Nevernight (The Nevernight Chronicle #1) - Jay Kristoff Page 0,29

with tears, the thought of the man who’d killed him filled her heart with hate.

“Poor Captain Puddles…”

“… meow…,” said a voice.

The little girl glanced up at the sound, dragging dark hair from damp lashes. And there on the cobbles, amid the weeds and the rot and the filth, she saw a cat.

Not her cat, to be sure. O, it was black as truedark, just like the good captain had been. But it was thin as paper and translucent, as if someone had cut a cat’s shape out of shadowstuff itself. And despite the fact that he now wore a shape instead of no shape at all, she still recognized her friend. The one who’d helped her when no one else in the world could.

“Mister Kindly?” she asked.

“… meow…,” he said.

She reached toward the creature as if to pet him, but her hand passed through him as it might a wisp of smoke. Looking into his darkness, she felt that same sensation—her fear leeching away like poison from a wound, leaving her hard and unafraid. And she realized though she had no brother, no mother, no father, no familia, she wasn’t entirely alone.

“All right,” she nodded.

Food first. She had no money, but she had her stiletto, and her brooch pinned to her (increasingly disheveled) dress. A gravebone blade would be worth a fortune, but she was loathe to give up her only weapon. However, she knew there were folk who’d give her money for the jewelry. Coin could buy her food and a room to lay low so she could think about what to do next. Ten years old, her mother in chains, her—

“… meow…,” said Mister Kindly.

“Right,” she nodded. “One puzzle at a time.”

She didn’t even know what part of Godsgrave she was in. She’d spent her entire life in the Spine. But her father had kept maps of the city in his study, hung on the walls with his swords and his wreaths, and she remembered the layout of the metropolis roughly enough. She was best off staying away from the marrowborn quarter, hiding as low and deep as she could until she was sure the consul’s men had given up the chase.

As she stood, Mister Kindly flowed like water into the black around her feet, her shadow darkening as he did so. Though she knew she should probably be frightened at the sight, instead Mia took a deep breath, combed her fingers through her hair, and stepped out of the alley, right into a sloppy pile of what she hoped was mud.2

Cursing in a most improper fashion and scraping her soles on the cobbles, she saw people of all kinds pushing along the cramped thoroughfare. Fair-haired Vaanians and blue-eyed Itreyans and tall Dweymeri with leviathan ink tattoos, dozens of slaves with arkemical marks of sale burned on their cheeks. But Mia soon realized the folk were mostly Liisian; olive of skin and dark of hair. Storefronts were marked with a sigil Mia recognized from her lessons with Brother Crassus and truedark masses inside the great cathedrals—three burning circles, intertwined. A mirror of the three suns that roamed the skies overhead. The eyes of Aa himself.

The Trinity.3

Mia realized she must be in the Liisian quarter—Little Liis, she’d heard it called. Squalid and overcrowded, poverty written in crumbling stonework. The canal waters ran high here, consuming the lower floors of the buildings around. Palazzos of unadorned brick, rusting to a dark brown at the water’s edge. Above the water’s reek, she could smell spiced breads and clove smoke, hear songs in a language she couldn’t quite comprehend but almost recognized.

She stepped into the flow of people, jostled and bumped. The crush might have been frightening for a girl who’d grown her whole life in the shelter of the Spine, but again, Mia found herself unafraid. She was pushed along until the street spilled into a broad piazza, lined on all sides by stalls and stores. Climbing up a pile of empty crates, Mia realized she was in the marketplace, the air filled with the bustle and murmur of hundreds of folk, the harsh glare of two suns burning overhead, and the most extraordinary smell she’d ever encountered in her life.

Mia couldn’t describe it as a stench—although a stench was certainly wrapped up in the incomparable perfume. Little Liis sat on the southwest of Godsgrave, below the Hips near the Bay of Butchers, and was skirted by Godsgrave’s abattoirs and various sewer outflows. The bay’s reek has been compared to a