And then …
“The fuck is—”
“Kraaaaaken!”
Mia threw off her cloak of shadows, fingernails digging into Julius’s fur as she looked back over her shoulder. Rearing up out of the churned sands, she saw half a dozen massive tentacles. The appendages were dark, leathery, lined with jagged hooks of awful bone. Drawn by her shadowerking, pierced a dozen or more times by the cavalry’s arrows, the enraged sand kraken dragged itself up out of the broken earth toward the men who’d hurt it. The monstrosity wrapped a hooked tentacle around the closest horse and rider, pulling them toward its hideous beaked maw.
Their horses were thrown into a frothing panic. The cavalry commander roared at his men to attack. But as another soldier cried out in fear, pointed at the two new runnels of boiling earth bearing down upon the cohort, utter chaos broke loose.
Another kraken burst from the blood-soaked sands, larger than the first. Drawn by the blood and screams, it cleaved a half-dozen riders in half with one sweep of its arms. A hail of arrows came raining down, a monstrous howl of pain shook the ground beneath Julius’s hooves. Dust rose in a boiling cloud, red sands and blood spraying in all directions. Mia saw flashing steel, silhouettes dancing in the haze, heard the blast of horns as a third kraken reared up from the bloodied earth and bellowed in hunger and rage. Some horsemen broke, others charged, still more milled about in chaos and confusion. Tentacles and swords and spears cut the air, men and monsters bayed and howled, the stink of blood and iron hanging in the rising cloud of dust.
Mia turned away from the slaughter she’d unleashed, hardening her heart. Ahead, through the wind-borne dust and shimmering heat haze, she could barely make out the shadows of the Blackverge Mountains.
The Crown of the Moon awaited her beyond.
Digging her heels hard into Julius’s flanks, Mia rode on.
* * *
Five turns later, Mia stood with her back to a falling sun, chewing her fingernails. In front of her, spurs of red stone rose into broken foothills and from there, into foreboding peaks. Behind her, Julius stood in a pall of dust, his jowls white with spit.
“I think this is it,” Mia muttered.
The camel bellowed and dropped a few pounds of shit into the dirt.
“Look, it’s not like that map was drawn by a master cartographer,” Mia growled. “It was copied off the wall of a thousand-year-old temple, then copied again in some dingy alley parlor in some fuckarse nowhere town on the north coast of Ashkah. It may not have been one hundred percent accurate.”
The camel warbled again, thick with disdain.
“Shut up, Julius.”
This was the fifth passage through the range she’d tried in as many hours, and Mia’s hope was fading. Each previous foray into the mountains had eventually finished in dead ends, or defiles too narrow to pass. Fuckarsing about with all these wasted attempts, she’d burned her lead on the Seventeenth Legion entirely. Looking to the south, she saw the soldiers were only a few hours’ march away now.
“These bastards don’t give up easily,” she murmured.
She had killed a few hundred of their cavalrymen, she supposed. Even if they weren’t under orders from their imperator, they’d still hunt and kill her on general principle now. But looking at the oncoming horde of legionaries, Mia could see their commander wasn’t just sending his heavy horse this time. He was sending everyone.
Mia strode across the broken ground, grabbed her camel’s rigging, and dragged herself up onto its hump. The beast bellowed a complaint, stomped its hooves, and tried to throw the girl off his back.
“O, shut the fuck up, Julius,” Mia sighed.
She struck the beast’s flanks with her riding crop, and the beast broke into a trot, leading them into a canyon between two jagged cliffs. Mia wondered if she might set an ambush at the pass for the soldiers following, but soon abandoned the notion—the gap between the peaks was wide enough to send an entire legion through abreast. Still, as she rode on, a lonely crow singing above her, she found herself frowning at the canyon walls about them.
These weren’t like the cliffs around the Quiet Mountain. The rocks weren’t weathered or smoothed by time. The mountains near the Church felt old, shrouded in the dust of ages, thick with history. These mountains felt … new.
The land sloped downward, as if she were headed into a depression. And riding on, Mia couldn’t shake the sense of foreboding crawling on her skin. The whisperwinds were growing louder. At times, she swore she could make out words among the shapeless babble. Voices that reminded her of her mother.
Her father.
Ashlinn.
Mia shook her head to clear it, feeling dizzy and lost. It seemed as if she were riding through a fog, though in truth, the light of the single sun was still bright at her back. She took a swallow of water from her saddlebag, wiped the sweat from her brow.
Something feels wrong here.
Magik, perhaps. The remnants of Ashkahi werkings, shattered and lost in the Empire’s fall. Even after centuries, so many years beneath the burning suns, it seemed the stain lingered, like blood seeping into broken earth. But sure and true, she could at last feel it in her bones now. A certainty in her chest.
This is the right way.
She rode on, the wind scrabbling and clawing through the stones. Mia’s hands and feet were tingling, a vague and muzzy feeling in her skull. An itch of sweat, dripping down her spine. She concentrated on the broken ground ahead, fancying she could hear her mother’s voice again. She could feel the cool press of Tric’s lips on hers as she kissed him goodbye. The touch of Ashlinn’s fingertips between her legs, the girl’s breath in her lungs. Unsure of what was real, what was memory. And always, ever, the whisperwinds. Close enough that she could feel soft breath brushing against her earlobe, goosebumps on her skin.
She heard crunching under Julius’s feet. Looking down to the earth beneath them and seeing it was littered with old bones. Human, animal, cracking and splintering as her camel trod upon them. She frowned, blinking as a jawless skull turned toward her, staring with hollow eyes as it whispered.
“If you start down this road, daughter mine, you are going to die.”
Peering at the path ahead, Mia realized it was finally narrowing. Cliffs of jagged red stone rose on either side of her. Looking to the sky above, she was struck with a sense of vertigo, realizing she had no sense of how much time had passed since she entered the fissure. Her hands were shaking. Her tongue parched. Her waterskin was almost empty, though she didn’t remember drinking that much.
You are going
to die.
Ahead of her, on either side of the passage, two statues loomed. Each was carved of sandstone, humanoid in shape, details worn down by the years. The leftmost was split asunder at the waist, its ruins tumbled about its ankles. The one on the right was mostly whole—a human figure with the vaguest hint of strange writings at the base, a long headdress, the head of a cat. It reminded Mia of the lantern on Marielle’s desk. She looked to Mouser’s blacksteel sword at her waist—human figures with feline heads, male and female, naked and intertwined.
“Ashkahi,” she murmured.
Lost to time. Lost to memory. So little of them remained. A few trinkets, scraps of knowledge. And yet, once these were a people, a civilization, an empire. Destroyed utterly in a calamity born of jealousy and rage.
She turned her eyes from the statues ahead to the path beyond. Past the broken monuments, the way was narrowing, closing to a thin defile. A crack running deep in the earth, splitting into a fork farther in, stone rising high on either side. From the map on Ash’s skin, Mia knew that beyond the split in the path lay a maze of runnels and fissures, spreading across the wastelands like spiderwebs.
And beyond that …
Beyond that …
Be …
She could hear her mother singing. Ashlinn sighing her name. Smell Mercurio’s cigarillo smoke on the air. See her father’s eyes as he asked her to join him. Terror rising in her
chest like a black tide, like a flood, threatening to drown her entirely.
Never flinch.
Never fear.
Her legs ached and her feet felt sore—how long had she been walking? Turns? Weeks? She couldn’t remember eating, but her belly was full. She couldn’t remember abandoning Julius, but the beast was nowhere to be seen. It was growing dark, she realized—as if the suns had finally sunk to their rest beyond the worldedge. For a moment she was struck with panic, thinking she’d been in here so long that truedark had fallen. But no, looking to the sky above her head, Mia could still see a thin strip of muddy indigo sunlight, feel the heat of Aa’s last eye in the heavens. The Dark had yet to claim dominion of the sky.
“This is all wrong,” she breathed.
She was close.
She shouldn’t be here.
She should turn back while she still could.
Walking through a labyrinth of red stone and deepening shadows. She could hear faint cries behind her, trumpets blaring, wondering what had become of the soldiers who pursued her into this forsaken place. Wondering why they ever came here.
Why she had.
Looking down, Mia saw her shadow moving like it was black flame, licking and seething over the scattered bones. Like gentle hands, tugging at her clothes, caressing her skin. She looked toward her feet and saw the sky above her. She looked up to the sky and saw nothing at all. She felt Ashlinn naked in her arms, the girl’s lips on her neck. Feeling her lover shiver as she traced the lines of her tattoo with her fingertips. The path through this place. Etched in black.
The rock around her was twisting, the shadows roiling, the light playing tricks in the nooks and crevices. It seemed as though she were surrounded by wailing faces, by grasping claws. The dark deepened, fathomless and perfect. Mia squeezed her eyes shut, realized she couldn’t feel anything anymore—not the ground under her feet or the pulse in her veins or the wind in her hair. The light of the last sun seemed dim as a distant candle, though the sky at her feet was still bright.
“You’re not my daughter.”
“You’re just her shadow.”
“The last thing you will ever be in this world, girl, is someone’s hero.”
“A girl with a story to tell.”
“All I hear, Kingmaker, are lies from the mouth of a murderer.”
“I want you gone, do you hear me?”
“I’d have killed the sky for you…”
The shadows reached out toward her, stretching into the nothing she’d become. She looked down to her own shadow and saw it was black, like tar, like glue, running between her fingers like melting candle wax. She could smell faint smoke and motes of dust, the perfume of empty tombs. Something crunching beneath her feet, dry and brittle as twigs. Sharp as the screaming in her mind.
“O, Goddess,” Mia breathed.
A bleakness so perfect she couldn’t imagine anything before or after or ever again. No light. No sound. No warmth. No hope. Tears welling in her eyes.
“O, Goddess … I can feel her.”
She pushed it aside. The fear. The sorrow. The loss and the pain. So close now, she could taste it. Reach out with trembling hands and touch it. Rip it from its cage of broken ribs and make it her own. Her birthright. Her legacy. Her blood and her vengeance. Her promise to the only one she had left.
Brother.
“I … I cannot swim very well.”
“I can.” She squeezed his hand again. “And I’ll not let you drown.”
The cliffs about her were fragmented now, run through with dark cracks and rife with shadows. On the broken earth beneath her, in the crumbling walls around her, she saw the faintest marks of civilization—the vague pattern of bricks here, a fragment of broken statue there. The ground she’d set her boots to sloped ever downward, and in it, she saw the faint impression of flagstones—as if this had once been a road, smashed with unspeakable fury into the shattered earth.
She was close now. That same pull she’d felt in the presence of Furian, of Cassius, of her father, now amplified a dozen-, a hundred-, a thousandfold. A black gravity. A bottomless undertow, rippling beneath the paper-thin skin of reality about her. The veil between this world and another felt thin and stretched. Something grander and more terrible was waiting on the other side. Something close to …
Home.
When she’d first heard tell of the Crown of the Moon, Mia had imagined something awe-inspiring. Something palatial. A fortress of gold, perhaps, glittering on an impossible mountaintop. A spire of silver, topped with a wreath of starlight. Instead, this was a desolation. A dissolution. She knew now she was walking into an enormous crater, wrought by an impact that had scoured the land of all but broken memories. Of the empire that once flourished in this place, there was almost no trace. Its legends, its lore, its magiks, its songs, and its people, all undone in an instant. A cataclysm that ruptured the very earth, leaving it forever broken.
Mia followed the slope inward. Downward. Wind curling in her hair. Whispers echoing in her ears. Vertigo swelling in her skull. She could definitely hear a woman’s voice now, discernible in the shapeless, haunted babble. And through the furrowed troughs and shattered defiles, dust on her skin and steel in her eyes, she finally stepped into the heart of the Ashkahi crater and saw it laid before her in all its broken glory.
The Crown of the Moon.
She almost smiled to see it. The final answer to the riddle of her life. The last revelation in a story written in ink and blood by the light of dusk and dawning. And in the end, after all the murder and all the miles, it was so simple. She could see the city of Godsgrave in her mind, as if from above—the Sword and Shield Arms, the Nethers, the towering, ossified Ribs. Shattered isles, run through with traceries of canals, looking for all the world like a giant laid upon its back. One piece missing.
And here it was.
Not a fortress of gold or a spire of silver.
“Of course,” Mia whispered.
A skull.
A colossal, impossible skull.
BOOK 5
SHE WORE THE NIGHT
CHAPTER 40
FATE
“The Crown of the Moon,” Mia breathed.
It was hundreds of feet tall, miles across, buried to the temples in splintered earth. Its face was upturned to the sky, a circle scribed into its vast and barren brow. It was gravebone of course, just like the Ribs, the rest of Godsgrave’s foundations, the blade on Mia’s back. The last remnants of Anais’s body, flung from the heavens by a vengeful father who should have loved him as an only son. His body had struck the earth so hard, the Itreyan peninsula was smashed beneath the sea, and there upon the ruins, Aa had commanded his faithful to build his new temple. But here, in the heart of the Ashkahi civilization, Anais’s severed head had struck the ground with unthinkable force, bringing the empire that worshipped him as a god to an end.
It seemed a lonely thing. A tragic thing. Infanticide, etched in ancient bone.
Mia climbed up the broken foothills, the blasted rocks. A single crow circled above, calling to no one at all. The dust curled and danced about her feet. Mia’s shadow pointed directly toward the skull, like a compass needle toward north. Fear gnawing on her stomach. Pressing on her chest. She could feel herself being pulled, stretched, a hunger like she’d never known.
It was as if all her life, she’d been unfinished, and she’d never realized until this moment. All the fragments of her brief existence seemed insignificant—Jonnen, Tric, Mercurio, Scaeva, even Ashlinn—they were only phantoms somewhere in the dark within. Because through all the years and all the blood, at last, at last, she was home.
No.
Mia gritted her teeth, balled her hands to fists.
This is not my home.
She was here for a reason. Not to sleep, but to awake. Not to be claimed, but to claim. The power of a fallen god. The legacy of a shattered line. The power of the light in the night. To tear it, beating and bleeding, from a shattered chest and wrest b
ack her brother from the bastard who’d claimed him. To fight and die for the only thing that gave her life meaning anymore. The only thing she had left.
When all is blood, blood is all.
Mia climbed up through the open mouth, across teeth as big as cathedrals. The shadows about her were twisting and curling, a dark descending, deep as dreaming. She stole through a split in the skull’s cavernous palate, up wending ways of dull gravebone, slipping out at last into a vast and lonely hall inside the skull’s hollowed crown. The cavity was round like an amphitheater, wide as a dozen arenas. It was almost entirely empty, thin spears of illumination piercing the hundreds of cracks in the bone above, the last sun’s dying light turning pitch-black to a dull gloom. The whisperwinds were so loud, Mia could feel them on her skin, hear the words beyond at last, here at their source—a tale of love and loss, of betrayal and butchery, of a sky torn asunder and all the land beside, a mother’s tears and a son’s blood and a father’s shaking, crimson hands.
Mia crept forward, avoiding the tiny patches of sunlight spilling through the cracks, hidden inside the dark she’d ever called friend. Looking about that black and empty gallery, she saw nothing. And yet she knew with terrible certainty she wasn’t alone. She peered into the nooks and furrows, searching for some sign of life, some source for the awful dread and hunger piercing her heart. And finally, looking up to a shelf of splintered gravebone behind her, Mia saw her standing alone.
A beauty. A horror. A woman.
At last.
Cleo.
She was tall. Willow slender. And young, O, Goddess … so very young. Mia had no idea what she’d expected—an ancient crone, an ageless husk—but Cleo barely looked older than she, truth told. Her hair was thick, black, glossy as a slick of oil, reaching past her ankles and dragging on the floor behind her. She wore a backless black gown, gossamer thin and unadorned, made entirely of shadows. The black hugged her frame, stretching all the way from her chin to her bare feet. Her arms were bare like her back, her skin the kind of pale that hadn’t seen the suns in …
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