Nevernight

by Jay Kristoff

  “I don’t know.” Tric found himself mumbling. “It’s just what she said.”

  Mia shook her head, crooked bangs swaying before her eyes.

  “You know, I’ve never understood that. How being named for a woman’s nethers is somehow more grievous than any other insult. Seems to me calling someone after a man’s privates is worse. I mean, what do you picture when you hear a fellow called a cock?”

  Tric shrugged, befuddled at the strange turn in conversation.

  “You imagine an oaf, don’t you?” Mia continued. “Someone so full of wank there’s no room for wits. A slow-minded bastard who struts about full of spunk and piss, completely ignorant of how he looks to others.”

  An exhalation of clove-sweet gray into the air between them.

  “Cock is just another word for ‘fool.’ But you call someone a cunt, well…” The girl smiled. “You’re implying a sense of malice there. An intent. Malevolent and self-aware. Don’t think I name Consul Scaeva a cunt to gift him insult. Cunts have brains, Don Tric. Cunts have teeth. Someone calls you a cunt, you take it as a compliment. As a sign that folk believe you’re not to be lightly fucked with.” A shrug. “I think they call that irony.”

  Mia sniffed, staring at the wastes laid out below them.

  “Truth is, there’s no difference between your nethers and mine. Aside from the obvious, of course. But one doesn’t carry any more weight than the other. Why should what’s between my legs be considered any smarter or stupider, any worse or better? It’s all just meat, Don Tric. In the end, it’s all just food for worms. Just like Duomo, Remus, and Scaeva will be.”

  One last drag, long and deep, as if drawing the very life from her smoke.

  “But I’d still rather be called a cunt than a cock any turn.”

  The girl sighed gray, crushed her cigarillo out with her boot heel.

  Spat into the wind.

  And just like that, young Tric was in love.

  1. The horse, not the captain.

  2. She was bitten by three different horses over the course of her stay on the farm, bucked off seven times (twice into manure), and stepped on once. She was also pinched on the behind by a particularly daring stable boy named Romero (sadly, on the same turn she was first bucked into shit), who’d been misinformed by a traveling minstrel that city women “enjoy that kind of thing.”

  The boy’s nose never quite healed properly, though he managed to recover three of his teeth. Last I heard, he’d been sentenced to four years in the Philosopher’s Stone for a brutal, and many said unprovoked, assault on a traveling minstrel.

  3. The Empire of Ashkah ruled the known world for approximately seven centuries; a period considered by learned scholars as a peerless age in the fields of science and the arts arcane. Ashkah was a society of sorcerers, whose bold ventures into the realms of magika—or werking, or whichever term you please—not only dwarfed the weaker thaumaturgical rites of the Liisian Magus Kings who followed them, but also changed the shape of reality itself.

  Sadly, as is often the case when mortals go fiddling with fabrics woven by the gods, someone, or something, is eventually going to get their noses put out of joint. No mortal scholar is quite sure about the exact nature of Ashkah’s fall. Many say their empire was scrubbed from the world by Aa himself. Others claim the werking of the Ashkah sorcerii caught the attentions of beings older than the gods—nameless monstrosities beyond the edge of universe and sanity, who gobbled the empire down like an inkfiend on a three-turn bender.

  And then, there are others who say someone among the sorcerii simply fucked up.

  Very, VERY badly.

  4. Mercurio named these trials “treasure hunts,” and though they varied in difficulty and danger to life and limb, they almost always began with Mia awakening with a mild slumberweed headache in unfamiliar surroundings. Once, after a lesson in the principles of magnetism, she’d awoken in the pitch-black of Godsgrave’s sewers with nothing but an iron hairpin and piece of chalk to help find her way out. After six months of lessons in the tongue of Old Ashkah, she’d awoken five miles into the Godsgrave necropolis with half a skin of water and directions to the exit written in Ashkahi script.

  Of course, while Mercurio called them “treasure hunts,” the only “treasure” to be found at the end of these exercises was “continued existence.” Still, they did make for a singularly dedicated student.

  5. Though referred to by the few scholars mad enough to study them as “sand kraken,” the apex predators of the Ashkahi wastes aren’t actually cephalopods. They swim in sand as easily as their sea-bound “kin” swim in water, filtering oxygen from the earth through specialized gills. They eat anything not possessed of an above-average running speed, and are renowned for temperaments most would describe as “uncooperative.”

  The undisputed expert in their study, Loresman Carlo Ribisi, theorized they’re a kind of desert worm, mutated by magikal pollutants from the ruins of the Ashkahi Empire. Ribisi postulated the beasts are possessed of canine-level intelligence, and to prove his theorem, captured an infant sand kraken, brought it back to the Grand Collegium in Godsgrave, and attempted to train it in simple tasks.

  Ribisi constructed stone mazes, filled them with earth, and set the beast (whom he named “Alfi” after a much-beloved familia pet) loose inside them. Alfi would be rewarded with food if he successfully traversed the labyrinth. Ribisi introduced more complex patterns as Alfi grew in size (six feet long at his last recorded measurement), also incorporating simple devices such as latches and doors to prove the beast’s growing intelligence. Sadly, Alfi utilized this knowledge one nevernight in escaping his enclosure, murdering the better part of the zoology faculty, including a rather disappointed Ribisi, before he was dispatched by a cadre of baffled Luminatii.

  Ordinances about the keeping of wildlife within college grounds were tightened considerably after this affair.

  6. Though a cadre of ten can be found in Godsgrave, the mekwerk giants of the Iron Collegium are kept unfueled and unmanned, only to be operated in times of absolute crisis. Owing to Itreyan military might and the difficulties of assaulting Godsgrave by anything other than sea, the presence of the machines in the city is mostly ceremonial. In the last forty truedarks, Godsgrave’s war walkers have been activated precisely twice.

  The first, during the overthrow of King Francisco XV—legionaries loyal to the monarchy attempted to storm the palace and rescue the king from his assailants when news of the uprising broke. The loyalist pilots (strictly a ceremonial position by that stage of the monarchy) surrendered once they discovered that Francisco and his entire family were already dead.

  The second incident commenced with three bottles of mid-shelf goldwine and a drunken boast to a would-be paramour, segued into a stumbling crash into the sixth Rib (which broke at the base and collapsed into the sea), and ended with a swift trial and an even swifter crucifixion for the young man involved.

  And the lass wasn’t even that keen on him …

  7. If any horse born in the sight of Aa was actually capable of mocking laughter, it was Bastard.

  8. Known as “the knuckles,” the gesture involves the raising of a fist with fore and babyfinger extended as far as the first knuckle.

  The gesture has origins at the Battle of the Scarlet Sands, where King Francisco I of Itreya, also known as “The Great Unifier,” defeated the last Liisian Magus King, Lucius the Omnipotent.

  After this defeat, it was presumed that Liisian resistance to Itreyan rule would falter. Itreyan occupation of its conquests was as ingenious as it was insidious—a small group of marrowborn Administratii would move into the power vacuum created by the destruction of the ruling class, and through coercion and bribery, establish a new local elite with ties to Itreya. Local sons would be sent to Godsgrave to be educated, Itreyan daughters would marry local men, wealth would flow into all the right pockets, and within a generation, the conquered would be wondering why they resisted in the first place.

  Not s
o in Liis, gentlefriends.

  After Lucius’s death, a garrison of Luminatii was stationed in the Liisian capital, Elai, to oversee “assimilation.” Things went well until a cadre of elite troops still loyal to Lucius’s memory raided a banquet in the former Magus King’s palace. The Itreyan elite and Luminatii garrison were captured, lined up by the loyalists, and, one by one, castrated with a red-hot blade.

  The captives were then released, the elite forces barricading themselves inside the palace and awaiting inevitable retaliation. Lasting more than six months, the Siege of Elai became legend. It was said the loyalists roamed the palace battlements, holding aloft their fists with fore and babyfinger extended as far as the first knuckle—a taunting gesture meant to remind the attacking Itreyans the rebels were still possessed of their … equipment, while the Itreyan’s jewels had been fed to the rebels’ dogs. Though the loyalists were eventually defeated, “the knuckles” has entered common use by many of the Republic’s citizens: a taunting gesture intended to flaunt superiority over an unmanned opponent.

  CHAPTER 6

  DUST

  Mia’s mother had given her a puzzle box when she was five years old—a wooden cube with shifting faces that, when correctly aligned, would reveal the true gift inside. It was the best Great Tithe gift she could ever remember receiving.1

  Mia had thought it cruel at the time. When all the other marrowborn children were playing with new dolls or wooden swords, she was stuck with this wretched box that simply refused to open. She bashed it against the wall, to no avail. She cried to her father it wasn’t fair, and he simply smiled. And when Mia stomped before the Dona Corvere and demanded to know why she hadn’t simply given her a pretty ribbon for her hair or a new dress instead of this wretched thing, her mother had knelt, and looked her daughter in the eye.

  “Your mind will serve you better than any trinket under the suns,” she’d said. “It is a weapon, Mia. And like any weapon, you need practice to be any good at wielding it.”

  “But mother—”

  “No, Mia Corvere. Beauty you’re born with, but brains you earn.”

  So Mia had taken the box and sat with it. Scowled at it. Stared at it until she dreamed about it. Twisting and turning and cursing it by all the swears she’d heard her father ever use. But after two months of frustration, she twisted a final piece and heard a wonderful sound.

  Click.

  The lid opened, and inside, she’d found a brooch—a crow with tiny amber eyes. The sigil of her Familia. The crow of Corvere. She wore it to mornmeal the next turn. Her mother had smiled and never said a word. She’d kept the box; in all the Great Tithes since, all the puzzles her parents had given her thereafter, it remained her favorite. After her father’s execution and mother’s arrest, she’d left the box and something of the little girl who loved it behind.

  But the brooch itself, she’d brought with her. That, and her gift for puzzles.

  She’d woken beneath a pile of refuse in a lonely alley, somewhere in the Godsgrave backstreets. As she pawed the sleep from her eyes, her stomach had growled. She knew the consul’s men might still be chasing her—that he might send more if he knew they’d failed to drown her. She had nowhere to stay. No friends. No money. No food.

  She was aching and alone and afraid. She missed her mother. Little Jonnen, her baby brother. Her soft bed and her warm clothes and her cat. The memory of him lying broken on the floor flooded her eyes with tears, the thought of the man who’d killed him filled her heart with hate.

  “Poor Captain Puddles…”

  “… meow…,” said a voice.

  The little girl glanced up at the sound, dragging dark hair from damp lashes. And there on the cobbles, amid the weeds and the rot and the filth, she saw a cat.

  Not her cat, to be sure. O, it was black as truedark, just like the good captain had been. But it was thin as paper and translucent, as if someone had cut a cat’s shape out of shadowstuff itself. And despite the fact that he now wore a shape instead of no shape at all, she still recognized her friend. The one who’d helped her when no one else in the world could.

  “Mister Kindly?” she asked.

  “… meow…,” he said.

  She reached toward the creature as if to pet him, but her hand passed through him as it might a wisp of smoke. Looking into his darkness, she felt that same sensation—her fear leeching away like poison from a wound, leaving her hard and unafraid. And she realized though she had no brother, no mother, no father, no familia, she wasn’t entirely alone.

  “All right,” she nodded.

  Food first. She had no money, but she had her stiletto, and her brooch pinned to her (increasingly disheveled) dress. A gravebone blade would be worth a fortune, but she was loathe to give up her only weapon. However, she knew there were folk who’d give her money for the jewelry. Coin could buy her food and a room to lay low so she could think about what to do next. Ten years old, her mother in chains, her—

  “… meow…,” said Mister Kindly.

  “Right,” she nodded. “One puzzle at a time.”

  She didn’t even know what part of Godsgrave she was in. She’d spent her entire life in the Spine. But her father had kept maps of the city in his study, hung on the walls with his swords and his wreaths, and she remembered the layout of the metropolis roughly enough. She was best off staying away from the marrowborn quarter, hiding as low and deep as she could until she was sure the consul’s men had given up the chase.

  As she stood, Mister Kindly flowed like water into the black around her feet, her shadow darkening as he did so. Though she knew she should probably be frightened at the sight, instead Mia took a deep breath, combed her fingers through her hair, and stepped out of the alley, right into a sloppy pile of what she hoped was mud.2

  Cursing in a most improper fashion and scraping her soles on the cobbles, she saw people of all kinds pushing along the cramped thoroughfare. Fair-haired Vaanians and blue-eyed Itreyans and tall Dweymeri with leviathan ink tattoos, dozens of slaves with arkemical marks of sale burned on their cheeks. But Mia soon realized the folk were mostly Liisian; olive of skin and dark of hair. Storefronts were marked with a sigil Mia recognized from her lessons with Brother Crassus and truedark masses inside the great cathedrals—three burning circles, intertwined. A mirror of the three suns that roamed the skies overhead. The eyes of Aa himself.

  The Trinity.3

  Mia realized she must be in the Liisian quarter—Little Liis, she’d heard it called. Squalid and overcrowded, poverty written in crumbling stonework. The canal waters ran high here, consuming the lower floors of the buildings around. Palazzos of unadorned brick, rusting to a dark brown at the water’s edge. Above the water’s reek, she could smell spiced breads and clove smoke, hear songs in a language she couldn’t quite comprehend but almost recognized.

  She stepped into the flow of people, jostled and bumped. The crush might have been frightening for a girl who’d grown her whole life in the shelter of the Spine, but again, Mia found herself unafraid. She was pushed along until the street spilled into a broad piazza, lined on all sides by stalls and stores. Climbing up a pile of empty crates, Mia realized she was in the marketplace, the air filled with the bustle and murmur of hundreds of folk, the harsh glare of two suns burning overhead, and the most extraordinary smell she’d ever encountered in her life.

  Mia couldn’t describe it as a stench—although a stench was certainly wrapped up in the incomparable perfume. Little Liis sat on the southwest of Godsgrave, below the Hips near the Bay of Butchers, and was skirted by Godsgrave’s abattoirs and various sewer outflows. The bay’s reek has been compared to a burst belly covered in horseshit and burning human hair, three turns rotten in the heat of truelight.

  However, masking this stench was the perfume of the marketplace itself. The toast-warm aroma of fresh-baked breads, tarts, and sugardoughs. The buoyant scents of rooftop gardens. Mia found herself half-drooling, half-sickened—part of her wishing to eat everything in sight, the othe
r part wondering if she’d ever eat again.

  Thumbing the brooch at her breast, she looked about for a vendor. There were plenty of trinket stalls, but most looked like two-copper affairs. On the market’s edge, she saw an old building, crouched like a beggar at the corner of two crooked roads. A sign swung on a squeaking hinge above its sad little door.

  MERCURIO’S CURIOS—ODDITIES, RARITIES & The FYNEST ANTIQUITIES.

  A door placard informed her, “No time-wasters, rabble, or religious sorts welcome.”

  She squinted across the way, looked down at the too-dark shadow around her feet.

  “Well?” she asked.

  “… meow…” said Mister Kindly.

  “I think so too.”

  And Mia hopped off her crates, and headed toward the store.

  Blood gushed across the wagon’s floor, thick and crusted on Mia’s hands. Dust clawing her eyes, rising in a storm from the camels’ hooves. There was no need for Mia to whip them; the beasts were running just fine on their own. And so she concentrated on quieting the headache splitting her brow and stilling the now-familiar urge to stab Tric repeatedly in the face.

  The boy was stood on the wagon’s tail, banging away at what might have been a xylophone, if xylophones were crafted from iron tubes and made a noise like donkeys rutting in a belfry. The boy was drenched in blood and dust too; gritted teeth of perfect white in a mask of filthy red and shitty tattoos.

  “Tric, shut that racket up!” Mia roared.

  “It scares off the krakens!”

  “Scares off the krakens…,” moaned Naev, from a puddle of her own blood.

  “No, it bloody doesn’t!” yelled Mia.

  She glanced over her shoulder, just in case the ungodly racket had indeed scared off the monstrosities chasing them, but alas, the four runnels of churning earth were still in close pursuit.

  Bastard galloped alongside the wagon, tethered by his reins. The stallion was glaring at Mia, occasionally spitting an accusing whinny in her direction.