by Jay Kristoff
“O, shut up!” she yelled at the horse.
“… he really does not like you…,” whispered Mister Kindly.
“You’re not helping!”
“… and what would help…?”
“Explain to me how we got into this stew!”
The cat who was shadows tilted his head, as if thinking. A chuddering growl from the behemoths behind shivered the wagon in its rivets, but the bouncing across the dunes moved him not at all. He looked at the rolling Whisperwastes, the jagged horizon drawing nearer, his mistress above him. And he spoke with the voice of one unveiling an ugly but necessary truth.
“… it is basically your fault…”
Two weeks had passed atop their lookout, and both Mia and Tric had begun losing faith in her theory. The first turn of Septimus was fast approaching—if they didn’t cross the Church threshold before then, there’d be no chance to be accepted among this year’s flock. They watched in turns, one climbing the spire to relieve the other, pausing to chat awhile between shifts. They’d swap tales of their time as apprentices, or tricks of the trade. Mia seldom mentioned her familia. Tric never mentioned his. And yet he always lingered—even if he had nothing to say, he’d simply sit and watch her read for a spell.
Bastard had eventually taken to eating the grass around the spire’s roots, though he did it with obvious disdain. Mia often caught him looking at her like he wanted to eat her instead.
Around nevernight’s falling on what was probably the thirteenth turn, she and Tric were sitting atop the stone, staring over the wastes. Mia was down to her last forty-two cigarillos and already wishing she’d brought more.
“I tried to quit once,” she said, peering at Black Dorian’s4 watermark on the fine, hand-rolled smoke. “Lasted fourteen turns.”
“Missed it too much?”
“Withdrawals. Mercurio made me take it back up. He said me acting like a bear with a hangover three turns a month was bad enough.”
“Three turns a … ah.”
“Ah.”
“… You’re not that bad are you?”
“You can tell me in a turn or so,” she chuckled.
“I had no sisters.” Tric began retying his hair, a habit Mia had noted he indulged when uncomfortable. “I am unversed in…”—vague handwaving—“… women’s ways.”
“Well, then, you’re in for a treat.”
He stopped in mid-knot, looking at Mia strangely. “You are unlike any girl I have ev—”
The boy fell silent, slipped off his rock into a crouch. He took out an old captain’s spyglass, engraved with the same three seadrakes as his ring, and pressed it to his eye.
Mia crouched next to him, peering toward Last Hope. “See something?”
“Caravan.”
“Fortune hunters?”5
“Don’t think so.” Tric spat on the spyglass lens, rubbed away the dust. “Two laden wagons. Four men. Camels leading, so they’re in for a deep trek.”
“I’ve never ridden a camel before.”
“Nor me. I hear they stink. And spit.”
“Still sounds a step up from Bastard.”
“A whitedrake wearing a saddle is a step up from Bastard.”
They watched the caravan roll across the blood-red sand for an hour, pondering what lay ahead if the group were indeed from the Red Church. And when the caravan was almost a dot on the horizon, the pair clambered down from their throne, and followed across the wastes.
They kept distance at first, Flowers and Bastard plodding slowly. Mia was sure she could hear a strange tune on the wind. Not the maddening whispers—which she’d still not become accustomed to—but something like off-key bells, stacked all atop one another and pounded with an iron flail. She’d no idea what to make of it.
The pair weren’t outfitted for a trek into the deep desert, and they resolved to ride up to the caravan when it stopped to rest. There was no creeping up on it—the stone outcroppings and broken monuments studding the wastes weren’t enough to conceal approach, and Mia’s cloak of shadows was only big enough for one. Besides, she reasoned, if these were servants of the Lady of Blessed Murder, they may not take kindly to being snuck up on as they stopped to piss.
Sadly, the caravan folk seemed happy enough to go as they went, so to speak. The pair were gaining ground, but after two full turns in the saddle, with Bastard nipping her legs and occasionally trying to buck her into the dust, Mia could take no more. Pulling the stallion up near a circle of weathered statues, she didn’t so much lose her temper as dropkick it across the sand.
“Stop, stop,” she spat. “Fuck this. Right in the earhole.”
Tric raised an eyebrow. “What?”
“There’s more bruises in my britches than there is bottom. It needs a breather.”
“Are we playing alliteration and you didn’t tell me, or…”
“Fuck off. I need a rest.”
Tric frowned at the horizon. “We might lose them.”
“They’re led by a dozen camels, Tric. A noseless dog could follow this trail of shit in the middle of truedark. If they suddenly start trekking faster than a forty-a-turn smoker with an armload of drunken prostitutes, I think we can find them again.”
“What do drunken prostit—”
“I don’t need a foot massage. Don’t want a back rub. I just want to sit on something that isn’t moving for an hour.” Mia slipped off the saddle with a wince, waved her stiletto at Bastard. “And if you bite me again, I swear to the Maw I’ll make you a gelding.”
Bastard snorted, Mia sinking down against a smooth stone with a sigh. She pressed one hand to her cramping innards, rubbed her backside with the other.
“I can help with that,” Tric offered. “If you need it.”
The boy grinned as Mia raised the knuckles. Tethering the horses, he sat opposite Mia as she fished a cigarillo from her case, struck her flintbox and breathed deep.
“Your Shahiid was a wise man,” Tric said.
“What makes you say that?”
“Three turns of this a month is plenty.”
The girl scoffed, kicked a toeful of dust at him as he rolled away, laughing. Pulling her tricorn down over her eyes, she rested her head against the rock, cigarillo hanging from her lips. Tric watched her, peering about for some sign of Mister Kindly. Finding none.
He looked about them, studying the stonework. The statues were all similar; vaguely humanoid figures with feline heads, blasted by winds and time. Standing up on the outcropping, he squinted through his spyglass, watching the camel caravan trekking away. Mia was right—they moved at a plodding pace, and even with a few hours’ rest, they’d make up the lost ground. He wasn’t as grass-green around horses as Mia was, but after three turns saddlebound, he was aching in a few of the wrong places. And so sitting in the shade for a spell, he tried his best not watch her as she slept.
He only closed his eyes for a second.
“Naev counsels him to be silent.”
A slurred whisper in his ear, sharp as the blade against his throat. Tric opened his eyes, smelled leather, steel, something rank he supposed might be camel. A woman’s voice, thick with spittle, accent he couldn’t place. Behind him.
Tric said not a word.
“Why does he follow Naev?”
Tric glanced around, saw Bastard and Flowers still tied up. Footprints in the dust. No sign of Mia. The knife pressed harder against his throat.
“Speak.”
“You told me to be silent,” he whispered.
“Clever boy.” A smile behind the words. “Too clever?”
Tric reached down to his belt, wincing as the blade twitched. Slowly, slowly, he produced a small wooden box, shook it softly, the faint rattle of teeth therein.
“My tithe,” he said. “For the Maw.”
The box was snatched from his hand. “Maw’s dead.”
“O, Goddess, not again—”
“She’s playing with you, Don Tric.”
Tric smiled to hear Mia’
s voice, grinned as the knifewoman hissed in surprise.
“I’ve a better game we can play, though,” Mia said brightly. “It’s called drop your blade and let him go before I cut your hands off.”
“Naev will slit his throat.”
“Then your head will join your fingers on the sand, Mi Dona.”
Tric wondered if Mia was bluffing. Wondered what it would be like to feel the blade swish from one ear to the other. To die before he’d even begun. The pressure at his neck eased, and he flinched as something small and sharp nicked his skin.
“Ow.”
Dark stars collided in his eyes, the taste of dusty flowers on his tongue. He rolled aside, blinking, only dimly aware of the struggle behind him. Whispering blades slicing the air, feet scuffing across blood-red sand. He glimpsed their attacker through blurring eyes—a small, wiry woman, face veiled, wrapped in cloth the color of desert sand. Carrying two curved, double-edged knives and dancing like someone who knew the steps.
Tric pawed the scrape on his neck, fingertips wet. He tried to stand but couldn’t, staring at his hand as his brain caught up. His mind was his own, but his body …
“Poisoned…,” he breathed.
Mia and the stranger were circling each other, blades clutched in knifefighter grips. They moved like first-time lovers—hesitant at first, drifting closer until finally they fell into each other’s arms, fists and elbows and knees, block and counters and strikes. The sigh of steel in the air. The wet percussion of flesh and bone. Having never really seen her matched against a human opponent, Tric slowly realized Mia was no slouch with a blade—well honed and seemingly fearless. She fought left-handed, her fighting style unorthodox, moving swift. But for all Mia’s skill, the thin woman seemed her match. Her every strike was foiled. Every advance countered.
After a few minutes of spectating, the feeling was returning to Tric’s feet. Mia was panting with exertion, crow-black hair clinging to her skin like weed. The stranger wasn’t pressing the attack; simply defending silently. Mia was circling, trying to get the sun behind her, but her foe was clever enough to avoid getting Saan in her eyes. And so at last, with a small sigh as if admitting defeat, Mia moved her shadow so the stranger would be ankle-deep in it anyway.
The woman hissed in alarm, trying to sidestep, but the shadows moved quick as silver. Tric watched her fall still, as if her feet were glued to the spot. Mia stepped up and struck at the woman’s throat, blade whistling as it came. But instead of dying, the stranger tangled up Mia’s forearm, twisted her knife free, and flipped the girl onto her bruised backside, swift as a just soul flying to the Hearth.6
Mia’s blade quivered in the sand between Tric’s legs, two inches shy of a very unhappy accident. The boy blinked at the gravebone, trying to focus. He felt as if he should give it back—that seemed important—but the warmth at his neck bid him sit awhile longer.
Mia rolled to her feet, red-faced with fury. Snatching the knife from the sand, she turned back to the woman, teeth bared in a snarl.
“Let’s try that again, shall we?” the girl wheezed.
“Darkin,” said the strange woman, only slightly out of breath. “Darkin fool.”
“… What?”
“She calls the Dark here? In the deep wastes?”
“… Who are you?”
“Naev,” she slurred. “Only Naev.”
“That’s an Ashkahi word. It means ‘nothing.’”
“A learned fool, then.”
Mia motioned to Tric. “What did you do to my friend?”
“Ink.” The woman displayed a barbed ring on her finger. “A small dose.”7
“Why did you attack us?”
“If Naev had attacked her, the sands would be redder. Naev asked why they followed her. And now Naev knows. Naev wonders at the girl’s skill. And now Naev sees.” The veiled woman looked back and forth between them, made a slurping sound. “Sees a pair of fools.”
Tric rose on wobbly feet, leaning against the stone at his back. His head was clearing, anger replacing the haze. He drew his scimitar and glared at the three little women blurred before him, his pride stung to bleeding.
“Who are you calling fool, shorty?”
The woman glanced in his direction. “The boy whose throat Naev could have cut.”
“You snuck on me while I was sleeping.”
“The boy who sleeps when he should be watching.”
“How about you watch while I hand you your—”
“Tric,” Mia said. “Calm down.”
“Mia, this skinny streak of shit had a knife to my throat.”
“She’s testing you. Testing us. Everything she says and does. Look at her.”
Naev still held Mia’s gaze, eyes like black lamps burning in her skull. Mia had seen a stare like that before—the stare of a person who’d looked the end in the face so many times she considered death a friend. Old Mercurio had the same look in his eyes. And at last she knew the stranger for what she was.
The moment was nothing like she’d practiced in the mirror. And yet Mia still felt a sense of relief as she took the purse of teeth from her belt and tossed it to the thin woman. As if six years had been lifted from her chest.
“My tithe,” she said. “For the Maw.”
The woman hefted the bag in her hand. “Naev has no need of it.”
“But you’re from the Red Church…”
“It is Naev’s honor to serve in the House of Our Lady of Blessed Murder, yes. For the next few minutes at least.”
“Few minutes? What do you—”
The ground beneath them trembled. A faint tremor at first, felt at the small of her back. Rising every second.
“… Is that what I think it is?” Tric asked.
“Kraken,” Naev sighed. “They hear when she calls the Dark. A fool, as I said.”
Mia and Tric glanced at each other, spoke simultaneously. “O, shit…”
“Didn’t you know that?” Tric asked.
“Four Daughters, how was I supposed to know that? I’ve never been to Ashkah!”
“The kraken who attacked us before lost its bottle when you did your cloaky thing!”
“‘Cloaky thing’? Are you five years old?”
“Well, whatever it’s called, maybe you should stop it?” Tric pointed to the shadows around Naev’s feet. “Before it brings more?”
Mia’s shadow slithered back across the dust, took up its regular shape again. She kept a wary eye on Naev, but the woman simply sheathed her blade, head tilted.
“There are two,” she slurped. “Very large.”
“What do we do?” Mia asked.
“Run?” Naev shrugged. “Die?”
“Running sounds grand to me. Tric?”
Tric was already on Flowers’s back, the horse rearing to go. “Waiting on you, now.”
Mia vaulted into the saddle, offered a hand to the thin woman. “Ride with me.”
Naev hesitated a moment, tilting her head and fixing Mia in that black stare.
“Look, you’re welcome to stay here if you like…”
Naev stepped closer and the ground trembled. Bastard raised up on his hind legs, kicking at the air. Mia glanced behind to see a trail of churning earth approaching—as if something massive swum beneath the sand.
Right toward them.
As the stallion set his hooves back on the ground, she called the shadows again, fixing him in place long enough for Naev to scramble up behind her. A bellowing roar sounded under the earth, as if the things were also answering her summons. As Naev put her arms around Mia’s waist, she caught a whiff of spice and smoke. Something rotten beneath.
“She is making them angry,” the woman said.
“Let’s go!” Tric shouted.
Mia released Bastard’s hooves and kicked hard, the stallion bolting into a fast gallop. The ground behind exploded, tentacles bursting from the sand and cracking like hooked bullwhips. Mia heard a gut-watering bellow, glimpsed a beak that could swallow Bastard whole.
She saw a second runnel rumbling toward them from the west. Thundering hooves and roars filled her ears.
“Two of them, just like you said!” Mia yelled.
The veiled woman pointed north. “Ride for the wagons. We have ironsong to keep the kraken at bay.”
“What’s ironsong?”
“Ride!”
And so they did. A furious gallop over an ocean of blood-red sand. Glancing behind, she saw the two runnels converging, closing swift. She wondered how the beasts were tracking her. How they knew it was her who’d called the Dark. A tentacle broke the surface, two stories tall, set with hooks of blackened bone. Angry roars filled the air as it slammed back down to earth.
Dust whipping her eyes. Bastard snorting beneath her, hoof beats thudding in her chest. Mia held the reins hard, riding harder, grateful that though the stallion hated her like poison, he seemed to hate the thought of being eaten even more.
“Look out!” cried Tric.
Mia looked ahead, saw another runnel approaching from the north. Bigger, moving faster, shaking the earth beneath her. Flowers let out a terrified whinny.
“It seems there are three,” Naev said. “Apologies…”
Tentacles unfurled from the ground like the petals of some murderous flower. Mia looked into the beast’s maw, all snapping beak and hooked bone. As Flowers cut east to avoid the behemoth, Bastard finally came to the realization that he’d run much faster without two riders on his back. And so he started bucking.
Mia had the benefit of stirrups. Reins. A saddle. But Naev was riding on Bastard’s hindparts with nothing but Mia’s waist to keep her anchored. Bastard bucked again, whipping them about like rag dolls. And without a whisper, Naev sailed off the horse’s back.
Mia cut east to follow Tric, roaring at the boy over the chaos.
“We lost Naev!”
The Dweymeri glanced over his shoulder. “Maybe they’ll stop to eat her?”
“We have to go back!”
“When did you grow altruism? It’s suicide to go back there!”
“It’s not just altruism, you knob, I gave her my tithe!”
“O, shit,” Tric felt about his waist. “She took mine, too!”