The man twitched, toppling face-first from the tray. Luminatii cried warning as the body tumbled beneath the wagon’s belly and was pulped under the wheels. The middle wagon jolted hard as the men inside it bellowed. Falling over each other and throwing off gravity’s center, the wagon lurched sideways with the bright snap of breaking timbers and tore itself loose from its partner.
Dust and men flying. Axels and bones breaking. Mia reached into the bag at her belt, fished out a handful of shiny red globes. And as a half-dozen blurry shapes peered over the wagon’s tail to see what in the Daughters’ names was happening at the hitch, she let them fly, up and over the railing, and into the wagon’s tray.
Crackling booms sounded across the Whisperwastes, explosions unfurling in the wagon’s confines and tearing the cover and the men inside to pieces. And throwing aside her cloak of shadows, Mia slung herself into the carnage.
Blades drawn. Teeth bared. Moving among blinded and stumbling men like a serpent through water. Steel flashing, soldiers falling, crying out and swinging their cudgels at the blur in their midst; a bloodstained smudge moving through the smoke, wicked-sharp blades flashing. A few thought her some thing from the abyss, some daemonic servant of Niah set on their trail. Others mistook her for a horror from the Whisperwastes, a monstrosity spat into being by twisted magiks. But as she wove and swayed among them, blades whistling, breath hissing, the swiftest among them realized she wasn’t a daemon. Nor a horror. But a girl. Just a girl. And that thought terrified them more than any daemon or horror they could name.
She could feel them. Even the ones she couldn’t see. The brighter the light, the deeper the shadows. And she felt them, just as she’d felt the shadows of the strawmen targets in the Hall of Songs. Lashing out with all the skill Naev had gifted her, all the fury of that fourteen-year-old girl on the steps of the Basilica Grande. No cardinals or blazing Trinities to help them now. No sunsteel burning in their hands or white, polished armor at their breasts. Just leather on their skin and dust in their eyes, the blackened corpses of their comrades on the deck around them, the echo of the explosions ringing in their ears. And she, armed with all the hatred of all the years, daughter of murdered parents, sister to a murdered brother, marked of a darkest mother.
And one by one, each and all, she fed them to the Maw.
The camels pulling the wagon galloped on, still terrified enough of the kraken to keep running without a driver to whip them. With her foes inside the wagon dead, Mia slung the crossbow off her back. Fell to one knee and took aim at the nearest camel rider. She put a quarrel through his heart, loaded another and put it through a second’s throat. A few Luminatii veered out of range, but to their credit, most roared challenge and whipped their beasts harder, bearing down on the wagon and the girl inside. These were men of the First and Second Centuries, after all—the finest troops Godsgrave had to offer. They’d not be bested by some heretic child.
But her crossbow sang and the wyrdglass flew, men tumbling from their saddles or simply blasted free. A grizzled giant of a man made it to the wagon’s railing, but a throwing knife in his larynx silenced him forever. Another leaped from his camel onto the wagon’s tail, but as he clawed his way up, she shoved a globe of ruby wyrdglass into his mouth and kicked him free, the resulting explosion taking out another camel’s legs and sending its rider flying, despite all lack of wings.
Scanning the wastes, Mia saw the kraken had given up the chase—between silencing her calls to the Dark and the feast she’d left behind, the behemoths seemed well content, rolling and tumbling as they chased screaming Luminatii across the sands. Sheathing her blades, Mia leapt into the driver’s chair, intent now on the wagons ahead.
In all the carnage, Remus’s train had gained a solid lead. But with the weight of her unneeded companions shed, Mia’s camels traveled all the swifter, spitting and snorting and making whatever noise it is that camels make as they ran.1 Her wagon bounced over rocky dunes, weaving through gardens of broken Ashkahi monoliths, slowly closing the gap. She could see Remus in the lead carriage, but only because the man was so huge—everyone else was simply a blur through the dust and grit. And yet, she was acutely aware that at least sixty well-trained and fanatical thugs awaited her ahead, should her wagon ever catch up. Weighing the less-than-favorable odds, she wondered what exactly she was going to do when she got there.
Fortunately, she never had to learn the answer.
The Luminatii in Remus’s train had just watched her murder over sixty of their fellows, after all, and while it’s noteworthy that none of them actually stopped to help, Itreya’s finest were inclined to bear a grudge. As Mia’s wagon bore down on them, the soldiers manning the crossbows opened fire. Mia couldn’t exactly hide beneath her shadowcloak; firstly, she’d be unable to see, and thus, steer, but more important, it wouldn’t take the finest scholar of the Grand Collegium to figure out where the driver of a wagon was sitting, invisible or not. But Justicus Remus, more than a little impressed that this slip of a girl had just managed to single-handedly murder half a century of his finest men, seemed more concerned with escape than revenge. And so, instead of ordering his men to shoot at the lunatic flogging her poor camels into a lather, he ordered his men to shoot the poor camels instead.
And shoot them they did.
The first bolt struck the lead camel in the chest, felled it like a tree. The beast stumbled to its knees, snarled up in its harness and tripping the beast behind it. Another bolt sailed out of the dust, followed by a third, and amid the sickening crunch of bones and the bellows of camels in agony, Mia’s wagon crashed into the wretched tangle that had been hauling it, flipped end over end, and skidded to a bloody, screaming halt.
Mia was flung free, sailing a good twenty feet through the air before plunging face-first at the sand. She managed to tuck her shoulder as she hit, the wind knocked out of her as she tumbled, sand hissing, one boot flying free, finally rolling to a cursing, breathless rest some forty feet from the ruins of her ride.
She tried to rise, ears ringing, head swimming. Stumbling to her knees as a few more quarrels sailed out of the dust, watching as Remus’s wagon and Lord Cassius and the Ministry and her revenge all galloped farther and farther away.
She collapsed to all fours. Retched. Her ribs felt cracked, her mouth full of dust and bile. Thumping down on her belly, clawing at the sand.
Unable, at the last, even to crawl.
She’d got so close.
So close.
But again, at the final hurdle, she’d stumbled. And she’d fallen.
“Story of my life,” she muttered.
Her eyes fluttered closed.
She sighed.
And darkness fell.
CHAPTER 35
KARMA
Nudge.
Mia groaned, not daring to open her eyes.
Her head was ringing, ribs aching, every breath a battle.
She’d no idea how long she’d lain there.
Minutes?
Hours?
She could feel the suns above her, burning just outside her eyelids.
She knew what awaited her if she dared open them.
Failure.
Her wagon wrecked. Her camels slaughtered. The Quiet Mountain lay a turn back to the east, but hurt as she was, she’d be lucky to make it in two—presuming she didn’t get eaten by kraken or dustwraiths in the meantime. Getting to Last Hope on foot from here was impossible, but sti— Nudge.
Something soft and wet and whiskered. Smearing her lips with thick and warm. A tiny part of her brain screamed very loudly the Something was quite big and very obviously alive and was now snuffling at her, potentially as a prelude to eating her.
Her eyes fluttered open, pain waiting just beyond. She hissed, squinting up into a pair of wide nostrils, nudging her again and smearing her lips with—O, joy of joys—more snot. An enormous pink tongue smacked at huge yellow teeth and Mia came fully awake, scrambling away in a cloud of fine red dust until she realized exactly what had been trying to eat her.
It was a horse.
Black and glossy and twenty hands high.