It reeks of death in this room. Not just the saccharine decay of flesh or the earthen scent of brittle bones, but of bloodshed. Of carnage.
In the farthest corner, beneath one of the painfully bright windows, stands a table that’s tilted at an awkward, impossibly sharp angle.
I stifle a gasp when I notice the lump atop it is a body. A young man. His arms and legs are strapped down. His skin has taken on a chalky pallor. His lips are purple. But it’s the small, black hole in the side of his neck that forces me to stare with bulging eyes.
Something dark and malevolent oozes from his wound, like a slug born straight from the Shadowthorn. It’s thick and slow as gravity pulls it out from the man’s body and plops into the bucket stationed beneath his head.
Looking around the room, I suddenly take note that there is no shortage of cadavers here, and I realize what it is we’re about to be asked to do.
“The time has come for you to learn the art of bloodletting.” The Spirit Keep’s rasping, ethereal voice makes her sound as if she belongs among the dead herself.
She takes two final, painful strides to a table much closer to the door we entered. Though its surface lies flat rather than jutted up in a harsh angle as the other, the lumpy shape beneath the black fabric leaves no room for wondering what she is about to reveal underneath.
With the swiftness of a bird spreading its wings, the Spirit Keep flings the cloth away, revealing milky skin and the two glazed, half-lidded eyes of a young woman.
Silver’s breath hitches, recognition crossing her usually poised features. I watch her strain to look away from the body displayed before us, the one she so obviously recognizes. I’d wondered where these bodies had come from, the ones we’d been asked to dispose of. Glancing over at the other man on the table, black goop still leaking into the bucket beneath him, I recognize him. He was one of my neighbors, one of the ones I saw gutted as I raced to my cottage to find my parents.
Understanding settles over me now. These bodies, they’re gathered from the fallen towns. Ashenvale. Gravenburg. It’s likely there are bones in these walls from every single village the Shadowthorn has claimed.
“It is time you learned where necro-ink comes from.”
For someone so decrepit, her next few moves are done with the swift lethality of shadowsteel. The Spirit Keep pulls a knife from somewhere inside her billowing robes and strikes the young woman’s neck on the slab.
The stony walls seem to waver and quake. They crush in on me like a tomb as my breathing hastens, alarm seizing my chest.
But just as I fear I’m about to collapse, Dimitri appears at my side. His arm wraps around my waist to steady me and he shifts, taking on some of my weight. He is always here when I need him. Always.
On shaky breaths, I inhale the musty air like it is fresh and rejuvenating, only to instead smell more blood. I look up at him with pleading eyes, practically begging him to take me out the door nestled between the two windows, the one that surely leads outside to fresh air. But he doesn’t meet my gaze. He holds his focus on the impaled woman, even as his eyes twitch with the slightest show of unease.
Something about seeing this small show of weakness and his fortitude to push through it, emboldens me to do the same. If I can’t look upon dead bodies now, while within the safe limits of Arcathain, doing so in the Shadowthorn will only prove more impossible and more life-threatening. Once we’re inside Qaeus’ dark domain, I won’t be able to afford such hesitations.
I swallow the bile rising up in my throat, and once my head has anchored itself back onto my shoulders, once the dizziness begins to fade, I force myself to look upon the dead woman again.
“Once a demon’s venom enters the bloodstream,” the Spirit Keep says, continuing her instruction. “The blood can be harvested, but only once the body is brought here.”
With another burst of striking alacrity, the Spirit Keep jerks her knife from the child’s neck. She is utterly insensitive to the very notion that she is disfiguring our loved ones, our friends, people we grew up with and, if not cherished, and least valued as fellow Arcathainians. She stabbed this young woman as if she was nothing more than a poached squirrel.
The squelch of flesh as the blade springs free will be seared into my mind for eternity, followed by the slow dribbling of the poor girl’s blood as it clumps into the rusty bucket. I’ve been around dead animals enough to know how blood is supposed to look, how it’s supposed to smell and move. Her blood is sludge from the forest floor after a torrential rainfall. It is as dark as demon skin, and reeks of fetid plums and lamb meat that’s been left out in the sun too long. The only semblance it bears to normal blood is its sheen that manages to catch what little light is provided from the windows.
“Ashenvale fell over a month ago,” Dimitri says, morose but thoughtful. “Gravenburg suffered a demon scourge not too long after. These bodies…they were torn apart by demons. There should be no more blood left in them to give.”
“Ah, someone’s been studying the dead.” The Spirit Keep chuckles. She lifts one bony finger into the darkness. “But the dead differ from the Blighted. Those cut down by demons die with their venom in their veins. It curdles the blood, stills in the body, and will remain that way for quite some time, unless coaxed to come out.”
She leans over the young woman’s naked, grey body. She presses her palm between her breasts, places her other hand on top, and thrusts the weight of her down. Again and again she pumps. The dead woman’s ribs crack beneath the pattern of her compressions.
“The bloodletting,” she says between compressions, catching her breath with every few words as she goes. “It requires us to do the work the heart would normally.”
The dead woman jerks every time the Spirit Keep presses against her chest. My stomach lurches, a horrific sickening squeezing my intestines. Of all the times I’ve been sent here to help, never have I seen this side of the process. If this had been the task that had awaited myself or any of the others the first time we were sent to the catacombs, I have no doubt that the Shadow Crusade would have triple the number of deserters that they have now.
Now that I’m watching her, it’s easy to understand why such a thing would be kept from us. We were too new, still too unsavvy to the horrors of the Shadowthorn. Information like this isn’t meant for regular people. They shouldn’t have to know what happens to the retrieved bodies of their mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters.
“It looks exhausting,” a recruit mutters.
“It is,” the Spirit Keep says simply. “That is why we warm the bodies and angle them. It makes our work easier.”
“But,” I hear myself breathe. “Why are we learning this now?”
“Ah,” she says simply. “Another astute pupil. You are aware of the scourge that occurred the other night, yes?” She doesn’t wait for me to respond, nor does she ever stop pounding away at the woman’s chest, black sludge oozing down her neck in sickening pulses. “You are being taught bloodletting because it is imperative that the ritual never be lost, but as the Shadowthorn creeps nearer, it is only a matter of time before we lose Nigh. You may be the last unit of Crusaders to pass through these halls, to sleep in the cots in your dorms. Someday soon it will be you entering the Shadowthorn, and you will need to know where to find necro-ink and how to harvest it.”