by Jay Kristoff
“Always shall I come for thee,” he murmured. “Always.”
Adonai pulled back from her embrace, brushed tapered fingertips over her bruised eyes, her split lips. Marielle turned away, putting her chained hands to her breast as if to cover the wasted skin and weeping sores. But Adonai cupped her cheeks with bloody hands, turned her to face him.
“How many times must I tell thee, sister love, sister mine?” he whispered.
Adonai kissed her eyes. He kissed her cheeks. He kissed her lips.
“Thou art beautiful.”
The shadow punched through his chest. Black and gleaming and sharp as broken glass. Adonai gasped, red eyes wide. Marielle screamed, her brother’s blood spattering on her face. Another blade of shadows pierced the speaker’s chest, another, another, the weaver wailing again as her brother’s body was torn from her arms, up into the air. Adonai’s beautiful face was twisted, blood spilling over his lips as he clutched the shadows piercing his flesh. Eyes on Marielle as she reached toward him.
Mercurio looked to Scaeva’s body, watching in horror as the imperator placed one palm on the bloody floor, pushed himself upright. Liquid darkness was leaking from the holes in his flesh as he stood, his shadows writhing. Whisper slithered up from the dark at his master’s feet, coiled about his shoulder. Scaeva looked at the pinioned speaker with eyes black as the skies above.
“I have the blood of a god inside me, Adonai.” The imperator shook his head. “How could you possibly think to harm me with the blood of men?”
Scaeva closed his fist.
And Adonai was torn to pieces.
Marielle’s scream of rage and horror rang on marbled walls and singing Dweymeri crystal. Another wave of panic hit the crowd and they surged again, finally breaking through the ballroom doors and streaming out into the palazzo beyond. Mercurio could hear their cries, their panic, the thunder of their retreating footsteps, staring in disbelief at Adonai’s remains.
Sidonius was less awestruck. The big gladiatii had stolen across the bloody floor at Scaeva’s back, snatching up a fallen sunsteel sword. Bladesinger had already gathered Jonnen in her arms, dragging a dumbstruck Liviana Scaeva to her feet. Mercurio beckoned them, hoping to slink back into the dark and flee for their lives.
Except the dark could see everything he did now.
The shadows lashed out, snatching Jonnen from ’Singer’s arms and smashing her into the far wall. Sidonius roared and raised his sunsteel, the sword bursting into flames. A shadowblade punched through his belly and the gladiatii gasped, staggering. Another black blade flashed, sending the big Itreyan skidding across the bloody floor and crashing into one of the tall, fluted pillars.
“Sidonius!” Jonnen cried.
The imperator of Itreya staggered on his feet, clutching his head, dragging his hands back through his hair. He screamed once, mouth open wide, his tongue black and gleaming. The room trembled, as if in an earthquake. His shadow swelled about his feet, burst like a bubble, spilling out across the floor in a hundred shapeless rivulets. Scaeva tore at his robes, roaring again as black vomit gushed from his mouth.
“Julius!” Liviana wailed with horror at the sight of her husband. “Julius!”
The shadows around the room whipped and thrashed, spilling out over the tiles at Scaeva’s feet in a bottomless flood. A wind had picked up from nowhere, howling through the hall with a tempest’s fury. Liviana staggered toward her husband, eyes narrowed in the gale, hand outstretched.
“Julius!” she cried. “I beg you, stop this!”
Scaeva screamed again, clutching his temples. The shadows lashed about in blind fury, clawing great gouges through the walls, ripping upward through the ceiling. Mercurio crouched low as the mezzanine level shuddered and collapsed, the entire structure shaking. A vast chandelier overhead broke free, crashing to the floor and crushing the imperator’s wife before shattering into a million glittering shards.
“Mother!” Jonnen cried.
Scaeva clutched his temples again, roaring so hard his voice broke.
“FATHER!”
Scaeva’s eyes were filmed with black. Tearing off his mask of three suns, he cast it to the floor with a snarl of hatred. Black tears running down his cheeks, he lifted his foot and smashed it under his heel. Laughing. Arms about himself and groaning. And staring into those bottomless black eyes, Mercurio could see the fury of that fallen god was breaking loose inside him now. All the rage, all the pain, all the perfect hatred of a son betrayed, wishing only to destroy the temple to his betrayer.
Scaeva held out his arms as the room shuddered again. Wings of liquid darkness sprouted from his shoulders, lifting him into the air. Marielle dragged herself away from his dark fury, taking shelter against the pillar where Sidonius lay clutching his sundered belly. Black winds roared in the hall, almost forcing Mercurio to the floor. The burning coals in one of the cookfires had spilled, setting the tablecloths ablaze. Staggering across the bloodstains, heart thundering in his chest, the old man took hold of Bladesinger’s tunic and dragged her unconscious body to shelter near the weaver.
The old man worked at Marielle’s manacles with shaking hands, the lockpicks clicking as her irons slithered free. The scent of smoke was rising in the unholy wind as the flames spread. Mercurio gestured to Jonnen, now pressed back against the wall near Scaeva’s shattered throne.
“We need to snatch the boy and get the fuck out of here!” he bellowed.
Their pillar was ripped apart, the gravebone splintering like old, rotten wood. Mercurio cried out, the companions scattered and tumbled across the blood-soaked floor. The bishop felt ribbons of black seize his throat, wrap about his waist, strong as iron, cold as graves. He was dragged up into the air, gasping, flailing, clutching the bands of darkness squeezing his throat.
He found himself floating before the thing that had been Julius Scaeva. Pale cheeks smudged with black tears. Lips smeared with darkest blood.
“But…,” he gurgled.
Looking death in the face. Death smiling back.
“But … w-who writes the … third book?”
Black blades reared up, wicked sharp, gleaming dark. Ready to cleave his chest and heart in two. But with a hissing sigh, the thing that had been Scaeva suddenly turned his pitch-black eyes to the ceiling. Pale fingers curled into fists. The winds quieted for a moment, a tiny, fractured breath within the breaking chaos.
And into that silence, the godling breathed.
“She comes.”
CHAPTER 44
DAUGHTER
She wore the night.
Her gown was silken black. The jewels at her throat, darkling stars. Long skirts billowed out from her waist, flowed down to her bare feet, a corset of midnight cinched tight across ghost-pale skin.
White powder on her cheeks.
Black paint on her lips.
Legions in her eyes.
She alighted on the stony shore of the Nethers, a city of bones laid before her. A blade of the same in her hands. The black velvet wings at her back were vast as open skies, tips brushing the piers, the cobbles, the buildings beside her as she stalked up from the crusted waterline. The city’s shadows sighed at her coming, caressed her face with loving hands, welcoming her home.
The merrymakers. The hucksters. The beggars and the priests and the whores. All of them felt her before they saw her. Their music falling silent, their laughter falling still. A chill brushed the backs of their necks. A stillness deeper than death. Bringing to the pious and the sinner alike, a whisper.
A warning.
A word.
Run.
The fear spread out from her feet like a black tide. The suns had never seemed so far away, the night above never so dark, and they felt it, those mortals—felt it in their chests and in their bones. She was a reckoning. A ruin. The vengeance of every orphaned daughter, every murdered mother, every bastard son. Her father awaiting her, ahead and above.
Many waiting to become one.
And so they ra
n. The cobbles emptying before her. Rats flooding up from the sewers, fleeing as if she were dark flame. Folk scattering for their lives, not just back to the comfort of hearth and home, but down to the waterline, across the aqueduct, like the vermin all about them. Panic, pure and black, rippling before her. The city about her trembling, this tomb of a fallen divinity too long profaned by the tread of mortal feet. The grave of a fallen god, set now to become the grave of an empire.
She stalked the emptying streets, the deserted thoroughfares, on toward the forum. Pausing beside an upturned cart, she opened one pale hand. The shadows lifted a fallen mask, leafed in gold, placing it over her eyes. It was shaped like a crescent. Like a moon not yet full. The dark was alive about her. Inside her.
Pale and beautiful, she walked on.
She wore the night, gentlefriends.
And all the night came with her.
CHAPTER 45
LOVER
Spiderkiller closed her eyes.
The truedark breeze was cool on her skin.
The sky above as empty as the place her heart had once been.
The city was in chaos, growing deeper all the while. Somewhere behind her, the marrowborn fools who’d gathered for Scaeva’s gala were finally spilling out of the first Rib in a wailing multitude. The entire archipelago was trembling as if in the grip of an earthquake, great rents splitting the cobblestones or cracking the facades of the buildings about her. Black clouds had gathered above, choking the starlight and filling the air with thundersong. Somewhere in the warehouse district, the quakes had started a fire, black smoke rising into the dark. A wave of rats was streaming up from the Nethers, tumbling and squealing as they came. Spiderkiller could hear a growing mob of terrified citizens following on the rodents’ tails.
Godsgrave was coming to pieces all about her.
The Shahiid of Truths had known throwing in her lot with Scaeva was a gamble, but truthfully, it wasn’t one she’d bet heavily on. Before she was an acolyte of the Dark Mother or a member of the Red Church Ministry, Spiderkiller had been a survivor. She’d made her way in a world that had seemed ever set to end her, and she’d not only lived, but prospered. A woman didn’t last long in a world like hers by risking her entire stake on a single throw of the dice. No matter how sure the wager.
The Shahiid took a deep breath, calmed herself, opened her eyes again. She was well north of the forum, the chaos rising to the south and bleeding toward her. But she was ahead of it for now, making her way over the little bridges and whispering canals, shouldering her way through the good-hearted and the fatally curious who were making their way back toward the clamor.
She could understand that—the impulse to tread closer to the cliff to peer over the edge. The need to skip ahead a few chapters and learn how the story ends. But Spiderkiller herself had no desire to know how the tale of Itreya’s first imperator finished. Only that she be alive to read about it afterward.
Scaeva’s men had destroyed the Red Church chapel in the necropolis, but Spiderkiller knew of at least one cache of coin and weaponry he’d left untouched. Furthermore, the Church had a half-dozen boats moored at the Sword Arm docks, and at least two were small enough for her to handle alone. She may have grown into one of the deadliest assassins the Church had ever produced, but Spiderkiller was born a daughter of the Dweymeri Isles. Her father had been a shipwright, her older brother beside him. She knew oceans almost as well as she knew poisons.
The thoroughfares were becoming crowded now, the panic behind her swelling as Godsgrave shook again, again, like a diorama in the grip of a hateful child. People were spilling from their homes and taverna, out into the piazzas, bewildered, drunken, afraid. Screams and smoke were rising from the south, fear spreading through the streets like evershade through a bottle of Albari goldwine. The Shahiid kept to the back ways, crossing the Bridge of Threads and softly cursing the long, elaborate hems of her gown. She drew one of her poisoned blades from her waist, gilt with gold, carefully cutting a long slit into her dress so she might run better. And then, run she did.
The city shook again. Vermin streaming about her feet. Spiderkiller could see the gates of the necropolis ahead, fences of wrought iron silhouetted against the storm sky. She was only a few blocks from the waterline now, and from there, escape. Picking up her pace, she wiped sweat from her eyes, one long saltlock coming loose from the artful coils atop her head. The lightning above glittered on the gold at her throat and wrists, gleamed on her black lips as she entered the houses of Godsgrave’s dead.
Making her way through the graveyard, she stopped to steady herself against the cache—hidden in the tomb of some long-dead senator. She cast one dark eye over the inscription while she waited for the tremor to subside. The name was worn away with time, the features of the marble bust smoothed by years.
“Food for worms, all of us,” she murmured.
Black lips curled in a smile as she gazed to the night above.
“But not tonight, Mother.”
A chill stole over her, dark and hollow. Goosebumps rippling on her skin. Lightning flashed overhead, etching the necropolis shadows in black. A shape rose up before the Shahiid of Truths, hooded and cloaked, swords of what could only have been gravebone in its hands.
“Maw’s teeth,” she whispered.
It wasn’t human. That much was clear. O, it was shaped like one beneath that cloak. But though the night wasn’t all that cold, the figure’s breath hung in white clouds before its lips, Spiderkiller’s body shivering at the chill.
“Greetings, Shahiid.”
“’Byss and blood,” Spiderkiller breathed.
The thing peeled back its hood. Pallid skin. Ink-black fingernails. Long braids writhing like living things. Dark and bottomless eyes, alabaster wrought anew by the Mother’s hand. But even in truedark, all the city around her falling to chaos, Spiderkiller would have recognized her face anywhere.
The light of a thousand stars glittered in the girl’s gaze.
Empty as the Abyss she’d crossed to return here.
“… Ashlinn?”
“He couldn’t be here himself,” she said, black tears gleaming in her eyes. “Not even the Mother has the power to gift life to the dead twice. So he could only show me the way back. He was willing to give that much for her. That was the kind of boy he was. But Tric told me to tell you hello, Spiderkiller.”
The gravebone swords rose up in her hands.
“And he asked me to give you these.”
The truedark breeze was cool on her skin.
The sky above as empty as the place her heart had once been.
And Spiderkiller closed her eyes.
CHAPTER 46
FATHER
The shadows loosed their grip on his throat, and Mercurio fell to his knees.
The wind was a funeral dirge, howling and clawing at his skin. The fire was spreading from the spilled coals across the fallen furniture, smoke on his tongue. The thing that had been Julius Scaeva lowered his gaze from the ceiling to the entrance of the great hall as every door blasted inward with the sound of thunder. The shadows in the room warped and stretched, the entire Rib trembling. The dark seemed to deepen, the light of the few working arkemical globes suffocated. Mercurio felt a weight on his shoulders, pressing on his chest, crushing out his breath. A chill descended on the room, the scent of cloves and fallen leaves, the air thrumming with a tempest song. He lifted his head, old eyes turned toward the door.
And there she was. In all her glory.
“Mia,” he whispered.
Goddess, she was beautiful. The weight of years and blood and sacrifice, spread at her shoulders like dark wings. The scars of her trials etched on her skin and in the hollows of her chest, mirrored in her eyes. But nothing, no one, not the broken hearts or the shattered dreams or the simple tragedy of being alive and breathing had ever been enough to stop her. Larger than life, she was.
A girl with a story to tell.
She was dressed all in black: a corse
t and long skirts flowing like a river about her feet. A gravebone longblade waited in her hands. A golden mask covered her face, black paint on her lips, parting now as she spoke with a voice that shook the world.
“Father,” she said.
“Yes?” Mercurio answered.
She looked at him then. All the years between them became nothing at all. He was back in his little store, before it all began. Just the two of them, alone together. She was eleven years old, sitting at his feet as he showed her how to sweet-talk a padlock. She was thirteen, flint-black eyes glittering as she demanded to know why boys didn’t bleed. She was fifteen, borrowing his cigarillos and telling him some bawdy joke, a skinny, scrappy thing with a crooked fringe, not yet grown into her own skin. And it struck him in that moment just how much a part of him she was, just how much she meant, just how deeply she’d changed him, forever and always. This girl who’d dared where others had failed, who had never ever seen the world the way others did.
Nor had he, really.
Goddess, how he loved her …
She smiled at him. Just for a heartbeat. Black eyes gleaming with tears she’d never allow to fall in a place like this. And it struck him then, just how much she loved him back.
“I didn’t mean you,” she whispered sadly.
And she turned her dark, shaded eyes to the man behind him.
“I meant you,” she breathed.
Julius Scaeva looked at Mia with a stare as black as the blood inside him. He hovered perhaps twenty feet above the ground, dark, translucent wings rippling in the air about him, liquid black dripping from his fingertips. It was easy to see the thing inside him, the godling howling and smashing itself against the cage of his flesh. But the imperator of all Itreya seemed to have remembered himself for this last dance—some small part of what he’d been dragging itself back up to a thin and cracking surface. Enough at least to bare his teeth in a ghastly parody of a smile.
“It’s good to see you again, daughter,” he said.
“Mia!”