granted, that would be hard to do without his only son. But still, he was imperator now. He could cast off his barren wife, have any woman he wanted. Black Mother, he could take a dozen wives. Sire a hundred sons.
So why is he afraid?
Mia tossed her hair over her shoulder, glancing again at the silhouettes on the wall. Scaeva’s shadow was moving now, its motion violent and sudden. Her own was responding in kind, elongating, distorting, dark shapes unfurling at its back.
“You seem awfully concerned about Jonnen, Father,” she said. “And I can’t bring myself to believe it’s out of sentimentality. Could it be your dear wife Liviana isn’t the one who can’t have any more children?”
Dark eyes glanced below his waist.
“Getting soft in your old age?”
Scaeva took a step toward her, hand snaking beneath his robes. In a flash, their shadows struck each other, tangled and twisting and curling like smoke. Twice as dark as they should have been alone. Scaeva’s serpent reared up as if to strike, and Eclipse bared her fangs with a black growl. Mia felt her clothes and hair moving, as if a breeze were blowing behind her. As if the world were moving beneath her feet.
“You cannot know the stakes you toy with,” Scaeva said. “Do not make yourself my enemy, Mia. Not when I offer you peace. All who have stood against me now rot in the ground. All of them. Bring me your brother, and take your place at my side.”
“You are afraid,” she realized.
“Fear has its uses,” he replied. “Fear is what keeps the dark from devouring you. Fear is what stops you joining a game you cannot hope to win.”
He tossed the pawn toward her, and she caught it in her fist.
“If you start down this road, daughter mine, you are going to die.”
She knew she couldn’t touch him. Couldn’t even get close. Not with that Trinity about his throat. Not with Mercurio’s neck on the block. She could hear tromping feet, soft shouts in the distance—she guessed someone had found the bodies in her wake.
No more time to chat.
And so, she began to back away from him.
A single step. Then another. Farther and farther from the throat she’d sought for almost eight years. Their shadows were still entwined on the wall, strangling and seething, a knot of black rage. With effort, Mia dragged her shade back, Scaeva’s clinging on.
“Bring me my son, Mia,” he said, his voice soft and deadly.
She tore her shadow free, the dark about her shivering.
“I’ll consider it,” she said. “Father.”
A rippling in the darkness.
The whispered song of running feet.
And she was gone.
He stood there for long moments afterward, still as stone and just as silent.
The shadowserpent wove its way across the vast map of the Republic he now ruled, coiled in a black ribbon about his ankles.
“… Do you think she will listen …?” Whisper asked.
The imperator looked to the burning light outside.
“I think she is as much her mother’s daughter as mine,” he replied.
The serpent sighed. “… A pity …”
Scaeva walked to the chessboard. He stood above the frozen battleground, the pieces arrayed in fractured rows, looking down with those cool black eyes. In one swift motion, he sat, sweeping aside the pieces with his hand. Reaching to his throat, he grasped a leather thong, snapped it free. A silver phial hung upon it, stoppered with dark wax and engraved with runes in the tongue of Old Ashkah.
Scaeva broke the seal, pouring the contents upon the board, thick and ruby red.
And, using his fingertip like a brush, he began writing in the blood.
If the entry under “scoundrel” in Don Fiorlini’s bestselling Itreyan Diction: The Definitive Guide had an illustration, it probably would have looked a lot like Cloud Corleone.[1] But Cloud himself preferred the term “entrepreneur.”
The Liisian was clad all in black: a leather vest over a finely cut shirt (unlaced perhaps a touch too far) and a pair of what could only be described as conspicuously tight pants. Emerald-green eyes gleamed beneath the brim of his feathered tricorn hat, and a perpetual three-turn growth of beard dusted a jaw you could break a shovel on. He was stood in the harbormaster’s office in the Nethers docks. And he was haggling with a nun.
It had been a strange turn all told, really. It had begun eight hours earlier, when Cloud had placed a sizable and very drunken wager on the outcome of the Venatus Magni. In hindsight, the bet proved a less-than-sound investment of his meager funds.
O, he’d picked the winner, all right. Even the bookman who took the bet had told him he was thinking with his cock, but watching the gladiatii known as the Crow slice her former collegium mates to bloody chunks, Cloud had found himself admiring her form along with her legs. So confident had he been of the lass’s abilities, he’d wagered every coin he’d won over the previous five turns of bloodsport on her victory, along with a bunch more coin he truthfully couldn’t spare.
As the Crow had carved her way toward triumph in the final match, Cloud had been on his feet, hollering and howling with the rest of the mob. When she’d struck the final blow against the Unfallen, Cloud had danced a jig on the spot, grabbed the nearest comely lass and planted a kiss square on her lips (returned rather enthusiastically), which resulted in an all-in brawl with the lass’s sweetheart, a dozen of his friends, half of Cloud’s crew, and a hundred other punters who simply wanted a good dose of fisticuffs after a hard turn’s carnage. Truthfully, it’d been absolutely marvelous.
But then along came the first dose of the unexpected.
He’d watched it happen in slow motion. The Crow drawing her hidden blade on the victor’s plinth. Slicing the cardinal’s throat clean through. Stabbing the consul in the chest (or so he and half the crowd had imagined, anyway). Blood flowing like cheap plonk at a Liisian wedding. And even though the rest of the crowd fell to wailing, baying, panicking, watching that greasy fucker Duomo go down in a puddle of his own shit and blood, Cloud Corleone had found himself cheering at the top of his lungs.
The next dose of the unexpected had arrived in short order.
It’d taken Cloud almost an hour to shove his way to the bookman’s pits to collect his winnings, still riding high on the sight of the cardinal’s messy end. It was there that the scoundrel was informed by a scowling pack of Itreyan legionaries that because a slave had just topped the fanciest bastards in the whole bloody Republic, all bets were null and void. It wouldn’t do, you see, to profit from the death of the consul and grand cardinal at the hands of human property.
Cloud was tempted to inform the soldiers exactly what flavor of bastard the good cardinal actually was in life, but looking into their eyes, listening to the budding chaos in the city around him, he decided making a fuss would only make for further fuss. And so, with a flip of the knuckles toward the bookman’s shit-eating grin, the captain and his crew headed back to the harbor with tragically empty pockets.
With all the fistfights and fuckarsery and Scaeva’s announcement of his miraculous escape from the assassin’s blade in the forum (Cloud could’ve sworn she’d stabbed him clean), it took another three hours to make it back to the Bloody Maid. And now, in the office of