Slowly, slowly, he produced a small wooden box, shook it softly, the faint rattle of teeth therein.
‘My tithe,’ he said. ‘For the Maw.’
The box was snatched from his hand. ‘Maw’s dead.’
‘O, Goddess, not again—’
‘She’s playing with you, Don Tric.’
Tric smiled to hear Mia’s voice, grinned as the knifewoman hissed in surprise.
‘I’ve a better game we can play, though,’ Mia said brightly. ‘It’s called drop your blade and let him go before I cut your hands off.’
‘Naev will slit his throat.’
‘Then your head will join your fingers on the sand, Mi Dona.’
Tric wondered if Mia was bluffing. Wondered what it would be like to feel the blade swish from one ear to the other. To die before he’d even begun. The pressure at his neck eased, and he flinched as something small and sharp nicked his skin.
‘Ow.’
Dark stars collided in his eyes, the taste of dusty flowers on his tongue. He rolled aside, blinking, only dimly aware of the struggle behind him. Whispering blades slicing the air, feet scuffing across blood-red sand. He glimpsed their attacker through blurring eyes – a small, wiry woman, face veiled, wrapped in cloth the colour of desert sand. Carrying two curved, double-edged knives and dancing like someone who knew the steps.
Tric pawed the scrape on his neck, fingertips wet. He tried to stand but couldn’t, staring at his hand as his brain caught up. His mind was his own, but his body …
‘Poisoned …’ he breathed.
Mia and the stranger were circling each other, blades clutched in knife-fighter grips. They moved like first-time lovers – hesitant at first, drifting closer until finally they fell into each other’s arms, fists and elbows and knees, block and counters and strikes. The sigh of steel in the air. The wet percussion of flesh and bone. Having never really seen her matched against a human opponent, Tric slowly realised Mia was no slouch with a blade – well honed and seemingly fearless. She fought left-handed, her fighting style unorthodox, moving swift. But for all Mia’s skill, the thin woman seemed her match. Her every strike was foiled. Every advance countered.
After a few minutes of spectating, the feeling was returning to Tric’s feet. Mia was panting with exertion, crow-black hair clinging to her skin like weed. The stranger wasn’t pressing the attack; simply defending silently. Mia was circling, trying to get the sun behind her, but her foe was clever enough to avoid getting Saan in her eyes. And so at last, with a small sigh as if admitting defeat, Mia moved her shadow so the stranger would be ankle-deep in it anyway.
The woman hissed in alarm, trying to sidestep, but the shadows moved quick as silver. Tric watched her fall still, as if her feet were glued to the spot. Mia stepped up and struck at the woman’s throat, blade whistling as it came. But instead of dying, the stranger tangled up Mia’s forearm, twisted her knife free, and flipped the girl onto her bruised backside, swift as a just soul flying to the Hearth.fn6
Mia’s blade quivered in the sand between Tric’s legs, two inches shy of a very unhappy accident. The boy blinked at the gravebone, trying to focus. He felt as if he should give it back – that seemed important – but the warmth at his neck bid him sit awhile longer.
Mia rolled to her feet, red-faced with fury. Snatching the knife from the sand, she turned back to the woman, teeth bared in a snarl.
‘Let’s try that again, shall we?’ the girl wheezed.
‘Darkin,’ said the strange woman, only slightly out of breath. ‘Darkin fool.’
‘… What?’
‘She calls the Dark here? In the deep wastes?’
‘… Who are you?’
‘Naev,’ she slurred. ‘Only Naev.’
‘That’s an Ashkahi word. It means “nothing”.’
‘A learned fool, then.’
Mia motioned to Tric. ‘What did you do to my friend?’
‘Ink.’ The woman displayed a barbed ring on her finger. ‘A small dose.’fn7
‘Why did you attack us?’
‘If Naev had attacked her, the sands would be redder. Naev asked why they followed her. And now Naev knows. Naev wonders at the girl’s skill. And now Naev sees.’ The veiled woman looked back and forth between them, made a slurping sound. ‘Sees a pair of fools.’
Tric rose on wobbly feet, leaning against the stone at his back. His head was clearing, anger replacing the haze. He drew his scimitar and glared at the three little women blurred before him, his pride stung to bleeding.
‘Who are you calling fool, shorty?’
The woman glanced in his direction. ‘The boy whose throat Naev could have cut.’
‘You crept up on me while I was sleeping.’
‘The boy who sleeps when he should be watching.’
‘How about you watch while I hand you your—’
‘Tric,’ Mia said. ‘Calm down.’
‘Mia, this skinny streak of shit had a knife to my throat.’
‘She’s testing you. Testing us. Everything she says and does. Look at her.’
Naev still held Mia’s gaze, eyes like black lamps burning in her skull. Mia had seen a stare like that before – the stare of a person who’d looked the end in the face so many times she considered death a friend. Old Mercurio had the same look in his eyes. And at last she knew the stranger for what she was.
The moment was nothing like she’d practised in the mirror. And yet Mia still felt a sense of relief as she took the purse of teeth from her belt and tossed it to the thin woman. As if six years had been lifted from her chest.
‘My tithe,’ she said. ‘For the Maw.’
The woman hefted the bag in her hand. ‘Naev has no need of it.’
‘But you’re from the Red Church …’
‘It is Naev’s honour to serve in the House of Our Lady of Blessed Murder, yes. For the next few minutes at least.’
‘Few minutes? What do you—’
The ground beneath them trembled. A faint tremor at first, felt at the small of her back. Rising every second.
‘… Is that what I think it is?’ Tric asked.
‘Kraken,’ Naev sighed. ‘They hear when she calls the Dark. A fool, as I said.’
Mia and Tric glanced at each other, spoke simultaneously. ‘O, shit …’
‘Didn’t
