Darkdawn

by Kristoff, Jay

“I’ve heard worse, Captain.”

  He tilted his head. “Have you now?”

  The sister simply stared, and the lump of beef behind her loomed a little larger, and so without further ado Cloud escorted them down the stairwell into the Maid’s belly. Leading the pair along the tight hallway to the portside stateroom, he opened the door with a flourish and stepped aside.

  “Hammocks only, I’m afraid, but there’s space aplenty. You can dine with me or alone, as it please you. I’ve a bath in my cabin also, if you’ve a need. Arkemical stove. Hot water. Your privacy will be golden, and though I’d not expect it, you get lip from any of my salts, inform myself or BigJon and we’ll see it put arights.”

  “Your ‘salts’?”

  “My crew,” the man smiled. “Apologies, Sister, I’ve a sailor’s tongue. Regardless, the Bloody Maid is my home, and you’re my guests in it.”

  “My thanks, Captain,” the sister said, easing herself into one of the hammocks.

  Cloud Corleone considered the girl carefully. Her shapeless white robes were almost loose enough to hide another nun beneath—sadly designed to leave almost everything to the imagination. Her face was pretty, though, freckled cheeks, bright eyes the color of a cloudless sky. Dragging off her coif, she released long red locks down over her shoulders, creased with a gentle curl. She looked three turns tired and in need of a good meal, but still, you’d not kick her out of bed for farting, holy virgin or no.

  But something about her wasn’t right.

  “May I help you with something, Captain?” she asked, eyebrow cocked.

  The privateer stroked his stubble. “I’ve a bed in my cabin, too, should the hammock grow tiresome.”

  “Still trying to be charming, I see…”

  “Well.” He gave a bashful schoolboy smile. “I’ve a thing for women in uniform.”

  “More out of them than in, I’d wager.”

  The captain grinned. “We’ll be under way momentarily. North to Stormwatch, swift as sparrows, then back to Whitekeep. We’ll be there by weeksend, winds be kind.”

  “Let us pray, then, that they are.”

  “Any time you want me on my knees, Sister, just say the word.”

  The big fellow in the corner stirred slightly, adjusting one of those suspiciously sword-shaped lumps, and the captain decided he’d learned enough for now. With a wink that could charm the paint right off the walls, Cloud Corleone tipped his tricorn hat.

  “Good nevernight, Sister.”

  And he closed the cabin door.

  Walking up the hallway a moment later, the captain muttered softly to himself.

  “Nun my arse.”

  * * *

  “The balls on that slick bastard,” Ashlinn whispered incredulously.

  Mister Kindly coalesced above the cabin door.

  “… i wonder where he keeps his wheelbarrow…?”

  “I’m dressed as a nun,” Ashlinn said, looking about the room in indignation. “He does realize I’m dressed as a fucking nun, aye?”

  Throwing aside her cloak of shadows, Mia faded into view in the far corner. Jonnen stood with his wrists bound, one of his sister’s arms about him, her other hand clapped over his lips. He glared at the Vaanian girl as his sister removed her hand.

  “You have a filthy mouth, harlot.”

  “Quiet,” Mia warned. “Or it’s the gag for you again.”

  Jonnen pouted but fell silent, his eyes on his sister’s back as she crossed the cabin floor. Locking the door, Mia turned and met Ashlinn’s eyes.

  “I don’t trust him.”

  In the other corner, Tric drew his hood back off his head, thin white plumes spilling from his lips as he spoke. “NOR I.”

  “Well, that makes three of us,” Ash replied. “He might as well have the word ‘pirate’ stenciled on the arse end of those ridiculous pants. It’s a good thing he only gets his second two hundred after our arrival in Ashkah.”

  “I didn’t think the funds Mercurio gave us were still so flush.”

  “They’re … not,” Ash admitted. “But we can burn that bridge when we arrive at it. The Siren’s Song already left port. This ship is sailing in our direction, and we’ve got nothing left to barter passage with elsewhere. So we take our chances here, or start marching across the aqueduct on foot and praying for a miracle. And considering we stole this habit of mine off a clothesline at a convent, I’m not too sure any of the divinities will be in a mood to answer nicely.”

  Mister Kindly began licking a translucent paw on his perch above the door.

  “… this whole endeavor would be made infinitely easier if, o, i don’t know, we could somehow make ourselves unseen for the rest of the journey…”

  Mia scowled up at her passenger. “It’s truelight, Mister Kindly. I can barely manage to hide me and Jonnen with those accursed suns in the sky. But my thanks for making me feel shittier about our predicament than I already did.”

  “… you are most welcome…,” he purred.

  Mia turned her eyes to the door the privateer had left by.

  “Our captain seems a clever one,” she murmured.

  “PERHAPS TOO CLEVER,” Tric said.

  “No such thing, in my experience.”

  Mia eased herself into one of the hammocks with a groan and a wince. She sat and chewed her lip in thought for a while, fighting a losing battle with her leaden eyelids.

  “But Ash is right,” she finally declared. “We don’t have much left in the way of choice. I say we take our chances on the Maid. As long as Jonnen and I stay out of sight, and you can put up with his flirting for a few weeks, I think we’re safe here.”

  “… i am sure dona järnheim will loathe every minute of the attention…”

  Ashlinn ignored the shadowcat above the door, looking at Mia with concern. The girl was slouched in her hammock, head hung low, rocking softly with the shush and whisper of the water against the hull. Mia looked about to fall over from sheer exhaustion. They could hear the Maid’s crew overhead, BigJon’s rainbow-colored bouts of profanity, the song of sails being unfurled, the smell of salt and sea strung in the air.

  Jonnen was still standing in the corner, Eclipse in his shadow.

  “Did you hurt him, Kingmaker?” he asked softly.

  Mia met her brother’s dark eyes, the shadow of Julius Scaeva hanging in the air between them. It was long moments before she answered.

  “No.”

  “I want to go home,” the boy said.

  “And I want a box of cigarillos and a bottle of goldwine big enough to drown in,” Mia sighed. “We don’t always get what we want.”

  “I do,” he scowled.

  “Not anymore.” Mia ran her fingers across her eyes and stifled a yawn. “Welcome to the real world, little brother.”

  Jonnen simply glared back at her. Eclipse uncoiled from the dark at his feet, the shadowwolf joining the boy’s silhouette on the wall, darkening it further. Without the daemon riding his shadow, he’d likely have been reduced to hysterics by now, but considering what he’d been through, the child was doing well.

  Still, Ashlinn didn’t like the way the boy stared at his sister.

  Angry.

  Hungry.

  “… WHAT NOW…?” Eclipse growled.

  “… a quick round of crumpets and strumpets…?” Mister Kindly offered.

  “… MUST YOU, LITTLE MOGGY…?”

  “… always, dear mongrel…”

  The shadowwolf turned its not-eyes to the rest of the room.

  “… AM I HONESTLY EXPECTED TO BELIEVE THIS BOORISH CUR AND ITS PREPUBESCENT HUMOR IS THE FRAGMENT OF A SHATTERED DIVINITY…?”

  “Shut up, the pair of you,” Ashlinn snapped.

  “The ‘what now’ is simple,” Mia said, stifling another yawn. “The Ministry have Mercurio. Until we have him back, Scaeva and I are at an impasse.” She shrugged. “So we have to get him back.”

  “Mia, they’ll have Mercurio in the Quiet Mountain,” Ashlinn said. “The heart of the R
ed Church’s power on this earth. Guarded by Blades of the Mother, the Ministry themselves, and ’byss knows what else.”

  “Aye,” Mia nodded.

  “Further, I’m sure I don’t need to point out that they took Mercurio to get to you,” Ashlinn continued, her voice rising. “They told you they have him because they want you to come looking for him. If this were any more obviously a fucking trap, they’d have a row of high-priced courtesans dancing in Liisian lingerie atop it, singing a rousing chorus of ‘this is obviously a fucking trap.’”

  Mia smiled faintly. “I love that song.”

  “Mia…,” Ashlinn moaned, exasperated.

  “He took me in, Ashlinn,” Mia said, her smile vanishing. “When everything else had been taken away. He gave me a home and he kept me safe when he had no reason under the suns to do it.” Mia looked up at the girl, eyes shining. “He’s familia. More familia to me than almost anyone in this world. Neh diis lus’a, lus diis’a.”

  “When all is blood…”

  “Blood is all,” Mia nodded.

  Ashlinn just shook her head.

  “MIA—” Tric began.

  “The Quiet Mountain is in Ashkah, Tric,” Mia interrupted. “We have to head that way, regardless. So ease off on the destiny talk for a while, neh?”

  “YOU HAVE ACCEPTED IT, THEN?”

  “My mind’s nothing close to made up,” Mia said, stretching her legs out on the hammock with a soft groan. “But traveling in the right direction’s enough for now.”

  “The Ministry are going to know we’re coming,” Ash pointed out, standing to help Mia off with her bloodstained boots. “The Quiet Mountain is a fortress.”

  “Aye,” Mia said, wiggling her toes with a wince.

  “So how in the Mother’s name do you expect to get inside and rescue Mercurio?” Ash demanded, pulling off the other boot. “Let alone out alive again?”

  “Front door,” Mia said, sighing deep as she finally lay back in the hammock and gave in to her exhaustion.

  “The front fucking door?” Ash hissed. “Of the Quiet Mountain? You’d need an army to get in there, Mia!”

  Mia closed her eyes.

  “I know an army,” she murmured. “A little one, anyways…”

  “What in the Mother’s holy name are you babbling about?” Ash raged.

  The hammock swayed and rolled with the weary girl atop it. The chaos and bloodshed of the last few turns, the epiphanies and prophecies, the promises broken and yet unfulfilled, all of them seemed to have finally caught up with her. As the lines of care in her face softened, the scar upon her cheek twisted her lip ever so slight, made it seem like she was smiling. Her breast rose and fell with the rhythm of the waves.

  “Mia?” Ash asked.

  But the girl already slept.

  Jonnen spoke softly into the silence.

  “… What does ‘prepubescent’ mean?”

  CHAPTER 9

  SLUMBER

  She dreamed.

  She was a child, beneath a sky as gray as goodbye. Walking on water so still it was like polished stone, like glass, like ice beneath her bare feet. It stretched as far as she could see, flawless and endless. A meniscus over the flood of forever.

  Her mother walked to her left. In one hand, she held a lopsided scale. The other was wrapped in Mia’s own. She wore gloves of black silk, long and glimmering with a secret sheen, all the way up to her elbows. But when Mia looked closer, she saw they weren’t gloves at all, that they dripped

  dripdrip

  dripdrip

  on the stone/glass/ice at their feet, like blood from an open wrist.

  Her mother’s gown was black as sin as night as death, strung with a billion tiny points of light. They shone from within, out through the shroud of her gown, like pinpricks in a curtain drawn against the sun. She was beautiful. Terrible. Her eyes were as black as her dress, deeper than oceans. Her skin was pale and bright as stars.

  She had Alinne Corvere’s face. But Mia knew, in that dreaming, knowing kind of way, that this wasn’t her real face. Because the Night had no face at all.

  And across the infinite gray, he waited for them.

  Her father.

  He was clad all in white, so bright and sharp it hurt Mia’s eyes to look at him. But she looked all the same. He stared back as she and her mother approached, three eyes fixed on her, red and yellow and blue. He was handsome, she had to admit—almost painfully so. Black curls dusted with just the faintest hints of gray at his temples. Shoulders broad, bronze skin contrasting sharply with the snow white of his robes.

  He had Julius Scaeva’s face. But Mia knew, in that dreaming, knowing kind of way, that this wasn’t his real face, either.

  Four young women stood about him. One wreathed in flame and another shrouded in waves and the third wearing only the wind. The fourth was sleeping on the floor, clad in autumn leaves. The wakeful trio stared at Mia with bitter, unveiled malice.

  “Husband,” her mother said.

  “Wife,” her father replied.

  They stood there in silence, the six of them, and Mia could have heard her heart thumping in her chest, if only she’d had one.

  “I missed you,” her mother finally sighed.

  The silence grew so complete, it was deafening.

  “This is he?” her father asked.

  “You know it is,” her mother replied.

  And Mia wanted to speak then, to say she wasn’t a he but a she. But looking down, the child saw the strangest thing reflected in the mirrored stone/glass/ice at her feet.

  She saw herself, as she saw herself—pale skin and long dark hair draped over thin shoulders and eyes of burning white. But looming at her back, she saw a figure cut from the darkness, black as her mother’s gown.

  It peered at her with its not-eyes, its form shivering and shifting like lightless flame. Tongues of dark fire rippled from its shoulders, the top of its crown, as if it were a candle burning. On its forehead, a silver circle was scribed. And like a looking glass, that circle caught the light from her father’s robes and reflected it back, the radiance as pale and bright as Mia’s eyes.

  And looking into that single, perfect circle, Mia understood what moonlight was.

  “I will never forgive you for this,” her father said.

  “I will never ask you to,” her mother replied.

  “I will suffer no rival.”

  “And I no threats.”

  “I am greater.”

  “But I was first. And I trust your hollow victory will keep you warm in the night.”

  Her father looked down at her, his smile dark as bruises.

  “Would you like to know what keeps me warm in the night, little one?”

  Mia looked down at her reflection again. Watched the pale circle at her brow shatter into a thousand glittering shards. The shadow at her feet splintered, splayed in every direction, maddening patterns surging, seething, the night-thing shapes of cats and wolves and serpents and crows and the shapes of nothing at all. Ink-black tendrils sprouted from her back like wings, razors of darkness from every fingertip. She could hear screaming, growing louder and louder.

  Realizing at last that the voice was her own.

  “The many were one,” her mother said. “And will be again.”

  But her father shook his head.

  “In every possible sense, you are my daughter.”

  He held up a black pawn on his burning palm.

  “And you are going to die.”

  BOOK 2

  DYING LIGHT

  CHAPTER 10

  INFIDELITY

  Mia woke with a gasp, almost falling from her hammock.

  The portholes were shuttered as they’d been for the past two turns. The cabin was shrouded in the same gloom that had filled it since they put out from the Nethers, rocking to the gentle motion of the open sea. Almost three turns after the magni, Mia was still aching in places she never knew she had, and still in need of about seven more nevernights’ worth of slee
p.

  Genuine sleep, that is.

  Dreams. Dreams of blood and fire. Dreams of endless gray. Dreams of her mother and her father, or things wearing their faces. Dreams of Furian, dead at her hand. Dreams of her shadow, growing darker and darker at her feet until she slipped down into it and felt it flow up and over her lips and down into her lungs. Dreams of laying on her back and staring into a blinding sky, her ribs flayed apart, tiny people crawling through her entrails like maggots on a corpse.

  “MORE NIGHTMARES?”

  The voice made her shiver, then feel guilty for doing so. She cast a furtive glance at Ashlinn, asleep in the hammock beside hers. Then back to the deadboy, sitting in that corner as he’d done since they put out to the Sea of Silence. Tric’s hood was drawn back and he sat with legs crossed, gravebone swords in his lap, black hands resting flat upon the blades.

  Goddess, but he was still beautiful. Not the rugged, earthen beauty he’d been before, no. There was a dark beauty to him now. Carved of alabaster and ebony. Black eyes and pale skin and a voice so deep she could feel it between her legs when he spoke. A princely beauty, wrapped in a robe of night and serpents. A crown of darkling stars on his brow.

  “Apologies, did I wake you?”

  “I DON’T SLEEP, MIA.”

  She blinked. “Ever?”

  “NEVER.”

  Mia dragged her hair back from her face, swinging her legs off the side of her hammock quiet as she could. As she sat up straight, her wounds pulled and her bandages tugged at her scabs and she couldn’t help but wince with the pain of it all. Conscious of those pitch-black eyes following her every move.

  She was dying for a cigarillo. For fresh air. For a fucking bath. They’d been stuck in here together for two turns straight now, and the strain was wearing on all of them.

  Jonnen was a knot of fury and indignity, kept in check only by Eclipse’s constant presence in his shadow. He sat for hours, pouting and sullen, ripping up tendrils of his own shadow and throwing it at the far wall, just as he’d done at Mia’s eyes in the necropolis. Eclipse would pounce upon the ball of shadowstuff like a puppy and Jonnen would smile, but the smile would disappear as soon as he caught Mia looking at him.