by Kat Ross
At Captain Mafuone’s signal, two Marakai stepped forward with damp cloths. When they wiped him clean, the skin was smooth and unbroken. Nazafareen leaned heavily on the sword. Her eyes felt hot and too tight in her skull.
“What happened?” Kallisto ran up, the Maenads crowding behind her.
“Chimera on the Chione, that’s what,” the captain replied stonily. She turned to Nazafareen. “Show me.”
Nazafareen gestured with her stump to the open door of the cabin. Captain Mafuone glanced inside. When she turned back, her face was grim.
“I think you people need to tell me who you really are,” she said.
“So you hunt three daēvas?”
They’d all crammed into Captain Mafuone’s cabin. Large windows gave a view of the Austral Ocean on all sides. To the east, a band of pale blue still marked the horizon with Solis. Knickknacks of gold and ivory and carnelian sat on shelving built into the walls, held in place by wooden rails. Nazafareen sensed that some were talismans, but the knowledge was dim, the whisper of a voice in a distant room. Once she had fully crossed the border to Nocturne, they would simply be like any other objects to her.
The captain sprawled in a wooden chair, arms crossed over her chest. It was bolted to the deck but had a mechanism that allowed it to turn in different directions. The waters had grown rougher in the Umbra, the wind stronger. She kept one muscular leg braced against the floor. Spray dashed against the thick glass windows.
The Maenads sat along one wall. Nazafareen leaned against Darius, drawing comfort from his warmth. He’d drunk nine cups of water after the healing. Nazafareen had helped wash off the rest of the blood. The rags had reddened two full buckets.
“Yes, but first we musy pay a visit to Sakhet-ra-Katme,” Kallisto replied. She and Herodotus occupied the only other chairs in the cabin, across a table from the captain and also bolted to the floor.
“Sakhet does not wish to be found.”
Kallisto gave a small smile. “Nevertheless, we seek her.”
Captain Mafuone turned to Darius. “You say the Oracle holds daēvas prisoner at the Temple of Apollo?”
Darius nodded. The captain shared a look with two other Marakai, who rested easily on their haunches at her side. One was the crewman with the neck tattoo who’d showed Nazafareen the water barrels. The other wore Sat-bu on her hands, each finger inked with a tentacle. Both had rich brown skin and high foreheads, with full lips and sharp cheekbones. The Marakai were a handsome people, well suited to both the blazing sun of Solis and the bitter dark of Nocturne.
“Something has been stalking us,” Captain Mafuone said slowly. “Over the last year, three ships disappeared without a trace. It’s not unheard of. Occasionally a rogue wave will catch a crew unawares. But three? One has to wonder.” Her dark eyes gazed at Darius. “Do you think the Oracle is behind it?”
The ship rolled through a deep trough. Nazafareen swallowed. She didn’t mind the up-and-down pitching so much, but the side-to-side was worse. Herodotus had not emerged from his cabin, she noticed.
“I can’t say for certain,” Darius replied, “but the priestess there told me she’d never seen a Marakai. I think she spoke the truth.”
“So it is something else.” The captain hesitated. The female Marakai laid an inked hand on her arm with a sharp warning look. Mafuone shook it off. “We must tell them, Tefnut. The time for keeping this secret is past.”
Tefnut’s dark eyes narrowed, but she gave a grudging nod.
“There are whispers of a man with red hair,” Captain Mafuone continued. “Whispers that things long dead walk again. Some have seen this man in the Isles. Some in Tjanjin. They are rumors only. But with all you have told me, we’d be fools not to listen.”
“I’ve seen this man too, though only in visions,” Kallisto said. “He is a monster. And he hunts a Marakai child. I don’t know her name, but Sakhet might.” Her motherly face hardened. “We cannot let him find her.”
The captain thought for a moment, her expression grave. “The Marakai have never forgotten the Vatras and what they did. We call it Isfet, the time of disorder and chaos. It ended in the sundering of the world into light and dark. Sat-bu warned us Isfet would come again. If the Vatras do live….” She trailed off, unwilling to finish the thought. “I agree Sakhet’s wisdom is needed now. We will help you find her.”
Kallisto nodded but Nazafareen could see the tension leave her shoulders.
“Once we get near the Isles, I can ask the birds,” Kallisto said. “They know where she lives. Dionysius willing, they will aid us.”
Captain Mafuone made a curious writhing gesture with her left hand. “May Sat-bu grant this girl shelter from the storm.” She turned to Nazafareen, her eyes growing a few degrees chillier. “So Eirik Kafsnjór set the chimera on you.”
Nazafareen nodded.
“And now he’s dead.”
She nodded again.
The captain sighed. “I cannot claim it’s a great loss. He treated the Marakai fairly, but he had to if he wished to continue trading with us. Eirik was not a…pleasant man. But we stay out of the feuding between Danai and Valkirin.”
“The clans will have to stand together when your Isfet comes again,” Kallisto observed tartly. “It is another reason I need to find Sahket-ra-katme. She has the authority to make the others listen.”
“It’s been a long time.” Captain Mafuone shrugged. “Many have forgotten what happened, or they do not really believe.” She turned back to Nazafareen. “And you, Breaker. What shall I do with you?”
“I can’t wield the power in Nocturne,” Nazafareen said quickly. “And I swear to follow your orders. You won’t have any more trouble from me. Please don’t kick me off your ship.”
Long seconds passed. Finally, the captain gave a curt nod.
“You may stay. But if you break your promise….” Her lips spread in an evil grin. “I will show where Sat-bu lives. It is deep and cold. You would not like it very much.”
Nazafareen and Darius stood together at the stern rail of the Chione. They held hands as the sky grew darker, and darker still, until only the faintest hint of light lingered to the east. He pointed out Artemis, who travelled nearer each day though she was still smaller than the other moons, and a group of stars he called the Archer.
“The same constellation existed in the Empire. You used to think they were an army of angels, waiting to come down to earth to fight the last battle against the undead Druj,” Darius said.
“And how do you know I wasn’t right?” Nazafareen asked lightly.
He smiled. And then the last blush of light failed. The mantle of Nocturne fell across the sea. The bond dissolved. Darius drew her into his arms—both of them solid and whole again—and rested his chin on her head. The wind strummed the rigging like a ghostly lyre. Whitecaps curled above deep troughs laced with spindrift that gleamed silver beneath the triple moons.
“Darius,” she said after a while. “I’m cold.”
“Do you really expect me to fall for that?” He squinted. “I suppose you think I’m easy now.”
She frowned. “Aren’t you?”
He gave her a stern look that curled her toes.
“For you, Nazafareen.” Darius kissed her. “Only for you.”
Laughing, they hurried below.
26
Nicodemus
The White Sea tossed the little sailboat around like a leaf in a whirlwind. It climbed a steep crest and wallowed down the back side, only to be lifted up again with sickening speed by the next swell. Foam streaked the heaving surface. Errant lateral waves sent gouts of icy water over the gunwales.
By any objective standard, the conditions would be classified as a gale. But this was the White Sea and Nicodemus, who had spent two years learning its hazards, considered himself lucky to have met such fair weather. Still, he’d lashed himself to the mast with a coil of rope. He was soaked to the skin, his auburn hair plastered to his face. The ropes bit into his flesh and the
cold gnawed his bones, but he was grinning. Every now and then, he shouted a challenge to the sea, the words snatched away by the wind.
Overhead, a rash of stars glittered against the dome of the sky. Hecate ascended to the east, Artemis to the south. He gripped the navigational talisman with numb fingers. It was made of all nine metals and had many moving parts, including three glass lenses that aligned in a particular way. Once Selene rose, he could take a reading.
It had taken two years to discover the coordinates—not that he’d looked quite as hard as Domitia wanted him to. When they’d first escaped and gone their separate ways, he’d been shocked by the world outside the Kiln. In his life before, you might die over a cup of brackish, foul-tasting water. You might die taking a piss in the night if you stepped on something that didn’t want to be stepped on. You might suffocate in a sandstorm. You might be bitten or stung or disemboweled. And if you let the fear paralyze you, if you hunkered down in a hole and refused to move, you’d slowly starve to death.
There were a hundred ways to die in the Kiln, each worse than the last. He’d witnessed most of them firsthand.
As a final cruelty, their faceless jailers had set powerful wards that dampened elemental magic. His people were left naked and defenseless in a labyrinth of horrors.
So when Nicodemus found himself in Tjanjin, with its exotic women and endlessly flowing food and drink and material luxuries beyond imagining, he decided to enjoy himself for a while. It was easy to pass as mortal. At first he’d simply taken what he wanted, but that drew unwanted attention. So he learned how to get the pieces of gold and silver they used as currency. He was terrible at cards, but it required only the tiniest flow of air to make the dice fall as he wished them to.
He’d bought himself fine clothes. Gorged on pickled quail and egg tarts and honeyed birds’ nests, all served on porcelain plates as thin as an eyelash and painted with pictures of dragons. He fucked and gambled and drank fiery jiu wine—but he never fought, not if he could help it, and he only killed when he had a good reason. Nicodemus had done enough fighting and killing that he regarded both things with a sort of weary practicality and took no pleasure from either.
Domitia had other ideas. She’d pestered and pestered until he finally gave in and began the search he’d promised to conduct. Nicodemus didn’t hate the Marakai as much as he hated the others. The Marakai didn’t lead soft lives. Their path was a harsh one. And they gave nine-tenths of what they earned back to their gods. That fact had astonished him at first. The extravagant waste of it. Holds brimming with silver and gold, ivory and carnelian and amber, opium and spell dust, carpets, silks, spices, ceramics, tapestries—all dumped into what they called the Great Green.
But after giving the matter some thought, Nicodemus decided he respected it. The Marakai were an austere, devout people. They feared their gods far more than they lusted for treasure, a sentiment he understood. Fear had driven him all of his life. And in the end, fear of what he was becoming—a soulless, scrabbling creature—had driven him to risk death to escape.
But the Danai…. His lip curled. They’d reduced his clan to wild animals. It wasn’t enough to destroy the capital. The Vatras had been banished to the hellish forge of the Kiln and not once in a thousand years had anyone bothered to see how they fared. Gaius said the Kiln had been different before. Dotted with lush oases and pools of crystal clear water. But after the sundering, it all withered. The barren sands devoured everything. And the Vatras weren’t the only living things to adapt. The creatures that managed to carve out a niche for themselves were invariably poisonous, armored and hungry.
Nicodemus turned his face away as a towering wave crashed over the bow, sending his little boat spinning. He desperately seized air and tried to correct course. The boat veered just as an onrushing comber lifted it so high the keel cleared the water. It tumbled down into the trough, floundering, and he felt the immense power of the sea sweep through him. It shook his marrow, quickened his blood, and he released the Nexus with a gasp.
Nicodemus understood why the Marakai worshipped the sea. To work fire was sublime but scouring, leaving the user utterly spent. Earth made his bones ache. Air, that weakest and most ethereal of elements, was simply boring. But to touch the mindless, untamed fury of the White Sea…. It humbled him.
The Marakai who had given him the coordinates didn’t believe he’d make it. Nicodemus knew this. The daēva was an addict and would do almost anything to get spell dust, but he still wouldn’t talk until Nicodemus had shown him the boat he planned to take. The daēva laughed when he saw the tiny single-masted craft bobbing in the harbor of Chang’an. He thought Nicodemus to be mortal. He’d laughed, and then wiped a trickle of too-dark blood from his mouth with the back of his sleeve. The sleeve had other stains on it, long dried. In Nicodemus’s experience, humans who inhaled spell dust directly rarely lived more than a year. He had no idea what it did to a daēva, but this one was rotting inside.
When he first saw the Marakai dust fiend, Nicodemus had been on the verge of giving up the search. He’d tried to use his crystal globe to find the Marakai talisman but it had shown him only a shadow. Some kind of ward hid the girl—most likely to prevent exactly his sort from tracking her down. Nicodemus knew it was a girl because he’d found her parents. Before they died, they admitted the power had passed to her. But they didn’t know where she was now, or even what her name was, because Sakhet-ra-katme had taken her as an infant to be raised by another family, a family who had no idea the child they kissed and hugged and cooed to sleep at night was a weapon capable of summoning a typhoon a thousand leagues across. It was possible the girl herself did not know this.
So he had tried to use the globe to find Sakhet-ra-katme. All it showed him was a bank of dense, roiling fog.
A year of fruitless inquiries passed. No one knew where she lived, or even if she still did. Across the sea, Domitia pursued her own strategy, but Nicodemus lacked the patience to trace a millennium of bloodlines, if such a thing was possible. The Marakai did not welcome nosy strangers. It was why he’d had to quietly kill so many of them.
And then he’d been passing by a dust den in a seedy district of Chang’an when he saw the Marakai emerge, red-eyed and jittery. The supply of dust coming from Samarqand through Delphi had dwindled to almost nothing. Prices had skyrocketed. The daēva was desperate, but Nicodemus had his own sources. And it turned out that this particular daēva was a distant relation of Sakhet herself. He knew how to find her.
Nicodemus watched as Selene rose slowly above the horizon. At the peak of a wave, in the instant before the boat plummeted down again, he held the talisman just so and took a reading from all three moons. Then he adjusted his course accordingly. There was still a long way to go, but he could find the way.
Nicodemus had never known his father. His mother was a distant memory, a faded image of a thin woman with red hair and sun-darkened skin. She had called him Legio, which meant little soldier. He didn’t know how old he was when she died. Too young to count the years of his age.
But there were others he cared for back in the Kiln. If the talismans were found, they could unmake the spell that held the Gale in place. Rip the prison door right off its hinges.
Gaius was a mad dog who would burn everything, but Nicodemus had no desire to live in a world reduced to ashes. He liked this new life. He liked pretty things and fine food. He liked flowers and kittens and music and poetry. He liked to watch the thundering horse races before the emperor’s palace. The only thing he objected to was the other daēvas. Nicodemus wondered how the Danai would like living in the Kiln. He smiled. Now that would be a fitting punishment.
As for the Valkirins, he remained undecided. They had played their part in creating the Gale, but the old woman he’d spoken to was surprisingly friendly. When he felt her eyes on him, he’d thought it was Domitia. Globes were exceedingly rare. He’d taken his from the emperor of Tjanjin. Nicodemus didn’t think of it as stealing since his own people had mad
e it, along with every single other talisman in the world, though the emperor didn’t see it that way.
But it was not Domitia who’d come knocking. It was an ancient, white-haired Valkirin. She’d promised to be his spy at Val Moraine if he got rid of the Danai invaders.
Nicodemus shook wet hair from his eyes. Petty fools, all of them. What did they have to feud over? They were already rich beyond imagining. Their children didn’t die. Their bellies were full. Domitia, who was more like Gaius than she’d care to admit, wanted to collar them all. Nicodemus just wished to be back in his bed in Chang’an, with a beautiful woman to warm it. These mortals had soft hands and shiny hair. They were not scarred or malnourished. Their carefree laughter almost made him forget.
Almost.
But not quite.
“I am coming for you, Sakhet-ra-katme,” he yelled at the stars. A wave nearly capsized the boat and he burst into laughter. It sounded deranged, even to him. He found he didn’t care. “Put the tea on!”
Sakhet was the first talisman, the bringer of storms, but that nameless girl…she would be the last.
Read on for a sneak peek of Monstrum, Book #3 in the Fourth Talisman series! It comes out June 15, 2018 and is available for preorder now on Amazon.
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Cheers, Kat
Chapter One
mother of storms
Meb tipped the bucket of fish guts over the rail and watched them vanish into the black water. The guts would make a tasty meal for something. A silverside, maybe, or a dragonet. If she’d been alone, Meb might drop a hook to see what showed up. But the current master of the Asperta stood braced on the deck a few paces away, eyes tight with concentration as he guided the vessel through heavy seas. Salt spray lashed his bare arms. The left one sported a tattoo of a small grey cat, her striped tail curling around his biceps. He appeared oblivious to Meb’s presence—she was beneath notice—but he’d know if she shirked her chores. They always did. And she wasn’t supposed to be fishing. She was supposed to be cleaning fish.