Darkdawn

by Kristoff, Jay

“Stand back!”

  Ashlinn hefted her gravebone swords, hacking at the black hemming him in. Jonnen wondered at the futility of it. But his eyes widened as the blades sank deep, splitting the shadows asunder. Ashlinn struck again, swinging as though she were chopping wood, more of the dark sheared away. And Jonnen saw the truth of it all then. How all of it fit together. The bones. The blood. The city about him and the titans above him and the fragment inside him—all of it was connected.

  All of it was One.

  So he opened his hands toward the darkness. Entwined with the black around him, within him, a single fragment of the greater whole. His fingers curled as he took hold, cold and slick beneath his grip. And teeth gritted, face twisted, he tore the bars apart, the shadows shattering about him.

  Ashlinn caught him up in her arms, slinging him onto her hip with one hand, the other still holding a bloody sword. They looked up through the broken rib into the truedark sky as two black shapes streaked overhead, crashing into the cobblestones outside and splitting the island down to its foundations. Ashlinn staggered, even the strength of the grave barely enough to keep her upright. The tremors shook them, the City of Bridges and Bones thrashing in its death throes. Jonnen saw water rushing in through the cracked wall now, covering the street outside, its scent heavy in the air.

  “The ocean,” he whispered.

  “Never fear,” the girl replied, kissing his brow. “I’ll not let you drown.”

  He’d heard those words before. Aboard the Bloody Maid, as the tempest roared and the lightning flashed and the Ladies of Storms and Oceans tried to drag them down to their doom. He remembered Mia sitting across from him, cross-legged and soaked to the skin. He’d hated her, back then. With all he had to give. And still she’d squeezed his hand and sang to him in the dark and promised not to let him sink.

  Ashlinn was making her way through the broken wall now, ankle-deep in the rising seas, cradling him with one arm. Beyond, the city was burning, splintering, crumbling. The streets were all but deserted as they staggered out into the thoroughfare. To the south, toward the Basilica Grande, Jonnen heard screaming darkness, the rage of godlings at war. To the north lay the rubble of the forum, and beyond, the harbors of the Sword and Shield Arms.

  Ships.

  Escape.

  Ashlinn looked into the boy’s eyes. A question swimming amidst that starlit black. Divinities only knew what she’d been through to return here. The strength it had taken to drag herself back from the Abyss. He’d heard her swear to Tric that she’d kill the sky to be the one standing beside Mia at the end. But meeting Ashlinn’s gaze, he knew she understood how much he meant to the one they both loved. Knew that, if he asked it, she’d turn her back and get him to safety first.

  But the boy pressed his lips together. Looking past the fear, the chaos, the hunger, the pain, seizing hold of what mattered most and holding tight.

  He looked into Ashlinn’s eyes and shook his head.

  “When all is blood, blood is all.”

  * * *

  “You scat-loving fuckweasels, pull them in before I toss you over!”

  Cloud Corleone reached over the railing, dragging another sodden child to safety. The lass was shivering, terrified, dripping wet. Beside him, his crew were hauling up their ropes and dragging more folk in from the thrashing oceans. Not being much help in matters of physicality, BigJon was up on the quarterdeck, bellowing obscenities at his salts in the hope it’d further motivate them.

  As if witnessing the end of the entire fucking Republic wasn’t enough.

  Cloud pulled the little girl into his arms, handed her off to Andretti behind him. Dragging his sleeve across his soot-stained cheeks and pressing his spyglass to his eye, the captain took a moment to look back out across the City of Bridges and Bones. Smoke was pouring from the warehouses, flames spreading across the laden silos in the Nethers, cinders falling like rain.

  The blaze had started in the southern ’Grave, and most folk had fled north across the aqueduct or to the harbors in the Arms. But there was still no shortage of people who’d taken to the closest waters they could find. The storm-wracked ocean around them was filled with rowboats, gondolas, dinghies, wine barrels, and planks of wood laden with men, women, and bawling children—every kind of craft capable of floating and some that weren’t. Itreyans, Liisians, Vaanians, ’byss and blood, a countless horde of dogs, rats, even horses. Name the creed or kin and there they were, paddling away from the dying city, clinging to the Maid’s flanks or grasping at the ropes his crew threw down or simply swimming for their lives fast as they were able. The ocean was lit red by the raging firelight. The winds about them cut to the bone.

  “We can’t take on many more, Captain!” BigJon yelled over the rolling thunder, steadying himself against the rails. “We’re close to overcrowded as is!”

  “Keep bringing them aboard until we’re well past close!” Corleone yelled.

  Cloud had already ordered his holds emptied to make room for more hapless passengers—he knew exactly how many his Maid could take before she floundered. But before you mistake him for a lovable scoundrel rather than a mercenary bastard, you should know he was as keen as his first mate to take his leave from the dying metropolis. But alas …

  “I can’t see them anywhere!” BigJon shouted.

  “I keep telling you, this thing fucking works!” Corleone waved his spyglass. “But the shadowcat said they’d be coming, and we’re not leaving ’til they’re aboard!”

  “I didn’t know we’d started taking orders from daemons, Cap’n!”

  “I didn’t know you’d traded in your balls for a vagina, either, but here we are!”

  “You know, I’ve never understood that!” BigJon called. “I mean, women squeeze babies out of those things, why are they considered—”

  “There they are!” Kael cried from the crow’s nest.

  Cloud turned his eyes to the water, squinting through the smoke and cinders, wincing as thunder crashed again. He saw a gondola cutting the rolling waters, familiar bedraggled figures inside it. Sidonius was at the bow, arms gleaming in the firelight as he paddled with a broken board. Cloud could see some misshapen crone shrouded in a dark cloak, sitting beside an old man who could only be Mia’s mentor, Mercurio. Bladesinger sat aft, looking a little worse for wear but still paddling hard. The quartet had picked up a dozen passengers in their flight, men and women hanging on to the sides, children crowded about them in the gondola’s belly.

  “Throw a line!” Cloud bellowed.

  His salts scrambled to obey, tossing a rope over the rails into the thrashing seas. Sidonius snatched it up, dragged them in. The big gladiatii helped the children up first, going so far as to toss a few of the smaller ones up to his crew’s waiting arms like toys. The misshapen woman followed with a helping hand from Bladesinger, clutching her cowl about her neck, head bowed low. ’Singer followed and then came Sidonius, reaching down and roaring at Mercurio to climb.

  The old man looked back toward the City of Bridges and Bones, his face pale and drawn. The capital of the Itreyan Republic was crumbling, hungry waters rushing in, the smaller islands already beginning to sink below the waves. He had tears in his eyes, glittering with the glow of the flames before them and the lighting arcing above.

  “Mercurio, come on!” Sidonius bellowed.

  The old man shook his head. But finally he took hold of the rope, the big Itreyan hauling him aboard.

  “All right, make sail, you two beggar fuckstains!” BigJon bellowed. “Toliver, get your worthless hide aloft before I skin it off you! Andretti, move your arse before I kick it over the side! Away, you nonna-fuckers, away!”

  As his crew scurried to obey, Corleone helped Mercurio to steady himself. Wiping the sweat and soot from his face, the privateer peered into the old man’s eyes.

  “Where’s Mia?” he asked.

  The old man looked back into the doomed city, letting his tears fall.

  “Gone,” he whispered.

&
nbsp; * * *

  A moonlit eon burned inside her.

  The life that was hers before this one.

  Mia remembered all of it. What it was to sail across the velvet black above this mortal plane. To sit astride a throne of silver, bringing magik to the world and light to the darkness. To be a child. To be a god. To be worshipped and feared, to be alive, to be dead, to be somewhere and forever in between.

  To love and live.

  To hate and die.

  Fury boiled in her veins and crackled in her father’s eyes as they crashed to the earth, splitting the flagstones to rubble. Their impact shattered a thousand windows across the forum, blasting doors from their hinges and ringing bells in their teetering towers. The city that had been their body groaned and bled and burned and drowned, and they tore at each other in their rage, heedless of it all. Mia could feel it—all the years and miles and blood and wrong between them. There wasn’t a hole in creation deep enough to bury it all. So she’d bury him instead.

  Father.

  But Scaeva was her match. Just as strong. Just as swift. Just as sharp. Slamming her backward into the Senate House, steps paved with the skulls of Darius Corvere’s legions. Toppling the body of a mighty War Walker, the metal giant crashing onto the Iron Collegium and shattering it like glass. Marble pillars falling, stone rent asunder, lightning arcing in the heavens overhead. Their forms, black and vast now, the god inside them breaking loose, choking itself inside its own grave.

  They crashed against each other like waves on a broken shore. Ripping each other and the city around them to splinters. She tore at his face. He gouged at her eyes. He hurled her into the sky. She smashed him into the earth. The buildings collapsed and the cathedrals fell and the Ribs toppled, the oceans rose and the fires burned, and above them, high above them, their Mother bit her lip and hoped that all she’d done wouldn’t prove to be for naught.

  Father and daughter. Creator and destroyer. Two halves at war, without and within. Dark and light. Silence and song. Earth and sky. Sleep and waking. Serenity and rage. Water and blood. Mia had no idea which half would win.

  “You should have joined me when I asked,” he hissed.

  “You should have killed me when you had the chance,” she spat in reply.

  They slammed against the towering statue of Aa, three arkemical globes still burning in the Everseeing’s outstretched hand, his mighty sword raised to the horizon. Scaeva looked to the shattered metropolis around them, smiling black.

  “Is this what you wanted, daughter?”

  “All this,” she hissed. “And just one thing more, Father.”

  Her hands closed around his throat, sinking into black skin.

  “Die for me.”

  A legion of daemons tore and clawed the air about them, dark winds howling with the rage of a hurricane. He smashed her away from him, the blow like thunder, the blood like rain.

  “You cannot kill me,” her father said.

  His lips twisted in a dripping smile.

  “You are me.”

  The words stilled her. Struck her. Shook her to her core. Because wasn’t it true? Wasn’t that the half she’d fed? The half that must win in the end? What was Mia Corvere, if not murder and rage? What had driven her from the dark of her past? Sustained her when all else failed? So many buried in their graves by her hand. Soldiers and senators and slaves. Could she remember their faces? She’d never even known their names. And how much sleep had she lost over it, truly? How many women had she widowed? How many children orphaned?

  Had she stopped to think, for a single moment, who they might be? Had they been people to her at all? With hopes and lives and dreams? Or had they simply been obstacles in the way of her ambitions? An annoyance to be removed, just as Julius Scaeva removed Darius and Alinne Corvere? Because at the last, if she were honest with herself, in the long quiet hours of the nevernight without her passengers, alone with her heart, Mia Corvere’s greatest fear wouldn’t have ever been failing to kill her father.

  It would have been becoming him.

  But how many Mias had she helped create?

  After all of it, all the blood and death?

  How can I hate him?

  When I’m so much like him?

  And then she saw them.

  Two tiny figures, golden in the darkness.

  Two burning truths, shining in the night.

  They seemed so small amidst all that sound and fury. Jonnen clutched Mia’s gravebone dagger in his hands. Ashlinn held the boy in her arms, fingers spattered black by her return through the walls of the Abyss. Together, they struggled through the raging tempest, step by step through the howling gale. Not away, but toward. Around the base of Aa’s statue, across the shattered stone, inching ever closer to her father’s back.

  Her brother and her girl.

  Her blood and her beloved.

  The difference between him and me.

  Mia fixed black eyes on her father. The statue of the Everseeing behind him, the pale sword gleaming in its hand. The darkness around them shivered. Black wings unfurled at her back. She remembered what it was to sail across the dark above this world. The burning shards swelling inside her, longing to return.

  She could see her loves, even now, forcing their way through the storm. Ashlinn’s golden blond, whipping in the winds, Jonnen’s eyes narrowed against the tempest. The night burned bright above her, her heart ached for all she’d be leaving behind. But this was good, she realized. This was right. A republic in ashes behind her. A city of bridges and bones laid at the bottom of the sea by her hand.

  That was a better ending than most.

  She spread her arms wide, as if to embrace him.

  He readied himself for her blow.

  “Goodnight, Father,” she said.

  And cradled in Ashlinn’s arms, Jonnen struck. A pinprick really. A needle into the heel of a titan. But beyond anything else it might have been, the blade was gravebone. Crafted from a body that had plummeted to earth a millennium ago, still imbued with some tiny fragment of the power of the god it belonged to.

  And in the end, who can cut you deeper than yourself?

  The blade sank through the shadows.

  Black blood flowed.

  Scaeva screamed.

  Arms open wide, Mia collided with him. Driving him back onto the Everseeing’s outstretched blade. The statue’s sword pierced his chest, burst through her back, gleaming white as lightning licked the skies. A tremor hit the island, the earth splitting beneath them. Black winds roared and thunder crashed and she raised her hands and seized his face, forcing him back farther onto the blade as her thumbs found his eyes. She pushed through, black bursting, agonized wails bubbling in the howling night. The shards burning white-hot inside her, all the world collapsing around her, a deafening voice screaming inside her.

  The many were one.

  THE MANY WERE ONE.

  Mia felt the ground crumble away beneath her feet. The warm infinity waiting beyond. Birth and death. Day and night. Crushing him in her hands, enfolding him in her arms, kissing him goodbye. A rushing swell, deeper than oceans, than the black between the suns, than the dark at all light’s ending. All the pieces inside her catching fire, a billion tiny points of light, a shattered totality begun now anew.

  They were everything.

  They were nothing.

  Ending.

  Beginning.

  A universe about them, warm and red and barely a hand’s width wide. A dark pressure all around them, forcing them out, inviting them in. Gravity dragging them from weightlessness, down, down toward an earth that must, in the finish, reclaim us all. The source abandoned, amniotic warmth left behind. Cold air on bloody skin, noises too sharp and real, new eyes closed tight against awful brightness, the violence of their becoming. A severing, stripping them from their core, cutting them off from all they’d known and leaving them alone, alight, alive.

  A howl spilling from their virgin throats.

  And then?

>   And then, the shelter of strong arms. The cushion of a warm breast. The perfect joy of her kiss upon their fevered brow and the promise that all would be well in the end.

  “Mother?” they asked.

  “I love you, my son.”

  The many were one.

  Burning in the eyes of the sun.

  Beginning anew what was undone.

  The many were one.

  THE MANY

  ARE

  ONE.

  CHAPTER 48

  TITHE

  The sky was as gray as the moment you realize you can never go home again.

  Anais walked on water so still it was like polished stone, like glass, like ice beneath his bare and burning feet. It stretched as far as he could see, flawless and endless.

  His mother walked to his left. Beautiful and terrible. But though she’d tried to, he wouldn’t allow her to hold his hand. He was angry with her, you see. At her meddling and machinations. Though her visitation to the little imperator’s dreams had proved the spur to prick the Chosen’s skin, to have her embrace the destiny that was hers, he was keenly aware of how badly it all could have gone wrong. And of the tithe that had been paid for his rebirth.

  His mother carried her scales instead, black gloves up to her elbows, dripping on the eternity at their feet, like blood from an open wrist. Niah’s gown was black also, strung with a billion tiny points of light. Her eyes were as dark as her prison had been, and her smile was vengeance, one thousand years wide.

  Across the infinite gray, he waited for them.

  Father.

  He was clad all in white. Tall as mountains. But Aa didn’t burn so bright as Anais remembered. His three eyes, red and yellow and blue, were all closed now. His radiance dimmed. The dark about them swelled, his mother looming at his shoulders, black as the truedark skies gleaming below the gables of heaven.

  The Moon’s sisters stood arrayed about their father. Tsana wreathed in flame and Trelene shrouded in waves and Nalipse wearing only the wind, Keph sleeping on the floor, clad in autumn leaves. They watched him approach with unveiled malice, but he could see they feared him. He could see why. His domain was the sky, after all. Higher than all of them.