Their music falling silent, their laughter falling still. A chill brushed the backs of their necks. A stillness deeper than death. Bringing to the pious and the sinner alike, a whisper.
A warning.
A word.
Run.
The fear spread out from her feet like a black tide. The suns had never seemed so far away, the night above never so dark, and they felt it, those mortals—felt it in their chests and in their bones. She was a reckoning. A ruin. The vengeance of every orphaned daughter, every murdered mother, every bastard son. Her father awaiting her, ahead and above.
Many waiting to become one.
And so they ran. The cobbles emptying before her. Rats flooding up from the sewers, fleeing as if she were dark flame. Folk scattering for their lives, not just back to the comfort of hearth and home, but down to the waterline, across the aqueduct, like the vermin all about them. Panic, pure and black, rippling before her. The city about her trembling, this tomb of a fallen divinity too long profaned by the tread of mortal feet. The grave of a fallen god, set now to become the grave of an empire.
She stalked the emptying streets, the deserted thoroughfares, on toward the forum. Pausing beside an upturned cart, she opened one pale hand. The shadows lifted a fallen mask, leafed in gold, placing it over her eyes. It was shaped like a crescent. Like a moon not yet full. The dark was alive about her. Inside her.
Pale and beautiful, she walked on.
She wore the night, gentlefriends.
And all the night came with her.
CHAPTER 45
LOVER
Spiderkiller closed her eyes.
The truedark breeze was cool on her skin.
The sky above as empty as the place her heart had once been.
The city was in chaos, growing deeper all the while. Somewhere behind her, the marrowborn fools who’d gathered for Scaeva’s gala were finally spilling out of the first Rib in a wailing multitude. The entire archipelago was trembling as if in the grip of an earthquake, great rents splitting the cobblestones or cracking the facades of the buildings about her. Black clouds had gathered above, choking the starlight and filling the air with thundersong. Somewhere in the warehouse district, the quakes had started a fire, black smoke rising into the dark. A wave of rats was streaming up from the Nethers, tumbling and squealing as they came. Spiderkiller could hear a growing mob of terrified citizens following on the rodents’ tails.
Godsgrave was coming to pieces all about her.
The Shahiid of Truths had known throwing in her lot with Scaeva was a gamble, but truthfully, it wasn’t one she’d bet heavily on. Before she was an acolyte of the Dark Mother or a member of the Red Church Ministry, Spiderkiller had been a survivor. She’d made her way in a world that had seemed ever set to end her, and she’d not only lived, but prospered. A woman didn’t last long in a world like hers by risking her entire stake on a single throw of the dice. No matter how sure the wager.
The Shahiid took a deep breath, calmed herself, opened her eyes again. She was well north of the forum, the chaos rising to the south and bleeding toward her. But she was ahead of it for now, making her way over the little bridges and whispering canals, shouldering her way through the good-hearted and the fatally curious who were making their way back toward the clamor.
She could understand that—the impulse to tread closer to the cliff to peer over the edge. The need to skip ahead a few chapters and learn how the story ends. But Spiderkiller herself had no desire to know how the tale of Itreya’s first imperator finished. Only that she be alive to read about it afterward.
Scaeva’s men had destroyed the Red Church chapel in the necropolis, but Spiderkiller knew of at least one cache of coin and weaponry he’d left untouched. Furthermore, the Church had a half-dozen boats moored at the Sword Arm docks, and at least two were small enough for her to handle alone. She may have grown into one of the deadliest assassins the Church had ever produced, but Spiderkiller was born a daughter of the Dweymeri Isles. Her father had been a shipwright, her older brother beside him. She knew oceans almost as well as she knew poisons.
The thoroughfares were becoming crowded now, the panic behind her swelling as Godsgrave shook again, again, like a diorama in the grip of a hateful child. People were