Nevernight (47 page)

Carlotta looked at the acolytes around her.

Crumpled her notes in her fist.

“I’ve a better notion with what to do with them,” she murmured.

And drawing back her fist, Lotti slammed it into Jessamine’s jaw.

The redhead flew back off her chair, a look of almost comic shock on her face. Lotti fell atop her, flailing and spitting, her usually stoic facade shattered to pieces. She grabbed Jessamine’s throat, slammed her head back against the stone and proceeded to try and
feed
the girl her sodden notes as Jessamine thrashed and kicked. The pair tumbled about in a flurry of curses and sopping pages. Jessamine landed a hook on Carlotta’s jaw, Lotti smashed her notes into the redhead’s nose, the wet crunch making Mia wince.

There were no Shahiid present—nobody to break up the brawl. Diamo seemed to arrive at the same conclusion Mia and Ash did, stepping into the fray and pulling Carlotta and Jessamine apart. Lotti was thrashing and bucking, cursing hard enough to make the most hardened sailor give up the game and become an Ironpriest. But Jessamine was insane with rage, face twisted, nose gushing, slicking her lips and chin with blood. She clawed at the air, bucking in Diamo’s grip, eyes locked on Carlotta.

“You’re dead, bitch,” she spat. “You hear me?
Dead
!”

“Let her go!” Carlotta roared at Diamo. “Let her go!”

“I’m going to feed you your fucking heart! I’m going to g—”

“ENOUGH!”

The bellow brought stillness to the seething mass of acolytes, and all eyes turned. Mia saw Ash’s brother Osrik standing on the bench, cheeks blotched with rage.

“What in the Maw’s name is wrong with you two? We’re disciples of Niah, not fucking braavi. We stand in the house of a
goddess
. Show some damned respect!”

Osrik’s tirade seemed to knock the worst of the heat from Carlotta. Mia and Ash were hanging on to an arm each, slowly loosing their grips. Diamo eased off Jessamine, and with a final, poisonous glance, the girl wiped the blood from her chin and sat back at table, eating as if nothing had happened. Cold and hard as a barrel of ice.

Mia and Ash helped Carlotta gather her scattered notes. The trio were crouched over the wreckage, Carlotta trying to arrange the pages into some sort of order. Her work was a shambles, soaked to ruin in places. Her shoulders were slumped, her usually stoic facade in tatters. Weeks of labor undone in a moment. Mia found herself feeling sorry for the girl. Lotti was sharp as a razor, and good company to boot. Next to Ash, the girl was as close to a friend as any she really had in these halls.

“Don’t trouble yourself about what that bitch said,” Ash whispered, glancing at Carlotta’s flawless cheek. “That’s not who you are anymore.”

“It was never who I was.”

Carlotta’s hands fell still. Her stare growing clouded.

“It was just who they made me.”

Mia threw Ash a warning glance, thinking it best to leave the sore spot alone. Gathering more pages, she handed them to Lotti along with a change of subject.

“I keep my notes in my room,” she said. “I’m perhaps not as far along as you, but you can borrow them if you like.”

Carlotta blinked. Seeming to return from whatever memory she was lost in, her mask locking back into place. She spared Mia a small smile.

“I’ll be all right. I’ve memorized much of it. I’ll ask Spiderkiller for permission to work late in the hall. Should be able to catch the rest up if I miss a little sleep. So my thanks for the offer, but I’m still going to kick your arse, Corvere.”

“Be careful,” Ash warned. “There’s someone who wants to kick yours worse.”

Carlotta glanced at Jessamine. The girl was calmly eating her meal, acting as if she had her nose punched bloody all the time. Showing no pain. No weakness. Jess was an insufferable cow, but Mia had to admit it: The girl had stones.

“Let her try,” Carlotta said.

Lotti glanced over her shoulder, looking Osrik up and down. The boy had resumed his place at table after his tirade, scowling at the post-brawl mess. “You know, your brother’s a bit of all right when he gets all shouty, Ashlinn.”

“O, Black Mother, shut your mouth before I spew.”

Carlotta rose and padded over to Osrik, spoke to him quietly, sodden notebook in hand. Oz smiled his handsome smile, fingertips brushing Lotti’s own.

Mia waggled her eyebrows at Ash. “They’ve been getting cozy. I saw them working together on some concoction a few turns back. And they seem to get paired up in Truths an awful lot.”

Ash ballooned her cheeks, pretended to vomit under the table.

Mia smirked, but inside, she found herself more than a little uneasy. Initiation was creeping closer. Friction was rising. Knives were out. The knowledge that not everyone would become a Blade hung between every breath, the idea that fellow acolytes were competition coloring every moment. It’d become easy to think that way. Seeing their fellows drop by the wayside, one by one. Every death turning them a little colder. The Church’s tests were becoming more dangerous, the Ministry’s regard for the acolytes’ lives ever more cavalier. Mia knew it was idiocy to worry about anyone but herself.

That was the point, she supposed. What was it Naev had said?

This place gives much. But it takes much more.

Stripping away the empathy. The pity. Piece by piece. Death by death.

And what will be left in the end?

Mia looked about the Sky Altar. The faces. The bloodstains. The shadows.

Blades
, she realized.

Blades.

1. A language spoken entirely in gestures of the hands, fingers and face. Utilized by a master, a conversation in Tongueless can appear as little more than a series of tics, winks and subtle nods, completely unremarkable to anyone not trained in the art.

Newer practitioners often appear to be pulling silly faces in the midst of a seizure, but practice makes perfect, as they say.

2. The braavi are a loose collective of gangs that run much of the criminal undertakings in Godsgrave—prostitution, larceny and organized violence. For hundreds of years, the braavi were a thorn in the sides of various Itreyan kings, and even after the Republic was formed, they remained dug into the Nethers of Godsgrave like particularly stubborn ticks. Their predations wore at trade, cut into profits, and it seemed no amount of Luminatii raids could permanently remove them.

It was a newly elected senator, Julius Scaeva, who first proposed the notion of giving more powerful braavi gangs—such as those who control the docks and warehouse districts of Godsgrave—an official stipend from the Republic’s coffers. He argued that it would be cheaper to pay the thugs than organize an official police force to combat them, and that the gangs themselves would benefit from a period of stability. Scaeva financed the first payment from his own personal fortune, and was rewarded virtually overnight with an astonishing drop in the crime rates of the Nethers. This saw his popularity skyrocket—among the merchants who plied trade through the docks, the citizens who had previously been caught up in the wars between the Luminatii and braavi, and from the thugs themselves, who rather enjoyed being paid for simply getting paid. It was after this coup that Scaeva first came to be known among the mob as “Senatum Populiis”—the People’s Senator.

The names his opponents called him behind closed doors, of course, were far less flattering.

But only when the doors were
firmly
closed.

CHAPTER 25

S
KIN

Two weeks later, everything began to change.

The flock was gathered for mornmeal as usual. Mia’s head was fuzzy after hours working on Spiderkiller’s formula. Carlotta spent the entire meal working in her salvaged notebook on the Shahiid’s quandary, barely speaking a word. She’d been pulling late hours in the Hall of Truths to make up for the destruction of her work, her eyes bloodshot and bruised. And though Lotti didn’t speak of it, her feud with Jessamine hung in the air like poison. Ashlinn filled the gaps with talk about some new beau she’d found last trip to Godsgrave; a senator’s son who apparently talked about his father’s business in his sleep.

As the acolytes were shuffling from the Sky Altar, Mia saw Shahiid Aalea take Tric aside, speak to him in hushed tones. Beneath the ink, Mia saw the boy’s face visibly pale. He seemed set to argue, but Aalea cut his protests off at the knees with a smile as sharp as gravebone.

The turn’s lesson was in the Hall of Songs, and Solis had been focusing on the art of ranged weaponry over the last few lessons. A series of strawman targets were suspended from the ceiling by oiled iron chains. Standing an acolyte in the sparring circle, Solis equipped them with crossbows or throwing knives, and instructed their fellows to swing the targets at their backs and heads. The strawmen were heavy enough to knock you flying if they struck home, and not getting clobbered by one proved solid motivation indeed. Mia was just grateful that a switch from sparring matches meant a break from serving as Jessamine’s training dummy, but in this particular game, she discovered she had an advantage her fellows didn’t.

The realization came as she took her place in the circle, throwing knives held in her teeth. As Mia tied her long hair back in a braid, Diamo seized the opportunity to catch her unawares, sent his strawman sailing soundlessly at her exposed back. But though she couldn’t see the target rushing toward her spine, somehow, she could still sense it incoming. Stepping aside, she perforated the strawman with three knives, turned on Diamo with a withering scowl.

The boy blew her a kiss.

As more targets had come sailing toward her from the other acolytes, Mia managed to dodge each and every one. Perhaps it was because the dark here had never known sunslight. But Mia realized that even without seeing them, she could
feel
them.

She could feel their shadows.

Mia managed to avoid every target during her time in the circle. Moving like a breeze among the strawmen, knives singing, grateful she’d finally found something in Solis’s hall she excelled at. She’d heard no word from Chronicler Aelius about his search for a tome that unlocked the mysteries of the darkin. There’d been no sign of Lord Cassius since her torture session in Godsgrave. But slowly, surely, she was discovering more about her gift. A smile curled her lips, and remained there until about halfway through the lesson, when Tric took his place in the circle and Marcellus hit him square in the back with a flying strawman.

Marco flashed a smile (much improved by the weaver, Mia thought) and bowed.

“You’ll have to be quicker than that, Tricky.”

Tric picked himself up off the ground and growled. “You want to wait until I’m ready, next time?”

“That’d defeat the point of the exercise, wouldn’t it?”

“Damn Itreyans,” Tric growled. “You can always count on them to stick the knife in when you turn your back, aye?”

Marco’s handsome smile slowly died. “You’re half-Itreyan yourself, you fool.”

Mia’s heart sank. Tric’s eyes widened. And then it was on. Fists and curses, elbows and snarls, the boys falling into a tumble on the stone. Tric split Marco’s brow with his fist, punched his lip bloody. Solis soon broke it up, thrashing both boys with his belt like children until they stopped fighting. Hauling Marco to his feet, he ordered him to go see Marielle and get his hurts mended.

“And you,” the Shahiid growled at Tric. “Ten laps of the stair. Down and up. Go.”

Tric glared into the blind man’s eyes, and Mia was honestly wondering if he was about to try to take a piece. But with a black scowl, the boy obeyed. Solis roared at the other acolytes to get back to work, and Hush stepped into the circle to begin his round. Mia noticed Tric never returned to the hall after his tenth lap.

She went searching for him when Songs was done, checking his room, the Sky Altar, the athenaeum. She finally found him the in the Hall of Eulogies, thumbs hooked in his belt, staring up at the statue of Niah. A thousand corpses’ names carved on the stone at their feet. Nameless tombs on the walls all around.

“How do, Don Tric?”

He glanced at her briefly. Nodded once.

She edged up to him slowly, hands clasped behind her. The Dweymeri boy had turned back to the statue, looking up at Niah’s face. The statue’s eyes had the disconcerting quality of seeming to look right at you, no matter where you stood. The goddess’s expression was fierce. Dark. Mia wondered who or what the sculptor had imagined Niah staring at when he crafted her countenance. For the first time, she noticed Niah held her scales in her right hand. The sword gripped tight in the other.

“She’s left-handed,” Mia said. “Like me.”

“She’s nothing like you,” Tric growled. “She’s a greedy bitch.”

“… Are you entirely sure it’s wise to call her a bitch in her own house?”

Tric looked at her sidelong. “I though you didn’t believe in the divinities?”

Mia shrugged. “Hard not to when the God of Light apparently hates your guts.”

“Fuck him. And fuck her. What good do they do us? They give us one thing. Life. Miserable and shitty. And after that? They take. Your prayers. Your years.” He waved at the unmarked graves all about them. “Even the life they gave you in the first place.”

Tric shook his head.

“Take is all they do.”

“… Are you all right?”

Tric sighed. Shoulders slumped. “Shahiid Aalea gave me the word.”

Mia waited patiently. The boy pointed to the ink on his cheeks.

“I’ve put it off as long as I could,” he said. “After dinner. My turn with the weaver.”

“… Ah.”

She placed an awkward hand on his arm. Unsure what to say.

“Why were you avoiding it? The pain?”

Tic shook his head. Mia said no more, letting silence do the talking for her. She could see the boy struggling. Feel Mister Kindly in her shadow, gravitating toward his fear like flies to dying meat. He wanted to speak, she knew it. All she had to do was give him the room to—

“I told you about my mother,” he said. “My … father.”

Mia nodded, almost sick with sorrow at the thought of it. Touching his hand again. Sighing, Tric stared at his feet. Words struggling behind his teeth. Mia simply stood beside him, holding his hand. Waiting for the silence to fill.