Nevernight (The Nevernight Chronicle #1) - Jay Kristoff Page 0,197

to burst loose. But both the Luminatii’s luck and the hook managed to hold, and, spitting a mouthful of red dirt, Mia crawled on. She could see next to nothing, but the rumbling was close now. Over the thunder of the wheels, hooves and ironsong, she heard a heavy twang, realizing the Luminatii were firing at the closest kraken with the crossbows on the wagon’s flanks. Teeth gritted, nails clawing the wood, she crawled up to the coupling between the fore and middle wagons. And sawing away with her blade, she hacked the tethers loose. The only things holding the train together now were luck and a few pieces of worn metal.

And luck always runs out.

The wagons veered west, headed for rockier ground where the kraken would have a hard time following. Mia clung on for grim life to the foremost wagon’s hitch as the ground grew rougher, the wheels crunching, axels grinding as the trains bounced over divots and potholes and clumps of stone. They crested a small hill, camels frothing under the driver’s whips. The train plunged down, hit a deep trough on the other side. Couplings groaned. Soldiers cursed. And in a flurry of dust and gravel and shrieking iron, the rearmost wagon broke free.

Timbers snapping, the hitch bar ploughed into the ground and the wagon flipped upright, balancing on its snout for a few torturous seconds before rolling end over end. The twenty-odd men inside were flung about like toys, screaming and shouting and crashing atop one another, thrown through the tearing canvas or crushed beneath tumbling supply crates. The wagon flipped end over end, skidding to a halt on its roof, a broken, splintered ruin.

Cries of alarm rose from the middle wagon. Screams of horror as something huge rose up out of the sand near the wreck and set to work, maw yawning wide, tentacles flailing. Men and camels running or dying, red sand drenched redder still, their comrades in the fleeing train helpless but to stare and pray. But as ill fortune would have it, one of the Luminatii had the common sense to wonder how the rear wagon had broken loose, leaned out over the tray and saw the couplings between fore and mid-wagons had been sawn away. He frowned, sure it must be a trick of the light, squinting at the strange … blur that seemed to be perched atop the hitch. Wondering what he was looking at for the few brief seconds it took that blur to rise up, lean in close and push a gravebone stiletto right into his eye.

The man twitched, toppling face-first from the tray. Luminatii cried warning as the body tumbled beneath the wagon’s belly and was pulped under the wheels. The middle wagon jolted hard as the men inside it bellowed. Falling over each other and throwing off gravity’s center, the wagon lurched sideways with the bright snap of breaking timbers and tore itself loose from its partner.

Dust and men flying. Axels and bones breaking. Mia reached into the bag at her belt, fished out a handful of shiny red globes. And as a half-dozen blurry shapes peered over the wagon’s tail to see what in the Daughters’ names was happening at the hitch, she let them fly, up and over the railing, and into the wagon’s tray.

Crackling booms sounded across the Whisperwastes, explosions unfurling in the wagon’s confines and tearing the cover and the men inside to pieces. And throwing aside her cloak of shadows, Mia slung herself into the carnage.

Blades drawn. Teeth bared. Moving among blinded and stumbling men like a serpent through water. Steel flashing, soldiers falling, crying out and swinging their cudgels at the blur in their midst; a bloodstained smudge moving through the smoke, wicked-sharp blades flashing. A few thought her some thing from the abyss, some daemonic servant of Niah set on their trail. Others mistook her for a horror from the Whisperwastes, a monstrosity spat into being by twisted magiks. But as she wove and swayed among them, blades whistling, breath hissing, the swiftest among them realized she wasn’t a daemon. Nor a horror. But a girl. Just a girl. And that thought terrified them more than any daemon or horror they could name.

She could feel them. Even the ones she couldn’t see. The brighter the light, the deeper the shadows. And she felt them, just as she’d felt the shadows of the strawmen targets in the Hall of Songs. Lashing out with all the skill Naev had gifted