Mia had her knife out, smiling.
“That’s the sweetest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
Tric drew his scimitar, those pretty hazel eyes locked on hers. Confusion and rage boiling behind her stare. A soup of it, thick in her head, silencing the common sense shouting at the back of the room. She wanted to kill this boy, she realized. Cut him belly to throat and wash her hands inside him. Soak herself to the elbows and paint her lips and breasts with his blood. Her thighs ached at the thought. Breath coming faster as she pressed one hand between her legs, murder and lust all a-tumble in her head as Mister Kindly whispered from her shadow.
“… this is not you…”
“Away,” she hissed. “To the Maw with you, daemon.”
“… these thoughts are not your own…”
Tric was advancing, eyes narrowed to knife-cuts, veins standing taut in his throat. He was breathing heavy, pupils dilated. Mia glanced below his waist and realized he was hard, britches bulging, the thought making her breath quicken. She blinked sweat from her eyes and pictured her blade slipping in and out of his chest, his into hers, tasting copper on his tongue …
“This isn’t right…,” she breathed.
Tric lunged, a sweeping blow passing over her head as she swayed. She aimed a kick for his groin, blocked by his knee and tempted for a second to simply drop to her own. She stabbed at his exposed belly, knowing this was wrong, this was wrong, pulling the blow at the last moment and rolling aside as he swung again at her head. He was grinning like a lunatic, and the thought struck her funny as well. Trying not to laugh, trying to think beyond her desire to kill him, fuck him, both at once, lying with him inside her as they stabbed and bit and bled to their endings on the sand.
“Tric, stop it,” she gasped.
“Come here…”
Chest heaving, hand outstretched even as she moved closer. Panting. Wanting.
“Something is wrong. This is wrong.”
“Come here,” he said, stalking her across the sand, swords raised.
“… this is not real…”
She shook her head, blinking the sting from her eyes.
“… you are mia corvere…,” said Mister Kindly. “… remember…”
She held out her hand and her shadow trembled, stretching out from her feet and engulfing the boy’s. He stuck fast in the sand and she backed away, arms up as if to ward off a blow. The knife was heavy in her grip, drawing her back, mind flooded with the thought of plunging it inside him as he plunged inside her but no, NO, that wasn’t her (this isn’t me) and with a desperate cry, she hurled her blade away.
She fell to her knees, flopped onto her belly, eyes screwed shut. Sand in her teeth as she shook her head, pushed the lust and the murder down, focused on the thought Mister Kindly had gifted her, clinging to it like a drowning man at straw.
“I am Mia Corvere,” she breathed. “I am Mia Corvere…”
Slow clapping.
Mia lifted her head at the somber sound, echoing inside her head. She saw figures around her, clad in desert red, faces covered. A dozen, gathered about a slight man with a curved sword at his waist. The hilt was fashioned in the likeness of human figures with feline heads—male and female, naked and intertwined. The blade was Ashkahi blacksteel.2
“Mia?” Tric said, his voice now his own.
Mia looked the clapping man over from her cradle in the dust. He was well built, handsome as a fistful of devils. His hair was curled, dark, peppered with gray. His face was of a man in his early thirties, but deep, cocoa brown eyes spoke of years far deeper. A half-smile loitered at the corners of his lips like it was planning to steal the silverware.
“Bravo,” he said. “I’ve not seen anyone resist the Discord so well since Lord Cassius.”
As the man stepped forward, the others about him broke as if on cue. They began unloading the caravan, unhitching the exhausted camels. Four of them lifted Naev into a sling, carrying her toward the cliff. Mia could see no rope. Could see no—
“What is your name?”
“Mia, master. Mia Corvere.”
“And who is your Shahiid?”
“Mercurio of Godsgrave.”
“Ah, Mercurio at last musters the courage to send another lamb to the Church of Slaughter?” The man held out his hand. “Interesting.”
She took the offered hand, and he pulled her up from the dust. Her mouth was dry, heart thudding. Echoes of murder and desire thrumming in her veins.
“You are Tric.” The man turned to the boy with a smile. “Who carries the blood and not the name of the Threedrake clan. Adiira’s student.”
Tric nodded slow, dragged his locks from his eyes. “Aye.”
“My name is Mouser, servant of Our Lady of Blessed Murder and Shahiid of Pockets in her Red Church.” A small bow. “I believe you have something for us.”
The question hung like a sword above Mia’s head. A thousand turns. Sleepless nevernights and bloody fingers and poison dripping from her hands. Broken bones and burning tears and lies upon lies. Everything she’d done, everything she’d lost—all of it came to this.
Mia reached for the pouch of teeth at her belt.
Her belly turned to ice.
“… No,” she breathed.
Feeling about her waist, her tunic, eyes widening in a panic as she realized—
“My tithe! It’s gone!”
“O, dear,” said Mouser.
“But I just had it!”
Mia searched the sands about her, fearing she’d lost it in the struggle with Tric. Scrabbling in the dust, tears in her eyes. Mister Kindly swelled and rolled inside her shadow’s dark, but even he couldn’t keep her terror completely at bay—the thought that everything had been for nothing … Crawling in the dirt, hair tangled across her eyes, chewing her lip and—
Clink, clink.
She looked up. Saw a familiar sheepskin purse held in supple fingers.
Mouser’s smile.
“You should be more careful, little lamb. Shahiid of Pockets, as I said.”
Mia stood and snatched the purse with a snarl. Opening the bag, she counted the teeth therein, clutched it in a bloodless fist. She looked the man over, rage engulfing her terror for a moment. She had to resist the urge to add his teeth to her collection.
“That was heartless,” she said.
The man smiled wider, sadness lingering at the corners of those old eyes.
“Welcome to the Red Church,” he said.
1. The “Philosopher’s Stone,” as it was colloquially known, was a thin spear of rock off the coast of Godsgrave, surrounded by unforgiving reefs and drake-infested deeps. Atop the stone sat an abyssal keep, carved from the rock, it was said, by Niah herself. Into this pit, Godsgrave poured any criminal not deserving of outright execution. The prison overflowed with brigands and thieves, and the underpaid Administratii seemed almost entirely unconcerned with provisioning, medical care, or ensuring convicts were released in a timely fashion.
A one-year term could easily stretch into three or five before the prison’s clerks would get around to processing the required paperwork. As such, most prisoners spent much of their time thinking deep thoughts about injustice, the nature of criminality, and how that pair of boots they stole wasn’t really worth the five years of life they paid for it. Hence the nickname “Philosopher’s Stone.”
Owing to the overcrowding, the Itreyan Senate had devised an ingenious and entertaining method of population control known as “the Descent,” held during truedark Carnivalé every three years. However, an unexplained “incident” during the most recent Descent—also the night of the Truedark Massacre—saw large portions of the Philosopher’s Stone destroyed, and the spire itself partially collapsed. It has been abandoned ever since; a hollow, lean-to shell, supposedly haunted by the ghosts of the hundreds murdered within, the horrors of their deaths embedded in the stone for all eternity.