The Lion & the Deathless Dark — Chapter 1

C HA P T E R O N E

n my brief time as an acolyte, I once heard a priestess define legacy.

When you think back to the times you met a new soul, she said, is it aI good or a bad day? Our goal, as acolytes, is that we might leave every soul we meet in a better place than where we found them.

Back then, I was nobody. To be remembered at all had seemed like a gift. To be remembered fondly? Incomprehensible.

Well, now everyone remembered the day that they met me. It was usually a bad day. Often, even, their worst.

The head hit the ground with a wet, blunt THUMP. The scent of burning suffused the air. A cacophony of curses rang out as half a dozen full-grown men scurried back against the wall like frightened rats.

“I warned him,” I said coolly. “Just like I’m warning you.”

Their eyes, wide and white around drug-dilated pupils, locked onto me —onto my sword, glowing gold-white, clutched in my hands.

The Blade of Retribution. A sword once held by the Goddess of Justice herself, Shiket—one of the six mounted on her back, before she had gifted

one to a mortal follower.

Having it made me a little famous.

No, no one ever forgot meeting me now. {You are not wasting any time, are you?} the sword sniffed disapprovingly.

We don’t all get to stick around for five thousand years, Zefiah.

Zefiah—the sword’s ancient given name. {If you would like to last to see thirty, you might want to be more cautious.}

I thrust Zefiah at the nearest quivering spectator. He was slack-jawed, apparently too high to have the good sense to crowd against the walls like his comrades.

“You,” I said. “Gaveer Iron. Where? Don’t try to tell me he’s not here.”

The man blinked slowly at me. “You’re the Vindica Ultis,” he breathed,

voice trembling.

I smiled. “You’ve heard of me.”

Everyone had heard of me, in one way or another. From the eastern mountains to the southern deserts to the western islands. Everyone knew about the Vindica Ultis. {Technically,} Zefiah corrected, {I am the one with the reputation.} And you have the gall to call me arrogant. {My confidence is earned.} My chosen target gaped at me instead of providing any useful information.

“Sh-Sh-Shiket is looking for Gaveer?” he said.

“My business is none of yours,” I replied.

The truth was, my search for Gaveer had nothing to do with Shiket. The one who had demanded his head was actually a warlord three kingdoms away, and he was paying a handsome sum for it. We were scraping the bottom of our coffers these days. Shiket had been keeping me busy, which meant not a lot of time for the more lucrative work.

Hence why I was making the—perhaps risky—decision to drag a cultist out of his den right from the belly of their main compound.

But the price was really, really good.

I scanned the room. The house had once been grand. It had probably belonged to some nobleman or lord in the time before the sun fell. I could still remember, vaguely, what places like this had once looked like—palaces of glittering gold and crystal and marble, surrounded by sprawling gardens of manicured color.

That’s what I missed most. Color. It was amazing what ten years of darkness could do to sap it all away. No flowers, no leaves. No food that wasn’t brown or grey.

I glanced at the river of blood slithering across the cracked tile floor.

Still plenty of red, though.

Anyway, I couldn’t look back on it with too much nostalgia. Yes, this estate had once been a thing of beauty. But it had been run by a legion of, at

best, poorly paid servants who were here out of desperation or—more likely —slaves who hadn’t chosen to be here at all.

That part probably hadn’t changed. Through a large arched doorway, I glimpsed metal bars. No doubt holding people within. All that ugliness, so much more visible now than it was before the dark.

The house had now fallen into significant disarray. Wallpaper peeled, wood rotted. Silver accents that had once served as decoration had been stripped—reworked into bars or chains or weapons to defend against the vampires. The gates that we’d dismantled to get into the compound had pulsed with an ethereal glow. Not for beauty, as perhaps they once had, but for protection against fallen ones—blessed by the magic of the White Pantheon.

Still, even at its strongest, the magic couldn’t keep out determined vampires. Nothing could.

I glanced over my shoulder at the once-grand front doors that we had smashed through, glowing metal debris scattered on the ground. Then I eyed the blood spreading over the floor. There would be more by the time we were done.

Only a matter of time before vampires showed up here. Long after we were gone, if we were lucky, but we’d been short on luck lately.

“Gaveer Iron,” I said again, raising my sword, in my most booming, divinely-blessed voice. “In the name of Shiket, Lady of Justice, present him to me. I am the Vindica Ultis. Do not defy me.”

The men stared. They all looked like the illustration of Gaveer that I’d received: scruffy beards, overgrown hair, gaunt cheekbones. He could have been any of them.

Another puddle was spreading now, this one a cloudy pool of urine.

I rolled my eyes. For gods’ sake. Maybe humanity didn’t deserve to survive, if this was the best we had to offer.

“Very well. I suppose I’ll have to—”

“Sh!” One of the cultists raised a finger, blinking hard.

We all stopped.

Listened. {What a lovely sound,} Zefiah said, ever the bloodthirsty little bitch.

I bit back a curse.

The howls were distant, but unmistakable. The sounds of the soulless were so uniquely horrific, no one would ever mistake them for any other

creatures. Not barks or howls, but these terrible, mournful, aching cries.

Like they were in constant pain.

Perhaps they were. Some said that the Shadowborn vampires, one of the two Houses that led the vampire goddess Nyaxia’s war against humanity,

created the beasts from their own dead.

We were out of time.

I whirled around and, in one smooth movement, sliced off another head with enough force to send it flying against the wall with an unceremonious thump.

“Gaveer,” I said, voice cold and firm. “Give him to me. Or else we lock the doors and let the soulless eat you alive. Surely you know what would happen to you then, hm?”

No one did, actually. Not exactly. But the stories were bad enough that all of them concocted their own pants-shitting horror.

One man’s eyes flicked over my shoulder.

There.

There it was.

I turned and approached the tall, slender man against the wall. The drawing wasn’t even that good. They didn’t get anything but the beard right.

“Gaveer,” I said sweetly. “Someone important is looking for you.”

“I didn’t do anything to offend the Lady of Justice.”

“You did offend Duke Vinwest, though.”

A flicker of confusion, settling to fear. “He’s a prick.”

Vinwest was a prick. But he offered much better compensation than the gods did, and I wasn’t paid to care whether this man was innocent.

“Let’s go,” I said, and raised my sword. {Watch it!} Zefiah warned, a little too late.

A blunt impact struck me across the back of the head. Stars exploded across my vision.

I spun around to see a scraggly woman with long, fair hair clutching a makeshift club—now stained with my blood. More cultists had gathered in the stairwells, waiting for their chance to strike.

A lot of them. Even for us.

Before I could react, a bolt of silver shot from the rafters, impaling the woman through the throat.

My head snapped up to see a lithe figure balancing on the balcony railing, curly brown hair piled atop her head, a gleaming copper crossbow braced against her shoulder.

Gods fucking damn it, Valentina. She was not supposed to do that. {I wonder where she learned such impatience?} Zefiah mused.

That, really, was when it all went to shit.

The howls came again, this time louder, squealing and groaning. Gaveer turned tail and bolted through a back door into the belly of the mansion, at the exact time that the wave of cultists descended upon us. The men rushed me, apparently all of them getting the same bright idea. If only they knew how common it was. Men looked at a woman carting around a blessed sword half her size and thought, Hell, how hard could it be to take that

thing off her?

The answer was: hard.

I spun, blade drawn, and Zefiah sliced through three bodies like they were made of butter.

God magic. Had to hate it, had to love it.

Another wave of howls. The hair stood on my arms, and an unnatural tremor rippled through my bones.

That was the real danger of the soulless. The fear, radiating from their skin like paralytic poison. Even I was affected by it. My muscles went rigid, heart stuttering in my chest, a wave of adrenaline-fueled panic surging.

Count something. Anything. Four doors on this side. Seven windows.

Twelve chairs— {Kyrene!} Zefiah warned, and I moved just in time to defend myself against yet another man throwing himself at me. Godsdamn it. I needed backup.

“Marko, where the hell are—” I bellowed.

But then I saw a wave of people rushing from the hallways upstairs.

Saw one of them lunging for Valentina—

“Val!” I screamed.

Too late.

A teenage boy bearing a clumsy little sword grabbed her. She hadn’t been paying attention. She struggled, ripped away from him, then lost her

balance and tumbled from the rail.

My heart stopped.

I dove across the room and barely managed to break her fall with my own body—which, in hindsight, may not have been any better than the ground. We slid across the floor. Zefiah slipped from my grasp. I braced myself over Valentina as the others came for us.

She whispered in my ear, “Left!”

I twitched my head to one side as she slid a copper device from beneath her sleeve and pressed a button on her palm.

FWIP.

A silver streak grazed my right ear.

A spray of blood.

A shriek behind us, as someone fell.

Valentina beamed with pride. I gave her a flat glare that said she’d still be hearing about it later.

I rolled to grab Zefiah’s hilt as another wave of howls rang out. Closer now. We were fucked. This was such a mess.

Where the hell was—

“Marko!” Valentina cried cheerfully.

{Useless buffoon,} Zefiah sighed.

I was inclined to agree.

Marko stumbled through the back door, barreling through the crowd of cultists like a bull through a pack of sheep. He swayed slightly as he swung

his axe from side to side.

Where had he been? {It appears that he was drinking,} Zefiah said disapprovingly.

Zefiah did not like Marko. Who could blame her? He was a piece of shit. And he was definitely drunk.

But he was also good with his hands. Good at using them for killing, and good at using them for— A high-pitched screech drowned out all else.

Freeze. Pain.

Four doors. Seven windows. Twelve chairs. And— I lifted my head to see Marko freeing himself from the paralysis, sweeping through the rest of the cultists. And Valentina— She was on the ground, struggling to rise. She was such a small person, easily affected by the soulless on her best days, and more susceptible than ever now, when she was in such dire need of hixis. My heart went cold when I saw the pool of blood beneath her.

Blood. Dangerous. {Kyrene, pay attention!} Zefiah bellowed.

I turned around just in time to see the cultist—the leader, the first man I’d threatened—looming over me.

And before I could prepare my own strike, a blade erupted through his gut.

He let out a wet garble, then fell limp to the floor as my savior yanked the sword free.

Mirie frowned at her weapon with a line of disgust over her nose, smoothing her freshly bloodstained white robes with her free hand. Then she looked around with obvious distaste.

“I take it that none of these severed heads belong to our mark,” she said drily, not bothering to hide her judgment.

It was quiet now. Far too quiet. The cultists who’d chosen to fight were dead, and the rest had fled. The soulless were surely near, still. Perhaps just temporarily distracted.

I gave Mirie an unamused look as I pushed myself to my feet. She only smiled in response. She had a beautiful smile, warm and calm, framed by just a hint of lines around her dark eyes.

It was also a very self-righteous smile. A requirement for joining any priesthood, from what I could tell. Acolytes were attracted to me for obvious reasons, but Mirie was the only one who stuck around. I had come to be secretly grateful for it.

“Enough judgment,” I muttered. “You can always go back to the church, priestess.”

I turned to Valentina, who now stood unsteadily.

“That was fun,” she said, and I genuinely was not sure if she was being sarcastic or not.

My gaze locked onto her torso. To the blood soaking through her shirt.

When she turned, I spotted it in her hair, too, pouring from the back of her head. And she was swaying.

Valentina had not had a dose of hixis in five days and thirteen hours.

She did not tell me this—she hid it, in fact—but I was keeping track. The cruelty of Val’s illness was that it was so easily managed if she had the right medicine. A dose every day, and she was fine. One every week, and she could survive. But she was feeling its absence, even if she’d never admit it.

The stuff was so damned expensive.

Mirie was already making quick work of Val’s wounds, binding them with cloth bandages.

“That was fun.” Marko grabbed a curtain, wiping gore off the edge of his axe.

I spun to him. “Where the hell were you?”

“What do you mean?”

“You were late.”

“No, I wasn’t.”

“And you’re drunk.”

“No, I’m not,” he said coolly, looking at me like I was the crazy one, and I bit my tongue.

Arguing with Marko was useless. Especially when he was drunk— which he was.

Mirie peered through the window. The compound was isolated. The nearest town was many miles away, and when we’d arrived, it had only been visible in faint little dots of light right up at the horizon.

Now, there was more light, and closer. Not the warm glow of torches, but blue—blue of Nightfire, vampire magic.

Shit.

Mirie and I exchanged a glance, and without a word, I could hear her I

told you so.

She had told me so.

We were far from civilization. Low on supplies and low on money.

Shiket had been after me for weeks about a string of heads she wanted me to bring her. But you couldn’t eat divine favor. Nor could you trade it for hixis.

When I’d initially picked up the job for Vinwest, I had thought the compound would be closer. And the vampires were moving north, when they had spent the last six months concentrating on the south. To make things worse, our new healer had died last week, and in the stupidest possible way—a gambling squabble in some backwoods village. Which meant we had no way to quickly stop bleeding.

But I tried to never show nor feel uncertainty. I learned the hard way, when the sun first fell, that the darkness was no place for indecision. Often, taking no action at all was more fatal than choosing the wrong one. Even the vampires knew it. Terror was their greatest weapon.

Still, as I looked at the blood soaking Valentina’s clothing, I felt it

anyway.

“You alright, kid?” I said.

She gave me a crooked smile, wide enough to reveal a hint of her copper tooth on the left side. “They can’t get me that easy.” She pulled up her sleeve and fussed with the machine built around her arm—the spear gun that had saved me when I caught her. Mirie gingerly pulled the silver dart from the eye of the fallen cultist, who spasmed with the wet POP, and handed it back to Valentina, who re-mounted it in the machine.

Valentina was the best machinist I’d ever met—a follower of Srana, goddess of science and machinery, which gave her the ability to craft technological weaponry. Her skill was pure artistry, even though she was barely sixteen and self-taught.

“The mark’s long gone,” Marko said, putting his hands on his hips and looking out the back door. “We going after him?”

Yes. The answer was on the tip of my tongue, immediate and obvious.

Never once had I let a mark escape. It would be a branding nightmare.

Imagine. The Vindica Ultis, bested by some common criminal.

But then I looked at Valentina, and her blood, and the spot beside her where our healer would have been if he’d still been alive. At the window overlooking the darkness, which I knew held beasts that were only coming

closer.

Gods fucking damn it.

I thought briefly, fondly, of the simple years I had spent alone. How had I ended up in charge of all these people? {Humans are pack animals,} Zefiah said unhelpfully.

Please shut up.

“He’ll get tired eventually,” I said. “Not many places for him to go out here. We have time before we go after him.”

“Really?” Valentina said. “You don’t want to go right now?”

“Fuck that,” Marko grumbled. “We’ve got five hundred riding on this.”

The soulless shrieked again in the distance. It was a calculation with only one answer. We’d have to get Val out of here, and fast, if those soulless didn’t find a distraction.

We made our way back to the front entrance. Valentina paused at one of the ajar doors.

“Do you hear that?” she said, not waiting for an answer before she pushed it open and let out a gasp.

It was the cage that I’d glimpsed earlier. It was an ugly, makeshift creation, rods bolted into the ceiling and the floor, adorned with rusted nails. There were perhaps ten or twelve people inside, all of them cowering against the wall except for one: a middle-aged man, who looked up at us with a delirious gap-toothed grin.

The blood of the three headless bodies had seeped into this room, though it took me a minute to realize that there was more blood than those

corpses could have produced.

“Prisoners,” Valentina said.

Maybe. Sometimes groups like this would imprison trespassers. Or they could be slaves. Bodies were valuable, especially if any were magic wielders of a god that the group lacked. Followers of Vitarus, god of farming and famine, or Ijakai, goddess of animals, were especially valuable.

Srana, too. I’d barely saved Valentina from being carted off by traffickers half a dozen times now.

But Mirie nudged my arm. She nodded down at the crusted red on the floor. At the injuries on the prisoners.

My stomach turned.

Most were missing limbs. The wounds were fresh.

Cannibalism wasn’t taboo anymore, in places like this. Just another part of survival. When meat of any kind was so rare, and produce even rarer, it was considered blasphemous to let any sustenance go to waste.

Valentina saw it after we did. Her face fell.

“Don’t worry,” she said to the prisoners. “At least we’ll get you out now.”

She said this like it was a given. Just an easy truth.

The prisoner closest to the bars smiled up at me. He held something gold in his hand, wrapped tight in his fist. A necklace of some kind.

I was no true believer of the gods. Yes, when I stood before Shiket, I still felt the overwhelming desire for her approval, her love. Every mortal felt that way in the presence of the divine, the same way we felt hunger or thirst or sexual lust. Biological impulse. But I knew exactly what the gods were. Selfish beings.

Still, in moments like this, I thought perhaps I understood the gods.

When people looked at me like this man did—like my very existence was a

gift. When the gods stood before their kneeling acolytes, did they feel as I did right now?

Like they were choking on the weight of that responsibility? {No,} Zefiah said softly. {They do not.} I nudged the lock—a big, knotted, ugly mass of metal. The soulless wailed in the distance. Still far, but getting closer.

“This will take me a minute to hack open,” I said. “You’re a mess, Valentina. Mirie, Marko, go patch her up. I’ll be out in a few minutes.”

I didn’t look up as they filed out of the room. Mirie lingered the longest, and I could feel her eyes on me even though I refused to meet them.

I waited until they were gone, then kneeled before the bars.

“I’m sorry that this happened to you,” I said to the prisoners. “It never should have. I imagine you’ve suffered plenty.”

They whispered excitedly to each other in a language I couldn’t place. I wondered if they spoke Oketian at all. Some rose to their feet, or whatever they had left of them. Most were missing one or both legs.

They looked at me with all the glorious adoration befitting whatever stories they’d heard of me—me, the Harbinger of the Just, the Vindica Ultis, mortal made blessed.

The man reached through the bars and pressed the necklace into my hand. I looked down to see a pendant bearing the profile of Shiket in my palm. The metal was worn over the impression of her face. It had been touched many times in prayer.

It was beautiful, surely expensive when it was first made, probably before the sun’s fall. But it was not just a pretty trinket. It marked this man as a high-ranking acolyte of Shiket. It would entitle him to passage, care, and supplies at any church of any god in the White Pantheon. He was showing it to me to demonstrate his devoutness. That he deserved to be saved.

My throat tightened. I closed my hand around the pendant.

A fresh wave of howls from the soulless cut the air, approaching faster, prompting some of the prisoners to press their hands over their ears.

“I can give you a choice,” I said. “I can leave you here, and you can make your best bid for survival against the soulless. Or I can offer you a quick death. Painless as I can make it.”

The prisoner’s smile faded.

The realization fell over them slowly, and I wanted to look away rather than watch it sink into their skin like blood into sand.

I didn’t. I wouldn’t spare myself from that.

These people would not be coming with us. They were bleeding even more than Valentina was. They were slow, and nothing attracted the vampires or their thralls like living, injured prey. Perhaps they would make themselves useful; perhaps if I let them free, they would go their own way and would not try to follow us.

But I saw the way they looked at me. Like they would follow me to the ends of the earth. And I couldn’t let that happen. Not when I so badly needed a diversion. Something alive and bleeding to distract the soulless while we got our mark and made our escape.

Once, on the second—worst night of my life, someone had gripped my shoulders and told me, You have to save yourself. It was the first time I had held a sword. The first night I had killed. And it had taken me so long to learn that lesson.

But I only learned something the hard way once. These people would only learn it once, too.

I watched their faces change as they realized that I would not save them.

That no one would.

Had I looked like that, the night I had realized it?

I offered the man his pendant back. But he just shook his head.

“Keep it,” he said. “Every time you look at it, think of us.”

His voice was raspy with disuse, weak with exhaustion. His accent was thick. But I still felt the anger.

You’d think there would be more of it. You’d think there would be tears.

But these days, all that remained was bitter resignation. Like it was all just confirmation of something they had already suspected.

That, to me, was saddest of all.

Everyone always looks at their heroes like that, in the end.