Nevernight (10 page)

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 Republic. 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?”

“I don’t know.” Tric found himself mumbling. “It’s just what she said.”

Mia shook her head, crooked bangs swaying before her eyes.

“You know, I’ve never understood that. How being named for a woman’s nethers is somehow more grievous than any other insult. Seems to me calling someone after a man’s privates is worse. I mean, what do you picture when you hear a fellow called a cock?”

Tric shrugged, befuddled at the strange turn in conversation.

“You imagine an oaf, don’t you?” Mia continued. “Someone so full of wank there’s no room for wits. A slow-minded bastard who struts about full of spunk and piss, completely ignorant of how he looks to others.”

An exhalation of clove-sweet gray into the air between them.

“Cock is just another word for ‘fool.’ But you call someone a cunt, well…” The girl smiled. “You’re implying a sense of malice there. An intent. Malevolent and self-aware. Don’t think I name Consul Scaeva a cunt to gift him insult. Cunts have brains, Don Tric. Cunts have teeth. Someone calls you a cunt, you take it as a compliment. As a sign that folk believe you’re not to be lightly fucked with.” A shrug. “I think they call that irony.”

Mia sniffed, staring at the wastes laid out below them.

“Truth is, there’s no difference between your nethers and mine. Aside from the obvious, of course. But one doesn’t carry any more weight than the other. Why should what’s between my legs be considered any smarter or stupider, any worse or better? It’s all just meat, Don Tric. In the end, it’s all just food for worms. Just like Duomo, Remus, and Scaeva will be.”

One last drag, long and deep, as if drawing the very life from her smoke.

“But I’d still rather be called a cunt than a cock any turn.”

The girl sighed gray, crushed her cigarillo out with her boot heel.

Spat into the wind.

And just like that, young Tric was in love.

1. The horse, not the captain.

2. She was bitten by three different horses over the course of her stay on the farm, bucked off seven times (twice into manure), and stepped on once. She was also pinched on the behind by a particularly daring stable boy named Romero (sadly, on the same turn she was first bucked into shit), who’d been misinformed by a traveling minstrel that city women “enjoy that kind of thing.”

The boy’s nose never quite healed properly, though he managed to recover three of his teeth. Last I heard, he’d been sentenced to four years in the Philosopher’s Stone for a brutal, and many said unprovoked, assault on a traveling minstrel.

3. The Empire of Ashkah ruled the known world for approximately seven centuries; a period considered by learned scholars as a peerless age in the fields of science and the arts arcane. Ashkah was a society of sorcerers, whose bold ventures into the realms of magika—or werking, or whichever term you please—not only dwarfed the weaker thaumaturgical rites of the Liisian Magus Kings who followed them, but also changed the shape of reality itself.

Sadly, as is often the case when mortals go fiddling with fabrics woven by the gods, someone, or some
thing
, is eventually going to get their noses put out of joint. No mortal scholar is quite sure about the exact nature of Ashkah’s fall. Many say their empire was scrubbed from the world by Aa himself. Others claim the werking of the Ashkah sorcerii caught the attentions of beings older than the gods—nameless monstrosities beyond the edge of universe and sanity, who gobbled the empire down like an inkfiend on a three-turn bender.

And then, there are others who say someone among the sorcerii simply fucked up.

Very, VERY badly.

4. Mercurio named these trials “treasure hunts,” and though they varied in difficulty and danger to life and limb, they almost always began with Mia awakening with a mild slumberweed headache in unfamiliar surroundings. Once, after a lesson in the principles of magnetism, she’d awoken in the pitch-black of Godsgrave’s sewers with nothing but an iron hairpin and piece of chalk to help find her way out. After six months of lessons in the tongue of Old Ashkah, she’d awoken five miles into the Godsgrave necropolis with half a skin of water and directions to the exit written in Ashkahi script.

Of course, while Mercurio called them “treasure hunts,” the only “treasure” to be found at the end of these exercises was “continued existence.” Still, they did make for a singularly dedicated student.

5. Though referred to by the few scholars mad enough to study them as “sand kraken,” the apex predators of the Ashkahi wastes aren’t
actually
cephalopods. They swim in sand as easily as their sea-bound “kin” swim in water, filtering oxygen from the earth through specialized gills. They eat anything not possessed of an above-average running speed, and are renowned for temperaments most would describe as “uncooperative.”

The undisputed expert in their study, Loresman Carlo Ribisi, theorized they’re a kind of desert worm, mutated by magikal pollutants from the ruins of the Ashkahi Empire. Ribisi postulated the beasts are possessed of canine-level intelligence, and to prove his theorem, captured an infant sand kraken, brought it back to the Grand Collegium in Godsgrave, and attempted to train it in simple tasks.

Ribisi constructed stone mazes, filled them with earth, and set the beast (whom he named “Alfi” after a much-beloved familia pet) loose inside them. Alfi would be rewarded with food if he successfully traversed the labyrinth. Ribisi introduced more complex patterns as Alfi grew in size (six feet long at his last recorded measurement), also incorporating simple devices such as latches and doors to prove the beast’s growing intelligence. Sadly, Alfi utilized this knowledge one nevernight in escaping his enclosure, murdering the better part of the zoology faculty, including a rather disappointed Ribisi, before he was dispatched by a cadre of baffled Luminatii.

Ordinances about the keeping of wildlife within college grounds were tightened considerably after this affair.

6. Though a cadre of ten can be found in Godsgrave, the mekwerk giants of the Iron Collegium are kept unfueled and unmanned, only to be operated in times of absolute crisis. Owing to Itreyan military might and the difficulties of assaulting Godsgrave by anything other than sea, the presence of the machines in the city is mostly ceremonial. In the last forty truedarks, Godsgrave’s war walkers have been activated precisely twice.

The first, during the overthrow of King Francisco XV—legionaries loyal to the monarchy attempted to storm the palace and rescue the king from his assailants when news of the uprising broke. The loyalist pilots (strictly a ceremonial position by that stage of the monarchy) surrendered once they discovered that Francisco and his entire family were already dead.

The second incident commenced with three bottles of mid-shelf goldwine and a drunken boast to a would-be paramour, segued into a stumbling crash into the sixth Rib (which broke at the base and collapsed into the sea), and ended with a swift trial and an even swifter crucifixion for the young man involved.