sup from between the blood-slicked thighs of some nameless young Hand (but they were all nameless, weren’t they?), listening to the lass’s heart beat in time with his mouthfuls, swift as bird wings against the cage of her ribs. Her pulse thudding red upon his tongue, lub dub lub dub, so sweet and warm he could have swallowed the girl whole.
But he drank too much. He’d been ill afterward, spewing crimson over the bone-white planes of his palms, on his knees and shaking. The perfection of his torture never failed to amuse and outrage in equal measure, the bitterness of his curse made all the crueler by the fact he’d chosen it for himself. He knew the tithe his power would take before he claimed it. Knew the price to be paid for dredging up magiks long buried in the calamity of Old Ashkah. To have power over the blood, he must be enslaved to the blood. Just as Marielle was a slave of her flesh.
Blood was a speaker’s only sustenance, but it was also an emetic. To drink too much was to know awful sickness. To drink too little was to know awful hunger. A constant, flawless sanguine torture.
What price, power?
“Any word?” Solis asked.
The Revered Father’s chambers were nestled high in the Mountain, atop a twisting spiral of tightening stairs. Since he’d been given the role by Drusilla, Solis had done very little to redecorate. Arkemical glass sculpture on the ceiling, white furs on the floor, white paint on the walls. An ornate desk stacked high with papers and tomes, overflowing bookshelves lined the chamber left and right.
Behind the desk, the wall was carved with hundreds of recesses. Inside them, Drusilla had kept keepsakes from her turns as an assassin—jewelry and weapons and trinkets taken from her victims. There was still a gleam of silver to be seen there—hundreds of blood phials, sealed with dark wax. But the only trophy Solis kept from his past was a pair of rusted, bloodstained manacles, hanging on the wall above his head.
“How many didst thou slay, Lastman?” Adonai asked, a small smile on his lips.
“What?” Solis asked.
Adonai glanced at the Revered Father. Heavyset. Heavy jaw. Heavy hands. Marielle had mended his burns, but she couldn’t regrow his hair—his ash blond eyebrows were mere shadows, his once-spiked beard reduced to bedraggled fluff. His dark robe strained at the muscles in his arms, drawn up around his elbows to show the scars etched on his forearm. Thirty-six deaths wrought in the Mother’s name, each scribed in the smooth song of his skin. But …
“In the Descent.” Adonai nodded to the rusty manacles. “Beating and bludgeoning thy way through the Philosopher’s Stone, freedom thy goal. How many didst thou slay?” Adonai tilted his head. “And begrudge our new imperator for it, dost thou? ’Twas Julius Scaeva’s notion to empty the Stone with the hands of its own occupants, neh?”
“What word from Galante?” Solis asked, ignoring the question.
“None yet,” Adonai lied, the same small smile on his lips.
“None?” Spiderkiller asked.
Adonai turned from the manacles on the wall, looking to the other members of the Ministry. They were seated in a semicircle around the Lastman’s desk, a trio of murderers with a tally between them that would make the Night smile.
If, of course, they had any interest in the Mother of Night at all.
Spiderkiller first. Walnut skin, saltlocks twisted into elegant curls atop her head. She was clad in her traditional emerald green, gold as always at her throat. The average Itreyan citizen would never touch a gold coin in their lives, and yet Spiderkiller dripped with it. The chains at her throat could have paid for an estate in upper Valentia. The rings on her fingers could have freed half the slaves in Stormwatch. She wore the face of the dour Shahiid of Truths well, but she hid her love of coin worst among the Ministry. She was a bower bird, decorating the nest of her own flesh. Vanity wrapped plain across expanses of dark skin.
Mouser next. Mouser with his dark, tousled hair and his young man’s face and old man’s eyes. Mouser, with his estates scattered all across the Republic, each one with a life-sized portrait of himself in the foyer and a dressing room full of women’s underthings, deep as a forest. Adonai knew of at least seven of Mouser’s wives, though he was certain there were more. Only the Mother knew how many children he’d spawned. To Mouser, immortality was best achieved through