Читать книгу Nevernight - Jay Kristoff, Jay Kristoff - Страница 16

Mia’s mother had given her a puzzle box when she was five years old – a wooden cube with shifting faces that, when correctly aligned, would reveal the true gift inside. It was the best Great Tithe gift she could ever remember receiving. ^fn1

Mia had thought it cruel at the time. When all the other marrowborn children were playing with new dolls or wooden swords, she was stuck with this wretched box that simply refused to open. She bashed it against the wall, to no avail. She cried to her father it wasn’t fair, and he simply smiled. And when Mia stomped before the Dona Corvere and demanded to know why she hadn’t simply given her a pretty ribbon for her hair or a new dress instead of this wretched thing, her mother had knelt and looked her daughter in the eye.

‘Your mind will serve you better than any trinket under the suns,’ she’d said. ‘It is a weapon, Mia. And like any weapon, you need practise to be any good at wielding it.’

‘But, mother—’

‘No, Mia Corvere. Beauty you’re born with, but brains you earn.’

So Mia had taken the box and sat with it. Scowled at it. Stared at it until she dreamed about it. Twisting and turning and cursing it by all the swears she’d heard her father ever use. But after two months of frustration, she twisted a final piece and heard a wonderful sound.

Click.

The lid opened, and inside, she’d found a brooch – a crow with tiny amber eyes. The sigil of her Familia. The crow of Corvere. She wore it to mornmeal the next turn. Her mother had smiled and never said a word. She’d kept the box; in all the Great Tithes since, all the puzzles her parents had given her thereafter, it remained her favourite. After her father’s execution and mother’s arrest, she’d left the box and something of the little girl who loved it behind.

But the brooch itself, she’d brought with her. That, and her gift for puzzles.

She’d woken beneath a pile of refuse in a lonely alley, somewhere in the Godsgrave backstreets. As she pawed the sleep from her eyes, her stomach had growled. She knew the consul’s men might still be chasing her – that he might send more if he knew they’d failed to drown her. She had nowhere to stay. No friends. No money. No food.

She was aching and alone and afraid. She missed her mother. Little Jonnen, her baby brother. Her soft bed and her warm clothes and her cat. The memory of him lying broken on the floor flooded her eyes with tears, the thought of the man who’d killed him filled her heart with hate.

‘Poor Captain Puddles …’

‘… meow …’ said a voice.

The little girl glanced up at the sound, dragging dark hair from damp lashes. And there on the cobbles, amid the weeds and the rot and the filth, she saw a cat.

Not her cat, to be sure. O, it was black as truedark, just like the good captain had been. But it was thin as paper and translucent, as if someone had cut a cat’s shape out of shadowstuff itself. And despite the fact that he now wore a shape instead of no shape at all, she still recognised her friend. The one who’d helped her when no one else in the world could.

‘Mister Kindly?’ she asked.

‘… meow …’ he said.

She reached towards the creature as if to pet him, but her hand passed through him as it might a wisp of smoke. Looking into his darkness, she felt that same sensation – her fear leaching away like poison from a wound, leaving her hard and unafraid. And she realised though she had no brother, no mother, no father, no familia, she wasn’t entirely alone.

‘All right,’ she nodded.

Food first. She had no money, but she had her stiletto, and her brooch pinned to her (increasingly dishevelled) dress. A gravebone blade would be worth a fortune, but she was loath to give up her only weapon. However, she knew there were folk who’d give her money for the jewellery. Coin could buy her food and a room to lay low so she could think about what to do next. Ten years old, her mother in chains, her –

‘… meow …’ said Mister Kindly.

‘Right,’ she nodded. ‘One puzzle at a time.’

She didn’t even know what part of Godsgrave she was in. She’d spent her entire life in the Spine. But her father had kept maps of the city in his study, hung on the walls with his swords and his wreaths, and she remembered the layout of the metropolis roughly enough. She was best-off staying away from the marrowborn quarter, hiding as low and deep as she could until she was sure the consul’s men had given up the chase.

As she stood, Mister Kindly flowed like water into the black around her feet, her shadow darkening as he did so. Though she knew she should probably be frightened at the sight, instead Mia took a deep breath, combed her fingers through her hair, and stepped out of the alley, right into a sloppy pile of what she hoped was mud. ^fn2

Cursing in a most improper fashion and scraping her soles on the cobbles, she saw people of all kinds pushing along the cramped thoroughfare. Fair-haired Vaanians and blue-eyed Itreyans and tall Dweymeri with leviathan ink tattoos, dozens of slaves with arkemical marks of sale burned on their cheeks. But Mia soon realised the folk were mostly Liisian; olive of skin and dark of hair. Storefronts were marked with a sigil Mia recognised from her lessons with Brother Crassus and truedark masses inside the great cathedrals – three burning circles, intertwined. A mirror of the three suns that roamed the skies overhead. The eyes of Aa himself.

The Trinity. ^fn3

Mia realised she must be in the Liisian quarter – Little Liis, she’d heard it called. Squalid and overcrowded, poverty written in crumbling stonework. The canal waters ran high here, consuming the lower floors of the buildings around. Palazzos of unadorned brick, rusting to a dark brown at the water’s edge. Above the water’s reek, she could smell spiced breads and clove smoke, hear songs in a language she couldn’t quite comprehend but almost recognised.

She stepped into the flow of people, jostled and bumped. The crush might have been frightening for a girl who’d grown her whole life in the shelter of the Spine, but again, Mia found herself unafraid. She was pushed along until the street spilled into a broad piazza, lined on all sides by stalls and stores. Climbing up a pile of empty crates, Mia realised she was in the marketplace, the air filled with the bustle and murmur of hundreds of folk, the harsh glare of two suns burning overhead, and the most extraordinary smell she’d ever encountered in her life.

Mia couldn’t describe it as a stench – although a stench was certainly wrapped up in the incomparable perfume. Little Liis sat on the southwest of Godsgrave, below the Hips near the Bay of Butchers, and was skirted by Godsgrave’s abattoirs and various sewer outflows. The bay’s reek has been compared to a burst belly covered in horseshit and burning human hair, three turns rotten in the heat of truelight.

However, masking this stench was the perfume of the marketplace itself. The toast-warm aroma of fresh-baked breads, tarts, and sugardoughs. The buoyant scents of rooftop gardens. Mia found herself half-drooling, half-sickened – part of her wishing to eat everything in sight, the other part wondering if she’d ever eat again.

Thumbing the brooch at her breast, she looked about for a vendor. There were plenty of trinket stalls, but most looked like two-copper affairs. On the market’s edge, she saw an old building, crouched like a beggar at the corner of two crooked roads. A sign swung on a squeaking hinge above its sad little door.

MERCURIO’S CURIOS – ODDITIES, RARITIES & The FYNEST ANTIQUITIES.

A door placard informed her, ‘No time-wasters, rabble, or religious sorts welcome.’

She squinted across the way, looked down at the too-dark shadow around her feet.

‘Well?’ she asked.

‘… meow …’ said Mister Kindly.

‘I think so too.’

And Mia hopped off her crates, and headed towards the store.

Blood gushed across the wagon’s floor, thick and crusted on Mia’s hands. Dust clawing her eyes, rising in a storm from the camels’ hooves. There was no need for Mia to whip them; the beasts were running just fine on their own. And so she concentrated on quieting the headache splitting her brow and stilling the now familiar urge to stab Tric repeatedly in the face.

The boy was stood on the wagon’s tail, banging away at what might have been a xylophone, if xylophones were crafted from iron tubes and made a noise like donkeys rutting in a belfry. The boy was drenched in blood and dust too; gritted teeth of perfect white in a mask of filthy red and shitty tattoos.

‘Tric, shut that racket up!’ Mia roared.

‘It scares off the krakens!’

‘Scares off the krakens …’ moaned Naev, from a puddle of her own blood.

‘No, it bloody doesn’t!’ yelled Mia.

She glanced over her shoulder, just in case the ungodly racket had indeed scared off the monstrosities chasing them, but alas, the four runnels of churning earth were still in close pursuit. Bastard galloped alongside the wagon, tethered by his reins. The stallion was glaring at Mia, occasionally spitting an accusing whinny in her direction.

‘O, shut up!’ she yelled at the horse.

‘… he really does not like you …’ whispered Mister Kindly.

‘You’re not helping!’

‘… and what would help …?’

‘Explain to me how we got into this stew!’

The cat who was shadows tilted his head, as if thinking. A chuddering growl from the behemoths behind shivered the wagon in its rivets, but the bouncing across the dunes moved him not at all. He looked at the rolling Whisperwastes, the jagged horizon drawing nearer, his mistress above him. And he spoke with the voice of one unveiling an ugly but necessary truth.

‘… it is basically your fault …’

Two weeks had passed atop their lookout, and both Mia and Tric had begun losing faith in her theory. The first turn of Septimus was fast approaching – if they didn’t cross the Church threshold before then, there’d be no chance to be accepted among this year’s flock. They watched in turns, one climbing the spire to relieve the other, pausing to chat awhile between shifts. They’d swap tales of their time as apprentices, or tricks of the trade. Mia seldom mentioned her familia. Tric never mentioned his. And yet he always lingered – even if he had nothing to say, he’d simply sit and watch her read for a spell.

Bastard had eventually taken to eating the grass around the spire’s roots, though he did it with obvious disdain. Mia often caught him looking at her as if he wanted to eat her instead.

Around nevernight’s falling on what was probably the thirteenth turn, she and Tric were sitting atop the stone, staring over the wastes. Mia was down to her last forty-two cigarillos and already wishing she’d brought more.

‘I tried to quit once,’ she said, peering at Black Dorian’s^fn4 watermark on the fine, hand-rolled smoke. ‘Lasted fourteen turns.’

‘Missed it too much?’

‘Withdrawals. Mercurio made me take it back up. He said me acting like a bear with a hangover three turns a month was bad enough.’

‘Three turns a … ah.’

‘Ah.’

‘… You’re not that bad are you?’

‘You can tell me in a turn or so,’ she chuckled.

‘I had no sisters.’ Tric began retying his hair, a habit Mia had noted he indulged when uncomfortable. ‘I am unversed in …’ – vague handwaving – ‘… women’s ways.’

‘Well then, you’re in for a treat.’

He stopped in mid-knot, looking at Mia strangely. ‘You are unlike any girl I have ev—’

The boy fell silent, slipped off his rock into a crouch. He took out an old captain’s spyglass, engraved with the same three seadrakes as his ring, and pressed it to his eye.

Mia crouched next to him, peering towards Last Hope. ‘See something?’

‘Caravan.’

‘Fortune hunters?’^fn5

‘Don’t think so.’ Tric spat on the spyglass lens, rubbed away the dust. ‘Two laden wagons. Four men. Camels leading, so they’re in for a deep trek.’

‘I’ve never ridden a camel before.’

‘Nor me. I hear they stink. And spit.’

‘Still sounds a step up from Bastard.’

‘A whitedrake wearing a saddle is a step up from Bastard.’

They watched the caravan roll across the blood-red sand for an hour, pondering what lay ahead if the group were indeed from the Red Church. And when the caravan was almost a dot on the horizon, the pair clambered down from their throne, and followed across the wastes.

They kept distance at first, Flowers and Bastard plodding slowly. Mia was sure she could hear a strange tune on the wind. Not the maddening whispers – which she’d still not become accustomed to – but something like off-key bells, stacked all atop one another and pounded with an iron flail. She’d no idea what to make of it.

The pair weren’t outfitted for a trek into the deep desert, and they resolved to ride up to the caravan when it stopped to rest. There was no creeping up on it – the stone outcroppings and broken monuments studding the wastes weren’t enough to conceal approach, and Mia’s cloak of shadows was only big enough for one. Besides, she reasoned, if these were servants of the Lady of Blessed Murder, they may not take kindly to being crept up on as they stopped to piss.

Sadly, the caravan folk seemed happy enough to go as they went, so to speak. The pair were gaining ground, but after two full turns in the saddle, with Bastard nipping her legs and occasionally trying to buck her into the dust, Mia could take no more. Pulling the stallion up near a circle of weathered statues, she didn’t so much lose her temper as drop-kick it across the sand.

‘Stop, stop,’ she spat. ‘Fuck this. Right in the earhole.’

Tric raised an eyebrow. ‘What?’

‘There’s more bruises in my britches than there is bottom. It needs a breather.’

‘Are we playing alliteration and you didn’t tell me, or …’

‘Fuck off. I need a rest.’

Tric frowned at the horizon. ‘We might lose them.’

‘They’re led by a dozen camels, Tric. A noseless dog could follow this trail of shit in the middle of truedark. If they suddenly start trekking faster than a forty-a-turn smoker with an armload of drunken prostitutes, I think we can find them again.’

‘What do drunken prostit—’

‘I don’t need a foot massage. Don’t want a back rub. I just want to sit on something that isn’t moving for an hour.’ Mia slipped off the saddle with a wince, waved her stiletto at Bastard. ‘And if you bite me again, I swear to the Maw I’ll make you a gelding.’

Bastard snorted, Mia sinking down against a smooth stone with a sigh. She pressed one hand to her cramping innards, rubbed her backside with the other.

‘I can help with that,’ Tric offered. ‘If you need it.’

The boy grinned as Mia raised the knuckles. Tethering the horses, he sat opposite Mia as she fished a cigarillo from her case, struck her flintbox, and breathed deep.

‘Your Shahiid was a wise man,’ Tric said.

‘What makes you say that?’

‘Three turns of this a month is plenty.’

The girl scoffed, kicked a toeful of dust at him as he rolled away, laughing. Pulling her tricorn down over her eyes, she rested her head against the rock, cigarillo hanging from her lips. Tric watched her, peering about for some sign of Mister Kindly. Finding none.

He looked around them, studying the stonework. The statues were all similar; vaguely humanoid figures with feline heads, blasted by winds and time. Standing up on the outcropping, he squinted through his spyglass, watching the camel caravan trekking away. Mia was right – they moved at a plodding pace, and even with a few hours’ rest, they’d make up the lost ground. He wasn’t as grass-green around horses as Mia was, but after two turns saddlebound, he was aching in a few of the wrong places. And so sitting in the shade for a spell, he tried his best not to watch her as she slept.

He only closed his eyes for a second.

‘Naev counsels him to be silent.’

A slurred whisper in his ear, sharp as the blade against his throat. Tric opened his eyes, smelled leather, steel, something rank he supposed might be camel. A woman’s voice, thick with spittle, accent he couldn’t place. Behind him.

Tric said not a word.

‘Why does he follow Naev?’

Tric glanced around, saw Bastard and Flowers still tied up. Footprints in the dust. No sign of Mia. The knife pressed harder against his throat.

‘Speak.’

‘You told me to be silent,’ he whispered.

‘Clever boy.’ A smile behind the words. ‘Too clever?’

Tric reached down to his belt, wincing as the blade twitched. Slowly, slowly, he produced a small wooden box, shook it softly, the faint rattle of teeth therein.

‘My tithe,’ he said. ‘For the Maw.’

The box was snatched from his hand. ‘Maw’s dead.’

‘O, Goddess, not again—’

‘She’s playing with you, Don Tric.’

Tric smiled to hear Mia’s voice, grinned as the knifewoman hissed in surprise.

‘I’ve a better game we can play, though,’ Mia said brightly. ‘It’s called drop your blade and let him go before I cut your hands off.’

‘Naev will slit his throat.’

‘Then your head will join your fingers on the sand, Mi Dona.’

Tric wondered if Mia was bluffing. Wondered what it would be like to feel the blade swish from one ear to the other. To die before he’d even begun. The pressure at his neck eased, and he flinched as something small and sharp nicked his skin.

‘Ow.’

Dark stars collided in his eyes, the taste of dusty flowers on his tongue. He rolled aside, blinking, only dimly aware of the struggle behind him. Whispering blades slicing the air, feet scuffing across blood-red sand. He glimpsed their attacker through blurring eyes – a small, wiry woman, face veiled, wrapped in cloth the colour of desert sand. Carrying two curved, double-edged knives and dancing like someone who knew the steps.

Tric pawed the scrape on his neck, fingertips wet. He tried to stand but couldn’t, staring at his hand as his brain caught up. His mind was his own, but his body …

‘Poisoned …’ he breathed.

Mia and the stranger were circling each other, blades clutched in knife-fighter grips. They moved like first-time lovers – hesitant at first, drifting closer until finally they fell into each other’s arms, fists and elbows and knees, block and counters and strikes. The sigh of steel in the air. The wet percussion of flesh and bone. Having never really seen her matched against a human opponent, Tric slowly realised Mia was no slouch with a blade – well honed and seemingly fearless. She fought left-handed, her fighting style unorthodox, moving swift. But for all Mia’s skill, the thin woman seemed her match. Her every strike was foiled. Every advance countered.

After a few minutes of spectating, the feeling was returning to Tric’s feet. Mia was panting with exertion, crow-black hair clinging to her skin like weed. The stranger wasn’t pressing the attack; simply defending silently. Mia was circling, trying to get the sun behind her, but her foe was clever enough to avoid getting Saan in her eyes. And so at last, with a small sigh as if admitting defeat, Mia moved her shadow so the stranger would be ankle-deep in it anyway.

The woman hissed in alarm, trying to sidestep, but the shadows moved quick as silver. Tric watched her fall still, as if her feet were glued to the spot. Mia stepped up and struck at the woman’s throat, blade whistling as it came. But instead of dying, the stranger tangled up Mia’s forearm, twisted her knife free, and flipped the girl onto her bruised backside, swift as a just soul flying to the Hearth.^fn6

Mia’s blade quivered in the sand between Tric’s legs, two inches shy of a very unhappy accident. The boy blinked at the gravebone, trying to focus. He felt as if he should give it back – that seemed important – but the warmth at his neck bid him sit awhile longer.

Mia rolled to her feet, red-faced with fury. Snatching the knife from the sand, she turned back to the woman, teeth bared in a snarl.

‘Let’s try that again, shall we?’ the girl wheezed.

‘Darkin,’ said the strange woman, only slightly out of breath. ‘Darkin fool.’

‘… What?’

‘She calls the Dark here? In the deep wastes?’

‘… Who are you?’

‘Naev,’ she slurred. ‘Only Naev.’

‘That’s an Ashkahi word. It means “nothing”.’

‘A learned fool, then.’

Mia motioned to Tric. ‘What did you do to my friend?’

‘Ink.’ The woman displayed a barbed ring on her finger. ‘A small dose.’^fn7

‘Why did you attack us?’

‘If Naev had attacked her, the sands would be redder. Naev asked why they followed her. And now Naev knows. Naev wonders at the girl’s skill. And now Naev sees.’ The veiled woman looked back and forth between them, made a slurping sound. ‘Sees a pair of fools.’

Tric rose on wobbly feet, leaning against the stone at his back. His head was clearing, anger replacing the haze. He drew his scimitar and glared at the three little women blurred before him, his pride stung to bleeding.

‘Who are you calling fool, shorty?’

The woman glanced in his direction. ‘The boy whose throat Naev could have cut.’

‘You crept up on me while I was sleeping.’

‘The boy who sleeps when he should be watching.’

‘How about you watch while I hand you your—’

‘Tric,’ Mia said. ‘Calm down.’

‘Mia, this skinny streak of shit had a knife to my throat.’

‘She’s testing you. Testing us. Everything she says and does. Look at her.’

Naev still held Mia’s gaze, eyes like black lamps burning in her skull. Mia had seen a stare like that before – the stare of a person who’d looked the end in the face so many times she considered death a friend. Old Mercurio had the same look in his eyes. And at last she knew the stranger for what she was.

The moment was nothing like she’d practised in the mirror. And yet Mia still felt a sense of relief as she took the purse of teeth from her belt and tossed it to the thin woman. As if six years had been lifted from her chest.

‘My tithe,’ she said. ‘For the Maw.’

The woman hefted the bag in her hand. ‘Naev has no need of it.’

‘But you’re from the Red Church …’

‘It is Naev’s honour to serve in the House of Our Lady of Blessed Murder, yes. For the next few minutes at least.’

‘Few minutes? What do you—’

The ground beneath them trembled. A faint tremor at first, felt at the small of her back. Rising every second.

‘… Is that what I think it is?’ Tric asked.

‘Kraken,’ Naev sighed. ‘They hear when she calls the Dark. A fool, as I said.’

Mia and Tric glanced at each other, spoke simultaneously. ‘O, shit …’

‘Didn’t you know that?’ Tric asked.

‘Four Daughters, how was I supposed to know that? I’ve never been to Ashkah!’

‘The kraken who attacked us before lost its bottle when you did your cloaky thing!’

‘“Cloaky thing”’? Are you five years old?’

‘Well, whatever it’s called, maybe you should stop it?’ Tric pointed to the shadows around Naev’s feet. ‘Before it brings more?’

Mia’s shadow slithered back across the dust, took up its regular shape again. She kept a wary eye on Naev, but the woman simply sheathed her blade, head tilted.

‘There are two,’ she slurped. ‘Very large.’

‘What do we do?’ Mia asked.

‘Run?’ Naev shrugged. ‘Die?’

‘Running sounds grand to me. Tric?’

Tric was already on Flowers’s back, the horse rearing to go. ‘Waiting on you, now.’

Mia vaulted into the saddle, offered a hand to the thin woman. ‘Ride with me.’

Naev hesitated a moment, tilting her head and fixing Mia in that black stare.

‘Look, you’re welcome to stay here if you like …’

Naev stepped closer and the ground trembled. Bastard raised up on his hind legs, kicking at the air. Mia glanced behind to see a trail of churning earth approaching – as if something massive swum beneath the sand.

Right towards them.

As the stallion set his hooves back on the ground, she called the shadows again, fixing him in place long enough for Naev to scramble up behind her. A bellowing roar sounded under the earth, as if the things were also answering her summons. As Naev put her arms around Mia’s waist, she caught a whiff of spice and smoke. Something rotten beneath.

‘She is making them angry,’ the woman said.

‘Let’s go!’ Tric shouted.

Mia released Bastard’s hooves and kicked hard, the stallion bolting into a fast gallop. The ground behind exploded, tentacles bursting from the sand and cracking like hooked bullwhips. Mia heard a gut-watering bellow, glimpsed a beak that could swallow Bastard whole. She saw a second runnel rumbling towards them from the west. Thundering hooves and roars filled her ears.

‘Two of them, just like you said!’ Mia yelled.

The veiled woman pointed north. ‘Ride for the wagons. We have ironsong to keep the kraken at bay.’

‘What’s ironsong?’

‘Ride!’

And so they did. A furious gallop over an ocean of blood-red sand. Glancing behind, she saw the two runnels converging, closing swift. She wondered how the beasts were tracking her. How they knew it was her who’d called the Dark. A tentacle broke the surface, two storeys tall, set with hooks of blackened bone. Angry roars filled the air as it slammed back down to earth.

Dust whipping her eyes. Bastard snorting beneath her, hoof beats thudding in her chest. Mia held the reins hard, riding harder, grateful that though the stallion hated her like poison, he seemed to hate the thought of being eaten even more.

‘Look out!’ cried Tric.

Mia looked ahead, saw another runnel approaching from the north. Bigger, moving faster, shaking the earth beneath her. Flowers let out a terrified whinny.

‘It seems there are three,’ Naev said. ‘Apologies …’

Tentacles unfurled from the ground like the petals of some murderous flower. Mia looked into the beast’s maw, all snapping beak and hooked bone. As Flowers cut east to avoid the behemoth, Bastard finally came to the realization that he’d run much faster without two riders on his back. And so he started bucking.

Mia had the benefit of stirrups. Reins. A saddle. But Naev was riding on Bastard’s hindparts with nothing but Mia’s waist to keep her anchored. Bastard bucked again, whipping them about like rag dolls. And without a whisper, Naev sailed off the horse’s back.

Mia cut east to follow Tric, roaring at the boy over the chaos.

‘We lost Naev!’

The Dweymeri glanced over his shoulder. ‘Maybe they’ll stop to eat her?’

‘We have to go back!’

‘When did you grow altruism? It’s suicide to go back there!’

‘It’s not just altruism, you knob, I gave her my tithe!’

‘O, shit,’ Tric felt about his waist. ‘She took mine, too!’

‘You get Naev,’ she decided. ‘I’ll distract them!’

‘… mia …’ said the cat in her shadow. ‘… this is foolish …’

‘We have to save her!’

‘… the boy’s stallion will not take him back there …’

‘Because he’s afraid! And you can fix that!’

‘… if i drink him, i cannot drink you …’

‘I’ll deal with my own fear! You just deal with Flowers!’

A hollow sigh.

‘… as it please you …’

Red earth, torn and wounded, shaking beneath them. Dust in her eyes. Heart in her throat. She felt Mister Kindly flit across the sand and coil inside Flowers’s shadow, feasting on the stallion’s terror. She felt her own rise up in a flood – an ice-cold swell in her belly, so long forgotten she was almost overcome. So many years since she’d had to face it. So many years with Mister Kindly beside her, drinking every drop so she could always be brave.

Fear.

Mia jerked on the reins, bringing Bastard to a halt. The stallion snorted but obeyed the steel in his mouth, stamping and snotting. Bringing him about, Mia saw Naev was on her feet, clutching her ribs as she ran across the churning sand.

‘Tric, go!’ Mia roared. ‘I’ll meet you at the wagon!’

Tric still looked a touch befuddled from the ink. But he nodded, charging back towards the fallen woman and the approaching kraken. Flowers ran fast as a hurricane towards the monstrosity, completely fearless with the eyeless cat clinging to his shadow.

The first kraken erupted behind Naev, tentacles the size of longboats cutting the air. The thin woman rolled and swayed, slipping between a half-dozen blows. Sadly, it was the seventh that caught her – hooks tearing her chest and gut as the tentacle snatched her up. And even in that awful grip, the woman refused to cry out, drawing her blade and hacking at the limb instead.

Terror filled Mia’s veins, fingertips tingling, eyes wide. The sensation was so unfamiliar, it was all she could do not to sink beneath it. Yet the fear of failing was stronger than the thought of dying in a kraken’s arms, memories of her mother’s words on her father’s hanging turn still carved in her bones. And so she reached inside herself, and did what had to be done.

She wrapped her shadow about herself, fading from view on the stallion’s back. The kraken holding Naev paused, tremors running its length. And with a howl that shivered her bones, the beast dropped its prey onto the sand, and turned towards Mia with its two cousins swimming fast behind.

The girl turned and rode for her life.

Teeth gritted, glancing over her shoulder as massive shapes breached the earth, diving back below like seadrakes on the hunt. Beyond the horrors, she saw Tric at full gallop, snatching Naev up and dragging the wounded woman over his pommel. Naev was drenched in blood, but Mia could see she was still moving. Still alive.

She turned Bastard north, galloping towards the caravan. The churchmen were no fools – their camel train was already tearing away across the dust. The kraken kept pace with Bastard, one slamming into the sand just thirty feet behind, the stallion stumbling as the ground shuddered. Great roars and the hiss of their bodies piercing the earth filled her ears. Wondering how they could sense her, Mia rode towards a stretch of rocky badlands, praying the ground was something approaching solid.

About forty eroded stone spires thrust up through the desert’s face; a small garden of rock in the endless nothing. Throwing aside her shadowcloak, Mia wove between them, heard frustrated roars behind. She gained a short lead, galloping out the other side as the kraken circled around. Slick with sweat. Heart pounding. She was closing on the camel train, inch by inch, foot by foot. Tric had reached it, one of the wagonmen reaching for Naev’s bloody body, another manning a pivot-mounted crossbow loaded with bolts as big as broom handles.

She could hear that same metallic song on the wind – realised some strange contraption was strapped to the rear wagon beside the crossbow. It looked like a large xylophone made from iron pipes. One of the wagonmen was hitting it like it had insulted his mother, filling the air with noise.

Ironsong, she realised.

But beneath the cacophony, she could hear the kraken behind, the earth being torn apart by horrors big as houses. Her thighs ached, muscles groaned, and she rode for all she was worth. The fear was swelling in her – a living, breathing thing, clawing at her insides and clouding thought and sight. Hand shaking, lips quivering, please, Mother, take it away …

At last she drew alongside the rearmost wagon, wincing at the racket. Tric was yelling, holding out his hand. Her heart was thundering in her breast. Teeth chattering in her skull. And with Bastard’s reins in her fist, she drew herself up on unsteady legs and leapt towards him.

The boy caught her, pulled her against his chest, hard as mahogany and drenched in blood. Shaking in his arms, she looked up into hazel eyes, noted the way he was staring at her – relief and admiration and something yet besides. Something …

She felt Mister Kindly slink back into her shadow, overwhelmed for a moment by the terror in her veins. And then he drank, and sighed, and nothing of it remained but fading memory. Herself again. Strong again. Needing no one. Needing nothing.

Muttering thanks, she pushed herself from Tric’s grip and stooped to tie Bastard to the wagon’s flank. Tric knelt beside Naev’s bleeding body to check if she still lived. The churchman in the pilot’s chair roared over the xylophone.

‘Black Mother, what did you—’

A tentacle burst from the earth in front of them, whistling as it came. It tore through the driver’s midriff, ripping him and one of his fellows clean in half, guts and blood spraying as the wagon roofs were torn away like paper. Mia dived to the deck, hooks sweeping mere inches over her head as the wagon rocked sideways, Tric roaring and Bastard screaming and the newly arrived kraken bellowing in fury. The crossbow and its marksmen were smashed loose from the tray, sailing off into the dust. The camels swerved in a panic, sending the wagon train up on four wheels. Mia lunged for the abandoned reins, bringing the train down with a shuddering jolt. She dragged herself into the pilot’s seat and cursed, glancing over her shoulder at the four beasts now pursuing them, shouting over the bedlam to Mister Kindly.

‘Remind me never to call the Dark in this desert again!’

‘… have no fear of that …’

The churchman manning the xylophone had been knocked clear when the kraken struck, now wailing as one of the monsters dragged him to his death. Tric snatched up the man’s fallen club and started beating on the contraption as Mia roared at Naev.

‘Which way is the Red Church from here?’

The woman moaned in reply, clutching the ragged wounds in her chest and gut. Mia could see entrails glistening in the worst of it, Naev’s clothes soaked with gore.

‘Naev, listen to me! Which way do we ride?’

‘North,’ the woman bubbled. ‘The mountains.’

‘Which mountains? There are dozens!’

‘Not the tallest … nor the shortest. Nor the … scowling face or the sad old man or the broken wall.’ A ragged, spit-thick sigh. ‘The simplest mountain of them all.’

The woman groaned, curling in upon herself. The ironsong was near deafening, and Mia’s headache bounced around the inside of her skull with joyful abandon.

‘Tric, shut that racket up!’ Mia roared.

‘It scares off the krakens!’ Tric bellowed.

‘Scares off the krakens …’ moaned Naev.

‘No, it bloody doesn’t!’ yelled Mia.

She glanced over her shoulder, just in case the ungodly racket had indeed scared off the monstrosities chasing them, but alas, they were still in close pursuit. Bastard galloped alongside, glaring at Mia, occasionally spitting an accusing whinny in her direction.

‘O, shut up!’

‘… he really does not like you …’

‘You’re not helping!’

‘… and what would help …?’

‘Explain to me how we got into this stew!’

The cat who was shadows tilted his head, as if thinking. He looked at the rolling Whisperwastes, the jagged horizon drawing nearer, his mistress above him. And he spoke with the voice of one unveiling an ugly but necessary truth.

‘… it is basically your fault …’