The Kingdoms of Dust

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Authors: Amanda Downum
skiagraphy—viewing through shadows, or casting them into illusions. Even making them solid for heartbeats at a time. Melantha knew better tricks.
    Darkness gathered beneath her hand, pooling like tar. Rough brick smoothed to glass, and slicker still. Soon what had been a wall felt like oil, a patch of black that rippled at her touch. Sweat chilled on her scalp and neck.
    She hooked her fingers in the crawling shadow and yanked. Darkness tore like the husk of rotten fruit, with a sick wet sound she felt in her chest. She braced against the dizziness that always came. Shadows were natural, even the black of a moonless night. This was something more, unreal in its intensity. A gift from her mother, double-edged like all the rest.
    She tensed as the fabric of the world parted for her. She hadn’t opened shadows so deeply since she’d murdered Zadani. The ghost wind had been waiting for her even in the dark paths that day, had nearly swallowed her before she could escape. Today, however, she faced only empty silence.
    Melantha took a deep breath and grabbed Corylus by the ankles once more. He would have no burial or burning, even if he had kin or friends to perform the rites. Nothing she took into the abyss came out again, once she let it go. Every time she crossed the threshold she feared she’d trip over memories, tokens, corpses—all the things she left behind. It hadn’t happened yet, but how much could the dark hold?
    Quietus wouldn’t mind the absent corpse—they weren’t sentimental—but she’d have to explain it to Nerium. She hoped her mother was right and Iskaldur was worth this much trouble. Closing her eyes, she heaved herself backward, hauling the corpse with her.
    Like falling into a pool whose depth she couldn’t measure. She floated in lightless cold, with no sense of up or down. The urge to struggle was overwhelming, the urge to open her mouth and scream, but practice had taught her better. There was no air for her in the dark, and the thought of taking the blackness into her lungs terrified her. She could only move through shadow for the span of a held breath.
    Her hands tightened on Corylus. Soft boot leather, flesh and muscle and bone beneath. The dark drank the last of his warmth greedily. She ought to have something to say, but there was nothing.
    She let go.
     
    An hour later, she found Iskaldur’s apprentice in a tavern called The Three-legged Dog.
    The building was low and dim, wedged into one of Kehribar’s oldest and least reputable neighborhoods. The air smelled permanently of spilled beer and scorched onions, burning olive oil and sweat. Lamp-smoke blackened the beams and the horn windows, enfolding the common room in a permanent gloom no matter the hour. Not the sort of place for tourists, but the girl who called herself Moth sprawled comfortably across a booth in the back, laughing with a boy her own age.
    Melantha smiled behind her scarf.
    She had learned a little about Moth from her mother’s notes and more from Corylus—too much wine left him gossipy. Before the girl took up with Iskaldur, there had been little to tell. Her name in Erisín had been Dahlia, the mark of a prostitute and a mother’s cruelty. According to Corylus, she had been a thin sparrow of a girl, lost in Iskaldur’s shadow. That changed in Thesme, when a pimp thought the name gave him leave to lay hands on her. Iskaldur left the man in a pool of his own guts, but the next day Dahlia had cut off her long dark hair and taken a new name.
    Melantha understood such transformations all too well. She quashed a feeling of kinship; nostalgia was as dangerous as regret.
    Her quarry paid her no attention as she paid for a beer and slipped into a dark corner. The drink was only cover, but the house brew turned out to be rich and malty and bittersweet, good enough to overlook the dubious cleanliness of the mug. In between sips, she shuffled shadows till she found a clear view of Moth and her boy.
    Moth’s lips were

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