Kitabı oku: «The Nevernight Chronicle», sayfa 5
‘Sand kraken!’ Tric roared, a little needlessly.fn5
Mia drew her gravebone dagger, lashing out at a tentacle whipping her way. Oily blood spurted, a chuddering roar shivering the earth as Mia tumbled between two more of the dreadful limbs, ducking a third and rolling up into a panting crouch. Mister Kindly unfurled from her shadow, peering at the horror and not-breathing a small, soft sigh.
‘… pretty …’
Tric drew his scimitar, leaped from his stallion’s back, and hacked at the tentacle clutching Bastard’s leg. With the snapping whip of salted cord, the appendage split, another roar spilling from the beast, eyes wide as dinner plates, dusty gills flaring. Its severed limb flailed about, spraying Tric with reeking ichor. Bastard whinnied again in terror, blood spilling from his neck where the tentacle was wrapped and squeezing.
‘Let him go!’ Mia shouted, stabbing at another tentacle.
‘Back off!’ Tric roared to her.
‘Back off? Are you mad?’
‘Are you?’ Tric gestured at her dagger. ‘You plan on killing a sand kraken with that damned toothpick? Let it have the stallion!’
‘To the ’byss with that! I just stole that fucking horse!’
Feinting low, Mia lashed out at another hooked limb, drawing a fresh gout of blood. A flailing backswing saw Tric splayed in the dust, cursing. Mia curled her fingers, wrapping a hasty handful of shadows around herself so she might avoid a similar blow. Those hooks looked vicious enough to gut a War Walker.fn6
Though inconvenienced by the little sacks of meat and their sharp sticks, the kraken seemed mostly intent on dragging its thoroughbred meal – who no doubt begrudged his theft now more than ever – below the sands. But as Mia pulled the darkness to her, the monstrosity spat a shuddering roar and exploded back out from the earth, limbs flailing. Almost as if it were angry at her.
Tric spat a mouthful of red sand and shouted warning, hacking at another limb. The shadowcloak seemed to do Mia no good – she was near blind beneath it, and the beast seemed to be able to see her regardless. And so she let it fall from her shoulders, dived towards the wailing horse, tumbling across the dust. She moved between the forest of hooks and flails, feeling the breeze of the almost-blows narrowly missing her face and throat, the whistling hiss of the tentacles in the air. There was no real fear in her amid that storm. Simply the sway and the feint, the slide and the roll. The dance she’d been taught by Mercurio. The dance she’d lived with almost every turn since her father took his long plunge from his short rope.
A dusty tumble, a backwards flip, skipping between tentacles like a child amid a dozen jump ropes. She glanced to the beast’s open beak, snapping and snarling above Bastard’s screams, the scrape of its bulk as it dragged itself farther from the sand. The smell of wet death and salted leather, dust scratching her lungs. A smile played on her lips as a thought seized her, and with a brief dash, a skipping leap off one and two and three of the flailing limbs, Mia hurled herself up onto Bastard’s back.
‘Maw’s teeth, she is mad …’ Tric breathed.
The horse bucked again, Mia clinging on with thighs and fingernails and sheer bloody-mindedness. Reaching into the saddlebags, she seized a heavy jar of bright red powder within. And with a sigh, she hauled it back and flung it into the kraken’s mouth.
The jar shattered on the creature’s beak, broken glass and fine red powder spraying deep into the horror’s gullet. Mia rolled off Bastard’s back to avoid another blow, scrabbling across the dust as an agonised shriek split the air. The kraken released the stallion, pawing, scratching, scraping at its mouth. Tric gave another half-hearted stab, but the beast had forgotten its quarry entirely, great eyes rolling as it flipped over and over, dragging its bulk back below the sand, howling like a dog who’s just returned home from a hard turn’s work to find another hound in his kennel, smoking his cigarillos and in bed with his wife.
Mia dragged herself to her feet, sand churning as the kraken burrowed away. Flipping the sweat-soaked bangs from her eyes, she grinned like a madwoman. Tric stood slack-jawed, bloody scimitar dangling from his hand, face caked in dust.
‘What was that?’ he breathed.
‘Well, technically they’re not cephalopods—’
‘I mean what did you throw in its mouth?’
Mia shrugged. ‘A jar of Fat Daniio’s widowmaker.’
Tric blinked. Several times.
‘… You just thrashed a horror of the Whisperwastes with a jar of chilli powder?’
Mia nodded. ‘Shame, really. It’s good stuff. I only stole the one jar.’
A moment of incredulous silence rang across the wastes, filled with the off-key song of maddening winds. And then the boy began laughing, a dimpled, bone-white grin gleaming in a filthy face. Wiping at his eyes, he flicked a sluice of dark blood from his blade and wandered off to fetch Flowers. Mia turned to her stolen stallion, pulling himself up from the sands, bloodied at his throat and forelegs. She spoke in calming tones, tongue caked in dust, hoping to still him.
‘You all in one piece, boy?’
Mia approached slowly, hand outstretched. The beast was shaken, but with a few turns’ rest at their lookout, he’d be mending, and hopefully more kindly disposed to her now she’d saved his life. Mia smoothed his flanks with steady hands, reached into the saddlebags for her—
‘Ow, fuck!’
Mia shrieked as the stallion bit her arm, hard enough to leave a bloody bruise. The horse threw back his head with what sounded an awful lot like snickering.fn7 And tossing his mane, he began a limping canter back towards Last Hope, bloody hoofprints in his wake.
‘Wait!’ Mia cried. ‘Wait!’
‘He really doesn’t like you,’ Tric said.
‘My thanks, Don Tric. When you’re done singing your Ode to the Obvious, perhaps you’ll do me the honour of riding down the horse escaping with all my bloody gear on his back?’
Tric grinned, vaulted onto Flowers’s saddle, and galloped off in pursuit. Mia clutched her bruised arm, listening to the faint laughter of a cat who was not a cat echoing on the wind.
She spat into the dust, eyes on the fleeing stallion.
‘Bastard …’ she hissed.
Tric returned a half-hour later, a limping Bastard in tow. Reunited, he and Mia trekked overland to the thin spur of rock that’d serve as their lookout. They were on constant watch for disturbances beneath the sand, Tric sniffing the air like a bloodhound, but no more horrors reared any tentacles (or other appendages) to impede progress.
Bastard and Flowers were allowed to graze on the thin grass surrounding the spire – Flowers partook happily, while Bastard fixed Mia in the withering stare of a beast used to fresh oats for every meal, refusing to eat a thing. He tried to bite Mia twice more as she tied him up, so the girl made a show of patting Flowers (despite not really liking him much either) and gifted the chestnut with some sugar cubes from her saddlebags. The stolen stallion’s only gift was the rudest hand gesture Mia could conjure.fn8
‘Why do you call your horse Flowers?’ Mia asked, as she and Tric prepared to climb.
‘… What’s wrong with Flowers?’
‘Well, most men name their horses something a little more … manly, is all.’
‘Legend or Prince or suchlike.’
‘I met a horse named Thunderhoof once.’ She raised a hand. ‘Light’s truth.’
‘Seems a silly thing to me,’ the boy sniffed. ‘Giving out that kind of knowing for free.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, you call your horse Legend, you’re letting people know you think you’re some hero in a storybook. You call your horse Thunderhoof … Daughters, you might as well hang a sign about your neck saying, “I have a peanut for a penis”.’
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 instil. 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 grey, 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 realised 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 the 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 it’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 a 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 grey 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 grey, crushed her cigarillo out with her boot heel.
Spat into the wind.
And just like that, young Tric was in love.
CHAPTER 6
DUST
Mia’s mother had given her a puzzle box when she was five years old – a wooden cube with shifting faces that, when correctly aligned, would reveal the true gift inside. It was the best Great Tithe gift she could ever remember receiving. fn1
Mia had thought it cruel at the time. When all the other marrowborn children were playing with new dolls or wooden swords, she was stuck with this wretched box that simply refused to open. She bashed it against the wall, to no avail. She cried to her father it wasn’t fair, and he simply smiled. And when Mia stomped before the Dona Corvere and demanded to know why she hadn’t simply given her a pretty ribbon for her hair or a new dress instead of this wretched thing, her mother had knelt and looked her daughter in the eye.
‘Your mind will serve you better than any trinket under the suns,’ she’d said. ‘It is a weapon, Mia. And like any weapon, you need practise to be any good at wielding it.’
‘But, mother—’
‘No, Mia Corvere. Beauty you’re born with, but brains you earn.’
So Mia had taken the box and sat with it. Scowled at it. Stared at it until she dreamed about it. Twisting and turning and cursing it by all the swears she’d heard her father ever use. But after two months of frustration, she twisted a final piece and heard a wonderful sound.
Click.
The lid opened, and inside, she’d found a brooch – a crow with tiny amber eyes. The sigil of her Familia. The crow of Corvere. She wore it to mornmeal the next turn. Her mother had smiled and never said a word. She’d kept the box; in all the Great Tithes since, all the puzzles her parents had given her thereafter, it remained her favourite. After her father’s execution and mother’s arrest, she’d left the box and something of the little girl who loved it behind.
But the brooch itself, she’d brought with her. That, and her gift for puzzles.
She’d woken beneath a pile of refuse in a lonely alley, somewhere in the Godsgrave backstreets. As she pawed the sleep from her eyes, her stomach had growled. She knew the consul’s men might still be chasing her – that he might send more if he knew they’d failed to drown her. She had nowhere to stay. No friends. No money. No food.
She was aching and alone and afraid. She missed her mother. Little Jonnen, her baby brother. Her soft bed and her warm clothes and her cat. The memory of him lying broken on the floor flooded her eyes with tears, the thought of the man who’d killed him filled her heart with hate.
‘Poor Captain Puddles …’
‘… meow …’ said a voice.
The little girl glanced up at the sound, dragging dark hair from damp lashes. And there on the cobbles, amid the weeds and the rot and the filth, she saw a cat.
Not her cat, to be sure. O, it was black as truedark, just like the good captain had been. But it was thin as paper and translucent, as if someone had cut a cat’s shape out of shadowstuff itself. And despite the fact that he now wore a shape instead of no shape at all, she still recognised her friend. The one who’d helped her when no one else in the world could.
‘Mister Kindly?’ she asked.
‘… meow …’ he said.
She reached towards the creature as if to pet him, but her hand passed through him as it might a wisp of smoke. Looking into his darkness, she felt that same sensation – her fear leaching away like poison from a wound, leaving her hard and unafraid. And she realised though she had no brother, no mother, no father, no familia, she wasn’t entirely alone.
‘All right,’ she nodded.
Food first. She had no money, but she had her stiletto, and her brooch pinned to her (increasingly dishevelled) dress. A gravebone blade would be worth a fortune, but she was loath to give up her only weapon. However, she knew there were folk who’d give her money for the jewellery. Coin could buy her food and a room to lay low so she could think about what to do next. Ten years old, her mother in chains, her –
‘… meow …’ said Mister Kindly.
‘Right,’ she nodded. ‘One puzzle at a time.’
She didn’t even know what part of Godsgrave she was in. She’d spent her entire life in the Spine. But her father had kept maps of the city in his study, hung on the walls with his swords and his wreaths, and she remembered the layout of the metropolis roughly enough. She was best-off staying away from the marrowborn quarter, hiding as low and deep as she could until she was sure the consul’s men had given up the chase.
As she stood, Mister Kindly flowed like water into the black around her feet, her shadow darkening as he did so. Though she knew she should probably be frightened at the sight, instead Mia took a deep breath, combed her fingers through her hair, and stepped out of the alley, right into a sloppy pile of what she hoped was mud. fn2
Cursing in a most improper fashion and scraping her soles on the cobbles, she saw people of all kinds pushing along the cramped thoroughfare. Fair-haired Vaanians and blue-eyed Itreyans and tall Dweymeri with leviathan ink tattoos, dozens of slaves with arkemical marks of sale burned on their cheeks. But Mia soon realised the folk were mostly Liisian; olive of skin and dark of hair. Storefronts were marked with a sigil Mia recognised from her lessons with Brother Crassus and truedark masses inside the great cathedrals – three burning circles, intertwined. A mirror of the three suns that roamed the skies overhead. The eyes of Aa himself.
The Trinity. fn3
Mia realised she must be in the Liisian quarter – Little Liis, she’d heard it called. Squalid and overcrowded, poverty written in crumbling stonework. The canal waters ran high here, consuming the lower floors of the buildings around. Palazzos of unadorned brick, rusting to a dark brown at the water’s edge. Above the water’s reek, she could smell spiced breads and clove smoke, hear songs in a language she couldn’t quite comprehend but almost recognised.
She stepped into the flow of people, jostled and bumped. The crush might have been frightening for a girl who’d grown her whole life in the shelter of the Spine, but again, Mia found herself unafraid. She was pushed along until the street spilled into a broad piazza, lined on all sides by stalls and stores. Climbing up a pile of empty crates, Mia realised she was in the marketplace, the air filled with the bustle and murmur of hundreds of folk, the harsh glare of two suns burning overhead, and the most extraordinary smell she’d ever encountered in her life.
Mia couldn’t describe it as a stench – although a stench was certainly wrapped up in the incomparable perfume. Little Liis sat on the southwest of Godsgrave, below the Hips near the Bay of Butchers, and was skirted by Godsgrave’s abattoirs and various sewer outflows. The bay’s reek has been compared to a burst belly covered in horseshit and burning human hair, three turns rotten in the heat of truelight.
However, masking this stench was the perfume of the marketplace itself. The toast-warm aroma of fresh-baked breads, tarts, and sugardoughs. The buoyant scents of rooftop gardens. Mia found herself half-drooling, half-sickened – part of her wishing to eat everything in sight, the other part wondering if she’d ever eat again.
Thumbing the brooch at her breast, she looked about for a vendor. There were plenty of trinket stalls, but most looked like two-copper affairs. On the market’s edge, she saw an old building, crouched like a beggar at the corner of two crooked roads. A sign swung on a squeaking hinge above its sad little door.
MERCURIO’S CURIOS – ODDITIES, RARITIES & The FYNEST ANTIQUITIES.
A door placard informed her, ‘No time-wasters, rabble, or religious sorts welcome.’
She squinted across the way, looked down at the too-dark shadow around her feet.
‘Well?’ she asked.
‘… meow …’ said Mister Kindly.
‘I think so too.’
And Mia hopped off her crates, and headed towards the store.
Blood gushed across the wagon’s floor, thick and crusted on Mia’s hands. Dust clawing her eyes, rising in a storm from the camels’ hooves. There was no need for Mia to whip them; the beasts were running just fine on their own. And so she concentrated on quieting the headache splitting her brow and stilling the now familiar urge to stab Tric repeatedly in the face.
The boy was stood on the wagon’s tail, banging away at what might have been a xylophone, if xylophones were crafted from iron tubes and made a noise like donkeys rutting in a belfry. The boy was drenched in blood and dust too; gritted teeth of perfect white in a mask of filthy red and shitty tattoos.
‘Tric, shut that racket up!’ Mia roared.
‘It scares off the krakens!’
‘Scares off the krakens …’ moaned Naev, from a puddle of her own blood.
‘No, it bloody doesn’t!’ yelled Mia.
She glanced over her shoulder, just in case the ungodly racket had indeed scared off the monstrosities chasing them, but alas, the four runnels of churning earth were still in close pursuit. Bastard galloped alongside the wagon, tethered by his reins. The stallion was glaring at Mia, occasionally spitting an accusing whinny in her direction.
‘O, shut up!’ she yelled at the horse.
‘… he really does not like you …’ whispered Mister Kindly.
‘You’re not helping!’
‘… and what would help …?’
‘Explain to me how we got into this stew!’
The cat who was shadows tilted his head, as if thinking. A chuddering growl from the behemoths behind shivered the wagon in its rivets, but the bouncing across the dunes moved him not at all. He looked at the rolling Whisperwastes, the jagged horizon drawing nearer, his mistress above him. And he spoke with the voice of one unveiling an ugly but necessary truth.
‘… it is basically your fault …’
Two weeks had passed atop their lookout, and both Mia and Tric had begun losing faith in her theory. The first turn of Septimus was fast approaching – if they didn’t cross the Church threshold before then, there’d be no chance to be accepted among this year’s flock. They watched in turns, one climbing the spire to relieve the other, pausing to chat awhile between shifts. They’d swap tales of their time as apprentices, or tricks of the trade. Mia seldom mentioned her familia. Tric never mentioned his. And yet he always lingered – even if he had nothing to say, he’d simply sit and watch her read for a spell.
Bastard had eventually taken to eating the grass around the spire’s roots, though he did it with obvious disdain. Mia often caught him looking at her as if he wanted to eat her instead.
Around nevernight’s falling on what was probably the thirteenth turn, she and Tric were sitting atop the stone, staring over the wastes. Mia was down to her last forty-two cigarillos and already wishing she’d brought more.
‘I tried to quit once,’ she said, peering at Black Dorian’sfn4 watermark on the fine, hand-rolled smoke. ‘Lasted fourteen turns.’
‘Missed it too much?’
‘Withdrawals. Mercurio made me take it back up. He said me acting like a bear with a hangover three turns a month was bad enough.’
‘Three turns a … ah.’
‘Ah.’
‘… You’re not that bad are you?’
‘You can tell me in a turn or so,’ she chuckled.
‘I had no sisters.’ Tric began retying his hair, a habit Mia had noted he indulged when uncomfortable. ‘I am unversed in …’ – vague handwaving – ‘… women’s ways.’
‘Well then, you’re in for a treat.’
He stopped in mid-knot, looking at Mia strangely. ‘You are unlike any girl I have ev—’
The boy fell silent, slipped off his rock into a crouch. He took out an old captain’s spyglass, engraved with the same three seadrakes as his ring, and pressed it to his eye.
Mia crouched next to him, peering towards Last Hope. ‘See something?’
‘Caravan.’
‘Fortune hunters?’fn5
‘Don’t think so.’ Tric spat on the spyglass lens, rubbed away the dust. ‘Two laden wagons. Four men. Camels leading, so they’re in for a deep trek.’
‘I’ve never ridden a camel before.’
‘Nor me. I hear they stink. And spit.’
‘Still sounds a step up from Bastard.’
‘A whitedrake wearing a saddle is a step up from Bastard.’
They watched the caravan roll across the blood-red sand for an hour, pondering what lay ahead if the group were indeed from the Red Church. And when the caravan was almost a dot on the horizon, the pair clambered down from their throne, and followed across the wastes.
They kept distance at first, Flowers and Bastard plodding slowly. Mia was sure she could hear a strange tune on the wind. Not the maddening whispers – which she’d still not become accustomed to – but something like off-key bells, stacked all atop one another and pounded with an iron flail. She’d no idea what to make of it.
