Nevernight (The Nevernight Chronicle #1) - Jay Kristoff Page 0,198

her, all the fury of that fourteen-year-old girl on the steps of the Basilica Grande. No cardinals or blazing Trinities to help them now. No sunsteel burning in their hands or white, polished armor at their breasts. Just leather on their skin and dust in their eyes, the blackened corpses of their comrades on the deck around them, the echo of the explosions ringing in their ears. And she, armed with all the hatred of all the years, daughter of murdered parents, sister to a murdered brother, marked of a darkest mother.

And one by one, each and all, she fed them to the Maw.

The camels pulling the wagon galloped on, still terrified enough of the kraken to keep running without a driver to whip them. With her foes inside the wagon dead, Mia slung the crossbow off her back. Fell to one knee and took aim at the nearest camel rider. She put a quarrel through his heart, loaded another and put it through a second’s throat. A few Luminatii veered out of range, but to their credit, most roared challenge and whipped their beasts harder, bearing down on the wagon and the girl inside. These were men of the First and Second Centuries, after all—the finest troops Godsgrave had to offer. They’d not be bested by some heretic child.

But her crossbow sang and the wyrdglass flew, men tumbling from their saddles or simply blasted free. A grizzled giant of a man made it to the wagon’s railing, but a throwing knife in his larynx silenced him forever. Another leaped from his camel onto the wagon’s tail, but as he clawed his way up, she shoved a globe of ruby wyrdglass into his mouth and kicked him free, the resulting explosion taking out another camel’s legs and sending its rider flying, despite all lack of wings.

Scanning the wastes, Mia saw the kraken had given up the chase—between silencing her calls to the dark and the feast she’d left behind, the behemoths seemed well content, rolling and tumbling as they chased screaming Luminatii across the sands. Sheathing her blades, Mia leapt into the driver’s chair, intent now on the wagons ahead.

In all the carnage, Remus’s train had gained a solid lead. But with the weight of her unneeded companions shed, Mia’s camels traveled all the swifter, spitting and snorting and making whatever noise it is that camels make as they ran.1 Her wagon bounced over rocky dunes, weaving through gardens of broken Ashkahi monoliths, slowly closing the gap. She could see Remus in the lead carriage, but only because the man was so huge—everyone else was simply a blur through the dust and grit. And yet, she was acutely aware that at least sixty well-trained and fanatical thugs awaited her ahead, should her wagon ever catch up. Weighing the less-than-favorable odds, she wondered what exactly she was going to do when she got there.

Fortunately, she never had to learn the answer.

The Luminatii in Remus’s train had just watched her murder over sixty of their fellows, after all, and while it’s noteworthy that none of them actually stopped to help, Itreya’s finest were inclined to bear a grudge. As Mia’s wagon bore down on them, the soldiers manning the crossbows opened fire. Mia couldn’t exactly hide beneath her shadow cloak; firstly, she’d be unable to see, and thus, steer, but more important, it wouldn’t take the finest scholar of the Grand Collegium to figure out where the driver of a wagon was sitting, invisible or not. But Justicus Remus, more than a little impressed that this slip of a girl had just managed to single-handedly murder half a century of his finest men, seemed more concerned with escape than revenge. And so, instead of ordering his men to shoot at the lunatic flogging her poor camels into a lather, he ordered his men to shoot the poor camels instead.

And shoot them they did.

The first bolt struck the lead camel in the chest, felled it like a tree. The beast stumbled to its knees, snarled up in its harness and tripping the beast behind it. Another bolt sailed out of the dust, followed by a third, and amid the sickening crunch of bones and the bellows of camels in agony, Mia’s wagon crashed into the wretched tangle that had been hauling it, flipped end over end, and skidded to a bloody, screaming halt.

Mia was flung free, sailing a good twenty feet through the air before plunging face-first at the sand. She managed to