by Jay Kristoff
It was sweet bliss, being out of the light of those awful suns. Her sweat was burning in her wounds. Throwing aside her shadow mantle, Mia slipped Jonnen off her shoulder. He was little, but Goddess, he wasn’t light, and her legs and spine practically wept with relief as she placed him onto the chapel floor.
“I’m going to free your feet,” she warned. “You try to run, I’ll tie you tighter.”
The boy made no sound behind his gag, watching silently as she knelt and loosened the strap about his ankles. She could see the mistrust swimming in those black eyes, the unabated anger, but he made no immediate break for freedom. Looping the strap through the bonds at his wrists, Mia stood and walked on, tugging the little boy along behind her like a sullen hound on a soggy leash.
She made her way quietly through twisted tunnels of femurs and ribs—remains of the city’s destitute and nameless, too poor to afford tombs of their own. Pulling on a hidden lever, she opened a secret door in a stack of dusty bones, and finally slipped into the Red Church chapel hidden beyond.
Mia crept down the twisting hallways, lined with the skeletons of those long perished. Shuffling behind her, Jonnen was wide-eyed, gazing at the bones all around them. But surrounded by the dead as he was, Mister Kindly stayed coiled in his shadow, keeping the worst of his fear at bay as they moved farther into the chapel.
The corridors were dark.
Silent.
Empty.
Wrong.
Mia felt it almost immediately. Smelled it in the air. The faint scent of blood wasn’t out of place in a chapel to Our Lady of Blessed Murder, but the lingering aroma of a tombstone bomb and burned parchment certainly was.
The chapel was far too quiet, the air far too still.
Suspicion ever her watchword, Mia pulled Jonnen closer and werked her mantle of shadows back about their shoulders. Creeping onward in near blindness. Jonnen’s breathing seemed far too loud in the silence, her grip on his leash damp with sweat. Her ears strained for the slightest sound, but the place seemed deserted.
Mia stopped in a bone-lined hallway, the hair on the back of her neck prickling. She knew, even before she heard Eclipse’s warning growl.
“… BEHIND…”
The dagger flashed from out of the darkness, gleaming silver, poison-dark. Mia twisted, damp hair whipping in a long black ribbon behind her, spine bent in a perfect arch. The blade sailed over her chin, missing her by a breath. Her free hand touched the ground, pushed her back up to standing, heart hammering.
Her mind was racing, brow creased in confusion. Beneath her cloak of shadows, she was almost blind, aye—but the world should have been just as blind to her.
Blind.
O, Goddess.
He stepped out from the dark, silent despite his bulk. His gray leathers were stretched taut across the barn-broad span of his shoulders. His ever-empty scabbard hung at his waist, dark leather embossed with a pattern of concentric circles, much like a pattern of eyes. Thirty-six small scars were etched into his forearm—one for every life he’d taken in the Red Church’s name. His eyes were milky white, but Mia saw his eyebrows were gone entirely. The once-blond stubble on his head was crisped black as if burned, and the four sharp spikes of his beard were charred nubs.
“Solis.”
His face was swathed in shadows, blind eyes fixed on the ceiling. He drew two short double-edged blades from his back, both darkened by poison. And, hidden as Mia was beneath her mantle, he still spoke directly to her.
“Treacherous fucking quim,” he growled.
Mia reached for her gravebone dagger with her free hand. Heart sinking as she realized she’d left it buried in Consul Scaeva’s chest.
“O, shit,” she whispered.
CHAPTER 2
BONEYARDS
The Revered Father of the Red Church strode forward, blades raised.
“I wondered if you’d be fool enough to return here,” he snarled.
Mia tightened her sweating grip on her brother’s leash. Sensing movement, she glanced over her shoulder and saw a slender boy with shocking blue eyes stepping from the necropolis shadows. He was death-pale, dressed in a charred black doublet. Two wicked knives gleamed in his hands, their blades black with toxin.
Hush.
“Well?” Solis sneered. “Nothing to say, pup?”
Mia stayed silent, wondering how Solis could sense her under her shadowcloak at all. Sound, perhaps? The scent of her blood and sweat? Regardless, she was exhausted, unarmed, wounded—in no shape to fight. Sensing her fear, the spreading cold in her gut, Mister Kindly slipped from the boy’s shadow into her own to quell it. And as the daemon flitted away from the dark about his feet, little Jonnen kicked Mia hard in the shins and snatched his hands from her sweating grip.
“Jonnen!” she cried.
The boy turned and bolted. Mia reached for him, hand outstretched and trying to catch him up. And Solis simply hefted his blades, lowered his head, and charged.
Mia swayed aside, the Shahiid’s blade whistling past her cheek as Hush closed in behind her. Spinning swift, she threw aside her shadowcloak, werking the shadows and tangling up the boy’s feet instead. He stumbled, fell, Mia slipping under another one of Solis’s sweeping strikes. Glancing to the cool dark in the corridor behind the Shahiid, she saw Jonnen fleeing back the way they’d come. And clenching her jaw tight she
Stepped
into the gloom
at Solis’s back
and bolted down the corridor after her fleeing brother.
“Jonnen, stop!”
Eclipse growled warning, and Mia twisted aside as one of Solis’s short swords came whistling at her out of the black. It struck the bone wall in front of her as she reached a sharp corner, remained quivering inside some long-dead skull. Mia grabbed it as she rushed past, twisting it loose and clutching it in her left hand as she ran on.
Dashing on his little legs, Jonnen found himself overtaken quickly. As Mia pounded up the corridor behind him, he glanced over his shoulder, put on a new spurt of speed. His hands were still bound, but he’d managed to drag the gag free from his mouth, shouting as she picked him up and slung him under her arm.
“Unhand me, wench!” he cried, wriggling in fury.
“Jonnen, be still!” Mia hissed.
“Let me go!”
“… still like him, do you…?” Mister Kindly whispered from Mia’s shadow.
“… LESS AND LESS WITH EACH PASSING MOMENT…,” Eclipse replied, flitting out ahead.
“… well, now you appreciate how i feel about you…”
“Shut it, the pair of you!” Mia gasped.
She bounced off a bone wall and stumbled around another corner, Solis and Hush close on her heels. Kicking through the tomb’s doorway, Mia dashed up the crumbling stairs and back into the awful glare of those three burning suns. Despite Mister Kindly feasting on her fear, her heart was threatening to burst from her ribs.
She’d spent the entire turn fighting for her life already—she was in no shape to tackle a fully armed Blade of the Red Church, let alone the former Shahiid of Songs. Charred eyebrows aside, Solis was one of the deadliest men alive with a blade. The last time they’d tangled, he’d hacked her arm clean off at the elbow. Hush was no slouch, either, and whatever kinship Mia and the boy might have had in their turns as acolytes seemed long evaporated. She was a traitor to the Red Church in his eyes, worthy only of a slow and very painful murder.
She was outnumbered. And in her current state, outclassed.
But how the ’byss coul
d Solis see me?
Mia Stepped through the shadows to give herself some kind of lead, but with the three suns blazing overhead and her exhaustion from the great games thickening her blood, she only managed to travel a few dozen feet. She clipped her shin on a tombstone, staggered, and almost fell. She might’ve pulled on her mantle again, but Solis seemed able to sense her anyway. And truth told, she was too tired to manage it all—the wriggling boy in her arms, the desperate chase, werking the dark. Wild eyes searching now for any way of escape.
She skipped up onto a low marble tomb and vaulted the wrought-iron fence of the necropolis. Hitting the ground hard, she gasped, almost falling again. She was in the grounds of a grand chapel to Aa now, built beside the houses of the dead. She could see a broad cobbled road scattered with citizens beyond the churchyard, tall tenements lining the street, flowers in the window boxes. The chapel itself was limestone and glass, the three suns on its belfry mirroring the three suns above.
Black Mother, they were so bright, so hot, so—
“… MIA, BEWARE…!”
A dagger sailed from Hush’s outstretched hand, whistling toward her back. She twisted with a cry, the blade slicing through a lock of her long, dark hair and sailing past her scarred cheek, close enough for her to smell the toxin on the blade. It was Rictus—a fast-working paralytic. One good scratch and she’d be helpless as a newborn babe.
They want me alive, she realized.
“Release me, villain!” her brother shouted, thrashing again.
“Jonnen, please—”
“My name is Lucius!”
The boy bucked and kicked under Mia’s arm, still trying to free himself from her grip. He managed to drag his hand loose from the sodden leather bonds about his wrists, and with a gasp, he threw it up into Mia’s face. And as if the suns were suddenly extinguished in the sky, all the world went black.
She stumbled in the sudden dark. Her boot clipped a broken flagstone, and her legs went out from under her. Mia gritted her teeth as she hit the ground, hissing in pain as she tore her knees and palms bloody. Her brother also fell, crying out as he tumbled across the gravel to a graceless halt.
The boy rose from the dirt. The boy she’d thought long dead. The boy she’d just snatched from the clutches of a man he should have hated.
“Assassin!” he roared. “The assassin is here!”
And fast as he could, he dashed out into the street.
Mia blinked hard, shook her head—she could hear Jonnen yelling as he ran, but she could see nothing at all. In a rush, she realized her brother had somehow werked the shadows over her eyes, completely blinding her. It was a trick she’d never learned, never tried, and she’d have admired the boy’s creativity if he wasn’t turning out to be such a troublesome little prick.
But the shadows were hers to werk just as much as Jonnen’s, and death was running right on her heels. Mia curled her fingers into claws, tore the darkness away from her eyes just as the Revered Father and his silent companion vaulted the iron fence and dropped into the churchyard behind her.
Mia hauled herself to her feet, blinking hard as her sight returned. Her arms felt like putty. Her legs were shaking. Turning to face Solis and Hush, she was barely able to raise her stolen sword. Her shadow writhed around her long leather boots as the two killers fanned out to flank her.
“Call the guards!” Jonnen cried from the street beyond. “Assassin!”
The citizens turned to stare, wondering at the ruckus. A priest of Aa stepped out from the chapel doors, clad in his holy vestments. A cadre of Itreyan legionaries down the block turned their heads at the sound of the boy’s cries. But Mia could pay heed to none of it.
Solis lunged at her throat, his blade a blur. Desperate, drawing on the dark new strength in her veins, she reached out, tangled up the Shahiid’s feet in his own shadow before he could reach her. Solis snarled in frustration, his strike falling short. Hush hurled another knife and Mia cried out, smashing it from the air with her stolen sword in a hail of bright sparks. And then she charged the silent boy, desperate to even the scales before Solis could break loose of her shadow werking.
Hush drew a rapier from his belt, met her charge, steel on steel. Mia knew the boy from the brief comradeship they’d shared as acolytes in the halls of the Quiet Mountain. She knew where he’d come from, what he’d been before he joined the Church, why he never spoke. It wasn’t because he lacked a tongue, no—it was because the owners of the pleasure house he’d been enslaved to as a child had knocked out all his teeth so he could better service their clientele.
Mia had been training in the art of the sword since she was ten years old. Hush had still been on his hands and knees on silken sheets. They’d both trained under Solis, true, and the boy had proved himself no novice with a blade. But in the last nine months, Mia had trained under the whip of Arkades, the Red Lion of Itreya—schooled in the arts of the gladiatii by one of the greatest swordsmen alive. And though she was exhausted, bleeding, bruised, her muscles were still hardened, her grip still callused, her form drilled into her hour upon hour beneath the burning sunslight.
“Guards!” came Jonnen’s call. “She’s here!”
Mia struck low, forcing Hush aside, her backswing whistling through the air. The boy stepped away like a dancer, blue eyes glittering. Mia raised her blade, telegraphing another strike. But with a deft flick of her boot, she scooped up a toeful of grit from the earth beneath them—an old gladiatii trick—and kicked it right at Hush’s face.
The boy reeled back and Mia’s blade sliced him across the chest, just a few inches short of splitting his ribs clean open. His doublet and the flesh beyond parted like water, but still the boy made no sound. He staggered back, one hand pressed to his wound as Mia raised her blade for the deathblow.
“… MIA…!”
She turned with a gasp, barely deflecting the strike that would have split her head apart. Solis had hacked his boots away, left them wrapped in tendrils of his own shadow, and charged Mia barefoot. The big man collided with her, sent her flying, her backside and thighs shredded on the stone as she hit the ground. She tumbled back up onto her feet with a black curse, fending off the flurry of strikes Solis aimed at her head, neck, chest. She struck back, sweat-soaked and desperate, long black hair stuck to her skin, Mister Kindly and Eclipse working hard to eat her fear.
“Guards!”
This was no fresh Blade of the Church she faced now, no. This was the deadliest swordsman in the congregation. And no cheap tricks learned in the arena would avail Mia here. Only skill. And steel. And sheer, bloody will.
She struck back at Solis, their blades ringing bright beneath the burning suns. His white eyes were narrowed, fixed somewhere in the empty over her left shoulder. And yet the blind man moved as if he saw her every strike coming from a mile away. Forcing her back. Beating her down. Wearing her out.
The crowd in the street had gathered outside the chapel gates now, drawn like flies to a corpse by Jonnen’s cries. The boy stood in the middle of the thoroughfare, waving at the cadre of legionaries, who were even now tromptromptromping toward them. Mia was tired, weak, outnumbered—she had only moments before this situation dissolved into a puddle of shite.
“Where’s Ashlinn and Mercurio?” she demanded.
Solis’s blade streaked past her chin as he smiled. “If you’ve a wish to see your old master alive again, girl, you’d best drop your steel and come with me.”
Mia’s eyes narrowed as she struck at the big man’s knees.
“You don’t call me girl, bastard. Not as if the word were kin for ‘shit.’”
Solis laughed and launched a riposte that almost took Mia’s head off. She twisted aside, sweat-soaked fringe hanging in her eyes.
“Perhaps you only hear what you want to hear, girl.”
“Aye, laugh now,” she wheezed. “But what will you do without your beloved Scaeva? When your other patrons learn the savior of the fucking Republic died at the hands of one of your own Bl
ades?”
Solis tilted his head and smiled wider, stilling the heart in Mia’s chest.
“Did he?”
“Halt! In the name of the Light!”
The legionaries burst through the chapel gates, all glittering armor and blood-red plumes on their helms. Hush was on his knees, the Rictus from Mia’s stolen blade rendering him numb and lethargic. Mia and Solis hung still, swords poised as the legionaries spread out into the courtyard. The centurion leading them was burly as a pile of bricks, heavy brows and a thick beard bristling beneath his glittering helm.
“Put down your weapons, citizens!” he barked.
Mia glanced at the centurion, the troops around them, the crossbows aimed square at her heaving chest. Jonnen forced his way through the soldiers, pointing right at her and shouting at the top of his lungs.
“That’s her! Kill her now!”
“Get back, boy!” the captain snapped.
Jonnen scowled at the man, drew himself up to his full height.*
“I am Lucius Atticus Scaeva,” he spat. “Firstborn son of Consul Julius Maximillianus Scaeva. This slave murdered my father, and I order you to kill her!”
Solis tilted his head slightly, as if taking note of the lad for the first time. The centurion raised an eyebrow, looking the little lordling up and down. Despite his disheveled appearance, the grime on his face and sopping robes, it could hardly be missed that he was clad in brilliant purple—the color of Itreyan nobility. Nor that he wore the triple-sun crest of the Luminatii legion upon his chest.
