Nevernight (18 page)

“Thirty-nine,” she said, with a voice like sweet smoke.

“
Revered Mother Drusilla, pray for us.
”

A woman slipped out of the darkness, soundless as cot death. She was elderly, curling gray hair bound in braids. An obsidian key hung about her throat on a silver chain. She seemed a kindly old thing, eyes twinkling as she looked over the group. Mia would’ve expected to find her in a rocking chair beside a happy hearth, grandchildren on her knee and a cup of tea by her elbow. This couldn’t be the chief minister of the deadliest band of—

“Eighty-three,” the old woman said, taking her place on the dais.

Maw take me, eighty-three
…

The Revered Mother looked over the group, a gentle smile on her lips.

“I bid you welcome to the Red Church, children,” she said. “You have traveled miles and years to be here. You have miles and years to go. But at journey’s end, you will be Blades, wielded for the glory of the goddess in the most sacred of sacraments.

“Those who survive, of course.”

The old woman gestured to the four figures around her.

“Heed the words of your Shahiid. Know that everything you were prior to this moment is dead. That once you pledge yourself to the Maw, you are hers and hers alone.” A robed figure with a silver bowl stepped up beside the Revered Mother, and she beckoned Mia. “Bring forth your tithe. The remnants of a killer, killed in turn and offered to Our Lady of Blessed Murder in this, the hour of your baptism.”

Mia stepped forward, purse in hand. Her stomach was turning flips, but her hands were steady as stone. She took her place before the old woman and her gentle smile, looked deep into pale blue eyes. Felt herself being weighed. Wondered if she’d been found wanting.

“My tithe,” she managed to say. “For the Maw.”

“I accept it in her name with her thanks upon my lips.”

Mia sighed as she heard the response, almost falling to her knees as the Revered Mother embraced her, kissed one cheek after another with ice-cold lips. She squeezed Mia tight as the girl breathed deep, blinking back hot tears. And turning to the silver bowl, the old woman dipped one stick-thin hand inside and drew it back, dripping red.

Blood.

“Speak your name.”

“Mia Corvere.”

“Do you vow to serve the Mother of Night? Will you learn death in all its colors, bring it to the deserving and undeserving in her Name? Will you become an Acolyte of Niah, and an earthly instrument of the dark between the stars?”

Mia found herself struggling to inhale.

The deep breath before the plunge.

“I will.”

The Revered Mother pressed her palm to Mia’s cheek, smearing the blood down her skin. It was still warm, the scent of salt and copper filling the girl’s lungs. The old woman marked one cheek, then the other, finally smudging a long streak down Mia’s lips and chin. The girl felt the gravity of that moment in her bones, dragging her belly to her boots. The Mother nodded and Mia backed away, hugging herself, licking the blood from her lips, near weeping, laughing. One step closer to avenging her familia. One step closer to standing on Scaeva’s tomb.

She was here, she realized.

I’m here.

The ritual was repeated, each acolyte bringing forth their tithes one by one. Some brought teeth, others eyes—the tall boy with the sledgehammer hands brought a rotting heart, wrapped in black velvet. Mia realized there wasn’t a single one of them who wasn’t a murderer. That of all the rooms in the Republic there was probably none more dangerous than the one she stood in, right at that moment.
6

“Your studies begin on the morrow,” the Revered Mother said. “Evemeal will be served in the Sky Altar in a half-hour.” She indicated the row of robed figures. “Hands will be available should you need guidance, and I would suggest you avail yourselves until you find your bearings. The Mountain can be difficult to navigate at first, and getting lost within these halls can have … unfortunate consequences.” Blue eyes glittered in the dark. “Walk softly. Learn well. May Our Lady be late when she finds you. And when she does, may she greet you with a kiss.”

The old woman bowed, stepped back into the gloom. The other Ministry members left one by one. Tric wandered over to Mia, greeted her with a smile, his cheeks red with blood. He’d been bathed and scrubbed, and even his saltlocks looked a little less sentient.

“You shaved,” she smirked.

“Don’t get used to it. Happens twice a year.” He squinted at Naev, recognition slowly widening in his eyes. “How in the name of the Lady…”

“We meet again.” The thin woman bowed low. “Naev gives thanks for his assistance in the deep desert. The debt shall not be forgot.”

“How are you still walking and breathing?”

“Secrets within secrets in this place,” Mia said.

“Corvere?” said a soft voice behind her.

Mia turned to the speaker. It was the girl she’d noted; the pretty one with a jagged red bob and green, hunter’s eyes. She was studying at Mia intently, head tilted. The tall Itreyan boy with sledgehammer hands loomed beside her like an angry shadow.

“In the ceremony,” the girl said. “You said your name was Corvere?”

“Aye,” Mia said.

“Are you by chance related to Darius Corvere? The former justicus?”

Mia weighed up the girl in her mind. Fit. Fast. Hard as wood. But whoever she was, Mia was certain Scaeva and his cronies would have no allies within these walls; Remus and his Luminatii had vowed to do away with the Red Church since the Truedark Massacre, after all. Even so, Mercurio had urged Mia to leave her name behind when she crossed this threshold. It was one of the few things they’d argued about. Stupid perhaps. But her father’s death was the whole reason she’d begun walking this road. The name Corvere had been erased from the histories by Scaeva and his lackeys—she’d not leave it behind in the dust, no matter what it cost her.

“I’m Darius Corvere’s daughter,” Mia finally replied. “And you are?”

“Jessamine, daughter of Marcinus Gratianus.”

“Apologies. Is that someone I should have heard of?”

“First centurion of the Luminatii Legion,” the girl scowled. “Executed by order of the Itreyan Senate after the Kingmaker Rebellion.”

Mia’s frown softened. Black Mother, this was the daughter of one of her father’s centurions. A girl just like her—orphaned by Consul Scaeva and Justicus Remus and the rest of those bastards. Someone who knew the taste of injustice as well as she did.

Mia offered her hand. “Well met, sister. My—”

Jessamine slapped the hand away, eyes flashing. “You’re no sister to me, bitch.”

Mia felt Tric bristle beside her, Mister Kindly’s hackles rise in the shadow at her feet. She rubbed her slapped knuckles, speaking carefully.

“I grieve your loss. Truly, I do. My fath—”

“Your father was a fucking traitor,” Jessamine snarled. “His men died because they honored their oaths to a fool justicus, and their skulls now pave the steps to the Senate House. Because of the mighty Darius Corvere.”

“My father was loyal to General Antonius,” Mia said. “He had oaths to honor too.”

“Your father was a fucking lapdog,” Jessamine spat. “Everyone knows why he followed Antonius, and it had
nothing
to do with honor. My father and brother were
crucified
because of him. My mother dead of grief in Godsgrave Asylum. All of them, unavenged.” The girl stepped closer, eyes narrowed. “But not much longer. You’d best grow some eyes in back of your head, Corvere. You’d best start sleeping light.”

Mia stared the girl down, unblinking, Mister Kindly swelling beneath her feet. Naev drifted closer to the redheaded girl, lisping in her ear.

“She will step away. Or she will be stepped upon.”

Jessamine glanced at the woman, jaw clenched. After a staring contest that stretched for miles, the girl spun on her heel and stalked off, the big Itreyan boy trailing behind. Mia realized her nails were cutting her palms.

“You surely do know how to make friends, Pale Daughter.”

Mia turned to Tric, found him smiling, though his hand was also up his sleeve. She relaxed a touch, allowed herself a smile too. Bad as she was at making them, at least she had one friend within these walls.

“Come on,” the boy said. “We going to evemeal or not?”

Mia looked after the retreating Jessamine. Glanced around at the other acolytes. The reality of where she was sank home deeper. A school of killers. Surrounded by novices or masters in the art of murder. She was here. This was it.

Time to get to work.

“Evemeal sounds good,” she nodded. “I can’t think of a better place to start scouting.”

“Scouting? For what?”

“You’ve heard the saying the quickest way to a man’s heart is through his stomach?”

“I always wondered about that,” Tric frowned. “Ribcage seems much quicker to me.”

“True enough. But still, you can learn a lot about animals. Watching them eat.”

“… You’re a little frightening sometimes, Pale Daughter.”

She gave him a wry smile. “Only a little?”

“Well, most times, you’re just plain terrifying.”

“Come on,” she said, slapping his arm. “I’ll buy you a drink.”

1. More balls than brains, gentlefriends. More balls than brains.

2. It refused, though sadly, they danced all the same.

3. The Rose River is possessed of the greatest misnomer in all the Itreyan Republic, and perhaps, all creation. Its stench is so awful that, when offered the choice between drowning in the Rose or being castrated and crucified, the Niahan heretic Don Anton Bosconi was famously quoted as asking his confessors, “Would you like to borrow a knife, gentlefriends?”

4. Goldwine is an Itreyan whiskey, so named for the vast fields of corn in the midlands from which it is distilled. Several familia are renowned for their recipes, most notably the Valente and Albari.

The rivalry between the two families has boiled from bad blood to outright blood
shed
on more than one occasion, the most famous of which, the War of Twelve Casks, lasted four truedarks and claimed no less than thirty-two lives. Declared an official Vendetta—that is, a bloodfeud sanctioned by the Holy Church of Aa—the conflict was so named because, amid the slaughter and arson that embodied it, only twelve casks of Albari whiskey survived to see distribution throughout the Republic.

Bottles of “Twelve Cask” are thus exceedingly rare and astonishingly expensive—a single bottle has been known to fetch over forty thousand golden tossers at auction. When the summer villa of Senator Ari Giancarli was set alight by two clumsy servants, Giancarli reportedly charged back into the blazing home no less than three times—to save his wife, his son, and his two bottles of Twelve Cask.

Rumors that he saved the bottles
first
are, of course, gross character slurs concocted by political rivals, and have absolutely no basis in fact.

(He saved them second.)

5. One of the old man’s favorite tests early in Mia’s apprenticeship was a game he called “Ironpriest,” in which he and the girl would see who could last the longest without speaking. Though Mia at first thought it a game to test her patience and resolve, in later years, Mercurio confessed he only invented the game to get some peace and quiet around the store.

His most infamous test, however, came about in Mia’s twelfth year. During a particularly freezing wintersdeep, the old man instructed the girl to wait on the rooftops opposite the Grand Chapel of Tsana for a messenger wearing red gloves, and follow the lad wherever he went. The matter, he told her, was of “dire import.”

The messenger, of course, was one of Mercurio’s many agents in the city. He was traveling nowhere of import—dire or otherwise—merely meant to lead Mia on a merry chase in the freezing cold and eventually back to the curio store. However, unbeknownst to Mercurio, the boy was hit by a runaway horse on his way to the temple district, and, thus, never arrived.

Mia remained on the rooftops despite the awful cold (only one sun resides in the sky during Godsgrave winters, and the chill is long and bitter). As the snows began to fall, she refused to move lest she miss her mark. When Mia hadn’t arrived by next morning, Mercurio grew worried, retracing the messenger’s assigned path until he at last arrived atop the temple district roof. There he found his apprentice, almost hypothermic, shivering uncontrollably, eyes still locked on the Chapel of Tsana. When the old man asked why in the Mother’s name Mia had stayed on the roof when she was in danger of freezing to death, the twelve-year-old simply replied, “You said it was important.”

Not without her charm, as I said.

6. Astonishingly, remarkably, impossibly incorrect.

CHAPTER 9

D
ARK

The old man straightened her nose out as best he could, wiped the blood from her face with a rag soaked in something that smelled sharp and metallic. And sitting her down at a little table in the back of his shop, he’d made her tea.

The room was somewhere between a kitchen and a library. All was swathed in shadow, the shutters drawn against the sunslight outside.
1
A single arkemical lamp illuminated stacks of dirty crockery and great, wobbling piles of books. Mia’s pain slipped away as she sipped Mercurio’s brew, the throbbing mess in the middle of her face rendered mercifully numb. He gave her honeyseed cake and watched her wolf down three slices, like a spider watches a fly. And when she pushed the plate aside, he finally spoke.

“How’s the beak?”

“Doesn’t hurt anymore.”

“Good tea, neh?” He smiled. “How’d it get broken?”

“The big boy. Shivs. I put my knife to his privates and he hit me for it.”

“Who told you to go for a boy’s cods in a scrap?”

“My father. He said the quickest way to beat a boy is to make him wish he was a girl.”

Mercurio chuckled. “Duum’a.”

“What does that mean?” Mia blinked.

“… You don’t speak Liisian?”