Mia turned away from the slaughter she’d unleashed, hardening her heart. Ahead, through the wind-borne dust and shimmering heat haze, she could barely make out the shadows of the Blackverge Mountains.
The Crown of the Moon awaited her beyond.
Digging her heels hard into Julius’s flanks, Mia rode on.
* * *
Five turns later, Mia stood with her back to a falling sun, chewing her fingernails. In front of her, spurs of red stone rose into broken foothills and from there, into foreboding peaks. Behind her, Julius stood in a pall of dust, his jowls white with spit.
“I think this is it,” Mia muttered.
The camel bellowed and dropped a few pounds of shit into the dirt.
“Look, it’s not like that map was drawn by a master cartographer,” Mia growled. “It was copied off the wall of a thousand-year-old temple, then copied again in some dingy alley parlor in some fuckarse nowhere town on the north coast of Ashkah. It may not have been one hundred percent accurate.”
The camel warbled again, thick with disdain.
“Shut up, Julius.”
This was the fifth passage through the range she’d tried in as many hours, and Mia’s hope was fading. Each previous foray into the mountains had eventually finished in dead ends, or defiles too narrow to pass. Fuckarsing about with all these wasted attempts, she’d burned her lead on the Seventeenth Legion entirely. Looking to the south, she saw the soldiers were only a few hours’ march away now.
“These bastards don’t give up easily,” she murmured.
She had killed a few hundred of their cavalrymen, she supposed. Even if they weren’t under orders from their imperator, they’d still hunt and kill her on general principle now. But looking at the oncoming horde of legionaries, Mia could see their commander wasn’t just sending his heavy horse this time. He was sending everyone.
Mia strode across the broken ground, grabbed her camel’s rigging, and dragged herself up onto its hump. The beast bellowed a complaint, stomped its hooves, and tried to throw the girl off his back.
“O, shut the fuck up, Julius,” Mia sighed.
She struck the beast’s flanks with her riding crop, and the beast broke into a trot, leading them into a canyon between two jagged cliffs. Mia wondered if she might set an ambush at the pass for the soldiers following, but soon abandoned the notion—the gap between the peaks was wide enough to send an entire legion through abreast. Still, as she rode on, a lonely crow singing above her, she found herself frowning at the canyon walls about them.
These weren’t like the cliffs around the Quiet Mountain. The rocks weren’t weathered or smoothed by time. The mountains near the Church felt old, shrouded in the dust of ages, thick with history. These mountains felt … new.
The land sloped downward, as if she were headed into a depression. And riding on, Mia couldn’t shake the sense of foreboding crawling on her skin. The whisperwinds were growing louder. At times, she swore she could make out words among the shapeless babble. Voices that reminded her of her mother.
Her father.
Ashlinn.
Mia shook her head to clear it, feeling dizzy and lost. It seemed as if she were riding through a fog, though in truth, the light of the single sun was still bright at her back. She took a swallow of water from her saddlebag, wiped the sweat from her brow.
Something feels wrong here.
Magik, perhaps. The remnants of Ashkahi werkings, shattered and lost in the Empire’s fall. Even after centuries, so many years beneath the burning suns, it seemed the stain lingered, like blood seeping into broken earth. But sure and true, she could at last feel it in her bones now. A certainty in her chest.
This is the right way.
She rode on, the wind scrabbling and clawing through the stones. Mia’s hands and feet were tingling, a vague and muzzy feeling in her skull. An itch of sweat, dripping down her spine. She concentrated on the broken ground ahead, fancying she could hear her mother’s voice again. She could feel the cool press of Tric’s lips on hers as she kissed him goodbye. The touch of Ashlinn’s fingertips between her legs, the girl’s breath in her lungs. Unsure of what was real, what was memory. And always, ever, the whisperwinds. Close enough that she could feel soft breath brushing against her earlobe, goosebumps on her skin.
She heard crunching under Julius’s feet. Looking down to the earth beneath them and seeing it was littered with old bones. Human,