Darkdawn

by Kristoff, Jay

  All right. This calls for a frontal assault.

  “’Waker,” she sighed. “I don’t want to go downstairs.”

  “… No?”

  “No,” she said, placing her hand on her hip. “I want you to warm me up.”

  The big man turned to look at her. His eyebrows drew together with glacial slowness.

  “… Really?”

  “Four Daughters!” she said in exasperation. “No wonder you never got your end away! Can I make this more obvious? Would grabbing you by your fucking ears and planting one on your dopey chops be of assistance in clarifying position?”

  The big man gave her a shy smile. “I … suppose it wouldn’t hurt?”

  She stared up at him a moment longer. Watching his eyes dance with mirth, his grin come out to play. And then she grabbed him by his breastplate, pushed herself up on tiptoes, and crushed her lips to his.

  He was laughing at first, his barrel-broad chest heaving under her hands. But soon the laughter stopped, his lips softening against hers, his chest heaving for an entirely different reason. Bryn’s bow slipped from her fingers as she entwined her hands in his saltlocks, hauled herself up his body, and wrapped her legs around his waist. He pushed her back against the parapet, big strong hands beneath her arse, holding her up as if she were light as feathers. Bryn squeezed him tight between her thighs, tongue flickering against his, the warmth of his skin filling her all the way to her bones.

  She sighed as he pulled his lips away from hers, the rain falling between them as if the sky were crying, her heart beating louder than the thunder.

  “I didn’t…” He blinked again, grinning for joy. “Really?”

  “O, Daughters,” she laughed. “You’re going to be hard work.”

  “I’ll try not to prove too burdensome,” he vowed.

  “Stop talking, you idiot,” Bryn whispered, running her hand down his cheek. “There’s better things you could be doing with your mouth.”

  “I’m not sure what you—”

  The blade flashed silver, bright as the lightning above. Past the collar of Wavewaker’s breastplate and down into his chest, cleaving his heart and filling his lungs with blood in a blinking. He tried to speak but only managed a cough, spattering Bryn’s face with red. She drew breath to cry out just as thunder crashed overhead, the crisp ring of the second blade slipping up under her armpit lost in the rumble.

  Bryn felt the steel pierce her chest. Felt herself falling. Hands caught her, slender but terribly strong, guiding her down onto the stone with all the gentleness of a mother holding her babe. She saw a figure above her as the sky kept crying. Dressed in a black doublet and britches. His lips were pursed as if he were sucking his teeth. He was one of the most beautiful boys she’d ever seen. Pale skin and sharp blue eyes.

  He knelt over Wavewaker on the flagstones beside her, lifted a gleaming knife, and cut his throat, ear to ear. Simple and quick. Bryn tried to cry no, but her mouth was full of blood. Salty and thick and too much to breathe through. Let alone scream.

  I’m cold.

  Bubbling up over her lips.

  The lips he’d been kissing just a moment before.

  I’m so cold.

  The beautiful boy turned to her.

  I want you to warm me up.

  And he raised a finger to his lips, as if wanting her to hush.

  * * *

  It happened in a heartbeat.

  Mia was leaning back in Ash’s arms, head resting on the girl’s shoulders, eyelids heavy with sleep. Butcher was still instructing Jonnen, smiling encouragement as the boy ran through clumsy stances and strikes. ’Singer lay on the stone by the cooking pit and Sid stared into the flames as Mia heard the faintest of whispers upstairs.

  A whisper of steel.

  Mia looked up just as Sidonius did. Both of them exchanging a glance.

  “…’Waker?” Sid called.

  Mia pulled herself to her feet. “Bryn?”

  A tiny object fell down among the raindrops, hit the flagstones a few feet away.

  Small.

  Round.

  White.

  “Wyrdglass!”

  The globe exploded with a damp shooof, filling the tower’s lower level with a choking cloud of white vapor. Heavy, rolling thick, the arkemical tang on the tip of Mia’s tongue telling her instantly what it was.

  Swoon.

  A sedative, brewed by Spiderkiller in the Quiet Mountain. One good breath and—

  Without thinking, without breathing, Mia felt for the shadows on the ruined ground outside the tower, and in the space of a blinking, she closed her eyes and

                    Stepped

                                      from the

                                                        white

  and into the black and rain beyond. She tore her gravebone blade from her scabbard and turned, down in a crouch, hair streaming out behind her in the storm. She saw a figure up on the tower’s broken top level, a dark-skinned arm hanging over the edge, a blond topknot, soaked in blood.

  No …

  Rage bubbling up inside her chest. The world slowing to beyond a crawl. Every second splintering into a million glittering fragments. Every raindrop falling through the gloom around her a single perfect jewel, tumbling slowly, sparkling with such sudden and astonishing clarity that each was like a diamond shot right into her mind.

  More shapes, dark-clad, moving up through the scrub, stepping out from the shadows and broken stone. She recognized Remillo and Violetta from her time in the Galante chapel—they used to go drinking together with her at weeksend. Sly-faced Arturo coming around the wall—he’d borrowed her cigarillos when he was trying to quit his habit. Silent Hush atop the battlements—the boy who’d helped her pass Spiderkiller’s trial during their time together as acolytes. And there, finger-thin and swift, short brown hair plastered to her brow, moving through the scrub like a drake through bloody water, came Bishop Tenhands herself.

  Blades, all.

  The Falcons, Ashlinn, Jonnen, each of them had fallen in the swoon already.

  Five to her one, then.

  No, not one.

  She looked to the dark at her feet.

  Many.

  A flash of lightning, a tempest roar, a flicker-black shadow moving swift through the bright. She

                                      Stepped

                                                        to Arturo first,

                                                                          strongest and cruelest, skipping out from the dark at his feet and burying her blade chu-wufffff into his chest. A bubble of blood, a spray of crimson, gravebone cleaving skin and muscle and bone and red, red, red dancing between the rain. She twisted the blade, felt his ribs snip-snap as she tore it free, spinning to watch him fall.

  A shapeless cry rang above, pretty Hush crouched like a bird in his bloody bower, killer-blue eyes bright in the lightning dance. She stretched her fingers into the dark at her feet, lovely deep, tearing a handful loose as she’d seen Jonnen do and reaching out through the space between them to blind that pretty blue

  “… behind…”

  whispers in her ear as the shadow who wasn’t a cat became the eyes in back of her head. Moving swift, rolling forward as the knife sailed over her head, close enough to hear it cut the rain through the thunder. She spun in place as Violetta hurled another, then another, razor-sharp and poison-black, no Swoon needed now they had little Jonnen on his back and
dreaming

  dreaming

  (of black skies and a million stars and a bright globe above)

  pale fingers curled into claws and dark shadows curled up and about Violetta’s boots like hungry snakes and

                              Mia Stepped

                                                  into the

                                                              shadow of the

                              tree at Violetta’s

  flank and plunged her longsword right into the woman’s belly, sideways and twisting, shearing through outer and inner and outer again, Violetta’s spine arching, mouth open as ropes of her insides, gleaming and steaming, spilled out in tangles of pink and red.

  “Fucking—”

  “… MIA…!”

  Bending backward as Tenhands’s blade whistled past her chin, dropping and rolling toward the tower across the dirt, hair in her eyes, sand on her tongue, the roar of arena crowds echoing in her ears

  CROWCROWCROW

  but that was yesterturn

  when things were simple and the Moon had no name and her father was still

  My …

  Tenhands drew back her fist, filled with dark and gleaming steel, not ten but one, but O, that would be enough. Eclipse rose up roaring on the broken wall behind the woman, fear like a chill on the wind, a shape cut from a shadow deeper than Mia had ever imagined, had ever dreamed, but a shadow

  a shadow

  a SHADOW

  all the same.

  And Mia realized that instead of Stepping to the black at the feet of a foe, or a tree, or a stone, instead, she could just use the wolf that was shadows, too, and she stretched out her hand and

                    Stepped

                                  through

                                                Eclipse

                                                              instead

                                                                   dropping out of the stone at the good bishop’s back and feeling the damp crunch as she swung, teeth bared, spitting hate, gravebone scything between the falling rain and cleaving Tenhands’s head almost off her shoulders.

  Red on her hands,

  on her face,

  on her tongue, water-thin and copper-sweet in the downpour, deep enough to drown her and still not enough

  never enough

  is it?

  a line of razor-white pain in her thigh, a flash of a blade, dark with venom. Mia gasped and turned, Remillo hurling another, skimming through the air she’d stood in a moment before, now empty

                    Stepping

                                      into the

                                                        shadow at her feet

                                                                          and out from the shadow

                                                                                            shaped like a cat on the ground behind him, bringing up her longsword, both hands on the hilt, ruby-red crow’s eyes on the hilt watching as the blade sheared up between his legs and dropped him screaming, split clean through to the hips.

  Hands slippery with blood now, smeared on her leathers, spilling from the wound he’d gifted her, poison in her racing heart, venom in her thundering veins.

  Four of five fallen, but still not enough.

  Too slow.

  “… mia…!”

  Turning as Hush dropped, pretty and silent

  TOO SLOW.

  “… MIA…!”

  and drove his heel right into the back of her head.

  White light.

  Crunch.

  Pain.

  Thud.

  Then black.

  * * *

  Thunder crashed again, rain beating on the stone like hammers to the anvil.

  A lone figure, standing with clenched fists and narrowed eyes. Looming above the fallen girl, hair splayed like a dark and broken halo around her head. Eyelashes fluttering. Senseless and bleeding.

  “… stay back…,” the not-cat hissed.

  “… YOU WILL NOT TOUCH HER…,” the not-wolf growled, standing between them.

  Hush ignored them both, stepping straight through them and seizing Mia by the hair. Face blank and pale, the boy dragged her over the rocks, back up into the shelter of the tower. He dumped her on the floor beside her unconscious comrades, taking care to crack her skull against the flagstones extra hard.

  “… wretched cur…”

  “… I WILL KILL YOU, BASTARD…!”

  The boy glanced at the shadowwolf, his face perhaps growing a touch paler, a faint tremble in his step. He backed out from the tower, eyes on the daemons, then turned to the carnage. The other Galante Blades were scattered around the ruins, bleeding or dead. Violetta was on her knees, blood spilling in ruby rivers from between her teeth, trying to stuff her bowels back into her body. She looked up as Hush stepped lightly from the tower, over to the broken ground where Bishop Tenhands lay.

  “H-Hush…,” she blubbed. “H-Help…”

  The boy ignored her, too. Silent as death. Reaching down to his dead bishop, the ruin Mia’s blade had made of her neck. Tenhands’s head still hung by a strip of muscle and skin, her spine cleaved clean in two. Hush fished about in the human wreckage, finally grasped a leather thong and snapped it free.

  At the end hung a phial of silver.

  “Hu … ush…,” Violetta begged.

  The boy marched back up into the tower, into the guttering firelight. Mia’s passengers were stood by her body, hissing and growling, but the boy paid them no mind. Instead, he knelt by the flames, held the silver phial up to the light. Breaking the dark, waxen seal, he poured the contents onto the stone, thick and ruby red.

  And using his fingertip like a brush, he began to write in the puddle.

  Four Blades dead.

  Boy and traitors captured.

  Advise.

  He glanced out into the rain as the thunder crashed, watched Violetta sinking onto her back in a pool of her own guts and shit. Shaking his head in disdain.

  weak

  And then the blood began to move.

  Hush turned his attention to it, waiting for his instructions. The vitus belonged to Adonai—every bishop had a supply in chapel, used it to send blood missives back and forth between the Mountain. Whatever was written in the red, Adonai knew. But more, because the blood was still bound to the speaker even over impossible distances, Adonai could manipulate it as easily as the blood in his pools.

  Hush watched the blood bead and shift, moving like quicksilver along the damp stone. It formed itself into letters, four in a gleaming red row.

  PRAY

  The pretty assassin frowned. He glanced
out into the storm again, flawless brow creased as he searched for meaning in Adonai’s instruction.

  Pray?

  What in the Mother’s name was the speaker talking about?

  Hush smeared the blood back across the stone and began writing again.

  Do not understa

  The blood moved. Forming itself into a glistening tendril and coiling around his finger. Hush pulled his hand back, but the blood moved with him, slurping around his hand like a serpent and slipping up his sleeve.

  The boy stood, eyes widening in alarm as he felt the blood crawling up his forearm, shoulder, and from there, to his throat. He clawed at it, gasping on instinct as the scarlet flood crept up over his chin, his lips, and into his open mouth.

  “Gnu-uuuhh!” he gurgled, lips peeled back from his toothless gums.

  A bubble of blood popped in his throat, he tried to inhale, gargling and coughing instead. Clutching at his neck, staggering back and almost falling into the cooking pit, the assassin stumbled out into the rain. Hands at his throat, blood streaming from his nose and eyes back into his mouth as he choked, pale face turning red, whirling on the spot, searching for some—

  The blade split his head clean apart like an axe chopping wood. Brain and skull splashed onto the ground at his feet as he fell face-first into the broken stone. Tric placed his boot on the boy’s back and dragged his gravebone scimitar free, slipped his second sword into Hush’s heart, and twisted for good measure.

  Lightning tore the sky, white hands clawing at the clouds in fury.

  Black hands held with palms upturned.

  “HEAR ME, NIAH,” the deadboy said. “HEAR ME, MOTHER. THIS FLESH YOUR FEAST. THIS BLOOD YOUR WINE. THIS LIFE, THIS END, MY GIFT TO YOU. HOLD HIM CLOSE.”

  “… about time you showed up…”

  Tric turned to the shadowcat, sitting on the broken wall and licking at its translucent paw. The wolf made of shadows peered at him from her mistress’s side.

  “… A LITTLE LATE FOR A DRAMATIC ENTRANCE…”