the sides, children crowded about them in the gondola’s belly.
“Throw a line!” Cloud bellowed.
His salts scrambled to obey, tossing a rope over the rails into the thrashing seas. Sidonius snatched it up, dragged them in. The big gladiatii helped the children up first, going so far as to toss a few of the smaller ones up to his crew’s waiting arms like toys. The misshapen woman followed with a helping hand from Bladesinger, clutching her cowl about her neck, head bowed low. ’Singer followed and then came Sidonius, reaching down and roaring at Mercurio to climb.
The old man looked back toward the City of Bridges and Bones, his face pale and drawn. The capital of the Itreyan Republic was crumbling, hungry waters rushing in, the smaller islands already beginning to sink below the waves. He had tears in his eyes, glittering with the glow of the flames before them and the lighting arcing above.
“Mercurio, come on!” Sidonius bellowed.
The old man shook his head. But finally he took hold of the rope, the big Itreyan hauling him aboard.
“All right, make sail, you two beggar fuckstains!” BigJon bellowed. “Toliver, get your worthless hide aloft before I skin it off you! Andretti, move your arse before I kick it over the side! Away, you nonna-fuckers, away!”
As his crew scurried to obey, Corleone helped Mercurio to steady himself. Wiping the sweat and soot from his face, the privateer peered into the old man’s eyes.
“Where’s Mia?” he asked.
The old man looked back into the doomed city, letting his tears fall.
“Gone,” he whispered.
* * *
A moonlit eon burned inside her.
The life that was hers before this one.
Mia remembered all of it. What it was to sail across the velvet black above this mortal plane. To sit astride a throne of silver, bringing magik to the world and light to the darkness. To be a child. To be a god. To be worshipped and feared, to be alive, to be dead, to be somewhere and forever in between.
To love and live.
To hate and die.
Fury boiled in her veins and crackled in her father’s eyes as they crashed to the earth, splitting the flagstones to rubble. Their impact shattered a thousand windows across the forum, blasting doors from their hinges and ringing bells in their teetering towers. The city that had been their body groaned and bled and burned and drowned, and they tore at each other in their rage, heedless of it all. Mia could feel it—all the years and miles and blood and wrong between them. There wasn’t a hole in creation deep enough to bury it all. So she’d bury him instead.
Father.
But Scaeva was her match. Just as strong. Just as swift. Just as sharp. Slamming her backward into the Senate House, steps paved with the skulls of Darius Corvere’s legions. Toppling the body of a mighty War Walker, the metal giant crashing onto the Iron Collegium and shattering it like glass. Marble pillars falling, stone rent asunder, lightning arcing in the heavens overhead. Their forms, black and vast now, the god inside them breaking loose, choking itself inside its own grave.
They crashed against each other like waves on a broken shore. Ripping each other and the city around them to splinters. She tore at his face. He gouged at her eyes. He hurled her into the sky. She smashed him into the earth. The buildings collapsed and the cathedrals fell and the Ribs toppled, the oceans rose and the fires burned, and above them, high above them, their Mother bit her lip and hoped that all she’d done wouldn’t prove to be for naught.
Father and daughter. Creator and destroyer. Two halves at war, without and within. Dark and light. Silence and song. Earth and sky. Sleep and waking. Serenity and rage. Water and blood. Mia had no idea which half would win.
“You should have joined me when I asked,” he hissed.
“You should have killed me when you had the chance,” she spat in reply.
They slammed against the towering statue of Aa, three arkemical globes still burning in the Everseeing’s outstretched hand, his mighty sword raised to the horizon. Scaeva looked to the shattered metropolis around them, smiling black.
“Is this what you wanted, daughter?”
“All this,” she hissed. “And just one thing more, Father.”
Her hands closed around his throat, sinking into black skin.
“Die for me.”
A legion of daemons tore and clawed the air about them, dark winds howling with the rage of a hurricane. He smashed her away from him, the blow like thunder, the blood