“Report to the justicus all is secure.”
Beneath the drying scarlet, Mia saw the boy blanch at the thought of stepping back into that awful pool. But he waded back into the red, disappeared down into the flow. Mia watched him go, turning her eyes back to Adonai. This was her last chance to cut off the beachhead. If the speaker died before the First Century came across— The blood surged about her, undertow sucking at her heels. She staggered, grasped the pool’s edge, slicking the marble with red. Adonai shook his head again, ever so slight, hands fluttering.
Don’t even think it.
Mia grit her teeth. Watching as the First Century began making the Walk. Man after man, minute after minute, dragged from the blood by their fellows. And finally, rising from the red, Mia saw the man she’d dreamed of killing for six long years. Waving aside the soldiers who sought to help him up, stepping from the pool, dripping great floods of gore onto the stone. Dark red, clotted thick in his beard, cascading down his back. Shoulders broad as the Mountain itself.
The justicus of the Luminatii Legions loomed over Speaker Adonai, mouth curled in disgust.
“Godlessness,” he growled. “Godlessness and heresy.”
Adonai said nothing, meeting the justicus’s gaze without flinching. A faint smile at his pretty lips. Remus wiped the blood from his face, turned to his second as an aide began strapping him into a beautiful suit of gravebone armor.
“Centurion, report.”
“The level is ours, Justicus. First and Second Centuries accounted for.”
“Excellent.” He motioned to Adonai. “Bind this apostate bastard good and tight.”
Soldiers marched forward, blood-soaked lengths of rope clutched in their hands. They shoved Adonai to the floor, lashed hands and feet behind his back like a calf awaiting slaughter. A rag was stuffed in his mouth, another tied about his eyes. One of the soldiers put a boot in for good measure, but Remus stopped him with a raised hand.
The justicus looked to Osrik, his tone curt.
“What of the Ministry?”
“Ashlinn knew her job,” Osrik said. “They’ll be trussed up like Great Tithe hogs when you arrive at the Sky Altar. Fear not.”
“Wait here until we return with the vaunted Lord of Blades and his godless flock.” He motioned to Adonai. “Should this heretic even twitch in a manner that displeases you, begin cutting off pieces of his sister until his behavior improves.”
Osrik nodded. Adonai tensed at the threat, but otherwise remained motionless.
Now fully armored, Remus looked around at his men, grim and blood-soaked. He reached to his belt, drew a long, beautifully carved gravebone longsword, crows in flight along the pommel and hilt. Mia’s eyes narrowed as she recognized it—it had hung on the walls of her father’s study beside his collection of maps.
Just how much more can this man take from me?
“Righteous brothers,” Remus began. “This eve, we strike a blow against a blasphemy that has blackened our glorious Republic for decades. The ministers of this godless Church are to be brought back alive to Godsgrave for interrogation. But any other night-worshipping bastard you cross within these walls is to be shown no mercy. We are the Right Hand of Aa, and this eve, we bring this house of heresy to its knees.”
The justicus held his stolen blade to his brow, lowered his head. The legionaries around the room did the same, lips moving in unison.
“Hear me, Aa. Hear me, Father. Your flame, my heart. Your light, my soul. For your name, and your glory, and your justice, I march. Shine upon me.”
Remus raised his head. Nodded at his men.
“Luminus Invicta.”
CHAPTER 33
STEPS
She waited.
Though her mind swam with images of what might be happening up those stairs, though her blood boiled at the thought of Ashlinn’s betrayal, her revenge against Remus within her grasp and yet untasted, she waited. If the Luminatii got Cassius and the Revered Mother in their clutches, every Red Church disciple was at risk. Her friends. Mercurio, too. Her first step had to be cutting off Remus’s escape. Cassius and Drusilla couldn’t be allowed to fall into the Confessionate’s hands.
And so she lurked in the blood. Cursing herself a fool. She knew it for certain now. Ash had killed Lotti. Tried to frame her for the murder. Every moment, every word she’d spoken had been a lie. Hush had warned her, too, that eve in the Hall of Truths.
you have one friend inside these walls
not carlotta
not tric or ashlinn
and not me
That friend lurked in the shadows of the room, watching with his not-eyes. Remus and his troops had marched out. But there were still a dozen Luminatii in the speaker’s chamber, clad now in ornate leather, embossed with the sigil of Aa. The armor was thick, the buckles made of wood, not a rivet or screw anywhere—specially crafted for the assault, no doubt. A half-dozen men stood watch over Adonai and Marielle. Six more at the threshold, watching the corridor beyond. The weaver was still unconscious, Osrik crouched beside her, his blade lingering at her throat.
Start at the beginning …
Mia couldn’t see much beneath her cloak anyway, and so she closed her eyes. Reached out to the shadows in the room. Just like she had among the strawmen in the Hall of Songs, she could feel those shadows like she could feel herself. She remembered what it was to be that fourteen-year-old girl again. Tearing Aa’s statue to pieces outside the Basilica Grande. Stepping between the shadows like a wraith. But most of all, she remembered the man who helped start it all, who’d seen her father hung, her mother in chains, her brother dead before he could walk.
She spread her arms beneath the blood. Fingers outstretched. Reaching through the flickering gloom, out to the shadows at each legionary’s feet. Curling them into hooks, digging them into the soles of the soldiers’ boots, every one. And, quiet as she could, she rose from Adonai’s pool.
She realized her mistake at once—though she was still hidden beneath her cloak of shadows, the blood she was soaked in wasn’t. As she hauled herself up on the ledge, scarlet spattered on the stone, bloody handprints appearing beneath her palms. The legionaries in the room turned to the sound, Osrik’s brow creased.
Confusion. Hesitation.
It was enough.
Mia stepped into the shadow beneath her stepped out
of the shadow
on the wall behind Osrik One of the legionaries saw movement from the corner of his eye, cried out in alarm, but by then Mia’s knife was already buried hilt-deep in the join between the boy’s neck and swordarm, severing the tendons clean. Osrik screamed, blade falling from nerveless fingers, Mia bringing her knee up into his jaw and sending him crashing to the floor. She snatched up his dagger, and then she was
stepping into the dark at her feet and out of the shadows behind another legionary, cutting his hamstrings with her blade and dropping him to the deck. The man beside him struck out at her with his cudgel and she swayed backward, the blow whistling past her chin, stepping inside his guard and burying her knee into his groin hard enough to make every man in the room wince in sympathy. The soldiers cried out, but trying to charge this gore-soaked horror from the sorcerer’s blood pit, they found their boots stuck fast to the stone.
Mia could feel it. The power of the night, coursing beneath her skin. The hungry Dark. The Mother herself, the goddess who’d marked her, staring with black eyes at these men who’d invaded her holy ground.
And she was angry.
She dropped one, then another, snatching up a cudgel and cracking it across jaws and the backs of skulls, skipping between patches of darkness and leaving only bloody footprints behind. They were men of the finest cohort in the legion—Remus hadn’t been foolish enough to bring any marrowborn lads or senators’ sons with him to the Mountain. But faced with this blood-soaked horror, black eyes and savage smile and red, red hands, soon enough, the fear had them.