Godsgrave

  The shadowcat sighed.

  “ . . . i know. and i am with you, mia. do not be afraid . . .”

  She checked the gravebone blade at her belt, the other in her sleeve.

  “Not with you beside me.”

  She stole out from the bathhouse, into the Red Church’s gloom. The hymns of the ghostly choir hung in the air as she made her way up winding stairs and down corridors of black stone, carved with patterns of endless spirals. Naev had once told her the patterns in the walls were a song about finding her way in the dark. Thinking about all Ashlinn had told her, she found herself wishing she knew the words. If the girl had spoken true, Mia would be utterly lost.

  It can’t be true.

  On through the hungry dark.

  It can’t be . . .

  Up coiling stair and down twisting spiral until she reached it.

  The Hall of Eulogies.

  She looked up at the towering statue of Niah, her sword and scales in hand. It might have been a trick of the light, but the goddess looked grimmer than usual.

  Mia’s footsteps echoed in the silent hall as she walked the periphery, brushing her fingertips over the empty tomb marked with Tric’s name. She thought of her friend, then. The counsel he’d given. The comfort she’d found in his arms. He’d been a rock in a world growing more uncertain by the nevernight . . .

  “You miss him,” came a voice.

  Mia turned, saw Shahiid Aalea standing in the archway, dark eyes glittering. She was dressed in sheer, bloody red, the same color as her lips. Black curls tumbled about her shoulders, her skin alabaster pale. A woman like her could have seemed cold as wintersdeep in the wrong light. But Aalea’s smile was as warm as a glass of goldwine.

  “Shahiid,” Mia said, bowing low.

  “You return.” Dark eyes flitted over Mia’s face. “Absent victory, by the look.”

  “I needed a nevernight back in my own bed,” Mia said. “But the Dona is dead. And the map is almost within my grasp.”

  “You’d rather the boy there instead, I’ll wager?”

  Aalea nodded to Tric’s empty tomb. Mia stared too, saying nothing. The Shahiid ran fingertips over Tric’s name, carved in the stone.

  “You miss him?” she asked.

  Mia saw no sense in denying it.

  “Not like a piece of me is gone.” She shrugged. “But aye. I do.”

  Aalea pursed her lips, as if uncertain to speak.

  “I loved someone once,” she finally said. “Thinking this place, this life I chose, could not sully what I knew to be so pure.” The Shahiid ran her fingers across her lips. “I loved that man as the Night loved the Day. I promised him we’d be together forever.”

  “What happened?” Mia asked.

  “He died,” Aalea sighed. “Death is the only promise we all keep. This life we live . . . there is room in it for love, Mia. But a love like autumn leaves. Beautiful one turn. A bonfire the next. Only ashes the remainder.”

  Mia was quietened by the picture Aalea conjured. Eyes to the tombs. She’d no wish to raise suspicion, but the last thing in the world she wanted was to stand here talking about love and loss with a mass murderer. Not if what Ashlinn had told her was anything close to true . . .

  “Did you think one turn you might find yourself beside a happy hearth?” Aalea asked. “With a beau at your side and grandchildren on your knee?”

  “ . . . I’m not sure what I supposed anymore.”

  “Such is not the lot of a Blade,” Aalea took Mia’s hand, pressing it to her lips. “But there is beauty in knowing all things end, Mia. The brightest flames burn out the fastest. But in them, there is warmth that can last a lifetime. Even from a love that only lasts the nevernight. For people like us, there are no promises of forever.”

  Mia looked to the statue above. Those eyes that followed wherever she walked. “My father used to say the art of telling a good story lies in knowing when to stop. Keep talking long enough, you’ll find there’s no such thing as a happy ending.”

  Aalea smiled. “A wise man.”

  Mia shook her head. Remembering the way he died. What he died for.

  “Not that wise.”

  Ashlinn’s words ringing in her ears. Her jaw clenched.

  Aalea looked again to Tric’s empty tomb.

  “He would have made a fine Blade,” she sighed. “And he was a beauty. But he is gone. Do not allow your sorrows to stray you from your path, Mia.”

  Mia looked Aalea deep in the eye. Her voice was iron.

  “I know my path, Shahiid. Sometimes, sorrow is all that keeps me on it.”

  Aalea smiled, sweet and dark as chocolate.

  “Forgive me. An old teacher’s habits die hard, I suppose. You are a Blade, for now. And a woman. And a beauty at that.” Aalea leaned closer, eyes locked on Mia’s, lips just a breath from her own. “I have been ever fond of you. Know if ever you seek counsel, it is yours. And if ever you wish to build a bonfire to keep you warm one nevernight, I am here.”

  Mia’s pulse ran quicker, skin prickling. This close, she could smell the rose and honey of the Shahiid’s perfume. Staring into those dark, kohl-smudged eyes, she wondered again if there was some arkemy at work at work in Aalea’s scent, or if . . .

  Eyes on the prize, Corvere.

  Mia slipped her hand free of Aalea’s. Licked at suddenly dry lips.

  “My thanks, Shahiid,” she murmured. “I’ll think on it.”

  “I am certain you will, love,” Aalea said, her smile deepening. “But now, I will leave you to your memories. Do not let the Revered Father find you here absent quarry, unless you actually enjoy hearing him bluster.”

  The Shahiid of Masks inclined her head and drifted out of the room, leaving her perfume hanging in the air. Mia watched her go, the pull of the woman almost dragging her off-balance. But knowledge of why she was here tempered all, crushing the butterflies in her belly. She felt her shadow ripple, the dark swelling at her feet.

  “ . . . dangerous, that one . . .”

  “The same could be said of every woman I know.”

  “ . . . where to begin . . . ?”

  “You start at this end and head inward. I’ll begin at the Mother’s feet. Keep an ear out for company. We’ve need of none.”

  “ . . . you do not honestly expect this search to bear fruit . . .”

  “I don’t know what to expect anymore. Let’s be about it.”

  Mia crouched at the foot of Niah’s statue, and in the light of that bloody stained glass, she began searching the names carved into the stone. One by one. Thousands of them. A spiral, coiling out from the goddess’s feet. The names of kings, senators, legates, lords. Priests and sugargirls, beggars and bastards. The names of every life taken in the service of the Black Mother.

  The choir and Mister Kindly were her only company, and she worked in silence. Wondering what she would do if all Ashlinn had told her was true. Once or twice she was forced to hide herself beneath her cloak of shadows as a Hand or new acolytes wandered through the hall. But for the most part, she was uninterrupted, on her knees in the dark as the names of the dead blurred together inside her head.

  She remembered the turn he died. Her father. Standing before the noose and the baying mob. Cardinal Duomo on the scaffold, hedgerow beard and broad shoulders. Julius Scaeva standing above, with his jet-black hair and his deep, dark eyes and his consul’s robes dipped in purple and blood. There to watch the leaders of the rebellion executed for their crimes against the great Itreyan Republic. Justicus Darius Corvere and General Gaius Antonius had gathered an army, set to march it upon their own capital. But on the eve of the invasion had come salvation, the rebel leaders delivered into the Republic’s hands.

  Mia had been too young to ask. And then, too blinded to wonder.

  But how?

  How had the leaders of the rebellion fallen into the Senate’s clutches, when they were safely ensconced within an armed camp? Antonius was no fool. Mia’s father, neither. It would have taken God himself
to breach their defenses and steal them away.

  God. Or perhaps someone in service to a goddess . . .

  “ . . . mia . . .”

  She looked up at the tone in Mister Kindly’s voice, pupils dilating in the dark.

  “ . . . o, mia . . .”

  She scuttled across the floor to where the shadowcat stood. Searching the names carved in the granite. Her father and Antonius had been hanged before the Godsgrave mob—even if the Red Church had something to do with their capture, they hadn’t actually killed them. But if others fell during their capture, then perhaps . . .

  Mia’s belly turned to greasy ice.

  “’Byss and blood,” she whispered.

  Carved in the stone, just as Ashlinn promised. A single name among the thousands. The name of a slave who purchased his freedom, and yet remained by her father’s side afterward. Darius Corvere’s right hand. His majordomo. A man who would have been with his justicus as he prepared to march on his own capital. A man who would have been with her father until the end.

  Andriano Varnese.

  “ . . . it is true, then . . .”

  Cold ice in her belly as her fingers traced the name in the stone.

  Ashes and dust in her mouth.

  The Red Church had a hand in her father’s capture. The rebellion’s failure. Why else would the name of her father’s majordomo be carved here on the stone? How else would a general and his justicus be captured in the middle of ten thousand men?

  All this time, she’d been training in a den of murderers to avenge herself on the men who’d executed her father. Never imagining for a moment that the murderers she trained with played a role in that same execution.

  And all at the behest of the man she wished to murder most of all.

  Ash had spoken truth.

  All of it. Everything.

  Undone in a moment.

  “O, Goddess,” Mia breathed.

  She looked to the statue above her. The sword and scales in her hand. The jewels sparkling in her robe, like stars in the still of truedark. Those black, pitiless eyes.

  “O, Black Mother, what do I do now?”

  The crowd was thunder.

  It reverberated through the stone around her, echoed on the sweat-slick walls. Dust drifted down from the wooden beams above, the rumble of thousands of feet, the tremor of their applause, the deafening peals of their adulation all around her, crawling on her skin and vibrating in the pit of her belly.

  Mia had never heard anything like it in all her life.

  She stood in the holding cell beneath the arena, peering out through the bars to the sands beyond. Matteo stood beside her, dark eyes wide in wonder. Sidonius paced up and down their little cell, like a caged beast longing to be unleashed. Or perhaps, longing to run. Mia looked at the word COWARD branded into his chest. Wondered what exactly he’d done to earn it.

  “You ever attended a venatus, little Crow?” he asked.

  “My father would never allow it. He thought the games were barbaric.”

  Sidonius looked out to the mob and nodded. “A wise man.”

  “Not that wise . . .”

  The wagon ride from Crow’s Nest to Blackbridge had taken almost a week. As ever, Mia, Matteo and Sidonius had been kept apart from the true gladiatii, and none of them deigned to speak a word to her. They’d been well fed, however, and perhaps out of some sympathy for what was to come, Butcher had refrained from pissing in any more dinners. After six turns, they’d arrived in the shadows of the Drakespine Mountains, and rolled into the sprawling metropolis of Blackbridge.1

  Now, they waited under the city’s great arena. The first exhibitions were under way—public murders sponsored by the local administratii. Mia watched as the sands were baptized with blood, convicted criminals and heretics and escaped slaves being executed e gladiatii, whetting the crowd’s appetite for the bloodshed to come.

  The Blackbridge arena was huge, elliptical, four hundred feet long. It seated at least twenty thousand people, the sunslight kept off the crowd by moving mekwerk canvases overhead. The stalls and bleachers were packed, folk traveling from miles around to witness the blood and glory of the venatus. Mia could see vendors selling salted meats and wine. Wives sitting with husbands, children riding on their parents’ shoulders for a better view.

  Nothing brings the familia together like a nice afternoon of slaughter.

  As common chattel, Mia and the other recruits were scheduled to fight first. The Winnowing was always a bloody spectacle, and the editorii always tried to put on a good show for the mob. But the crowd still favored bouts between their heroes over the mass slaughter of nameless wretches, no matter how impressive their murders. The bouts featuring true gladiatii would be fought afterward, once the Winnowing was done.

  Staring out at the blood-soaked sand, Mia felt herself trembling. The long-forgotten sensation of fear was swelling in her gut, turning her legs to water. The absence of Mister Kindly and Eclipse was a gnawing emptiness. An almost physical pain. She gripped the bars to still her shaking hands, cursing herself a coward.

  You fought to be here. All this, your design. And now you stand there, trembling like a fucking child . . .

  She pictured Duomo and Scaeva presiding over her father’s execution in the forum. The baying crowd, howling for her father’s blood. Looking out into the arena seats, she saw those same faces, that same awful delight. The same kind of people who cheered for her father’s death.

  But not for mine, you bastards. This is not where I die.

  She curled her fingers into fists.

  I’ve far too much killing to do.

  “Recruits,” came a voice.

  Mia turned, saw Executus at the cell door. Instead of his usual leather armor and whip, he was dressed in britches and a fine doublet, set with the red falcon of the Familia Remus and the golden lion of the Familia Leonides. His long gray hair was braided, his beard combed—if not for the scar slicing down his face and the iron leg, he might have been mistaken for a wealthy don out for an afternoon’s sport.

  “Now is the hour,” he said, his voice grave. “Death or glory awaits. It shall be for you to decide which is given, and which received.”

  Matteo spoke with a trembling voice. “What shape will the Winnowing take?”

  “The editorii will announce once you are in position. But no matter the challenge, the way to victory is always the same.” He gave a soft shrug. “Don’t get killed.”

  Matteo looked ready to spew his mornmeal all over his sandals. Sidonius was pacing again, running his hand over his stubbled scalp. Mia shifted her weight, one foot to another, sick to her stomach.

  The executus looked among them, and for the first time, Mia thought she saw the tiniest hint of softness in his eyes.

  “Every gladiatii once stood where you stand now,” he said. “Myself among them. No matter what you face on those sands, fear is the only enemy in your path. Conquer your fear, and you can conquer the world.”

  He placed his hand on his chest. Nodded once.

  “Sanguii e Gloria. I will see you after the Winnowing as blooded gladiatii, or by the Hearth when I go to my eternal sleep. Aa watch over you, and Tsana guide your hand.”

  Arena guards in black armor marched into the cell, escorted Mia and the others down a long corridor. She heard trumpets signaling the end of the executions. A roar echoed above their heads in response. Through the walls and beneath her feet, Mia heard the creak and groan of metal on metal, the grinding of mighty gears.

  “What is that?” Matteo whispered.

  “Mekwerk beneath the arena floor,” Mia replied. “The editorii control everything that happens on the sands from the underbelly.”

  “You know an awful lot about the venatus for a girl who’s never attended one,” Sidonius muttered.

  Mia tried to smile mysteriously in reply, but couldn’t quite manage it for the butterflies in her belly.

  They were marched into a larger holding pen, sealed with a great iron portc
ullis. Beyond, Mia could see the blistering sunslight, and the waiting arena. The sands daubed in crimson. The crowd swaying and rolling like water.

  The room was filled with perhaps forty others, lined up in orderly rows. Each was handed a heavy iron helm with a tall crest of scarlet horse hair, a short steel gladius and a broad rectangular shield daubed with a red crown. No armor. Nothing to protect the rest of her skin but the strips of fabric around her hips and chest. Mia looked among the mob, saw folk of every color and size, mostly men, a handful of women. In their eyes, she saw fervor, she saw fury, she saw fatalism.

  But most of all, she saw fear.

  “When the doors open,” bellowed a guard in a centurion’s plume, “take your place upon the sands and upon the stage of history! Sanguii e Gloria!”

  “Four Daughters, I’m not ready for this . . . ,” Matteo whispered.

  “Stay staunch,” Mia said, squeezing his hand. “Stay beside me.”

  “You have a plan, little Crow?” Sidonius murmured.

  Trumpets sounded again, the crowd roaring in answer.

  “Aye.” She swallowed thickly. “Don’t get killed.”

  A voice rang out across the arena, loud as the bellowing crowd.

  “Citizens of Itreya! Honored administratii! Senators and marrowborn! Welcome to the forty-second venatus of Blackbridge!”

  The roof above Mia’s head shook, dust falling as the folk on the bleachers overhead thundered in reply.

  “In honor of Governor Salvatore Valente, we present epic contest between heroic gladiatii of the finest collegia in the Republic! But first, those who seek glory upon the sands must be proved worthy before the eyes of the Everseeing! The time is nigh! The hour has come! The Winnowing is here!”

  Mia pushed her helm down onto her head, checked her gladius, missing Mister Kindly like a hole in her chest.

  Conquer your fear, and you can conquer the world . . .

  “Behold!” came the cry. “As we present to you, the Siege of Blackbridge!”

  Applause came then, almost deafening. But beneath the crowd’s fervor, Mia heard the great grinding under the floor rising in pitch. A commotion broke out in the front ranks, men and women pushing forward against the portcullis to see. Before Mia’s wondering eyes, the arena floor split apart, and a small keep made of stone began rising from the mechanism in the stadium’s underbelly.