cannot hear you, my son,” his father said, quiet anger in his tone.
“I said, he does not follow her,” Jonnen replied. “He tries to lead her instead.”
“To what?”
The boy looked at the chess piece in his father’s hand. He felt like that, now. A little piece on a board that was far too big. His time with Mia already seemed like a dream. The way he felt about her was a tangled mess inside his head—admiration, scorn, affection, horror. Perhaps even love. She was bold and brave and twice as big as life, and he knew she was important. That she had a role to play. But he’d known her all of eight weeks. He’d known his father nine years. And some loyalties just don’t die quietly, no matter what the storybooks say.
“The Crown of the Moon,” Jonnen heard himself whisper.
His father blinked. Surprise in his coal-black stare. The boy savored that a moment—it wasn’t often he found his father on the back foot.
“Mother spoke that name to me,” the imperator said. “In my dream. And my old friend Cardinal Duomo sought a map to that same place last year. He was of the belief it held the key to a magik that would undo the Red Church entirely. And despite my daughter’s efforts, Ashlinn Järnheim stole it.”
“She did.”
His father leaned forward on his elbows, looking Jonnen in the eye.
“Who, or what, is the Moon, my son?”
“… I cannot tell you, Father.”
His father picked up the gravebone dagger from the chessboard. Staring at Jonnen as he twirled it through his fingers. He didn’t say a word. But Jonnen could feel his glower, like a truelight heat beating on his skin. With a malevolent hiss, Whisper slipped free of the boy’s shadow, and without the passenger to consume it, his fear returned. Flooding cold into his belly and making his little hands tremble. The fear of disappointment. Of anger. Of hurt. The fear that only a boy who has looked into his father’s eyes and seen what he might one night become can ever truly know.
“I cannot tell you. But…”
Jonnen licked at dry lips. Searching for his voice.
“I can show you instead.”
* * *
“… Extraordinary…”
“It is at that,” the imperator breathed.
They stood far beneath the City of Bridges and Bones, before a black and gleaming pool. The air was oily and thick, drenched with the stench of blood and iron. Jonnen had explained something of what they might see below, and it simply wouldn’t do for soldiers of the faithful to learn their imperator was darkin—thus their Luminatii guards had remained at the entrance to the catacombs.
Jonnen, his father, and Whisper had stepped inside, down stairs of cold, dark stone and into the city’s underdark. The light of a single arkemical torch was all they had to see by, held high in the boy’s hand. They journeyed through the twisting tunnels of the necropolis, then into the shifting labyrinth of faces and hands beyond. Jonnen led them from memory, unerringly, for what seemed like hours in the lonely gloom. Until finally, they stepped out into a vast and circular chamber.
The boy stood now at his father’s side, watching their shadows stretch before them. Whisper slithered out from his master’s shadow, hypnotized, just as Mister Kindly and Eclipse had been. All around them, the beautiful faces etched on the walls and the floor were moving, just as they’d done the last time Jonnen stood here. The ground shifted and rolled beneath their sandals as stone hands reached toward them, stone lips whispering silent pleas. Jonnen understood who these faces belonged to now.
Their Mother.
Their true Mother.
The air was alight with it. Hunger. Anger. Hate. The anguished faces sloped downward into that deep depression, at once familiar and utterly alien, barely visible in the torch’s pale glow. The shoreline was all open hands and open mouths. And pooled there, gleaming dark and velvet smooth, lay the pool of black blood.
Godsblood.
“I think…”
His father took one hesitant step forward. He stretched out his hand, and Jonnen swore he saw the surface of the pool ripple in response.
“I think I saw this place. In my dream.”
“… Here he fell…,” the serpent whispered.
“Here he fell,” the little boy replied.
“And there is more of this?” The imperator stared at the pool, finally turning to look at his son. “Awaiting her at the Crown of the Moon?”
“I do not know,” the boy admitted, his voice small and afraid. “But Tric told Mia she must journey there to unite the pieces