“Enough,” Spiderkiller snarled. “Send us to Godsgrave.”
Adonai turned his eyes to the woman. “Fool ye must think me, Shahiid, to send my sister love with thee to thy Grave.”
“Refuse us again, and I’ll deliver Marielle to hers.”
“Then shall ye die.”
“And your sister love will join us, Speaker. Right before your eyes.”
Adonai glanced at the dagger pressed to his sister’s neck, his lips curling in derision. “Think ye thy blade sharp enough to draw blood near the likes of me, little spider?”
“The littlest spiders have the darkest bite, Adonai,” the Shahiid replied.
Adonai narrowed his eyes, noting the dagger pricking his sister’s skin was slightly discolored. A small droplet of Marielle’s blood welled on the tip, ruby bright.
“Already my venom worms its way to your sister love’s heart,” Spiderkiller said. “And only I have the knowing of the cure. Kill us, and you kill her besides.”
The Shahiid smiled, lips black and curling. She had him at checkmate, and Adonai and she both knew it. Trapped in the Mountain, Scaeva’s daughter would catch the Shahiid of Truths and the imperator eventually, no matter how many times they switched back and forth under her nose in the gloom. Their painful deaths would soon follow. The truth was, the pair had nothing to lose, and Adonai knew Spiderkiller was ruthless and vindictive enough to kill Marielle before she died just to spite him.
In truth, he’d always liked that about her.
And so, eyes still on his sister’s, the speaker waved to the pool, his voice calm as millpond water.
“Enter and be welcome.”
“… Be careful, Julius…,” the shadowviper hissed.
Scaeva’s stare was fixed firmly on Adonai’s, his voice cold and hard.
“No tricks, Speaker,” he warned. “Or your sister dies, I swear it.”
“I believe thee, Imperator. Else thee and thy get wouldst already be dead.”
“Get in the pool, Lucius.”
The boy glanced into the gore, obviously afraid. And yet he seemed in the end more afeared of his father, crouching beside the pool and slipping down into the red. Scaeva followed slower, gathering his boy to his side. Spiderkiller tossed her poisoned dagger out the door—nothing that hadn’t known the touch of life could travel through his pools, and the damage had already been done. The Shahiid of Truths stepped down into the blood, holding a swooning Marielle in her arms.
“If never I had reason to work toward thy ruin before, I have it now,” Adonai said, glaring at them both. “Sure and true.”
“Enough talk, cretin,” Scaeva said. “Obey.”
Adonai would have dearly loved to drown him then. Sweep him away in a tide of rippling red. But Scaeva’s son stood there in the crimson beside his father, and if Mia could forgive Adonai for denying her revenge against Scaeva by killing him, she’d surely not forgive him for drowning her brother in the process.
Adonai’s gaze drifted to his sister.
“Marielle?” he called.
His sister stirred but made no reply.
“Always shall I come for thee,” he vowed.
Spiderkiller tightened her grip, glowering at Adonai.
“My venom works swift, Speaker,” she warned.
So finally, eyes rolling back in his head, Adonai spoke the words beneath his breath. The room’s warmth grew deeper, the smell of copper and iron churning in the air. He heard the boy gasp as the blood began swirling, sloshing around the pool’s edge, faster and faster as the speaker’s whispers became a gentle, pleading song, his lips curled in an ecstatic smile, his fingertips tingling with magik.
At the last moment, he opened crimson eyes. Stared into Scaeva’s own.
“I shall see thee suffer for this, Julius.”
And with a hollow slurp, they disappeared into the flood.
CHAPTER 33
WELLSPRING
Mia sat on bloody stairs, head in her bloody hands.
She’d almost done it. It had almost worked.
Almost.
The Ministry were dead or defeated. The Church’s best remaining Blades had been slaughtered. The Quiet Mountain—home of the most vicious cult of killers the Republic had ever known—was now in her hands.
But he’d stolen away in the chaos. Slipperier than the shadowviper about his neck, more at home in the shadows than she’d ever given him credit for. Scaeva had doubled back, then doubled back again while Mia and the others blundered about in the maze of corridors and halls and stairwells looking for him. Not only claiming his prize, but slipping out through the speaker’s chambers with Spiderkiller beside him.
He’d cut Butcher’s throat. Pushed Naev to her death. Goddess, Mia hadn’t thought it possible, but he’d somehow murdered Eclipse—she knew it, she’d felt it, like a lance of black agony into her chest as she stumbled about in the gloom. And to compound the pain, the gaping wound he’d carved in her still-beating heart, he’d stolen back his son.
He’d taken Jonnen.
“Bastard.”
She whispered to the dark, tears rolling down her cheeks.
“That fucking bastard…”
“We’ll get him back, Mia,” Ashlinn said. “I promise.”
The girl sat beside Mia on the stable stairs, bloodstained hand resting on her thigh. Sidonius was knelt beside Butcher’s body, closing the Liisian’s eyes and arranging him in some kind of repose. Bladesinger stood close by, saying a soft prayer, spattered with the blood of the Mountain’s defenders. Tric was still above with Mercurio in the Hall of Eulogies, their watchful eyes on Aalea and Drusilla.
Jonnen …
Mia shook her head. Feeling fear swelling in her breast and reaching out for a passenger, only to find herself empty. Mister Kindly banished. Eclipse destroyed. Her power without them was undiminished, but for the first time since she was ten years old, she was facing a solitude with no end in sight. And despite the girl beside her, the allies around her who’d fought and bled and died for her, that thought terrified her more than anything she could remember.
And so, as ever, she reached for her oldest, dearest friend.
Rage.
She looked to Butcher, dead on the stairs, and felt the spark begin to smolder. She stared at Naev, laid out on the bloody floor, and felt it kindle. She thought of Eclipse, now just a memory, and felt it burst into flame. Immolating her fear and sweeping her up on wings of smoke and embers, burning in her lungs as she gritted her teeth and climbed to her feet. Her mind turning from her father to another.
The one who’d hurt her almost as badly as he.
The one who hadn’t escaped.
“Drusilla,” she spat.
* * *
“Goddess help me,” Drusilla breathed.
The Hall of Eulogies was quiet as graves. The names of the dead carved on the floor beneath her. The tombs of the fallen faithful on the walls around her. A half-dead Dweymeri boy stood beside her, twin blades in his hands. Drusilla blinked as the darkness rippled in front of her, as Aalea reached down and squeezed her fingers. The lady’s belly sank as she saw a dark shape step out from the shadow of the Mother’s statue. Niah loomed above them, carved of polished black granite. Manacles hanging from her dress. Sword in one hand. Scales in the other.
How will she weigh me? Drusilla wondered. How badly will I be found wanting?
“Mia,” Aalea whispered.
“Good nevernight, Mi Donas,” Corvere replied.
Her longblade was crusted with gore, amber eyes on the hilt as red as the blood painting her skin. Dark hair framed her pitiless stare. Drusilla remembered the first time she’d laid eyes on the girl, here in this very hall. Young and pale and green as grass. Her shaking hands and her little bag of teeth.
“Speak your name.”
“Mia Corvere.”
“Do you vow to serve the Mother of Night? Will you learn death in all its colors, bring it to the deserving and undeserving in her name? Will you b
ecome an Acolyte of Niah, and an earthly instrument of the dark between the stars?”
“I will.”
This was the hall where she’d been anointed. The statue she’d been chained against and scourged for her disobedience. The floor she’d found the truth of the Church’s conspiracy carved in. The heart of it all.
The old woman sighed softly.
Goddess, if only we’d known what she’d become …
“Good to see you again, little Crow,” Mercurio said.
“And you, Shahiid,” the girl replied, her eyes never leaving the Lady of Blades.
“Where’s Scaeva?” the old man asked.
Mia’s eyes narrowed in fury. “Not here.”
So the imperator had fled.
Corvere had failed.
Aalea took a slow step forward, hands raised, all honeyed tones and beautiful, blood-red smile. “Mia, my love, we should sp—”
The darkness lashed out, pointed like a spear, sharp as a sword. It sliced through Aalea’s throat, cleaving neatly from ear to ear. The woman’s dark eyes grew wide, blood-red lips parted as she coughed, hand to her neck. She tottered forward, ruby red spilling over milk-white skin. Looking to the Mother’s statue above, she mouthed a final prayer, tears welling in kohled lashes. And then the Shahiid of Masks toppled forward onto the bloody stone, her silvered tongue silenced forever.
Drusilla met Mia’s gaze, saw what awaited her there. She reached into her robe, adrenaline and fear tingling at her fingertips as she grasped the blade she kept between her breasts—the place the Dweymeri boy had been too polite to paw at when he searched her for weapons. The boy cried out now as the steel flashed, as Drusilla flung the poisoned dagger, whistling right at the girl’s throat.
Corvere raised her hand, fingers spread. The dark about her unfurled like a flower in bloom, tendrils of living shadow snatching the blade from the air. The girl lowered her chin, a small, fierce smile on her bloody lips. With a wave of her hand, the darkness carried the knife back across the room, laying it to rest at Drusilla’s feet.
“So much for the Lady of Blades,” she said.
“Mia…,” Drusilla began, her throat tightening.
“There are names missing,” the girl said.
The old woman blinked in confusion. “… What?”
Mia motioned to the granite floor around them. A spiral, gleaming now with Aalea’s blood, coiling out from the statue of Niah. Hundreds of names. Thousands. Kings, senators, legates, lords. Priests and sugargirls, beggars and bastards. The names of every life taken in the service of the Black Mother. Every kill the Red Church had made.
“There are some missing,” Mia repeated.
Drusilla felt a grip on her arms. Strong as iron. Cold as ice. Looking down, she saw the shadows had caught her up, black ribbons encircling her wrists, cutting off the blood. The old woman shrieked as she was dragged along the floor, unearthly strength slamming her up against the base of the Goddess’s statue. Her skull was ringing. Her nose bloodied. She dimly felt the shadows haul up her arms, bind her wrists with the manacles hanging from the Goddess’s robes.
“Unhand me!” Drusilla demanded, struggling. “Let me go!”
Mia’s reply was cold as winter winds.
“I’ve a story to hear, Drusilla,” she said. “And no patience to cut those missing names into this floor. But I should carve something to remember them by, at least.”
Drusilla felt the robes torn from her shoulders. The press of the statue’s cold stone against her bare skin. Terror piercing her heart. She looked over her shoulder, saw pity in Mercurio’s gaze. The deadboy’s black stare. The poisoned knife she’d thrown, rising up from the floor in the grip of cold, black ribbons.
“No…,” the old woman gasped, pulling against her bonds. “No! I have a familia, I have a—”
“This is for Bryn and Wavewaker,” Mia said.
Drusilla screamed as she felt the knife cut into her back. Thirteen letters, gouged with poisoned steel, deep into her flesh. Blood spilling down her skin, hot and thick. Agony seared between her shoulder blades.
“Mercurio!” she cried. “Help me!”
“This is for Naev and Butcher and Eclipse.”
Drusilla wailed again, long and shrill, her throat cracking as she bucked against the stone. She could feel the toxin on her blade at work, worming its way toward her withered heart. But above it, she could still feel the white-hot pain of the knife carving the names of the dead into her back.
“This is for Alinne and Darius Corvere.”
Warm wetness. Razored agony. Deep as years. But it was receding quickly now. A thudding ebb, slowing along with her pulse. The Lady of Blades sagged in her irons, her legs too weak to hold her any longer. The poison dragging her toward blessed blackness. She tried to think of her daughter then. Her son. Tried to remember the sound of her grandchildren’s laughter as they played in the sunslight. Eyes rolling up in her head as sleep beckoned with open arms.
“Stay with me, Drusilla,” came a voice. “I saved the worst for last.”
A lance of burning pain, right at the base of her spine. Dragging her back up into the hateful light for one last hateful moment. Mia stood close beside her now. A black chill spilling from the dark around her. A final caress gracing her cheek.
“This is for me,” Mia whispered. “The me who never was. The me who lived in peace and married someone beautiful and perhaps held a daughter in her arms. The me who never knew the taste of blood or the smell of poison or the kiss of steel. The me you killed, Drusilla. Just as surely as you killed the rest of them.”
The Lady of Blades felt a twisting stab of pain, right through her rotten heart.
A whisper, soft and black as night.
“Remember her,” the girl breathed.
And then, she felt nothing at all.
* * *
The choir had stopped singing.
Mia hadn’t noticed it at first. She wasn’t exactly sure when the song had ceased. But trekking through the Mountain’s belly, her own belly in her boots, she noticed how deathly quiet things had become. The acolytes and Hands who’d surrendered to her had been sealed inside their quarters, or locked down in the apothecarium (Mercurio had only killed two of the apothecaries during his ruse—there were still enough left to tend the others’ wounds). But with no voices or footfalls or the traditional hustle and bustle in the halls, the Mountain was quiet as death.
The Athenaeum was quieter still.
The great double doors opened with the soft press of Mia’s bloody fingertips. The dark that waited beyond—perfumed with parchment and ink and leather and dust—seemed more welcoming than any she’d ever felt. She walked into the library of the dead, her companions all in tow, her father’s gravebone longblade and Mouser’s blacksteel sword sheathed at her waist. And there, leaning against the railing of the mezzanine beside his faithful RETURNS trolley, stood the chronicler of her tale.
“Aelius,” Mia said.
“Ah,” the old wraith smiled. “A girl with a story to tell.”
He was dressed like he always was: britches and a scruffy waistcoat. His improbably thick spectacles were balanced on his hooked nose, two shocks of white hair protruding from his balding scalp. His back was bent like a sickle’s blade, a lit cigarillo dangling from his mouth. He looked about a thousand years old.
Which might not be all that far from the truth.
His smile was welcoming. Smug, even. And as Sidonius and Bladesinger looked about the Black Mother’s Athenaeum in wonder, as Tric and Ash and Mercurio watched with curious eyes, Aelius reached up behind his ear, plucked his ever-present spare cigarillo free, lit it on his own, and offered it to Mia.
The girl took the smoke, placed it on her lips, and dragged deep.
“You’ve got some fucking explaining to do,” she said, exhaling gray.
“How’re Adonai and Marielle?” he asked.
“Adonai’s alive,” Mercurio replied. “Scaeva took Marielle to Godsgrave.”
Aelius nodded, blowing a large smoke ring into the air. Mia blew a smaller one, sent it sailing through the chronicler’s. Meeting his pale blue eyes with her dark ones.
“I’m waiting,” she said.
“Simply put, I knew you’d charge in here half-cocked,” Aelius replied. “Thinking you were good enough to gut the Quiet Mountain all on your lonesome. Say what you will about being fearless, but there’s only the finest line between bravery and idiocy. And those passengers of yours tend to lead you closer to the latter than the former.”
“Once, perhaps,” Mia murmured. “No longer.”
“Aye.” The chronicler sighed a plume of smoke. “Apologies for your loss.”
Mia’s voice was hard as iron. Blood and tears dry on her cheeks.
“You were saying?”
The chronicler shrugged. “Given the way you were bound to burst in here, we needed a way to even the scales. Put Drusilla on the back foot, and enough Blades on the chopping block that you could gut what was left of the Church with one stroke. I figured the old bitch would come poking about the library, eventually. Find the first two parts of the chronicle. Especially with Mercurio spending all his free time down here.”
Aelius patted the RETURNS trolley, the three books atop it. One had pages edged in blood-red, a crow embossed on the cover. The second was edged in blue, embossed with a wolf. The last, trimmed black and spattered white, with a cat gracing the front.
She thought of Mister Kindly then. Heart aching in her chest. Wishing she had some way to call him back, wishing she could undo what she’d—
“So I let Drusilla find the books,” Aelius said. “The first two parts chronicling the story that is your life. And in the weeks that the Lady of Blades had her lackeys trawling through the dark down here for the third part … well, I wrote one.”
The chronicler drew deep on his cigarillo, exhaled a plume of smoke.
“I had to make some of it up, of course. But among other things, it outlined your ‘plan’ for entering the Quiet Mountain. After Drusilla’s lackeys ‘found’ it, all I needed to do was have Adonai warn you through Naev of the way you should actually approach the Church and get the drop on Drusilla’s welcoming party.” He squinted in the pall as he dragged on his cigarillo again. “Nice stroke with the arkemist’s salt, by the way. I’d not have thought of that.”
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