Kitabı oku: «The Nevernight Chronicle», sayfa 3

CHAPTER 3
EMBER

Mercurio awoke in darkness.

The pain in his head felt like the kind earned after a three-turn bender, and yet he could recall no recent debauchery. His jaw ached, and he could taste blood on his tongue. Groaning, he slowly sat upright in a bed lined with soft grey fur, hand to his brow. He had no idea where he might be, but something … the scent in the air perhaps, dragged him back to younger years.

‘Hello, Mercurio.’

He turned to his left, saw an old woman seated beside his bed. She looked to be around his age, her long grey hair bound in neat braids. She was dressed in dark grey robes, cool blue eyes pouched in deep wrinkles. At first glance, a bystander might’ve expected to find her in a rocking chair beside a merry hearth, a handful of grandsprogs around her, an old moggy on her knee. But Mercurio knew better.

‘Hello, you murderous old cunt,’ he replied.

Drusilla, Lady of Blades, smiled in reply.

‘You always did have a silver tongue, my dear.’

The old woman lifted a cup of steaming tea from the saucer in her lap, sipped slowly. Her eyes were fixed on Mercurio as he peered around the bedchamber, breathed deep, finally understanding where he was. The song of a choir hung in the cool, dark air. He smelled candles and incense, steel and smoke. He remembered the Ministry accosting him in the Godsgrave chapel. The scratch from the poisoned blade in Spiderkiller’s hand. The old man realized the blood he could taste belonged to pigs.

They’ve brought me back to the Mountain.

‘You haven’t changed your decor much,’ he sighed.

‘You know me, love. I was never one for extravagance.’

‘The last time I was in this bed, I told you it really was the last time,’ Mercurio said. ‘But if I knew you were this hungry for a return performance …’

‘O, please,’ the old woman sighed. ‘You’d need a block and tackle to get it up at your age. And your heart could barely stand it when we were twenty.’

Mercurio smiled despite himself.

‘It’s good to see you, ’Silla.’

‘Would that I could say the same.’ The Lady of Blades shook her head and sighed. ‘You addle-minded old fool.’

‘Did you really drag me all the way to the Quiet Mountain for a rebuke?’ Mercurio reached to his coat for his smokes and found both smokes and coat missing. ‘You could’ve just chewed my cods off back in the ’Grave.’

‘What were you thinking?’ Drusilla demanded, setting aside her tea. ‘Helping that idiot girl in her idiot schemes? Do you realize what you’ve done?’

‘I’m not fresh fallen from the last rains, ’Silla.’

‘No, you’re the bishop of Godsgrave!’ Drusilla stood, prowling around the bed, eyes flashing. ‘Years of faithful service. Sworn to the Dark Mother. And yet you helped a Blade of the Church break the Red Promise and murder one of our own patrons!’[fn1]

‘O, Goddess, don’t play the wounded devotee with me,’ Mercurio growled. ‘It’s as obvious as a beagle’s bollocks that you and your nest of snakes wanted Cardinal Duomo dead. You’ve all been in bed with Scaeva for years. Did Lord Cassius know? Or was this something you and the others conspired to behind his back?’

‘You’re a fine one to speak of conspiracies, love.’

‘How do you think the rest of the congregation would react if they knew, ’Silla? That the Ministry was content to bend over and spread cheek for our beloved People’s Senator? The hands of Niah upon this earth, become lapdogs of a fucking tyrant?’

‘I should have you killed for your betrayal,’ Drusilla snarled.

‘And yet I can’t help notice I’m not dead.’ The old man peered under the sheets. ‘Or that I’m sans trousers. You certain I’m not here for an encore? I’ve learned a few tricks since—’

Drusilla hurled a grey robe at the old man’s head.

‘You are here to serve as the worm you are.’

‘… As bait?’ Mercurio shook his head. ‘You really think she’s stupid enough to come after me? After all she’s been through, after all she’s—’

‘I know who Mia Corvere is,’ Drusilla snapped. ‘This is a girl who gave up any chance at a normal life or happiness to see her parents avenged. She sold herself into slavery on a gambit that even a lunatic would consider insanity, for a single chance to strike down the men who destroyed her house. She is fearless. Reckless beyond reckoning. So if there is one thing I’ve learned about your little Crow, it is this: there is nothing that girl will not do for her familia. Nothing.’

The old woman leaned over the bed, stared into the old man’s eyes.

‘And you, dear Mercurio, are more a father to her than her father ever was.’

The old man stared back, saying nothing. Swallowing the bile flooding his mouth. The Lady of Blades only smiled, leaning a little closer. He could still see her beauty beneath the scars of time. Remember the last nevernight they’d been in this bedchamber together, all those years ago. Sweat and blood and sweet, sweet poison.

‘You may wander in the Mountain if you wish,’ Drusilla said. ‘I’m certain you remember where everything is. The congregation has been informed of your betrayal, but you are not to be touched. We need you breathing for now. But please, don’t push the friendship by being more the fool than you’ve already been.’

Drusilla reached under the sheet between his legs, squeezed tight as he gasped.

‘A man can still breathe without these, after all.’

The old woman held on a moment longer, then released her icy grip. Lips still curled in her matronly smile, the Lady of Blades took her saucer and cup back up, turned, and stalked towards the bedchamber door.

‘Drusilla.’

The Lady of Blades glanced over her shoulder. ‘Aye?’

‘You really are a cunt, you know that?’

‘Ever the flatterer.’ The old woman turned back to him, her smile vanished. ‘But a man like you should know exactly where flattery gets you with a woman like me.’

Mercurio sat in the gloom after she left, wrinkled brow creased with worry.

‘Aye,’ he muttered. ‘In deep shit.’

He’d lurked in the bedchamber a few hours more, nursing his aching head and wounded ego. But boredom eventually bid him pull on the grey robe Drusilla had given him, tie the thin strip of leather about his waist. He didn’t bother trying to arm himself – Mercurio knew the only ways out of the Quiet Mountain were a two-week trek across the Ashkahi Whisperwastes, out through Speaker Adonai’s blood pool, or by leaping off the railings of the Sky Altar and into the shapeless night beyond.

Escape from here without help or wings was all but impossible.

He stepped from the bedchamber, leaning on the cane they’d (rather thoughtfully) left him, out into the gloom of the Quiet Mountain. Ice-blue eyes that seemed born to scowl surveyed the dark around him. The disembodied choir sung faintly, nowhere and everywhere at once. The halls were black stone, lit by windows of stained glass and false sunslight, decorated with grotesque statuary of bone and skin. Spiral patterns covered every inch of wall, intricate and maddening.

As soon as Mercurio’s feet touched the flagstones outside Drusilla’s room, he felt the presence of a robed figure, watching from the gloom. One of Drusilla’s Hands, no doubt, tasked to be his shadow for the duration of his stay.[fn2] He ignored the figure, wandered about his way, listening to it following behind. His old knees creaked as he descended the stairs, down the wending paths and through the labyrinthine dark, until he finally stepped into the Hall of Eulogies.

He looked around the vast space, forced to admire the grandeur even after all these years. Enormous stone pillars were arranged in a circle, stone gables carved from the Mountain itself soaring above. The names of the Church’s countless victims were scribed on the granite at his feet. Unmarked tombs of the faithful lined the walls.

The space was dominated by a colossal statue of Niah herself. Her black eyes seemed to follow Mercurio as he stepped closer, squinting in the false light. She held a scale and a wicked sword in her hands, her face beautiful and serene and cold. Jewels glittered on her ebony robe like stars in the truedark sky.

She who is All and Nothing.

Mother, Maid, and Matriarch.

Mercurio touched his eyes, his lips, his heart, looking up at his Goddess with clouded eyes. As he stood there in the hall, a knot of young folk entered from the steps below. They regarded the old bishop with wary stares as they passed, meeting his gaze only briefly. Smooth skin and bright eyes and clean hands, teenagers all. New acolytes by the look, just beginning their training.

He stared after them wistfully as they left. Remembering his own tutelage within these walls, his devotion to the Mother of Night. How long ago it all seemed now, how cold he’d grown inside. Once he’d been fire. Breathed it. Bled it. Spat it. But now, the only ember that remained was the one he kept burning for her – that snot-nosed, stuck-up little lordling’s bitch who’d wandered into his shop all those years ago, a silver brooch shaped like a crow in her hand.

He’d never made time for familia. To live as a Blade of the Mother was to live with death – with the knowledge that every turn could be your last. It hadn’t seemed fair to take a wife when she’d likely end a widow, nor make a child who’d probably be raised an orphan. Mercurio never thought he’d a need for children. If you’d asked him why he’d taken that raven-haired waif in all those years ago, he’d have muttered something about her gift, her grit, her guile. He’d have laughed if you’d told him he needed her as much as she needed him. He’d have cut your throat and buried you deep if you’d told him that one turn, he’d love her like the daughter he’d never had.

But in his bones, even as he ended you, he’d have known it true.

And now, here he was. A worm on Drusilla’s hook. For all his bluff, he knew the Lady of Blades spoke truth – Mia loved him like blood. She’d never let him die in here, not if she thought she had a chance to save him. And with those wretched daemons riding her shadow and eating her fear, in Mia’s head there was always a chance.

The old man peered at the granite colossus above him. The sword and scales in her hands. Those pitiless black eyes, boring into his own.

‘Where the fuck are you?’ he whispered.

He left the hall, Drusilla’s Hand lurking at a respectful distance behind as the old bishop shuffled on his way through the Mountain’s maze, his cane beating crisp on the black stone. His knees were aching by the time he reached his destination – he didn’t remember there being quite so many stairs in this place. Two dark wooden doors loomed before him, carved with the same spiral motif as decorated the walls. Each must have weighed a ton, but the old man reached out with one gnarled hand and pushed them open with ease.

Mercurio found himself on a mezzanine overlooking a forest of ornate shelves, laid out like a garden maze. They stretched off into a space too dark and vast to see the edges. On each shelf were piled books of every shape and size and description. Dusty tomes and vellum scrolls and famished notebooks and everything in between. The grand Athenaeum of the Goddess of Death, peopled with the memoirs of kings and conquerors, theorems of heretics, masterpieces of madmen. Dead books and lost books and books that never were – some burned on the pyres of the faithful, some simply swallowed by time, and others simply too dangerous to write at all.

An endless heaven for any reader, and a living hell for any librarian.

‘Well, well,’ said a croaking, hollow voice. ‘Look what the scabdogs dragged in.’

Mercurio turned to see an old Liisian man in a scruffy waistcoat, leaning on a trolley piled with books. Two shocks of white hair sprung from either side of his scalp, and a pair of finger-thick spectacles adorned his hooked nose. His back was so bent, he looked like a walking question mark. A fine cigarillo smouldered on his bloodless lips.

‘Hello, Chronicler,’ Mercurio said.

‘You’re a long way from Godsgrave, Bishop,’ Aelius growled.

The chronicler stepped closer, squared up against Mercurio, and glowered. As they stood there, face-to-face, Aelius seemed to stand taller, his shadow growing longer. The air rippled with some dark current, and Mercurio heard the shapes of colossi moving out between the shelves. Coming closer.

Aelius’s dark eyes burned as he considered Mercurio’s, his voice growing harder and colder with every word.

‘If I can still call you “Bishop” at all, that is,’ he spat. ‘I thought you’d be ashamed to show your face outside your bedchamber after what you pulled. Let alone drag yourself down here. What brings your traitorous hide to the Black Mother’s library?’

Mercurio pointed to the ever-present spare behind the chronicler’s ear.

‘Smoke?’

Chronicler Aelius hung still for a moment, eyes burning with dark flame. Then, with a small chuckle, he unfolded his arms, clapped Mercurio on his thin shoulder. Lighting the cigarillo on his own, he handed it over.

‘All right, whippersnapper?’

‘Do I look all right, old man?’ Mercurio asked.

‘You look like shite. But it’s always polite to ask.’

Mercurio leaned against the wall and gazed out over the library, dragging a sweet grey draught into his lungs. The smoke tasted of strawberries, the sugared paper setting his tongue dancing.

‘They don’t make them like this anymore,’ Mercurio sighed.

‘Same might be said of everything in this room,’ Aelius replied.

‘How’ve you been, you old bastard?’

‘Dead.’[fn3]

The chronicler settled in beside him.

‘You?’

‘Much the same.’

Aelius scoffed, breathed a plume of grey. ‘Still got a pulse in you from what I can see. What the ’byss you sulking about down here for, lad?’

Mercurio drew on his cigarillo. ‘It’s a long story, old man.’

‘A story about your Mia, I take it?’

‘… How’d you guess?’

Aelius shrugged his bone-thin shoulders, his eyes twinkling behind his improbable spectacles. ‘She always struck me as a girl with one to tell.’

‘We might be nearing the final page, I fear.’

‘You’re too young to be such a pessimist.’

‘I’m sixty-fucking-two,’ Mercurio growled.

‘As I say, far too young.’

Mercurio found himself chuckling, warm grey spilling from his lips. He leaned back against the wall, feeling the smoke buzz in his blood.

‘How long have you been down here, Aelius?’

‘O, a while,’ the chronicler sighed. ‘Never saw much sense in counting the years, though. It’s not as though I really have a choice about when I leave.’

‘The Mother keeps only what she needs,’ Mercurio murmured.

‘Aye.’ Aelius nodded. ‘She does at that.’

Mercurio tilted his head back, looked out on all those dead books with heavy-lidded eyes. ‘Do you hate her for it?’

‘Blasphemy,’ the old ghost scolded.

‘Is it?’ Mercurio asked. ‘If she doesn’t care what we say or do?’

‘And what makes you say that?’

‘Well, look at what this place has become,’ Mercurio growled, waving his cane at the dark. ‘Once, it was a house of wolves. Each murder, an offering to Our Lady of Blessed Murder. Feeding her hunger. Making her stronger. Hastening her return. And now?’ He spat on the flagstones. ‘It’s a whorehouse. The Ministry feed their own coffers, not the Maw. Their hands drip with gold, not red.’

Mercurio shook his head, breathing smoke as he continued.

‘O, we say all the words, make all the gestures, aye. “This flesh your feast, this blood your wine.” But still, when all the praying is done, we drop to our knees for the likes of Julius fucking Scaeva. How can you say Niah cares, if she allows this poison to fester in her own halls?’

‘Maw’s teeth.’ Aelius raised one snow-white brow. ‘Someone woke up on the wrong side of bed this morn.’

‘Fuck off,’ the old man spat.

‘What do you want her to do?’ the chronicler demanded. ‘She’s been banished from the sky for millennia, boy. Allowed to rule for a handful of turns every two and a half years. How much say over all this do you think she has? How much influence do you think she can exert in the prison her husband made for her?’

‘If she’s so powerless, why call her a goddess at all?’

Aelius’s frown deepened into a scowl. ‘I never said she was powerless.’

‘Because you were never one to state the fucking obvious.’

The chronicler looked at Mercurio hard. ‘I remember when you first arrived here, boy. Green as grass, you were. Soft as baby shite. But you believed. In her. In this. The brighter the light, the deeper the shadow.’

Mercurio scowled. ‘I’ve as much need for old Ashkahi proverbs as I have for a second ballsack, old man.’

‘You might have more need than you know, with young Drusilla on the prowl,’ Aelius smirked. ‘Point is, you had faith, boy. Where’d it go?’

Mercurio pressed the cigarillo to his lips, thinking long and hard.

‘I still believe,’ he replied. ‘The God of Light and Goddess of Night and their Four fucking Daughters. I mean, this place exists. You exist. The Dark Mother obviously still has some small sway.’ Mercurio shrugged. ‘But this is a world ruled by men, not divinities. And for all the blood, all the death, all the lives we’ve taken in her name, she’s still so fucking far away.’

‘She’s closer than you think,’ Aelius said.

‘I swear by all that’s holy, if you tell me she dwells in the temple of my heart, we’re going to find out if folk can return from the dead twice.’

‘They can’t, actually,’ the chronicler shrugged. ‘Not even the Mother has that power. You die once, you might make it back with her blessing. But cross back over to the Abyss once more? You’re gone forever.’

‘That threat was supposed to be rhetorical, old man.’

Aelius grinned, smudged his cigarillo out against the wall, and dropped the butt into the pocket of his waistcoat. ‘Come with me.’

The chronicler leaned on his RETURNS trolley, began wheeling it down the long ramp from the mezzanine to the Athenaeum floor below. Mercurio watched the old man shuffling away, dragging on his own smoke.

‘Come on, whippersnapper!’ Aelius barked.

The bishop of Godsgrave sighed and, pushing himself off the wall, followed the chronicler down the ramp into the library proper. Side by side, the pair wandered through the maze of shelves, mahogany and parchment and vellum all around. Every now and then, Aelius would stop and place one of his returned tomes back into its allotted place, almost reverently. The shelves were too tall to see over, and each aisle looked much the same. Mercurio was soon hopelessly lost, and a part of him wondered how in the Mother’s name Aelius made sense of this place.

‘Where the ’byss are we going?’ he grumbled, rubbing his aching knees.

‘New section,’ Aelius replied. ‘They pop up all the time in this place. When they want to be found, that is. I stumbled onto this one almost two years ago. Right before your girl arrived here for the first time.’

Out in the dark, Mercurio could hear bookworms shifting their massive bulks among the shelves. Leathery hides scraping along the stone, deep, rumbling growls reverberating through the floor. The air was dry and cool, echoing with the faint song of that beautiful choir. There was a peace to this place, no doubt. But Mercurio wondered if he’d manage an eternity in it with quite as much calm as Aelius.

They turned down a long shelf, twisting off in a gentle curve. As they walked the rows of dusty tomes wrapped in old skins and polished wood, Mercurio realized the curve was slowly tightening – that the shelf was turning in an ever-smaller spiral. And somewhere near the heart of it, out in all that dark, Aelius came to a stop.

The chronicler reached up to the top shelf, pulled down a thick book, and placed it in Mercurio’s hands.

‘The Mother keeps only what she needs,’ he said. ‘And she does what she can. In the small ways that she can.’

Mercurio raised an eyebrow, cigarillo still smouldering at his lips as he examined the tome. It was bound in leather, black as a truedark sky. The edges of the pages were stained blood-red, and a crow in flight was embossed in glossy black on the cover.

He opened the book, looked down to the first page.

‘Nevernight,’ he muttered. ‘Stupid name for a book.’

‘Makes for interesting reading,’ Aelius said.

Mercurio opened the book to the prologue, rheumy eyes scanning the text.

CAVEAT EMPTOR

People often shit themselves when they die.

Their muscles slack and their souls flutter free and everything else just … slips out. For all their audience’s love of death, the playwrights seldom—

Mercurio flipped through a few more pages, softly scoffing.

‘It has footnotes? What kind of wanker writes a novel with footnotes?’

‘It’s not a novel,’ Aelius replied, sounding wounded. ‘It’s a biography.’

‘About who?’

The chronicler simply nodded back to the book. Mercurio flicked through a few pages more, scanning the beginning of chapter three.

… dropped him into the path of an oncoming maidservant, who fell with a shriek. Dona Corvere turned on her daughter, regal and furious.

‘Mia Corvere, keep that wretched animal out from underfoot or we’ll leave it behind!’

And as simple as that, we have her name.

Mia.

Mercurio faltered. Cigarillo hanging from suddenly bone-dry lips. His blood ran cold as he finally understood what he held in his hands. Glancing up at the shelves around him. The dead books and lost books and books that never were – some burned on the pyres of the faithful, some swallowed by time, and others …

Simply too dangerous to write at all.

Aelius had wandered off down the twisted row, hands in his pockets and muttering to himself, a trail of thin grey smoke left behind him. But Mercurio was rooted to the spot. Utterly mesmerized. He began flipping faster through the pages, eyes scanning the flowing script, snatching only fragments in his haste.

‘The books we love, they love us back.’

‘I will give your brother your regards.’

‘Who or what is the Moon?’ she asked.

Mercurio reached the end, turning the book over and over in his hands. Wondering why there were no more pages and looking around the library of the dead in mute wonder and fear.

‘I found another one, too,’ Aelius said, returning from farther down the row. ‘About three months back. Wasn’t there one turn, next turn, there it was.’

The chronicler handed Mercurio another heavy tome. It was similar to the one he already held, but the pages were edged in sky blue rather than blood-red. A wolf was embossed on the black cover instead of a crow. Juggling the first book into the crook of his elbow, he opened the second’s cover and peered at the title.

‘Godsgrave,’ he muttered.

‘Follows on from the first,’ Aelius nodded. ‘I think I liked this one better, actually. Less fucking about at the start.’

The choir sang in the ghostly dark around them, echoing through the great Athenaeum. Mercurio’s hands were shaking, cigarillo falling from his mouth as he fumbled with the first tome, opening it finally to the title page.

And there it was.

NEVERNIGHT

BOOK 1 OF THE NEVERNIGHT CHRONICLE

by Mercurio of Liis

The old man closed the book, looked at Niah’s chronicler with wondering eyes.

‘Holy shit,’ he breathed.