boy who entered looked Dweymeri – leviathan ink facial tattoos (of terrible quality), salt-kissed locks bound in matted knots. But his skin was olive rather than brown, and he was too short to be an islander; barely a head taller than Mia, truth told. Dressed in dark leathers, carrying a scimitar in a battered scabbard, smelling of horse and a long road. When he prowled into the room, he checked every corner with hazel eyes. As his stare roamed the alcoves, Mia pulled the shadows about herself, and faded like a watermark into the gloom.
The boy turned to Fat Daniio, polishing that same grubby cup with the same grubby cloth. Eyeing the man over, the boy spoke with a voice soft as velvet.
‘Blessings to you, sir.’
‘A’right,’ Fat Daniio replied. ‘What’ll you ’ave?’
‘I have this.’
The boy placed a small wooden box upon the counter. Mia’s eyes narrowed as it rattled. The boy looked around the room again, then spoke in a tight whisper.
‘My tithe. For the Maw.’fn12
Captain Puddles had loved his Mia.
He’d known her since he was a kitten, after all. Before he’d forgotten the warm press of his siblings around him, she’d cradled him in her arms and kissed him on his little pink nose and he’d known she’d always be the centre of his world.
And so when Justicus Remus had stooped to seize the girl’s wrist at his consul’s command, Captain Puddles spat a yellow-tooth hiss, reached out with a paw full of claws, and tore the justicus’s face from eyehole to lip. Roaring, the big man seized the brave captain’s head with one hand, his shoulders with the other, and with an almost practised ease, he twisted.
The sound was like wet sticks snapping, too loud to be drowned by Mia’s scream. And at the end of those dreadful damp pops, a black shape hung limp in the justicus’s hand; a warm, soft, purring shape Mia had fallen asleep beside every nevernight, now purring no more.
She lost herself then. Howling, clawing, scratching. Dimly aware of being seized by another Luminatii and slung over his shoulder. The justicus clutched his bleeding face and drew his sword, fire uncurling down its length, the steel glowing with painful, blinding light.
‘Not here, Remus,’ Scaeva said. ‘Your hands must be clean.’
The justicus bellowed at his men, and her mother had screamed and kicked. Mia called for her, but a sharp blow struck her head, and it was all she could do to not fall into the black beneath her feet as the Dona Corvere’s cries faded into nothing.
Servants’ stairs, spiralling down. A passageway through the Spine – not the wondrous halls of polished white gravebone and crystal chandeliers and marrowbornfn1 in all their finery. A dim and claustrophobic little tunnel, leading out into the grounds beyond. Mia had squinted up – the Ribs arching into storm-washed skies, the great council buildings and libraries and observatories – before the men threw her into an empty barrel, slammed the lid, and tossed it into a horse-drawn cart.
She felt the cart whipped into motion, the trundle of wheels across cobbles. Men rode in the tray beside her, but she couldn’t make out their words, stricken by the memory of Captain Puddles lying twisted on the floor, her mother in chains. She understood none of it. The barrel rasped against her skin, splinters plucking at her dress. She felt them cross bridge after bridge, the haze of semiconsciousness thin enough now for her to start crying, hiccupping and heaving. A fist slammed hard against the barrel’s flank.
‘Shut up, you little shit, or I’ll give you something to wail about.’
They’re going to kill me, she thought.
A chill stole over her. Not at the thought of dying, mind you; in truth, no child thinks of herself as anything less than immortal. The chill was a physical sensation, spilling from the darkness inside the barrel, coiling around her feet, cold as ice water. She felt a presence – or closer, a lack of one. Like the feeling of empty at an embrace’s end. And she knew, sure and certain, that something was in that barrel with her.
Watching her.
Waiting.
‘Hello?’ she whispered.
A ripple in the black. A silent, ink-spot earthquake. And where there had been nothing a moment before, something gleamed at her feet, caught by the tiny chinks of sunslight spilling through the barrel’s lid. Something long and wicked-sharp as only gravebone can be, its hilt crafted to resemble a crow in flight. Last seen skittering beneath the curtain as Consul Scaeva slapped her mother’s hand away and spoke of pleading and promises.
Dona Corvere’s gravebone stiletto.
Mia reached towards it. For the briefest moment, she swore she could see lights at her feet, glittering like diamonds in an ocean of nothing. She felt an emptiness so vast she thought she was falling – down, down into some hungry dark. And then her fingers closed on the dagger’s hilt and she clutched it tight, so cold it almost burned.
She felt the something in the dark around her.
The copper-tang of blood.
The pulsing rush of rage.
The cart bounced along the road, her stomach curdling until at last they drew to a halt. She felt the barrel lifted, slung, crashing to the ground with a bang that made her almost bite her tongue clean through. She heard voices again, loud enough to ken the words.
‘I’m sick to my guts on this, Alberius.’
‘Orders are orders. Luminus Invicta, aye?’ fn2
‘Sod off.’
‘You want to trifle with Remus? With Scaeva? The saviours of the bloody Republic?’
‘Saviours my arsehole. You ever wonder how they did it? Captured Corvere and Antonius right in the middle of an armed camp?’
‘No, I bloody don’t. Help me with this.’
‘I heard it was magiks. Black arkemy. Scaeva’s in truck—’
‘Get staunch, you bloody maid. Who cares how they did it? Corvere was a fucking traitor, and this is traitor’s get.’
The barrel lid was torn away. Mia squinted up at two men, dark cloaks thrown over white armour. The first was a man with arms like tree trunks and hands like dinner plates. The second had pretty blue eyes and the smile of a fellow who choked puppies for sport.
‘Maw’s teeth,’ breathed the first. ‘She can’t be more than ten.’
‘Never to see eleven.’ A shrug. ‘Hold still, girl. This won’t hurt long.’
The puppy-choker clutched Mia’s throat, drew a long, sharp knife from his belt. And there in the reflection on that polished steel, the little girl saw her death. It would’ve been easy then, to close her eyes and wait. She was ten years old, after all. Alone and helpless and afraid. But here is truth, gentlefriends, no matter the number of suns in your sky. At the heart of it, two kinds of people live in this world or any other: those who flee and those who fight. Your kind has many terms for the latter sort. Berserker. Killer instinct. More