Corvere, and true to her word, the slaver’s papers held up under inspection.
Sid and the others had each taken their turn under the arkemist’s hands, and after some swift agony, the former legionary and gladiatii found his cheek free of a slave brand for the first time in six long years.*