by Jay Kristoff
And she looked up into Cleo’s eyes. The press of the dark upon her lips, the press of her fingernails into bloody palms. The shadows raged and seethed, the daemons howled and roared, the dark shivered and yawned all about her. Cleo raised her hand, black claws of living darkness at the tips of her fingers. Wailing in her ears. A hunger deep enough to drown in. Teetering on the brink of the Abyss.
“… LOOK AROUND YOU…!” Mister Kindly cried again.
Mia’s eyes flickered up, up to the pale light shining through the cracked dome above her. The single sun, waiting beyond. And at last, she heard him. She understood what he was telling her. Fingers closing about Mouser’s blacksteel blade at her waist, its edge keen enough to slice gravebone. And shining like blood and diamonds, sharp as broken glass, she hurled the blade upward, into the ceiling above their heads.
The blade struck the cracks, pierced the ancient bone. Pale blue light streamed in through the hole, the last gasp of a falling sun, still shockingly bright in the almost-dark. A spear of brilliance, gleaming down from the dying sky, striking Cleo where she stood. The woman staggered in the sudden radiance, the shadows bending, one hand held up against the light.
Mia’s fingers found the hilt of her father’s sword.
The crow on the hilt watching with amber eyes.
And teeth gritted, eyes flashing, she rose up from her knees. Bringing the blade with her, whistling as it came. She felt it cleave through Cleo’s chest, flesh and bone and heart beyond. The woman gasped and all the world stood still. She clutched the blade buried in her breast, palms cut to the bone on its edge. Looking into her foe’s eyes, emerald green into midnight black.
“Fear was never my fate,” Mia hissed.
And with one last blackened breath, Cleo fell.
Mia felt a crushing blow to her spine. Her flesh crawling. Her pulse hammering inside her veins. Her flesh felt aflame, agony, ecstasy, everything and nothing between as she swayed on her feet. A thousand screams, a thousand whispers, the black enveloping her, hundreds of daemons swarming, storming, seething about her. Her hair whipped above her as if a wind blew from below, her head thrown back, arms held out, black eyes closed. Shadows scrawled across the ground before her, through the air around her, maddened skeins of liquid black.
The hunger inside her drowned. The emptiness swallowed. Awakening and severing. Benediction and baptism and communion. All the pieces of herself, missing and lost, found at last. Every question answered. Every puzzle solved. All the world about her crumbling, flickering, shuddering, as if this were the ending of everything.
The beginning.
Face upturned to the sky, she saw it again—just as she’d done in Godsgrave Arena, the moment Furian fell beneath her blade. A field of blinding black, wide as forever. A dark infinity scattered with tiny stars, like her Black Mother’s gowns.
And there above her, Mia saw a globe of pale light burning. Not red or blue or gold, but a pale and ghostly white. She knew it for what it was now. Knew its riddle, knew its purpose, knew it burned within her as surely as she knew its name. Like the circle in her dreams, inscribed into the brow of the boy in her reflection.
The boy beside her.
The boy inside her.
Anais.
“The many were one,” he whispered.
The many fragments of his soul.
“And will be again.”
United in me.
“One beneath the three.”
One moon beneath three suns.
“To raise the four.”
The Four Daughters.
“Free the first.”
Niah, the first divinity.
“Blind the second and the third.”
Extinguish the second and third suns.
And what then would remain?
One sun.
One moon.
One night.
Balance. As it was, and should, and will be.
She fell to her knees. Gasping. Sobbing. The totality almost too much to bear. The power burning in her chest almost overwhelming. The shadows held still, hundreds of not-eyes now watching her from the gloom. The other pieces of his soul, long kept chained here in the dark to slake a tyrant’s darkest hungers.
A false messiah.
A fallen Chosen.
What now would she be?
Mia lifted her head, features framed by rivers of black.
The shadows held their breath.
“The many were one,” she whispered. “And will be again.”
Bloody hands outstretched. Beckoning them. The black about her shivered. Fear rippling among the fearless. And out of the trembling, hungry dark stepped a shape. A shape Mia knew almost as well as her own. A shape who’d found her the turn her world was taken away, who walked beside her through all the miles and all the murder and all the moments until …
Until the moment I sent him away.
“… you certainly took your time getting here…,” Mister Kindly said.
She smiled, tears slipping down scarred and branded cheeks.
“Forgive me,” she whispered.
The not-cat tilted his head.
“… i told you before, mia. i am a part of you. and you are the all of me…”
She ran her fingers through his fur. As real now as the bone beneath her feet. The part of her in him, the part of him in her, the parts of them together, many and one.
“… there is nothing to forgive…”
And he stepped back home. Back into the shadow he’d walked inside since the turn he found her as a child, small and frightened and alone no longer.
The others followed. Daemons of every shape: bats and cats, mice and wolves, snakes and hawks and owls. Hundreds of pieces of a shattered whole, hundreds of shadows merging with hers. A dark as deep as any she’d known now pooling at her feet, a fire as bright as any she’d felt burning inside her chest. And just for a moment, just for a breath, a dark and flickering shape was standing tall behind her. Black flame flowing over his skin, black wings at his back. A white circle was scribed at his brow, her eyes burning from within with a pale and ghostly radiance.
Moonlight.
In the distance, she could hear faint footsteps. The pulse of fearful hearts in heaving chests. The ring of steel, and prayers to the Everseeing.
Men, she realized. The soldiers of the Seventeenth who’d pursued her into the labyrinth. Five thousand of them. But the power of a god now flowed in her veins. A dark and fathomless strength no child of woman born could hope to match. Even without the legion of passengers now in her shadow, she feared no mortal man. She’d deal with them, each in kind, like moths to black flame.
Then Godsgrave.
And then …
Their voices rang through that broken skull, that hollowed crown.
Many and one.
“Father.”
The shadows placed her bloody sword in her hand.
“We come for you.”
CHAPTER 41
ANYTHING
Aelius stood in a forest of dark and polished wood in the Athenaeum, listening to the rustling leaves of vellum and parchment and paper and leather and hide.
All about him, books.
Books scribed on paper made from trees that never grew. Books written at the height of empires that never were. Books that spoke of people who never lived. Impossible books and unthinkable books and unknowable books. Books as old as he, bound to this place as he was. An inconceivable quirk of the Black Mother’s magiks created, in truth, for a solitary purpose.
And now, as Aelius heard the choir begin anew in the dark around him, as he felt Niah’s sigh of relief as an almost physical sensation, he knew he’d done it.
Mia had won through.
His mother was dead.
His work was finished.
The old man dragged deep on his cigarillo, savoring the taste upon his tongue. Looking about the forest of dark wood and rustling paper leaves. All those impossible, unthinkable, unknowable words. Treatises
of exiled apostates. Autobiographies of murdered despots. Opuses written by masters never apprenticed. Words only he would ever know. Words he was bound to, body and soul.
He breathed gray into the dark.
And he flicked his burning cigarillo into the stacks.
It took a moment, a breath, a wisp of smoke rising from the smoldering pages. But soon, the paper caught like tinder, brittle with age, dry as dust. The flames spread quick, first out along one shelf, and then to the next, crackling and hungry. Orange fingers, trembling and tearing, leaping from cover to cover and aisle to aisle.
The Lady of Flame ever hated her Mother Night.
Aelius sat in the middle of it, watching the conflagration rise higher and higher. Listening to the bookworms roar out in the brightening gloom. Black smoke drifting into the whispering dark. Tired beyond sleeping, but wanting only that. For all her dominion over death, not even the Mother had the power to give life to the dead twice. She had no choice but to grant his wish now. Sweet, long, and dark.
Finally.
Sleep.
He breathed the smoke. Savoring the taste. Feeling the pieces of him, the pages that bound him to this earth, burning away to nothing. Smiling at the thought that, in the end, it hadn’t been blades or poisons or arkemy that had brought down the murderers that took seed in this place after they struck him low. It’d been words.
Just simple words.
“Funny old place, this,” he sighed.
The flames rose higher.
The dark burned bright.
And finally,
finally,
the old man slept.
* * *
Tric could still smell Ashlinn’s perfume.
He stood on the Sky Altar, and it was all he could recall. Not the blood she’d coughed onto the stone, not the poisoned goldwine spilled at her feet. Staring out into the Abyss beyond the railing, all he could smell was the scent she’d worn.
Lavender.
He was glad of it. Remembering her that way. Flowers in his mind, not thorns. Forgiving her had been like lancing a festered wound. Letting go of his hatred, the weight off his shoulders, giving him wings enough to mourn her. His burden was almost lifted now. The shackles on his wrists almost broken.
Only one chain remained.
And so he thought about all he and Mia might have had. The thing they almost were. Savoring the taste on his tongue one last time before setting it aside. Throwing that last shackle off—the shackle of what might have been—and accepting what was.
Nowhere near enough. But perhaps enough to keep him warm.
Mia’s final kiss lingered on his lips. His final promise lingered in the air.
YOU ARE MY HEART. YOU ARE MY QUEEN. I’D DO ANYTHING YOU ASKED ME.
The boy looked down at the black stains on his hands.
“AND EVERYTHING YOU WON’T,” he sighed.
He looked out to the Abyss beyond the altar again.
And he stepped up onto the railing.
And he jumped.
CHAPTER 42
CARNIVALÉ
Words simply can’t do justice to the splendor of an Itreyan sunsset.
The faintest blood-red of Saan’s fallen glow, like blush on a courtesan’s cheek. Saai’s pale blue, like the eye of a newborn babe, falling into sleep. A magnificent watercolor portrait, glittering on the ocean’s face and reaching up into the gables of heaven. Dark stains leaking across the edges of the canvas.
It takes three turns for the light to fully die. All the Republic is washed in the stink of blood as Aa’s ministers sacrifice animals by the hundreds, the thousands, beseeching their Everseeing to return quick as he may. Long shadows fall across the streets of Godsgrave like funeral shrouds. As the Night creeps closer on pale, bare feet, the citizenry is gripped with a kind of hysteria. Purchasing their pretty dominos and fearsome voltos and smiling punchinellos from the mask makers. Fetching their finest coats and gowns from tailors and seamstresses. Hands shaking all the while. The pious flee to the cathedrals in droves to pray the long night away. The rest seek solace in the company of friends or the arms of strangers or the bottom of bottles. An endless run of soirees and salons pepper the calendar in the turns prior, as the light slowly perishes, as the citizens fight or fawn or fuck their fears away.
Then truedark falls. And Carnivalé begins.
Mercurio stared up at the night above his head. Black as the cloak across his thin shoulders. The gondola swayed and rolled along the canal under Sidonius’s careful hands. Bladesinger sat at the fore, watching with dark eyes as they slipped below a crowd of revelers on the Bridge of Vows. Adonai sat beside the old man, red stare glittering in the starlight. Like Mercurio’s, the blood speaker’s gaze was turned to the sky above, his long and clever fingers entwined in his lap.
They’d waited for Mia to return as long as they were able, but after Saai began its final descent, the bishop of Godsgrave had decided they could wait no longer. Sidonius had promised Mia he’d rescue her brother if she failed to return, and the gladiatii took his vows to heart. Adonai had spoken of nothing save his beloved Marielle’s return ever since Spiderkiller and Scaeva fled with the weaver in their clutches. Tric had simply disappeared one nevernight, and Mercurio had no idea where the boy had gone. Their numbers were thin. But who knew what was happening in the ’Grave since the imperator took the godsblood? Who knew what would remain after truedark fell? And so, as the suns failed, they’d gathered in the speaker’s chambers and slipped beneath the flood.
Drusilla’s palazzo had been abandoned—Mercurio presumed her familia and servants had fled at some prearranged moment when the Lady of Blades failed to return from the Mountain. They’d found weapons aplenty in the Lady of Blades’ caches, though—shortswords and daggers and longblades of Liisian steel, fine and sharp. Rummaging through her familia’s belongings, they purloined clothes that fit well enough, black cloaks to cover the pieces that didn’t. The taste of pig’s blood on his tongue, Mercurio had wandered out into the street and flagged down a runner, sent a coded message to one of his old contacts in Little Liis. Over the course of the next eight hours, word had been delivered back and forth across the City of Bridges and Bones, the old man’s information network thrumming with whispers like a dusty spider’s web. And finally satisfied, the bishop had led his band out to the private jetty behind Drusilla’s estate and stolen the choicest of her five gondolas.
Another round of fireworks burst in the skies overhead—the noise and light meant to frighten the Mother of Night back below the horizon. In the streets beyond the canal networks, Mercurio heard the citizens whoop and cheer in appreciation. Drusilla’s estate was in the heart of the marrowborn district, and they had only a short way to travel to the Ribs. But the canals were choked with boats of every shape and size, and the streets were even busier. Every taverna and pub overflowed with merrymakers, the air ringing with music and laughter, drunken shouts and bloody oaths. The citizens who passed them on the water wished them a swift truedark and a merry Carnivalé. Face hidden behind a purloined punchinello, the bishop of Godsgrave nodded and gave greeting in return, his old heart thudding in his chest all the while.
What had become of Mia?
What chance did they have without her?
And if she’d succeeded at the Crown of the Moon, what had she become?
“Thou had best be certain, Mercurio,” Adonai murmured.
“I’m certain,” the old man replied.
“If thou dost lead me on a merry chase and my sis—”
“I was bishop of this city for almost a year,” he whispered. “And I brokered information for the Church for fifteen years before that out of my store. My eyes are everywhere. Scaeva hasn’t moved Marielle from the first Rib since he brought her there. She’s imprisoned somewhere within his estate.”
“Jonnen, too?” Sidonius asked.
“Fucksakes, yes,” Mercurio said. “The boy is with his father.”
“Which means we have to kill his
father to get him back,” Bladesinger murmured.
“You’re jesting, aren’t you?” the old man muttered. “We’d have no chance of pulling off a miracle like that, even without that godsblood inside him. But Scaeva throws a traditional grand gala every truedark in his palazzo. The finest of Godsgrave society will be there. Senators, praetors, generals, the best of the marrowborn. If we’re careful, we can work our way in through that noise and crush. Jonnen’s a nine-year-old boy. He’ll be abed at some stage. We wait in the dark and snatch him from his crib.”
“Marielle comes not second after Scaeva’s whelp,” Adonai said.
“We move slow ’til we have the boy,” Mercurio said. “Then you and I move quick to get Marielle while Sid and Bladesinger get Jonnen to safety.”
“Not here be I for thy little Crow’s brother, Mercurio,” Adonai snapped. “Mia hath fallen at the Crown, for all we know. I seek my sister love, none other.”
“We’re not leaving without the weaver,” Mercurio said. “You have my word. But there’s one captain in this company, Adonai. And I’m giving the orders aboard this ship.”
“Boat,” Bladesinger murmured from the gondola’s bow.
Mercurio sighed, tired in his bones. “Everyone’s a critic.”
They made berth at a busy pier near the forum. The Ribs loomed to the south, the great gravebone expanses stretching high into the night. In their hollowed innards, the marrowborn of the city made their homes—their apartments carved within the bone itself. Status was conferred by proximity to the first Rib, where the Senate and consul traditionally lived during their tenures of power. But Mercurio’s rumor network had informed him that in the last two weeks, Scaeva had ordered the upper apartments vacated and the Senate relocated back to their palazzi in the marrowborn quarter; it seemed the imperator of Itreya would have none above him in his new world order. The old man had heard more disturbing rumors, too. Whispers of a shadow creeping over the metropolis, even before truedark fell. Talk of dissenters being taken in the nevernight, men and women simply disappearing, never to be heard of again. Talk of the Senate being disbanded, talk of iron fists in velvet gloves. Mercurio knew it would have been bad enough if absolute power had been handed to an ordinary man. But to give it to a man like Julius Scaeva, a man steeped in murder and brutality and now swollen with the power and malevolence of a fallen god …