by Jay Kristoff
Mia cursed as Bastard gave a small buck. Her thighs ached from the saddle, her rump was preparing to wave the white flag. She pointed to a lonely digit of broken stone ten miles distant.
“There.”
“All respect, Pale Daughter, but I doubt the greatest enclave of assassins in the known world would set up headquarters within smelling distance of Last Hope’s pig farms.”
“Agreed. But that’s where I think we should set camp. Looks to be a spring there. And we’ll have a good view of Last Hope from up top, and all the wastes around, I’d wager.”
“… I thought we were following my nose?”
“I only suggested that for the sake of whoever might be listening.”
“Listening?”
“We agree this is a trial, aye? That the Red Church is testing us?”
“Aye,” the boy nodded slow. “But that shouldn’t come as any shock. Surely your Shahiid tested you in preparation for the trials we’ll face?”
Mia jerked the reins as Bastard tried to turn back for the fifth time in as many minutes.
“Old Mercurio loved his testings,” she nodded. “Never a moment that couldn’t be some trial in disguise.4 Thing is, he never gave me a test I couldn’t beat. And the Church shouldn’t be any different. So what’s the one clue we’ve been given? What’s the only piece of this puzzle we have in common?”
“… Last Hope.”
“Exactly. I’m thinking the Church can’t be self-sustaining. Even if they grow their own food, they’d need other supplies. I was poking around the Beau’s hold and I saw goods the inbreds in Last Hope would have no use for. I’m thinking the Church has a disciple there. Maybe watching for novices, but more important, to trek those goods back to their stronghold. So all we need to do is watch for a laden caravan heading out into the wastes. Then we follow it.”
Tric looked the girl up and down, smiling faintly. “Wisdom, Pale Daughter.”
“Have no fear, Don Tric. I won’t let it go—”
The boy held up a hand, pulled Flowers to a sudden stop. He squinted at the badlands around them, nose wrinkled, sniffing the whispering desert air.
“What is it?” Mia’s hand drifted to her gravebone dagger.
Tric shook his head, eyes closed as he inhaled.
“Never smelled the like before. Reminds me of … old leather and dea—”
Bastard snorted, rearing up. Mia clutched his saddle, cursing as the red sand exploded around them and a dozen tentacles burst from beneath the ground. Twenty feet long, studded with grasping, serrated hooks, they looked as dry as the innards of an inkfiend’s needle.
Bastard whinnied in terror as one leathery appendage snaked around his foreleg, another cinching his throat in a hangman’s grip. The stallion fought, snotting and bucking like a wild thing. Mia found herself airborne again, bounced over Bastard’s head and tumbling toward the tentacles’ owner, now dragging itself from the earth and opening a hideous beaked maw. The air rang with a chittering, guttural hisssssssssssssssssss.
“Sand kraken!” Tric roared, a little needlessly.5
Mia drew her gravebone dagger, lashing out at a tentacle whipping her way. Oily blood spurted, a chuddering roar shivering the earth as Mia tumbled between two more of the dreadful limbs, ducking a third and rolling up into a panting crouch. Mister Kindly unfurled from her shadow, peering at the horror and not-breathing a small, soft sigh.
“… pretty…”
Tric drew his scimitar, leaped from his stallion’s back, and hacked at the tentacle clutching Bastard’s leg. With the snapping whip of salted cord, the appendage split, another roar spilling from the beast, eyes wide as dinner plates, dusty gills flaring. Its severed limb flailed about, spraying Tric with reeking ichor. Bastard whinnied again in terror, blood spilling from his neck where the tentacle was wrapped and squeezing.
“Let him go!” Mia shouted, stabbing at another tentacle.
“Back off!” Tric roared to her.
“Back off? Are you mad?”
“Are you?” Tric gestured at her dagger. “You plan on killing a sand kraken with that damned toothpick? Let it have the stallion!”
“To the ’byss with that! I just stole that fucking horse!”
Feinting low, Mia lashed out at another hooked limb, drawing a fresh gout of blood. A flailing backswing saw Tric splayed in the dust, cursing. Mia curled her fingers, wrapping a hasty handful of shadows around herself so she might avoid a similar blow. Those hooks looked vicious enough to gut a war walker. 6
Though inconvenienced by the little sacks of meat and their sharp sticks, the kraken seemed mostly intent on dragging its thoroughbred meal—who no doubt begrudged his theft now more than ever—below the sands. But as Mia pulled the darkness to her, the monstrosity spat a shuddering roar and exploded back out from the earth, limbs flailing. Almost as if it were angry at her.
Tric spat a mouthful of red sand and shouted warning, hacking at another limb. The shadow cloak seemed to do Mia no good—she was near blind beneath it, and the beast seemed to be able to see her regardless. And so she let it fall from her shoulders, dove toward the wailing horse, tumbling across the dust. She moved between the forest of hooks and flails, feeling the breeze of the almost-blows narrowly missing her face and throat, the whistling hiss of the tentacles in the air. There was no real fear in her amid that storm. Simply the sway and the feint, the slide and the roll. The dance she’d been taught by Mercurio. The dance she’d lived with almost every turn since her father took his long plunge from his short rope.
A dusty tumble, a backwards flip, skipping between tentacles like a child amid a dozen jump ropes. She glanced to the beast’s open beak, snapping and snarling above Bastard’s screams, the scrape of its bulk as it dragged itself further from the sand. The smell of wet death and salted leather, dust scratching her lungs. A smile playing on her lips as a thought seized her, and with a brief dash, a skipping leap off one and two and three of the flailing limbs, Mia hurled herself up onto Bastard’s back.
“Maw’s teeth, she is mad…,” Tric breathed.
The horse bucked again, Mia clinging on with thighs and fingernails and sheer bloody-mindedness. Reaching into the saddlebags, she seized a heavy jar of bright red powder within. And with a sigh, she hauled it back and flung it into the kraken’s mouth.
The jar shattered on the creature’s beak, broken glass and fine red powder spraying deep into the horror’s gullet. Mia rolled off Bastard’s back to avoid another blow, scrabbling across the dust as an agonized shriek split the air. The kraken released the stallion, pawing, scratching, scraping at its mouth. Tric gave another half-hearted stab, but the beast had forgotten its quarry entirely, great eyes rolling as it flipped over and over, dragging its bulk back below the sand, howling like a dog who’s just returned home from a hard turn’s work to find another hound in his kennel, smoking his cigarillos and in bed with his wife.
Mia dragged herself to her feet, sand churning as the kraken burrowed away. Flipping the sweat-soaked bangs from her eyes, she grinned like a madwoman. Tric stood slack-jawed, bloody scimitar dangling from his hand, face caked in dust.
“What was that?” he breathed.
“Well, technically they’re not cephalopods—”
“I mean what did you throw in its mouth?”
Mia shrugged. “A jar of Fat Daniio’s widowmaker.”
Tric blinked. Several times.
“… You just thrashed a horror of the Whisperwastes with a jar of chili powder?”
Mia nodded. “Shame, really. It’s good stuff. I only stole the one jar.”
A moment of incredulous silence rang across the wastes, filled with the off-key song of maddening winds. And then the boy began laughing, a dimpled, bone-white grin gleaming in a filthy face. Wiping at his eyes, he flicked a sluice of dark blood from his blade and wandered off to fetch Flowers. Mia turned to her stolen stallion, pulling himself up from the sands, bloodied at his throat and forelegs. She spoke in calming tones, tongue
caked in dust, hoping to still him.
“You all in one piece, boy?”
Mia approached slow, hand outstretched. The beast was shaken, but with a few turns’ rest at their lookout, he’d be mending, and hopefully more kindly disposed to her now she’d saved his life. Mia smoothed his flanks with steady hands, reached into the saddle bags for her—
“Ow, fuck!”
Mia shrieked as the stallion bit her arm, hard enough to leave a bloody bruise. The horse threw back his head with what sounded an awful lot like snickering.7 And tossing his mane, he began a limping canter back toward Last Hope, bloody hoofprints in his wake.
“Wait!” Mia cried. “Wait!”
“He really doesn’t like you,” Tric said.
“My thanks, Don Tric. When you’re done singing your Ode to the Obvious, perhaps you’ll do me the honor of riding down the horse escaping with all my bloody gear on his back?”
Tric grinned, vaulted onto Flowers’s saddle, and galloped off in pursuit. Mia clutched her bruised arm, listening to the faint laughter of a cat who was not a cat echoing on the wind.
She spat into the dust, eyes on the fleeing stallion.
“Bastard…,” she hissed.
Tric returned a half-hour later, a limping Bastard in tow. Reunited, he and Mia trekked overland to the thin spur of rock that’d serve as their lookout. They were on constant watch for disturbances beneath the sand, Tric sniffing the air like a bloodhound, but no more horrors reared any tentacles (or other appendages) to impede progress.
Bastard and Flowers were allowed to graze on the thin grass surrounding the spire—Flowers partook happily, while Bastard fixed Mia in the withering stare of a beast used to fresh oats for every meal, refusing to eat a thing. He tried to bite Mia twice more as she tied him up, so the girl made a show of patting Flowers (despite not really liking him much either) and gifted the chestnut with some sugar cubes from her saddlebags. The stolen stallion’s only gift was the rudest hand-gesture Mia could conjure.8
“Why do you call your horse Flowers?” Mia asked, as she and Tric prepared to climb.
“… What’s wrong with Flowers?”
“Well, most men name their horses something a little more … manly, is all.”
“Legend or Prince or suchlike.”
“I met a horse named Thunderhoof once.” She raised a hand. “Light’s truth.”
“Seems a silly thing to me,” the boy sniffed. “Giving out that kind of knowing for free.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you call your horse Legend, you’re letting people know you think you’re some hero in a storybook. You call your horse Thunderhoof … Daughters, you might as well hang a sign about your neck saying, ‘I have a peanut for a penis.’”
Mia smiled. “I’ll take your word on that.”
“It’s like these fellows who name their swords ‘Skullbane’ or ‘Souldrinker’ or somesuch.” Tric tied his saltlocks into a matted knot atop his head. “Tossers, all.”
“If I were going to name my blade,” Mia said thoughtfully, “I’d call it ‘Fluffy.’”
Tric snorted with laughter. “Fluffy?”
“’Byss, yes,” the girl nodded. “Think of the terror you’d instill. Being bested by a foe wielding a sword called Souldrinker … that you could live with. Imagine the shame of having the piss smacked out of you by a blade called Fluffy.”
“Well, that’s my point. Names speak to the namer as much as the named. Maybe I don’t want folks knowing who I am. Maybe I like being underestimated.”
The boy shrugged.
“Or maybe I just like flowers…”
Mia found herself smiling as the pair scaled the broken cliff-face. Both climbed without pitons or rope—the kind of foolishness common among the young and seemingly immortal. Their lookout loomed a hundred feet high, and the pair were breathless when they reached the top. But, as Mia predicted, the spur offered a magnificent vantage; all the wastes spread out before them. Saan’s red glare was merciless, and Mia wondered how brutal the heat would be during truelight, when all three suns burned the sky white.
“Good view,” Tric nodded. “Anything sneezes in Last Hope, we’ll ken it for certain.”
Mia kicked a pebble off the cliff, watched it tumble into the void. She sat on a boulder, boot propped on the stone opposite in a pose the Dona Corvere would have shuddered to see. From her belt, she withdrew a thin silver box engraved with the crow and crossed swords of the Familia Corvere. Propping a cigarillo on her lips, she offered the box to Tric. The boy took it as he sat opposite, wrinkling his nose and squinting at the inscription on the back.
“Neh diis lus’a, lus diis’a,” he muttered. “My Liisian is woeful. Something about blood?”
“When all is blood, blood is all.” Mia lit her cigarillo with her flintbox, breathed a contented sigh. “Familia saying.”
“This is familia?” Tric thumbed the crest. “I’d have bet you’d stolen it.”
“I don’t strike you as the marrowborn type?”
“I’m not sure what type you strike me. But some snotty spine-hugger’s child? Not at all.”
“You need to work on your compliments, Don Tric.”
The boy prodded her shadow with his boot, eyes unreadable. He glanced at the not-cat lurking near her shoulder. Mister Kindly stared back without a sound. When Tric spoke, it was with obvious trepidation.
“I’ve heard tell of your kind. Never met one before, though. Never thought to.”
“My kind?”
“Darkin.”
Mia exhaled gray, eyes narrowed. She reached out to Mister Kindly as if to pet him, fingers passing through him as if he were smoke. In all truth, there were few who’d seen her work her gift and lived to tell the tale. Folk of the Republic feared what they didn’t understand, and hated what they feared. And yet this boy seemed more intrigued than afraid. Looking him up and down—this half-pint Dweymeri with his islander tattoos and mainlander’s name—she realized he was an outsider too. And it briefly dawned on her, how glad she was to find herself in his company on this strange and dusty road.
“And what do you know about the darkin, Don Tric?”
“Folklore. Bullshit. You steal babies from their cribs and deflower virgins where you walk and other rot.” The boy shrugged. “I heard tell darkin attacked the Basilica Grande a few years back. Killed a whole mess of Luminatii legionaries.”
“Ah.” Mia smiled around her smoke. “The Truedark Massacre.”
“Probably more horseshit they cooked up to raise taxes or suchlike.”
“Probably.” Mia waved to her shadow. “Still, you don’t seem unnerved by it.”
“I knew a seer who could ken the future by rummaging in animal guts. I met an arkemist who could make fire from dust and kill a man just by breathing on him. Messing about with the dark seems just another kind of huckster thaumaturgy to me.” He glanced up to the cloudless sky. “And I can’t see much use for it in a place where the suns almost never set.”
“… the brighter the light, the deeper the shadows…”
Tric looked to the not-cat, obviously surprised to hear it speak. He watched it carefully for a moment, as if it might sprout a few new heads or breathe black flame. With no show of multiple heads forthcoming, the boy turned his eyes back to Mia.
“Where do you get the gift from?” he asked. “Your ma? Your da?”
“… I don’t know where I got it. And I’ve never met another like myself to ask. My Shahiid said I was touched by the Mother. Whatever that means. He surely didn’t seem to know.”
The boy shrugged, ran his thumb over sigil on the cigarillo box.
“If memory serves, Familia Corvere was involved in some trouble a few truedarks back. Something about kingmaking?”
“Never flinch. Never fear,” Mia sighed. “And never, ever forget.”
“So. The puzzle begins to make sense. The last daughter of a disgraced familia. Headed to the finest school of killers in all the Repub
lic. Planning on settling scores after graduation?”
“You’re not about to regale me with some wisdom on the futility of revenge, are you, Don Tric? Because I was just starting to like you.”
“O, no,” Tric smiled. “Vengeance I understand. But given the wrong you’re set on righting, I’m fancying your targets are going to be tricky to hit?”
“One mark is already in the ledger.” She patted her purse of teeth. “Three more to come.”
“These walking corpses have names?”
“The first is Francesco Duomo.”
“… The Francesco Duomo? Grand cardinal of the Church of the Light?”
“That’d be him.”
“’Byss and blood…”
“The second is Marcus Remus. Justicus of the Luminatii Legion.”
“… And the third?”
Saan’s light gleamed in Mia’s eyes, wisps of long black hair caught at the edges of her mouth. The shadows around her swayed like oceans, rippling near Tric’s toes. Twice as dark as they should have been. Almost as dark as her mood had become.
“Consul Julius Scaeva.”
“Four Daughters,” Tric breathed. “That’s why you seek training at the Church.”
Mia nodded. “A sharp knife might clip Duomo or Remus with a lot of luck. But’s not going to be some guttersnipe with a shiv that ends Scaeva. Not after the Massacre. He doesn’t climb into bed without a cadre of Luminatii there to check between the sheets first.”
“Thrice-elected consul of the Itreyan Senate,” Tric sighed. “Master arkemist. The most powerful man in the entire Republic.” The boy shook his head. “You know how to make it hard on yourself, Pale Daughter.”
“O, aye. He’s as dangerous as a sack of blackmark vipers,” Mia nodded. “A right cunt and no mistake.”
The boy raised his eyebrows, mouth slightly agape.
Mia met his stare, scowling. “What?”
“… My mother said that’s a filthy word,” Tric frowned. “The filthiest. She told me never to say it. Especially in front of dona.”
“O, really.” The girl took another pull on her cigarillo, eyes narrowed. “And why’s that?”
