Kitabı oku: «The Nevernight Chronicle», sayfa 4
CHAPTER 4
KINDNESS
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 balls than brains.
And it shouldn’t surprise you, knowing what little you know already, that in the face of this thug and his blade, and laden with memory of her father’s execution
never flinch
never fear
instead of wailing or breaking as another ten-year-old might have, young Mia gripped the stiletto she’d fished from the darkness, and slipped it straight up into the puppy-choker’s eye.
The man screamed and fell backwards, blood gushing between his fingers. Mia rolled from the barrel, the sunslight impossibly bright after the darkness within. She felt the something come with her, coiled in her shadow, pushing at her heels. She saw they’d brought her to some mongrel bridge, a little canal choked with filth, boarded windows all around.
The dinner plate man’s eyes grew wide as his friend went down screaming. He drew a sunsteel sword and stepped towards the girl, flame rippling down its edge. But movement at his feet drew his eyes to the stone, and looking down, he saw the girl’s shadow begin to move. Clawing and twisting as if alive, 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 fat man wouldn’t take my tithe.’
‘Nor mine. We’re being tested, I think.’
‘I thought the same.’
‘It’s possible they’re no longer here. I was heading into the wastes to look.’
‘If it’s death you seek, there are easier ways to find it.’ The boy gestured beyond Last Hope’s walls. ‘Where would you even start?’
‘I was planning on following my nose,’ Mia smiled. ‘But something tells me I’d do better following yours.’
The boy stared long and hard. Hazel eyes roaming her body, cool and narrowed. The blade in her hand. The shadows at his feet. The whispering wastes behind him.
‘My name is Tric,’ he said, sheathing the scimitar at his back.
‘… Tric? Are you certain?’
‘Certain about my own name? Aye, that I am.’
‘I mean no disrespect, sir,’ Mia said. ‘But if we’re to travell the Whisperwastes together, we should at least be honest enough to use our own names. And your name can’t be Tric.’
‘… Do you call me liar, girl?’
‘I called you nothing, sir. And I’ll thank you not to call me “girl” again, as if the word were kin to something you found on the bottom of your boot.’
‘You have a strange way of making friends, Pale Daughter.’
Mia sighed. Took her temper by the earlobe and pulled it to heel.
‘I’ve read the Dweymeri cleave to ritualised naming rites. Your names follow a set pattern. Noun then verb. Dweymeri have names like “Spinesmasher”. “Wolfeater”. “Pigfiddler”.’
‘… Pigfiddler?’
Mia blinked. ‘Pigfiddler was one of the most infamous Dweymeri pirates who ever lived. Surely you’ve heard of him?’
‘I was never one for history. What was he infamous for?’
‘Fiddling with pigs.fn7 He terrorised farmers from Stormwatch to Dawnspear for almost ten years. Had a three-hundred-iron bounty on him in the end. No hog was safe.’
‘… What happened to him?’
‘The Luminatii. Their swords did to his face what he did to the pigs.’
‘Ah.’
‘So. Your name cannot be Tric.’
The boy stared her up and down, expression clouded. But when he spoke, there was iron in his voice. Indignity. A well-nursed and lifelong anger.
‘My name,’ he said, ‘is Tric.’
The girl looked him over, dark eyes narrowed. A puzzle, this one. And sure and certain, our girl had ever the weakness for puzzles.
‘Mia,’ she finally said.
The boy walked slow and steady across the tiles, paying no attention to the black beneath him. Extending one hand. Calloused fingers, one silver ring – the long, serpentine forms of three seadrakes, intertwined – on his index finger. Mia looked the boy over, the scars and ugly facial tattoos, olive skin, lean and broad-shouldered. She licked her lips, tasted sweat.
The shadows rippled at her feet.
‘A pleasure to meet you, Dona Mia,’ he said.
‘And you, Don Tric.’
And with a smile, she shook his hand.
CHAPTER 5
COMPLIMENTS
The little girl had dashed through narrow streets, over bridge and under stair, red crusting on her hands. The something had followed her, puddled in the dark at her feet as they beat hard on the cracking flagstones. She’d no idea what it might be or want – only that it had helped her, and without that help, she’d be as dead as her father was.
eyes open
legs kicking
guh-guh-guh
Mia willed the tears away, curled her hands into fists, and ran. She could hear the puppy-choker and his friend behind her, shouting, cursing. But she was nimble and quick and desperately afraid, fear giving her wings. Running down dogleg squeezeways and over choked canals until finally, she slithered down an alley wall, clutching the stitch in her side.
Safe. For now.
Slumped with legs folded beneath her, she tried to push the tears down like her mother had taught her. But they were so much bigger than her, shoving back until she could stave them off no more. Hiccupping and shaking, snotty face pushed into red, red hands.
Her father was hanged as a traitor beneath the gaze of the high cardinal himself. Her mother in chains. The Familia Corvere estates given to that awful Justicus Remus who’d broken Captain Puddles’s neck. And Julius Scaeva, consul of the Itreyan Senate, had ordered her drowned in the canals like some unwanted kitten.
Her whole world undone in a single turn.
‘Daughters save me …’ she breathed.
Mia saw the shadow beneath her move. Ripple, as if it were water, and she a stone dropped into it. She was strangely unafraid, the fear in her draining away as if through punctures in the soles of her feet. She felt no sense of menace, no childish fears of unspeakables under the bed left to make her shiver. But she felt that presence again – or closer, a lack of any presence at all – coiled in her shadow on the stone beneath her.
‘Hello again,’ she whispered.
She felt the thing that was nothing. In her head. In her chest. She knew it was smiling at her – a friendly smile that might have reached all the way to its eyes, if only it had some. She reached into her sleeve, found the bloodstained stiletto it had given her.
The gift that had saved her life.
‘What are you?’ she whispered to the black at her feet.
No answer.
‘Do you have a name?’
It shivered.
Waiting.
Wait
ing.
‘You’re nice,’ she declared. ‘Your name should be nice too.’
Another smile. Black and eager.
Mia smiled also.
Decided.
‘Mister Kindly,’ she said.
According to the plaque above his stable, the stallion’s name was ‘Chivalry’, but Mia would come to know him simply as ‘Bastard’.
To say she wasn’t fond of horses is to say geldings aren’t fond of knives. Growing up in Godsgrave, she’d had little need for the beasts, and truthfully, they’re an unpleasant way to travel despite what your poets might say. The smell is akin to a solid right hook into an already broken nose, the toll on the rider’s tenders is measured more often in blisters than bruises, and travelling by hoof isn’t much quicker than travelling by foot. And all these issues are compounded if a horse has a sense of its own importance. Which, sadly, poor Chivalry did.
The stallion belonged to the garrison centurion, a marrowborn member of the Luminatii legion named Vincenzo Garibaldi. He was a thoroughbred, black as a chimney sweep’s lungs.fn1 Treated (and fed) better than most of Garibaldi’s men, Chivalry was tolerant of none but his master’s hand. And so, confronted with a strange girl in his stable as the watch sounded, he neighed in irritation and set about voiding his bladder over as many square feet as possible.
Having spent years living near the Rose River, the stench of stallion piss came as no real shock to Mia, who promptly slapped a bit into the horse’s mouth to shut him up. Hateful as she found the beasts, she’d endured a three-week stint on a mainland horse farm at Old Mercurio’s ‘request’, and at least knew enough not to place the bridle on the beast’s arse-end.fn2 However, when Mia hoisted the saddle blanket, Chivalry began thrashing in his pen, and it was only through a hasty leap onto the doorframe that the girl avoided growing considerably thinner.
‘Trelene’s heaving funbags, keep him quiet!’ Tric hissed from the stable door.
‘… Did you honestly just swear by a goddess’s “funbags”?’
‘Forget that, shut him up!’
‘I told you horses don’t like me! And blaspheming about the Lady of the Ocean’s baps isn’t going to help matters any. In fact, it’ll probably get you drowned, you nonce.’
‘I’ll no doubt have long years locked in whatever stinking outhouse passes for the jail in this cesspool to repent my sins.’
‘Keep your underskirts on,’ Mia whispered. ‘The outhouse will be occupied for a while.’
Tric wondered what the girl was on about. But as she slipped into Chivalry’s pen for another saddling attempt, he heard wails within the garrison tower, pleas to the Everseeing, and a burst of profanity so colourful you could fling it into the air and call it a rainbow. A stench was rising on the wind, harsh enough to make his eyes water. And so, as Mia rained whispered curses down on Chivalry’s head, the boy decided to see what all the fuss was about.
Mister Kindly sat on the stable roof, trying his best to copy the curiosity found in real cats. He watched as the boy moved quietly to the tower, scaled the wall. Tric peered through the sandblasted window into the room beyond, his face turning greenish beneath his artless tattoos. Without a sound, he dropped to the ground, creeping back to the stable in time to see Mia wrangle the saddle onto Chivalry’s back with the aid of several stolen sugar cubes.
The boy helped Mia handle the snorting stallion through the stable doors. She was short, and the thoroughbred twenty hands high, so it took her a running leap to make the saddle. As she struggled up, she noticed the green pallor on Tric’s face.
‘Something wrong?’ she asked.
‘What the ’byss is going on in that tower?’ Tric whispered.
‘Mishap,’ Mia replied.
‘… What?’
‘Three dried buds of Liisian loganberry, a third of a cup of molasses essence, and a pinch of dried cordwood root.’ She shrugged. ‘Mishap. You might know it as “Plumber’s Bane”.’
Tric blinked. ‘You poisoned the entire garrison?’
‘Well, technically Fat Daniio poisoned them. He served the evemeal. I just added the spice.’ Mia smiled. ‘It’s not lethal. They’re just suffering a touch of … intestinal distress.’
‘A touch?’ The boy cast one haunted look back to the tower, the smeared and groaning horrors therein. ‘Look, don’t be offended if I do all the cooking out there, aye?’
‘Suit yourself.’
Mia set her sights on the wastes beyond Last Hope, and with a doffed hat towards the watchtower, kicked Chivalry’s flanks. Sadly, instead of a dashing gallop off towards the horizon, the girl found herself bucked into the air, her brief flight ending in a crumpled heap on the road. She rolled in the dirt, rubbing her rump, glaring at the now whinnying stallion.
‘Bastard …’ she hissed.
She looked to Mister Kindly, sitting on the road beside her.
‘Not. A. Fucking. Word.’
‘… meow …’ he said.
With a sharp bang, the watchtower door burst open. A befouled Centurion Vincenzo Garibaldi staggered into the street, one hand clutching his unbuckled britches.
‘Thieves!’ he moaned.
With a half-hearted flourish, the Luminatii centurion drew his longsword. The steel flared brighter than the suns overhead. At a word, tongues of fire uncurled along the edge of the blade and the man stumbled forward, face twisted with righteous fury.
‘Stop in the name of the Light!’
‘Trelene’s sugarplums, come on!’
Tric leaped into Chivalry’s saddle, dragging Mia over the pommel like a sack of cursing potatoes. And with another sharp boot to the stallion’s flanks, the pair galloped off in the direction of their certain doom.fn3
The pair stopped off long enough to retrieve Tric’s own stallion – a looming chestnut inexplicably named ‘Flowers’ – before fleeing into the wastes. The Plumber’s Bane had done its work, however, and pursuit by Last Hope’s garrison was short-lived and largely messy. Mia and Tric soon found themselves slowing to a brisk canter, no pursuers in sight.
The Whisperwastes, as they were called, were a desolation grimmer than any Mia had seen. The horizon was crusted like a beggar’s lips, scoured by winds laden with voices just beyond hearing. The second sun kissing the horizon was usually the sign for Itreya’s brutal winters to begin, but out here, the heat was still blistering. Mister Kindly was coiled in Mia’s shadow, just as miserable as she. Propping a (stolen and paid-for) tricorn upon her head, Mia surveyed the horizon.
‘I’d guess the churchmen nest on high,’ Tric ventured. ‘I suggest we start with those mountains to the north, then swing east. After that, we’ll probably have been drained lifeless by dustwraiths or eaten by sand kraken, so our bones won’t mind where they get shit out.’
Mia cursed as Bastard gave a small buck. Her thighs ached from the saddle, her rump was preparing to wave the white flag. She pointed to a lonely digit of broken stone ten miles distant.
‘There.’
‘All respect, Pale Daughter, but I doubt the greatest enclave of assassins in the known world would set up headquarters within smelling distance of Last Hope’s pig farms.’
‘Agreed. But that’s where I think we should set camp. Looks to be a spring there. And we’ll have a good view of Last Hope from up top, and all the wastes around, I’d wager.’
‘… I thought we were following my nose?’
‘I only suggested that for the sake of whoever might be listening.’
‘Listening?’
‘We agree this is a trial, aye? That the Red Church is testing us?’
‘Aye,’ the boy nodded slow. ‘But that shouldn’t come as any shock. Surely your Shahiid tested you in preparation for the trials we’ll face?’
Mia jerked the reins as Bastard tried to turn back for the fifth time in as many minutes.
‘Old Mercurio loved his testings,’ she nodded. ‘Never a moment that couldn’t be some trial in disguise.fn4 Thing is, he never gave me a test I couldn’t beat. And the Church shouldn’t be any different. So what’s the one clue we’ve been given? What’s the only piece of this puzzle we have in common?’
‘… Last Hope.’
‘Exactly. I’m thinking the Church can’t be self-sustaining. Even if they grow their own food, they’d need other supplies. I was poking around the Beau’s hold and I saw goods the inbreds in Last Hope would have no use for. I’m thinking the Church has a disciple there. Maybe watching for novices, but more important, to trek those goods back to their stronghold. So all we need to do is watch for a laden caravan heading out into the wastes. Then we follow it.’
Tric looked the girl up and down, smiling faintly. ‘Wisdom, Pale Daughter.’
‘Have no fear, Don Tric. I won’t let it go—’
The boy held up a hand, pulled Flowers to a sudden stop. He squinted at the badlands around them, nose wrinkled, sniffing the whispering desert air.
‘What is it?’ Mia’s hand drifted to her gravebone dagger.
Tric shook his head, eyes closed as he inhaled.
‘Never smelled the like before. Reminds me of … old leather and dea—’
Bastard snorted, rearing up. Mia clutched his saddle, cursing as the red sand exploded around them and a dozen tentacles burst from beneath the ground. Twenty feet long, studded with grasping, serrated hooks, they looked as dry as the innards of an inkfiend’s needle.
Bastard whinnied in terror as one leathery appendage snaked around his foreleg, another cinching his throat in a hangman’s grip. The stallion fought, snotting and bucking like a wild thing. Mia found herself airborne again, bounced over Bastard’s head and tumbling towards the tentacles’ owner, now dragging itself from the earth and opening a hideous beaked maw. The air rang with a chittering, guttural hisssssssssssssssssss.
