Darkdawn

by Kristoff, Jay

  “And that’s it?” Mia asked.

  “It?” Aelius scoffed. “Lass, that plan was so cunning you could’ve painted it orange and set it loose in a bloody henhouse.”

  “My friends are dead,” she said. “My brother is stolen by my bastard father.”

  “And you, my dear, are Lady of Blades. Who’s going to refute your claim now? With the Ministry and their sharpest knives dead at your hand? The Red Church is shattered. Your nemesis is fled back to Godsgrave, licking his wounds and scooping the shite from his britches. Which means you’re free to pursue the destiny you’ve been avoiding like the plague since I set you on this path three fucking years ago.”

  Mia glanced at Tric. Those black eyes, burning with a million tiny stars.

  “Cleo’s journal,” she murmured.

  “Clever lass,” the chronicler nodded.

  “You knew,” she said, narrowing her eyes as she dragged on her smoke. “The Moon’s murder at the hands of the Sun. The fragments of Anais’s soul. The black blood beneath Godsgrave. Darkin. All of it.”

  Aelius shrugged. “Aye.”

  “Why the fuck didn’t you tell me?” she demanded.

  “What did I say when you came snooping about in here last year?”

  Mia sighed, remembering the last time the two of them had spoken, here in this very library. “‘Some answers are learned. But the important ones are earned.’”

  “I had to be sure about you,” Aelius said. “I had to know what you were made of. Cassius didn’t have it. The other darkin I’ve found over the years never came close. But we have to get it right this time, Mia. Because uniting the shards of Anais has been attempted once before, and that was so disastrous this world was almost consigned to an eternity of sunslight.”

  “Cleo,” Mia said.

  “Aye. Cleo.”

  Mia looked to Ashlinn. The fear she felt in her breast was reflected in her girl’s eyes. Ash could feel it, sure as Mia could—the mekwerk gears of a plan countless years, perhaps centuries in the making, spinning all around them. For a moment, she wanted to run. To take Ash’s hand and turn her back on all this blood and dark. Hide deep as they could and seek whatever happiness they could.

  “Who was she?” she heard herself ask.

  “Cleo?” Aelius shrugged. “Just a girl. Like any other in the newfound city of Godsgrave. Save for the sliver of Anais’s soul that found its way into her heart. Married too young to a brutal man, she killed him the year she first began to bleed. Thing of it was, her husband had a shard of Anais inside him, too. Darkin were more numerous in those turns, you see—Anais’s pieces were still scattered all across the Republic.”

  Aelius blew another smoke ring, paused a moment before he spoke again.

  “Once Cleo killed her beau, Niah drew what strength she could to herself and came to Cleo in a dream. Told the girl she was ‘Chosen.’ That she’d restore the balance between Night and Day. The way it was in the beginning, the way it was meant to be. And so Cleo set out to find more darkin. Killing them. Consuming their essence and claiming their daemons and growing ever deeper in her powers. And her madness.”

  “She was insane?”

  “She certainly went that way by the end of it all,” Aelius sighed. “Set aside the messiah complex she’d been instilled with for a minute. The simple truth is you can’t live a life ending the lives of others and expect to escape it unchanged. When you feed a soul to the Maw—”

  “You feed it a piece of yourself, too.”

  “And soon, there’s nothing left,” Ashlinn murmured, glancing at Tric.

  The chronicler nodded, exhaling strawberry-scented gray. “Cleo wandered the City of Bridges and Bones, then the wider Republic. Drawn to other darkin and consuming any she found. Urged on by Niah, amassing an ever-growing fragment of Anais’s soul inside her. Problem was, there was something else growing in her, too.”

  “The baby she mentioned in her journal,” Mia said.

  “Aye,” Aelius said. “And heavy with child, drenched in murder, she finally journeyed east across the Ashkahi wastes. Seeking the Crown of the Moon, where the brightest and most potent shard of Anais’s soul lay in wait for her. She gave birth, right there at the Crown. Alone, save for her passengers, she brought a boy kicking and screaming into the world. Crouched over bare and bloody rock. Cutting his cord with her own teeth. Such will. Such courage.”

  Aelius shook his head and sighed.

  “But when she learned the truth, her courage and will both failed her.”

  The Athenaeum was deathly still. Mia swore she could hear her own heart beating.

  “I don’t understand,” she said.

  “The Dark Mother wanted Cleo to help bring her dead son back to life,” Aelius said. “But there, at the Moon’s Crown, holding her own newborn son to her breast, Cleo learned the truth of what it would mean to raise Anais from the dead. She learned the body which houses the Moon’s soul must perish in his rebirth. That whoever gives Anais life must give up their own to see it done.”

  “For the Moon to live…”

  “Cleo had to die. But she had a son now, see. The boy she’d brought into the world with her own two hands. And she was but young herself. Her whole life ahead of her. She felt like a dupe, not a messiah. She felt betrayed rather than Chosen. And so she refused. Cursed Niah’s name. There at the Crown, she chose to remain. And there she remains still. Twisted by madness. Sustained by the shards of Anais she’d gathered to herself, and refusing to let another claim them.”

  “Trelene have mercy,” Bladesinger whispered.

  “You fucking bastard,” Ash spat.

  Mia turned to her girl, saw her glaring at Tric.

  “You knew, didn’t you?” Ash said, glowering at the boy. “You knew this shit. Where it would lead her. What it would cost her!”

  “I DIDN’T KNOW THE FULL TALE,” Tric said. “I DIDN’T KN—”

  “Bullshit!” Ash spat. “You’ve known this whole fucking time.”

  “Ash, stop it,” Mia said.

  “No, I won’t stop!” Ash cried, incredulous. “You can’t give the Moon life without giving up your own, Mia! That’s what this crusty old prick has been planning for the last three years?” She glared at Aelius, then shoved Tric in his chest. “And this rat bastard has been pushing you right toward your own grave.”

  “DON’T TOUCH ME AGAIN, ASHLINN,” Tric said. “I’M WARNING YOU.”

  “Warning me?” Ash scoffed. “Let’s remember what happened last time we—”

  “All right, stop it!” Mia snapped. “Both of you, enough!”

  Silence rang through the library. Somewhere out in the dark, a bookworm roared. Mia looked Aelius up and down, the wheels turning in her head, over and over. A wraith, trapped forever in this Athenaeum. The Dark Mother’s chronicler, a Hearthless soul, held for an eternity in the Church of the Lady of Blessed Murder. Helping Mia along her way. A battered journal here. A word of advice there.

  “They don’t tell stories about Red Church disciples, Chronicler,” Mia had said. “No songs sung for us. No ballads or poems. People live and die in the shadows, here.”

  “Well, maybe here’s not where you’re supposed to be.”

  “You’re him, aren’t you?”

  Mia peered into those pale blue eyes, realization slowly dawning.

  “You’re the babe she brought into the world,” she said. “You’re Cleo’s son.”

  The chronicler smiled. “Not just a pretty face and a shitty attitude, are you?”

  She looked around them, bewildered.

  “So what the fuck are you doing here?”

  “Fathers and daughters. Mothers and sons.” The chronicler shrugged. “You’re more familiar with the complexities of familia than most. My mother raised me, there at the Crown. The shadows were my only companions. I could have lived my whole life there, never knowing another soul. But as I grew older, Niah began speaking to me.

  “It happened at truedark mostly. She started se
nding me dreams. Whispering as I slept. She told me of her husband’s betrayal. Her son’s murder. And over the years, she convinced me that we all have a purpose in this life, and that my mother’s was to bring balance back to the skies. The Moon was inside my mother when she bore me, and that made me the Night’s grandson—at least in my eyes. So I tried to convince my mother of the selfishness in what she’d done. That Aa had been wrong when he punished his bride, slew his boy. That the skies deserved some kind of harmony, and Niah, some kind of justice. But the years in solitude had only compounded my mother’s delirium. There was no seeing reason for her.

  “And so, after years … I left. Seeking another way the Night might regain her rightful place in the sky. Worship of the Black Mother had been outlawed in the years after her banishment. But I thought if I could revive faith in Niah, the power she’d glean from our devotion might be enough to break the bonds of her prison alone. And so slowly, painstakingly, I founded a church in her name.”

  “You were the first Blade,” Mia realized.

  Aelius shrugged. “It started very small. But we truly believed back then. There was no killing, no offerings, none of that. We operated out of a little chapel on the north coast of Ashkah. The legends of the Night and the Moon etched in the walls.”

  “The temple Duomo sent us to,” Ash breathed. “The place I found the map.”

  “Aye,” Aelius said. “Our first altar, carved out of stone with our own hands.”

  “Red stone,” Ash said.

  “Red Church,” Mia murmured.

  “It was all going well,” Aelius said. “The faith was building. People still wanted to believe in the Mother of Night, despite the lies Aa’s church had begun telling about her. After perhaps a decade of devotion, when truedark fell and the Mother was closest to the earth, she was strong enough to lead us to this Mountain. A place where the walls between Night and Day were thinnest. And here, we truly began to flourish. But there’s a saying about all good things…”

  Aelius dragged deep on his cigarillo and sighed smoke.

  “There were those among the flock who saw differently than I, you see. Who didn’t worship Niah in her guise as the Mother of Night, but instead as Our Lady of Blessed Murder. They saw a new way to run the Church. A way that might turn our devotion to hard coin and our piety into a means to earthly power.”

  Aelius shrugged.

  “And they murdered me.”

  Mia blinked. “You were killed by your own followers?”

  “Aye.” The old man nodded, his face twisting. “Cunts.”

  “Goddess…,” Mia breathed.

  “It all went to shit after that. The Church I’d begun became a cult of assassins. It grew infamous and powerful, but Niah’s budding strength waned as the rot set in. Aa grew stronger as his faith spread in the wake of the Great Unifier’s conquering armies. Divinities are like that, you see—they really only have the power we grant them. The Black Mother had spent so much of her strength making this place, very little remained. And as the Church became more about murder and profit, less about true devotion, she grew weaker and weaker still.

  “By the time she’d gathered enough strength to bring me back to this … life, centuries had passed. The Church had become something else entirely. But there was still a sliver of it in the shadows. A tiny fragment of true belief she could use to play a game decades long. Making a few moves with a few pawns every truedark, just once every three years. Looking for another chosen. Seeking the one who might triumph where Cleo failed. Until finally … finally…”

  The chronicler met Mia’s eyes.

  “Here she is.”

  “I’m nobody’s savior,” she said. “I’m no hero.”

  “O, bullshit,” Aelius spat. “You know exactly what you are. Look at the things you’ve done. The things you do. You’ve been shaping the world with your every breath for the last three years, and don’t tell me you didn’t feel it was for something more than vengeance.” Aelius pointed at the first two Nevernight Chronicles on his little trolley. “I’ve read them. Cover to cover. More times than I can count. You’re more than just a killer. If you open your arms to it, you’re the girl who can right the fucking sky.”

  Aelius shook his head, glaring.

  “But we can’t afford to fuck this up again. There’s so little of Anais left, and every piece of him lost brings us one step closer to ruin. The piece in me when those bastards murdered me. The piece in Cassius when he died in Last Hope. Perhaps I should have helped you more. Perhaps I should have told you earlier. But I needed to know you had the will to see this through, Mia. To the end.”

  The chronicler looked deep into Mia’s eyes.

  “The very end.”

  “Scaeva still has my brother,” she said.

  “Aye,” Aelius said. “And by the time you reach Godsgrave, he’ll probably have an army waiting for you. But if you claim the power that awaits you at the Crown, once truedark falls, you’ll be able to take your brother back in a black heartbeat.”

  “And then I die.”

  The chronicler tilted his head and shrugged.

  “Everybody dies sometime. Very few of us die for something. You’re her Chosen, Mia. This is right. This is destiny.”

  “This is bullshit!” Ashlinn spat, glaring at the chronicler.

  The old wraith sighed gray. “You’ve no idea what you’re talking about, girl.”

  “Don’t call me girl, you creaky old fuck,” Ash snarled. “How easy is it for you to talk about what’s right when you don’t have to sacrifice a thing to do it?”

  Aelius glowered. “Don’t have to sacrifice…?”

  The chronicler straightened to his full height, fury burning in pale blue eyes.

  “One hundred and twenty-seven years,” he said. “That’s what I sacrificed. Over a century, spent rotting in this fucking Athenaeum, bound to these pages. Not alive. Not dead. Just existing and praying for the right one to come along.” He dragged his cigarillo off his lips, held it up between them. “You know how many times I thought about just tossing one of these into the stacks? Letting this place burn and me along with it? I want to sleep, girl. I want this to end. But no, I sat here waiting in the dark because I believed. You be mad at life all you like. You try to protect your love as hard as you can. But don’t you dare talk to me about fucking sacrifice. Not ever.”

  Mia looked about the faces of her comrades. Mercurio looked stricken, Bladesinger and Sidonius were both awed and afraid. Tric was as unreadable as stone, like the faces about the pool beneath Godsgrave’s heart. Ashlinn was simply furious, smoldering, looking at Mia and slowly shaking her head.

  “I need to think,” Mia whispered. “I need to think about this…”

  “The suns are falling to their rest,” Aelius said, eyes returning to hers. “Truedark approaches. Niah can only breathe life into Anais while Aa’s eyes are closed, and if we miss our opportunity now, who knows what the imperium will look like in another two and half years.”

  The chronicler crushed out his cigarillo underheel and nodded.

  “So don’t think too long, neh?”

  CHAPTER 34

  RIBBONS

  Bladesinger sat in the Sky Altar, an endless night wheeling above her head.

  The platform was carved deep into the Quiet Mountain’s flank, open to the sky it was named for. It protruded from the Mountain’s side, a terrifying drop waiting just beyond its ironwood railings. The Whisperwastes were laid out below, but above, where the sky should have burned with the stubborn light of the failing suns, Bladesinger could see only darkness. Filled with a million tiny stars.

  The benches and tables around them, once peopled with assassins and servants of the Black Mother, were empty. The Quiet Mountain was living up to its name—the choir she’d heard when they’d first stormed the assassin’s stronghold was still silent.

  Sidonius sat opposite her, perusing the first volume of the so-called Nevernight Chronicles. He’d borrowed it from Bladesinger
once she was done, flipping pages and tearing mouthfuls off a roast chicken he’d purloined from the Red Church larders. Bladesinger had only skimmed the first, and she was now halfway through the second chronicle. But she’d stopped before she reached chapter twenty-four.

  Their battle with the silkling.

  “’Byss and blood,” Sidonius murmured, turning the page with greasy fingers.

  “What part are you up to?” Bladesinger asked.

  “Ashlinn just stabbed Tric.”

  “Ah.” She nodded. “Ruthless little bitch.”

  “Aye,” Sid said, flipping the book and looking at the cover. “You know, it’s actually not a bad read. I mean, if you don’t mind footnotes and a fuckload of cursing.”

  “Eh.” Bladesinger sniffed dismissively, tossed a long saltlock off her shoulder. “You can tell it was written by a man.”

  “… How’s that?”

  Bladesinger raised an eyebrow and peered at the big Itreyan. “You didn’t think the sex scenes gave it away?”

  “I actually thought some of the smut was quite good?”

  “O, come off,” Bladesinger scoffed. “‘Aching nipples’? ‘Swollen bud’?”

  Sidonius blinked. “What’s wrong with ‘swollen bud’?”

  “I’ve not got a fucking flower between my legs, Sid.”

  “Well, what would you call it, then?”

  Bladesinger shrugged. “The little man in the boat?”

  “Why the fuck would you name a part of a woman’s nethers the ‘little man’?”

  “Something about the visual appeals?” She shrugged again. “Rowing is hard. It’s nice to imagine a man actually doing some work between the sheets for a change.”

  Sid grinned and shook his head. “You’re a fucking bitch, ’Singer.”

  Bladesinger laughed. “You only just noticed?”