Jonnen could still taste the blood.
It had been a full turn since they’d emerged from the pool in the Red Church chapel beneath Godsgrave’s necropolis, dripping in scarlet. Fifty of the Luminatii awaiting them had given him, his father, the woman called Spiderkiller, and the sorcerii called Marielle a hasty escort through the bustling streets. The other half century had remained behind to ensure none of Mia’s comrades gave pursuit.
Jonnen had wondered whether it would’ve been a good or bad thing. But none of them came after him at all.
Once back in their apartments in the first Rib, the Spiderkiller had taken the sorcerii away, only Aa knew where. His father had gone to bathe. Jonnen had been surrounded by slaves, thoroughly scrubbed, trimmed, and dressed in a white toga hemmed in purple. And finally, with rather more flair than he thought their ignoble retreat from the Mountain had warranted, his father had presented him to his mother.
Or at least, the woman who called herself his mother.
Liviana Scaeva had wept to see him, sweeping him up in an embrace so fierce the boy thought his ribs might have cracked. She’d praised the Everseeing, blessed his father’s name, dragging him close with one hand while the other still gripped her son.
“O, Lucius,” she’d sobbed. “My darling Lucius.”
And though he’d not spoken, the boy still heard the words ringing in his head.
My name is Jonnen.
They’d eaten a surreal sort of dinner together. Just the three of them, like he couldn’t remember them doing for an age. The table was laden with the finest fare the boy had tasted in months. No slop stews or cold porridge or dried beef. No eating in some miserable hutch or lonely ruin. No bawdy tales or cigarillo smoke. Instead, they had mouthwatering finger foods and sizzling roasts cooked to perfection and honeyed sweets that melted in his mouth. Flawless porcelain plates and silver cutlery and singing Dweymeri crystal glasses. Mother even let him have a little wine.
And all Jonnen could taste was the blood.
Poor Butcher.
Poor Eclipse.
He already missed the big Liisian and his crude talk and his wooden swords. He missed the shadowwolf’s company, their games of fetch, the fearlessness he’d felt when she rode his shadow. But he’d made his choice. Loyalty to his father. Fidelity to Itreya. Allegiance to the dynasty and the throne he would one turn ascend.
He’d made his choice.
And now he must live with it.
His mother had tucked him into bed. She’d hugged him for a full five minutes, as if afeared to ever let him go again. He’d spent a sleepless nevernight on spotless sheets, staring at the ceiling and pondering what he’d done. And the next turn, his father had sent for him.
Jonnen was escorted through their apartments with a cadre of a dozen Luminatii. Heavily armed. Heavily armored. Vigilant as bloodhawks and watching every shadow. The fresh tension in the air frightened him, truth told—he’d become so accustomed to Eclipse eating his fear, he’d forgotten how to manage it. As he waited in the corridor outside his father’s study, he found his hands and legs were shaking.
He honestly thought he might cry.
“Take five centuries of your best legionaries,” Jonnen heard his father command. “The blood pool is to be despoiled with oil and set ablaze. Arkemist’s salt set at every pillar and doorway and ignited as soon as your men are clear. I want no bone or stone of the Red Church chapel left intact.”
“Your will, Imperator,” a man replied.
Jonnen heard heavy footsteps, and a trio of Luminatii centurions marched out of his father’s study, resplendent in their gravebone armor and blood-red cloaks. They bowed to him as they passed, hurried off at their imperator’s command. Despite the fumble at the Mountain, it seemed the machinery of the entire Republic was still utterly bent to his father’s will.
Soon enough, Jonnen heard his father’s voice again.
“Come in, my son.”
Jonnen looked to the Luminatii around him, but none of the men moved a muscle. It was clear the boy’s audience with his father was to be a private one. And so, on unsteady legs, Jonnen proceeded inside.
His father was seated on the divan beside his chess set. He was dressed in a long purple toga, freshly shaved and bathed, his appearance, as ever, immaculate. But there were faint shadows beneath his eyes, as if perhaps he’d slept poorly, too.
His gaze was fixed on the only piece atop the board—a single black pawn. Beside it sat a stiletto, crafted of gravebone. Jonnen saw a crow on the hilt with red amber eyes. It seemed a little brother to the longblade Mia carried.
“Father,” the boy said.
“Son,” his father replied, waving to the divan opposite.
The boy trudged across the study floor, the map of the entire Itreyan region laid out at his feet. Itreya and Liis, Vaan and Ashkah—all of them now under his father’s control. No longer a Republic. A kingdom in all but name.
Jonnen sat down before its ruler.
“Where is Spiderkiller?” he asked, looking about. “The sorcerii?”
His father waved the question off, as if brushing away an insect.
“I had a dream last nevernight,” he said.
The boy blinked. Not quite what he was expecting.
“… What did you dream of, Father?”
“My mother,” his father replied.
“O,” the boy said, not knowing how else to respond.
“She was dressed in black,” his father continued, still staring at the chess piece. “As she never dressed in life. Long gloves, all the way to her elbows. And she spoke to me, Lucius. Her voice was faint. As if from very far away.”
“What did she say?”
“She said I should speak with you.”
“About what?” Jonnen replied.
“Mia Corvere.”
Ah.
This he expected.
“You mean my sister,” the boy heard himself say.
His father finally glanced up at that, and Jonnen heard a faint hiss as Whisper unfurled from the imperator’s shadow. The serpent peered at Jonnen with his not-eyes, licking the air with his not-tongue. He seemed more solid than he’d once been: a deeper black, now dark enough for two.
Jonnen could still hear Eclipse whimpering as—
“She told you, then,” his father said.
“Yes,” Jonnen replied, his throat feeling tight and dry.
His father leaned forward, his gaze burning. “What, exactly, did she say?”
The boy swallowed hard. He met his father’s eyes, but looked away just as swiftly. “Mia said she was your daughter. Sired on Alinne Corvere.”
Long silence descended on the study. Jonnen’s palms were damp with sweat.
“And what else?” his father finally said.
“She said…”
The boy’s voice faltered. He shook his head.
“Whisper,” his father said.
“… Be not afraid, little one…”
The shadowviper snaked forward, melting into Jonnen’s shadow. The boy sighed as the daemon swallowed his fear, drinking down mouthful after mouthful. Leaving him bold. Cold as steel. The boy met his father’s gaze again, cool and dark and hard. But this time, he didn’t look away.
“She said I was also sired on the Dona Corvere,” Jonnen said, his voice firm. “She told me that my mother is not my mother.”
His father leaned back on the divan, regarding Jonnen with black, glittering eyes.
“Is it true?” the boy asked.
“It is true,” his father replied.
Jonnen felt his stomach turn. His chest ache. He’d known it. Deep down inside, he knew Mia wouldn’t have told him a lie like that. But to hear it confirmed …
Jonnen’s eyes burned with tears. He blinked them back, wretched and ashamed.
“She is my sister.”
“I would have told you,” his father said. “When you were older. I had no wish to deceive you, my son. But some truths must be earned in time. And some truths are simply matters of perspective. Though she may not have given birth to you, Liviana loves you as a son. Do not doubt it for a moment, Lucius.”
“That is not the name my mother gave me.”
His father’s voice turned to iron. “It is the name I gave you.”
The boy bowed his head. And slowly, he nodded.
“Yes, Father.”
The imperator of all Itreya picked up the black pawn from the chessboard, though in truth, Jonnen’s eyes lingered on the stiletto. His father twisted the piece in his fingers, this way and that, letting the fading sunslight glint on the polished ebony. Lips pursed. Silence lingering.
“What else did she tell you?” he finally asked. “Your dear sister?”
“Many things,” the boy mumbled.
“Did she happen to speak of what she planned to do if her assault on the Mountain was successful?”
Jonnen shrugged. “Not really. But I can guess.”
“Guess, then.”
“She’ll try to kill you again.”
“And that is all she seeks? My death?”
“She really does not like you, Father.”
His father smiled and shook his head. “What of her companions, then? The Vaanian girl? The arena slaves? The dead one, returned from the grave? What do you know of them? What do they want? Why do they follow her?”
Jonnen shrugged. “Ashlinn seems to love her. I think she follows her heart.”
“And the gladiatii?”
“Mia rescued them from bondage. They follow her out of love and loyalty.”
“And what of the deadboy? The Dweymeri?”
Jonnen mumbled beneath his breath.
“I cannot hear you, my son,” his father said, quiet anger in his tone.
“I said, he does not follow her,” Jonnen replied. “He tries to lead her instead.”
“To what?”
The boy looked at the chess piece in his father’s hand. He felt like that, now. A little piece on a board that was far too big. His time with Mia already seemed like a dream. The way he felt about her was a tangled mess inside his head—admiration, scorn, affection, horror. Perhaps even love. She was bold and brave and twice as big as life, and he knew she was important. That she had a role to play. But he’d known her all of eight weeks. He’d known his father nine years. And some loyalties just don’t die quietly, no matter what the storybooks say.
“The Crown of the Moon,” Jonnen heard himself whisper.
His father blinked. Surprise in his coal-black stare. The boy savored that a moment—it wasn’t often he found his father on the back foot.
“Mother spoke that name to me,” the imperator said. “In my dream. And my old friend Cardinal Duomo sought a map to that same place last year. He was of the belief it held the key to a magik that would undo the Red Church entirely. And despite my daughter’s efforts, Ashlinn Järnheim stole it.”
“She did.”
His father leaned forward on his elbows, looking Jonnen in the eye.
“Who, or what, is the Moon, my son?”
“… I cannot tell you, Father.”
His father picked up the gravebone dagger from the chessboard. Staring at Jonnen as he twirled it through his fingers. He didn’t say a word. But Jonnen could feel his glower, like a truelight heat beating on his skin. With a malevolent hiss, Whisper slipped free of the boy’s shadow, and without the passenger to consume it, his fear returned. Flooding cold into his belly and making his little hands tremble. The fear of disappointment. Of anger. Of hurt. The fear that only a boy who has looked into his father’s eyes and seen what he might one night become can ever truly know.
“I cannot tell you. But…”
Jonnen licked at dry lips. Searching for his voice.
“I can show you instead.”
“… Extraordinary…”
“It is at that,” the imperator breathed.
They stood far beneath the City of Bridges and Bones, before a black and gleaming pool. The air was oily and thick, drenched with the stench of blood and iron. Jonnen had explained something of what they might see below, and it simply wouldn’t do for soldiers of the faithful to learn their imperator was darkin—thus their Luminatii guards had remained at the entrance to the catacombs.
Jonnen, his father, and Whisper had stepped inside, down stairs of cold, dark stone and into the city’s underdark. The light of a single arkemical torch was all they had to see by, held high in the boy’s hand. They journeyed through the twisting tunnels of the necropolis, then into the shifting labyrinth of faces and hands beyond. Jonnen led them from memory, unerringly, for what seemed like hours in the lonely gloom. Until finally, they stepped out into a vast and circular chamber.
The boy stood now at his father’s side, watching their shadows stretch before them. Whisper slithered out from his master’s shadow, hypnotized, just as Mister Kindly and Eclipse had been. All around them, the beautiful faces etched on the walls and the floor were moving, just as they’d done the last time Jonnen stood here. The ground shifted and rolled beneath their sandals as stone hands reached toward them, stone lips whispering silent pleas. Jonnen understood who these faces belonged to now.
Their Mother.
Their true Mother.
The air was alight with it. Hunger. Anger. Hate. The anguished faces sloped downward into that deep depression, at once familiar and utterly alien, barely visible in the torch’s pale glow. The shoreline was all open hands and open mouths. And pooled there, gleaming dark and velvet smooth, lay the pool of black blood.
Godsblood.
“I think…”
His father took one hesitant step forward. He stretched out his hand, and Jonnen swore he saw the surface of the pool ripple in response.
“I think I saw this place. In my dream.”
“… Here he fell…,” the serpent whispered.
“Here he fell,” the little boy replied.
“And there is more of this?” The imperator stared at the pool, finally turning to look at his son. “Awaiting her at the Crown of the Moon?”
“I do not know,” the boy admitted, his voice small and afraid. “But Tric told Mia she must journey there to unite the pieces of Anais’s soul.”
“Why travel all the way to the ruins of Old Ashkah?” his father asked. “Why not claim the power that resides right here beneath Godsgrave?”
“The remnants in this pool will not avail you, Father,” Jonnen said. “Tric warned Mia about them. They are what is left of the Moon’s rage. The part of him that wants only to destroy. They have festered down here in the dark too long. Mia did not dare to touch them. Nor should you.”
His father’s eyes glittered in the dark. Fixed upon that liquid malevolence. His hands balled into fists. Frustration. Agitation. Calculation.
“Duomo’s map.” The imperator turned his piercing black stare upon his son. “The one Järnheim stole. Did you see it?”
Jonnen swallowed hard. He loved his father, he truly did. Admired him. Emulated him. Envied him. But more, and above all, he feared him.
“I … saw it,” the boy whispered.
“Whisper,” his father said.
The shadowviper remained silent, swaying before the pool.
“Whisper!” the imperator snapped.
The serpent slowly turned its head, hissing softly.
“… Yes, Julius…?”
“Since you struck down my daughter’s passenger, you seem made of … darker stuff.” Black eyes looked the serpent over. “Do you feel changed?”
“… I am stronger since consuming the wolf, aye. I feel it…”
“The tale is true, then? In destroying another of these … fragments…”
“… We claim that fragment for ourselves…”
The imperator looked at his son. “And my daughter has killed other darkin?”
The boy nodded. “At least one.”
“Then she is at least twice as strong as I.”
Jonnen nodded again, watching his father by the light of their lonely torch. He could see the imperator’s mind at work—the cunning and intelligence that had seen Julius Scaeva lay waste to all who opposed him. To build his throne upon a hill of his enemies’ bones. And ever the apt pupil, the boy found his mind working, too.
His father had two problems with his wayward daughter, the way Jonnen saw it. First, that Mia might lay claim to whatever power lay waiting at the Crown of the Moon. And second, that even if she failed to claim it, with two fragments of Anais inside her, she was still more powerful than their father was. If she returned to Godsgrave at truedark—as she almost surely would—he’d be unable to stand against her, either way.
The imperator looked out over the inky black, his face etched like pale stone in the arkemical light. Jonnen couldn’t quite remember ever seeing his father wearing the expression he wore now. He seemed almost … afraid.
“She showed me this for a reason,” he murmured. “This is the answer. No mere throne or title. No work of man, destined for dust and history. This is ageless. Undying.”
The imperator of all Itreya slowly nodded.
“This is the power of a god.”
“… Yours for the taking, Julius…”
“It is dangerous, Father,” Jonnen warned.
“And what have I told you, my son?” the imperator asked. “About claiming true power? Does a man need senators? Or soldiers? Or servants of the holy?”
“No,” Jonnen whispered.
“What then, does a man need?”
“Will,” the boy heard himself say. “The will to do what others will not.”
Julius Scaeva, imperator of the Itreyan Republic, stood on that screaming shoreline, looking out over that ebon pool. Stone faces mouthed their silent pleas. Stone hands caressed his skin. The godsblood rippled in anticipation.
“I have that will,” he declared.
And without another word, he stepped into the black.
“… Julius…!”
“Father!” Jonnen cried, stepping forward.
No trace of the imperator remained, save a faint ripple across the gleaming black. The pool shimmered and shifted, a strange un-light playing upon its surface. The boy felt his heart thumping in his chest, taking another step closer. The stone faces had frozen still. Aa himself seemed to be holding his breath.
“Father?” Jonnen called.
A wailing beyond the edge of hearing. A thrumming in the dark behind his eyes. Jonnen blinked hard, swayed upon his feet, clutching his temples as a black pain lanced through his skull. The stone faces opened their mouths wide, the cries rising in volume until the walls themselves seemed to tremble. Whisper curled upon himself, hissing in agony. Jonnen did the same, dropping to his knees and cutting them bloody on the faces beneath him. The reverberations seemed to shake the room, the city, the very earth itself, though all in the chamber was frozen still.
Jonnen found himself screaming along, feeling a pull like some dark gravity. He looked into the godsblood and saw it trembling, perfect, concentric circles rippling out from the spot where his father had fallen. The boy’s belly flipped, his heart surged as he realized the liquid was receding, like an ebbing tide, draining back down into …
Into what?
He couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. He’d long since run out of breath to scream, but still he tried, eyes open wide, watching the blood sink lower and lower still. He could see a figure now, crouched at the center of the basin. A man, coated in gleaming black. The blood continued to sink, leaving the stone spotless behind it, every drop and spatter being drawn into the man’s very pores. His form shifted, nightmare shapes briefly twisting into being and disappearing just as swiftly. And as the screaming reached crescendo, the shape settled into something Jonnen recognized.
“… Father?”
He knelt at the bottom of the basin. Head bowed. One knee to the spotless stone. Silence fell in the chamber like a shroud.
“… Julius…?”
Jonnen’s father opened his eyes, and the boy saw they were utterly black. Despite the torchlight, the shadows around them were all being drawn toward him. Jonnen saw his own shadow, reaching out to his father’s with fingers outstretched. The longing and sickness and hunger inside him was almost a physical pain.
But slowly, ever so slowly, it ebbed. Fading, like the sunslight during truedark. Jonnen could see his father trembling with effort. His every muscle taut. The veins in his neck stretched to breaking. But gradually, the black across the surface of his eyes receded, withdrawing back into his irises and revealing the whites beneath.
“The will,” he breathed, his voice tinged with a dark reverberation.
The imperator raised his hands. The shadows about them came alive, writhing and twisting and seething and stretching, the black a living, breathing thing.
“The will to do what others will not.”
“… Julius…?” Whisper asked. “… Are you well…?”
The imperator snapped his fists shut. The shadows stopped their motion, falling still like scolded children. The imperator lowered his chin and smiled.
“I am … perfect.”
The air hummed. The shadows rippled. Whisper retreated from the pool’s edge, some instinct driving the serpent to coil inside Jonnen’s own shadow. But instead of the passenger lessening his fear, the boy felt his own terror double. The snake’s dread bleeding into his own.
His father climbed out of the now empty basin. Jonnen looked down and saw his father’s shadow was utterly black. Not dark enough for three or four or even dozens. It was a dark so fathomless that light seemed simply to die inside it. The boy could hear a faint hissing noise, like a frying pan on a hot stove.
Narrowing his eyes, the imperator reached inside his robe, pulling out a trinity of Aa hanging on a golden chain about his neck. The light from the holy symbol flared bright in the boy’s eyes, sickening, blinding. Jonnen gasped, stepping back with one hand raised to blot out the awful radiance. His stomach churning, he saw his father’s skin was hissing and spitting where it touched the trinity, like beef on a skillet, smoke rising up from the imperator’s burning flesh.
Jaw clenched, Julius Scaeva turned his will to the golden suns in his hand. Grip tightening, veins standing taut in his forearm, he slowly curled his fingers closed. The trinity crumpled like tin in a vise, crushed to a shapeless lump in his fist. Lip curling in disdain, he tossed the ruined metal aside, off into the cavern’s far-flung shadows. Eyes on the burned skin of his palm.
“We will return to the Ribs,” he said. “And you will draw me Duomo’s map.”
“Yes, Father,” the boy whispered.
His father looked at him then. Despite the passenger riding him, Jonnen felt a perfect sliver of fear pierce his heart. The dark about them rippled and his own shadow shivered, as if just as afraid as he was. And looking up into his father’s eyes, Jonnen saw they were filled with hunger.
“It is a good thing you’ve a memory as sharp as swords, my son.”