The Song of the Marked (Shadows and Crowns Book 1) Read online

  Copyright © 2020 by S.M. Gaither

  Cover Art by Amalia Chitulescu

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  This One’s For Evie

  (who isn’t allowed to read it until she’s older)

  Chapter One

  Casia hated thunderstorms, because they reminded her of the night she had watched her mother kill her father.

  A bone-rattling BOOM in the present, and suddenly Cas was unwillingly back in the past, nine years old and crouching behind the claw-footed chair, smelling the dust in the suede fabric, feeling the rough floor beneath her bare feet while her tiny body quivered from a mixture of fear and sickness.

  Another clap of thunder. Back in the present, Cas shifted closer to the rocks lining the mountain path. The rain started to fall in earnest. She gave her head a little shake, trying to spill the remnants of memory from it. She couldn’t stay in that memory. Not tonight.

  Too many things were riding on tonight being a success.

  Swiping the damp strands of hair from her eyes, Cas settled into a crouch, making herself as small as possible before creeping forward into the shadows cast by the rock ledges and the sparse bit of vegetation still growing this high up. She gripped the rough, knobby branch of a leafless and crooked tree, and then froze beneath it as she heard a low hissing sound. Her hand cautiously reached for the bow across her back.

  The hissing soon grew louder, accompanied by the whisper of scales sliding against stone.

  “Rock viper,” she muttered to herself as she reached for an arrow, her eyes wide and scanning the nooks and crannies for its hiding spot…

  There.

  A pair of yellow-slit eyes locked on her face. It flung itself from the ledge in the next instant, lashing toward her with its mouth open, its fangs flashing along with the lightning—

  Her arrow was faster. It pierced the creature in mid-air, causing it to break into a violent, twisting dance as it fell. The viper landed belly-up and thrashed against the gritty ground for a few seconds— thump, thump…thump……thump—before the stillness of death overtook it.

  Cas put a boot on its shovel-shaped head and yanked the arrow out, wiped the blackish blood off on a nearby cluster of weeds, and then continued on her way.

  There were likely more of those serpents lingering nearby, so she kept her bow out, nocking and readying an arrow every time she rounded a corner or crested a steep rise of the pebbly path—although the vipers were the least of her concerns, really, in spite of the venom they carried.

  There were far worse creatures that haunted these paths.

  Feral dogs, and the malevolent kui spirits, and countless other nasty things made of teeth and claws and ire… And most of those things would not be felled by a single arrow.

  There were also soldiers allegedly waiting in the pass just ahead of where she stood, and that was perhaps the most unnerving thing of all.

  That skinny passage ahead was known as The Bone God’s Pass—so called because of the white, crystalline structures that reached out from its rock walls like skeletal fingers. A half-mile of those clawing fingers awaited, according to the map Laurent had given Cas. After that, the pass would give way to a wider road, one that curved toward a gate made of metal and arched stones and white trees that twisted together in a way that could only be described as unnatural.

  That stone and metal gate was the ultimate point that she and her team were attempting to reach. Beyond it, the domain that was known as Oblivion—at least in the common tongue— awaited anyone who was brave enough to keep going.

  This would be the first time Cas had seen it all in person. Her chest tightened a little more with every step she took toward it. She rarely thought of herself as brave; she had simply become well-practiced at doing things in spite of her fear.

  Investigate the Oblivion Gateway.

  Bring me proof of whatever the king-emperor is up to.

  Those had been her lord patron’s instructions. This was the reason her team was here in spite of the danger and the fear—because of those specialized soldiers from King-Emperor Varen’s army, his so-called Peace Keepers, that were allegedly here as well. Her patron wanted to know why those Peace Keepers were here. Nobody frequented this dismal place without purpose. Most went out of their way to avoid it, actually, because most believed that the Bloodstone Mountains were cursed.

  And perhaps they were.

  Or the domain of Oblivion was, at least.

  Nestled in the northernmost ridges of the Bloodstones, that domain was a place covered in silver-black clouds that frequently swallowed people up and never spat them back out.

  Explanations for what lay beneath those clouds varied.

  Some said the cover was a natural barrier created from the decay of strange flora and fauna underneath it.

  Others claimed that Kerse, that ‘Bone God’ who was otherwise known as the Middle-God of Death and Destruction, had made a secret home there. That he still visited it whenever he grew tired of the various heavens that he and his fellow deities had long ago ascended to.

  Still other stories said there was a monster hiding deep in the heart of that silvery darkness, and it stalked the edges of its territory without rest, breathing sickness and famine and disaster out into the empire whenever it grew angry or restless.

  The truth was that nobody honestly knew what happened in the shadows of Oblivion. And the not-knowing was enough to convince most that it had to have been something wicked and wild at work—something wicked and wild that the king-emperor may or may not have been tangling himself up in.

  Cas wasn’t sure what she believed about this place. Not yet. But she tried not to think of the more terrifying stories she’d heard about it as she continued to wind her way through the uneven paths.

  As she came closer to the Bone God’s Pass, she returned her bow to the sheath slung across her back, and she reached instead for the small dart gun tucked inside her coat. The darts she carried tonight were tipped with a toxin derived from killsweed. Despite the plant’s name, this particular toxin was only meant to make a grown adult sleep very soundly for a very long time. She wasn’t here to kill.

  Not this time, at least.

  Between the last king-emperor’s rule and the Fading Sickness that had been ravaging the Kethran Empire for the past few decades, she couldn’t help feeling there was enough death in the world without her gratuitously adding to it.

  The path forked, and she took the route to the left. If she recalled that map she’d studied correctly, the Bone God’s Pass was just around the corner ahe
ad. She crept along until she reached the edge of that corner. Paused for a moment to steady herself, pressing her back against a smooth bit of rock. Then, shielding her face from the driving rain with one hand, her dart gun balanced and raised in the other, she took a deep breath and rounded that edge—

  Only to find that the entrance to that pass was unguarded.

  Strange.

  She had expected at least a few guards here, as the narrow way would have been an easy place to head off potential spies and intruders such as herself, and to keep them from creeping too close to the Oblivion Gate.

  She might have thought it a stroke of good luck… if she actually believed in that sort of thing. But Asra, the woman who’d raised her, had taught her long ago that Luck was a lesser-spirit that only the lazy and the foolish prayed to.

  Cas kept her guard up as she made her way down the hill. It was even darker here— almost like descending into a pit. She had a Fire-kind crystal in the small pouch attached to her belt, but she preferred not to use it; such crystals did not come cheap, for one thing, and she was also wary of attracting more attention to herself.

  She picked her way carefully through the near darkness, sprinting short distances whenever a flash of lightning helped illuminate the way.

  She made it to the pass, hesitated only a moment to study the cluster of elongated white stones that glinted like fangs around its opening, and then she stepped into that narrow mouth. The rain funneled down and the wind howled hauntingly loud in the more-enclosed space. She had only taken a few steps when she nearly tripped over…something.

  Something that she thought might have been a fallen piece of one of those odd white rock formations, or perhaps the wayward root of a scraggly tree— until a brief pause to narrow her eyes and let them adjust to the dark revealed that no, it was neither of those things.

  It was an arm.

  Cas stumbled back, gripping her dart gun more tightly. Two men clad almost entirely in black lay on the ground before her. Silver brooches fastened their cloaks, and they were engraved with the emblem of the king-emperor’s house—a tiger rearing on its hind legs with its jaws opened wide.

  The men almost looked as if they were sleeping, so much so that Cas gathered a few shreds of courage and crouched beside them for a closer inspection.

  Neither had a pulse. Their skin was rain-slicked and cold. One still had his eyes partially open, and his hooded gaze stared up at the dark sky, unseeing. It was hard to tell in the blackness, but his irises looked grey… unnaturally grey, as if all of their true color had been leached out of them by the Fading Sickness.

  They looked terribly similar to Cas’s own eyes—albeit considerably more dead.

  Heart pounding, she removed one of their brooches and dropped it into that pouch on her belt. She briefly wondered what had killed these men—had it been that Fading Sickness?— but then she pushed it all from her mind just as quickly. It wasn’t her job to make sense of things. She was getting paid to collect proof, that was all, and here was proof that some of the king-emperor’s men were at least in this area.

  It was a start.

  Hopefully her colleagues had found other things. They had split up to better search for these things—and to find the path of least resistance to that Oblivion Gate. A path that, so far, Cas still believed she had discovered; if two dead bodies and the occasional rock viper were the only things she had to face on this route…

  She kept going.

  Deeper and further through the pass of the Bone god she went. The stone walls squeezed more tightly around her. The air began to feel strange, to burn her lungs as she inhaled it, almost as if it was woven through with invisible threads of poison. She remembered then that a mask hung against her throat, buried under the cowl neck of her coat. It had allegedly been blessed by one of the Sky-kind—who were wielders of barrier magic—and Laurent had insisted they all wear them.

  Cas wasn’t convinced the mask would do much to protect against the evil airs of this place, or that she personally needed that protection, given her history. But she wasn’t in the mood to hear another smug lecture from Laurent, either, when he caught her not wearing it.

  At the very least, the mask might help hide her identity from any of the king-emperor’s men waiting up ahead. So she pulled it up, secured its bands around the curves of her ears, and then picked up her pace once more.

  The sound of boots tromping and chainmail rattling made her pause.

  She twisted around. Raised the dart gun to her lips. Cursed as she realized her mask was now covering those lips, and instead reached once more for her bow. She nocked and aimed an arrow into the darkness behind her.

  Two men emerged from that darkness. They were dressed almost identically, save for their cloaks. The man in front no longer had a cloak—because Cas had stolen the brooch that once held it in place.

  These were the same men that had been dead a moment ago.

  Despite their dead, vacant stares, now they moved as if they were alive. Alive and fast. The one in front rushed her, whipping his short sword from its sheath with a fluidity that was otherworldly. The noises that creaked and groaned from his mouth were equally unnatural.

  A slew of terrified curses fell from Cas’s own mouth as she sized up her targets.

  It didn’t count as gratuitous killing if her targets were already dead, did it?

  She decided quickly that it didn’t, and she loosed an arrow and then swiftly followed it with another. Both arrows hit their mark, and the first not-quite-dead man staggered back a few steps, the arrows jostling but not falling from the pale forehead they now protruded from.

  The man regained his balance. His hooded eyes darted upward, just briefly, as if those arrows were only a minor nuisance that he was barely aware of.

  The second man drew closer, groaning out sounds that soon twisted into what were clearly words, though they were spoken in a language Cas did not recognize. He seemed equally unconcerned about the arrows bouncing around in his companion’s head— even as thick currents of blood began to ooze from that puncture wound.

  The bleeding man responded to that second man in a tone that sounded almost…amused.

  With a sick feeling wringing her gut, Cas realized what she was going to have to do to stop these two.

  And she was going to need a sword for it.

  The arrow-impaled man lifted his blade and sliced toward her. Cas ducked his attack. She darted around him, and around the man behind him, too—a difficult maneuver in the tight space—and then she planted a foot in the lower back of that second man. He fell into the other. As the two became a briefly incapacitated, tangled-up heap, Cas aimed an arrow at the sword-wielding man’s wrist.

  It struck and pierced straight through. He didn’t cry out. His dead body didn’t seem to register any pain. But the strike jostled his grip enough that the sword fell from his hand. It clanged against the rocky ground and then skittered a short ways down the path.

  Cas didn’t hesitate. She tossed her bow aside and leapt forward, stomping a boot between the shoulder blades of the second man as he tried to untangle himself.

  He swatted for her ankle.

  She dodged, propelled herself into another leap, and landed deftly on the other side of the two men. She snatched up the fallen sword and spun back around to face her enemies.

  They untangled and rose, swaying a bit as they did. Quick as a shadow, the one she’d fired arrows into swept around behind her. A deathly cold swept over Cas as he came, and suddenly the rain that was falling felt like needles of ice stabbing into her.

  She gripped the sword in both hands and spun around, hoisting it high, as if she planned on delivering a crushing overhead blow. Her target crossed his arms and lifted his bracers to take the brunt of the attack, leaving his mid-section completely unguarded. Cas pulled her blade back down and aimed a powerful kick into his stomach. As he doubled over and curled inward, exposing his neck, she swung her stolen sword in the arc she’d truly planned all a
long.

  It lodged deeply into his neck. Cas twisted her torso, drawing strength from her core as she’d been taught to do, and the blade proved sharp enough to manage the rest of the job; the thunder and howls of wind drowned out what she imagined was a gruesome noise as the man’s head was severed fully from his neck.

  The body crumpled but then kept moving for a moment, writhing about without its head, its hands beating along the ground and searching.

  It might have been comical looking, if it hadn’t been so horrifying.

  Cas kept moving as well, afraid she might end up frozen in place if she didn’t—either from fear, or from that strange cold that the undead men were still giving off. She found that severed head before its body could and, cringing, she drew back and kicked it as hard as she could, sending it hurtling back up the path she’d already traveled.

  The headless body ceased its searching and went still.

  The second undead man had stopped in his tracks, watching her. His head lolled about on his shoulders, still attached but suddenly appearing too heavy for his neck—as if whatever puppet strings were controlling him had suddenly gone slack. His hooded grey eyes drifted over her, briefly locking on her face. On her eyes. Then his body slumped, and he dropped to his knees and fell forward onto the ground.

  Cas heaved for breath as she stared at him.

  What—or who— had given him life?

  And what had killed him in the first place?

  Chapter Two

  Trembling slightly, Cas grabbed her bow, returned it to its place on her back, and then backed away from the still bodies. She didn’t want to ask any more questions, suddenly; she just wanted to keep going, to finish this job and get as far away from these strange mountains as she possibly could.