reaching out towards him like hungry hands.
‘Light save me,’ he breathed.
The blade wavered in the thug’s grip. Mia backed away across the bridge, bloody knife in one trembling fist, the something still pressing at her heels. And as the puppy-choker clawed back to his feet with his face painted blood, the little girl did what anyone would have done in her position – ratio of balls to brains be damned.
‘… run …!’ said a tiny voice.
And run she did.
The Dweymeri boy underwent much the same exchange with Fat Daniio as Mia,fn3 although he suffered it with silent dignity.
The innkeeper informed him a girl had been asking the same questions, gestured to her booth – or at least, the booth she’d been sitting at. Mia had stolen up the stairwell by that point and was listening just out of sight, silent as an Itreyan Ironpriest.fn4
After muttering thanks, the Dweymeri boy asked if there were rooms available, paying coin from a malnourished purse. He was headed up the stairs when one of the local card players, a gent named Scupps, spoke.
‘Yer one of Wolfeater’s mob?’
The boy replied with a deep, soft voice. ‘I know no Wolfeater.’
‘He’s no crewman off the Beau.’ Mia recognised this second voice as Scupps’s brother, Lem. ‘Look at the size of ’im. He’s barely tall enough to reach Wolfeater’s balls.’
Laughter.
‘Mebbe that’s the point?’
More laughter.
The Dweymeri boy waited to ensure there was no more hilarity forthcoming, then continued up the stairs. Mia had slipped into her room, watching from the keyhole as the boy padded to his own door. His feet made barely a whisper, though Mia knew the boards squeaked like a family of murdered mice. The boy glanced over his shoulder towards her door, sniffed once, then slipped inside.
The girl sat in her room, considering whether to approach him or simply leave Last Hope at turn’s end as she planned.fn5 He was obviously looking for the same thing she was, but he was likely a cold-blooded psychopath. She doubted many novices seeking the Red Church had motives as altruistic as her own.
As soon as the town bells rang in nevernight, she heard the boy head downstairs, soft as velvet. She felt her shadow stir and stretch, insubstantial claws digging at the floorboards.
‘… if i do not return by the morrow, tell mother i love her …’
The girl snorted as the not-cat slipped beneath her door. She waited hours, reading by candlelight rather than open her shutters to the sun. If she was leaving this turn, she’d need do it at twelve bells, when the watchtower changed shifts. Easier to steal the stallion then. The knowledge she could have just bought some old nag raised its hand at the back of the lesson hall, and was shushed by the thought she shouldn’t be heading out into the wastes on anything but the finest horse this town had to offer.fn6
She felt a rippling chill, a sense of loss, and the cat who was shadows hopped up onto the bed beside her. Blinked with eyes that weren’t there. Tried to purr and failed.
‘Well?’
‘… he ate a sparing meal, watched the ones who insulted him between mouthfuls, and followed them home when they left …’
‘Did he kill them?’
‘… pissed in their water barrel …’
‘Not too bloodthirsty, then. And afterwards?’
‘… climbed up on the stable roof. he has been watching your window ever since …’
A nod. ‘I thought he marked me when he first entered.’
‘… a clever one …’
‘Let’s see how clever.’
Mia packed her things, books bound in a small oilskin satchel on her back. She’d hoped she might slip out unnoticed, but now this Dweymeri boy watched her, it was no longer a question of if she’d deal with him. Only how.
She snuck out from her room, across the squeaky floorboards, making no squeak at all. Sliding up to an empty room opposite, she slipped two lockpicks from a thin wallet, setting to work and hearing a small click a few minutes later. Slipping from the window, flitting across the roof, she felt sunslight burning the windblown sky, adrenaline tingling her fingertips. It was good to be moving again. Tested again.
Dashing across the alley between the Imperial and the bakery next door, boots less than a whisper on the road. The not-cat prowled in front, watching with his not-eyes.
Just as she’d done outside Augustus’s window, Mia reached out and took hold of the shadows about her. Thread by thread, she drew the darkness to her with clever fingers, like a seamstress weaving a cloak – a cloak over which unwary eyes might lose their way.
A cloak of shadows.
Call it what you will, gentlefriends. Thaumaturgy. Arkemy. Werking. Magik. Like all power, it comes with a tithe. As Mia pulled her shadows about her, the light grew dimmer in her eyes. As ever, it became harder for her to see past her veil of darkness, just as she was harder to see inside it. The world beyond was blurred, muddied, shrouded in black – she had to walk slow, lest she trip or stumble. But wrapped inside her shadows, she crept on, on through the nevernight glare, just a watercolour impression on the canvas of the world.
Up to the stable’s flank, climbing the downspout by feel. Crawling onto the roof, she squinted in her gloom, spotted the Dweymeri in the chimney’s shadow, watching her bedroom window. Mia padded across the tiles, imagining she was back in Old Mercurio’s warehouse; dead leaves scattered across the floor, a three-turn thirst burning in her throat, four wild dogs asleep around a decanter of crystal-clear water.
Motivation had been the old man’s watchword, sure and true.
Closer now. Uncertain whether to speak or act, begin or end. Perhaps twenty paces away, she saw the boy tense, turn his head. And then she was rolling beneath the fistful of knives he hurled, three in quick succession, gleaming in the light of that cursed sun. If this were truedark she would’ve had him. If this were truedark—
Don’t look.
She snapped to her feet, stiletto drawn, her shadow writhing across the tiles towards him. The Dweymeri boy had drawn his scimitar, two more throwing knives poised in his other hand. Dark saltlocks of matted hair swayed over his eyes. The tattoos on his face were the ugliest Mia had ever seen, looking like they’d been scrawled by a blind man in the midst of a seizure. Yet the face beneath …
The pair stood watching each other, still as statues, moments ticking by like hours as the gale howled about them.
‘You have very good ears, sir,’ she finally said.
‘You have better feet, Pale Daughter. I heard nothing.’
‘Then how?’
The boy offered a dimpled smile. ‘You stink of cigarillo smoke. Cloves, I think.’
‘That’s impossible. I’m upwind from you.’
The boy glanced at the shadows moving like snakes around his feet.
‘Seems to be raining impossible in these parts.’
She stared at him. Hard and sharp and lean and quick. A rapier in a world of broadswords. Mercurio was better at reading folk than any person she’d known, and he’d taught her to sum others up in a blinking. Whoever this boy was, whatever his reasons for seeking the Church, he was no psychopath. Not one who killed for killing’s sake.
Interesting.
‘You seek the Red Church,’ she said.
‘The