The child’s body on the slab was still. Relief made Lore weak-kneed. What happened with Horse must have been a mistake, maybe she hadn’t severed their connection fully—
But then, as if scenting her on the air, the body sat up.
The movement was unnatural. The corpse’s arms swung loosely as it bent at the waist, as if a string were attached to the head, pulling him up. The eyes opened slowly, black pits in the pale face, as the corpse slowly turned toward Lore. Like he’d been waiting for her to arrive, to give orders.
The weakness in her knees wasn’t relief anymore.
“Shit,” Bastian breathed. “Shit on the Citadel Wall.”
Gabe said nothing, but the very air behind her felt tense and cold, as if shock seeped out of him to infect the atmosphere.
It took her a moment to remember what she was here to do when faced with those black eyes. She needed to ask the corpse what had happened. She needed to ask it to tell the truth.
“What killed you?” she breathed.
The small mouth unhinged, a circle of black. It spoke without moving. “The night,” the child said, in a voice like a rockslide. “The night killed me.”
The four of them—Lore, Gabe, Bastian, the corpse—stayed still and silent. Then Bastian gestured to the slab. “See, Gabe? Told you it wasn’t me.”
Gabe shifted on his feet and ignored him entirely. “The night doesn’t help us much.”
Lore’s brows drew together, her concentration completely focused on the child in front of her. The mouth opened again, wider this time.
She expected an echo of the same message. But this felt different. The lips still didn’t move, the dead vocal cords still didn’t work. But there was a sense of effort this time. The corpse’s words before had seemed rote, a trained bird repeating what it’d been taught to say. This was… intelligent. Purposeful.
Like something else was using its mouth.
“Find the others,” the corpse said, the words rough and crawling from that dead throat, that dead and unmoving tongue. “They are not destroyed.”
She half expected the body to fall backward after the message was delivered, the purpose served. Instead, those black eyes still stared at her, mouth still opened, and Lore remembered why she was really here.
Whatever she’d done to reanimate this corpse, she had to undo it.
Half a heartbeat, then she reached out her hands, closed her eyes. All she could think to do was walk back through the steps she’d taken before, see if maybe she could reverse the flow of death. Send it in, rather than pull it out.
Around the slab, Gabe and Bastian didn’t move.
Instinct was all she had to follow here. Lore thinned that forest in her mind, loosening its protection. She took a breath, then held it until her vision began to white out, until everything faded to the muted gray of dead matter or the blazing white of something living. Gabe and Bastian were smudges of light, the body on the slab the color of charcoal—something between, something that should be dead, but with the death spooled out of it.
Mortem was easy to find—it lived in the rock, in the glass solarium above, slowly turning pink with incoming dawn. But it was hard for her to grasp, hard to get a handle on.
Bastian. Bastian was here.
Lore opened her eyes, fixed them on him. “Bastian. You have to go.”
Incredulity crossed his face first, then a blaze of rage. “Absolutely not. I thought we established that—”
“I can’t get a grip on Mortem while you’re here.” She was too tired to argue. Gods, how long had it been since she’d slept? “I don’t know why, but if I’m going to do this, I need you to leave the vault.”
To his credit, Gabe didn’t look smug. He didn’t look at Bastian at all, only at Lore, his brow furrowed. Channelers could see Mortem, but non-channelers couldn’t—they could only see the effects it left on a person. Gabe had seen her reach for Mortem, seen her fail to grasp it.
She watched him a moment, saw him hold his breath, his fingers go white and cold. Testing to see if he could grab hold of Mortem when she couldn’t. No dark threads attached to his fingers—he couldn’t grasp the magic of death when Bastian was around, either.
Lore couldn’t decide if that was comforting or alarming.
Bastian stared at her, not quite a glare, his arms crossed over his still-bare chest, his full mouth pressed into a white line. He nodded, just once, and stalked from the vault.
Gabe didn’t ask questions. Didn’t do anything but wait.
She was thankful for that. Lore closed her eyes, held her breath, lowered her mental defenses until she could sense Mortem again. She reached for it, twirled a thread of it around her necrotic fingers, her veins sludgy and blackened as her blood just barely moved.
The Mortem worked its way through her, death crowding her cells but not taking over. Slowly, it gathered in her palms, and slowly, Lore raised her hands and pushed it out.
It trailed across the vault, a viscous, dark line. It entered the corpse’s slack mouth, the gaping nostrils, the open black eyes. And as it did, the body slowly sank back down, the unnatural bend of the waist lessening by incremental degrees.
She fed death to the corpse and laid it slowly to rest again.
Lore slumped on the floor, pins and needles sweeping down her whole body as her blood quickened again, itchy and uncomfortable. Her breath heaved, her heart working overtime after tithing its beat.
Gabe came to her. Knelt before her, pulled her up by the shoulders, stared into her face.
“I’m fine,” Lore rasped, an answer to the question Gabe hadn’t asked. Not quite true, but there wasn’t anything he could do about it. “It worked, and I’m fine.”
The vault door opened, like Bastian somehow knew it was done. He walked in, stopped when he saw Lore and Gabe on the floor. He didn’t ask her if she was fine. Didn’t show any kind of concern.
Because he knows exactly what you are. He knew channeling Mortem was as familiar to her hands as their heartlines.
Light filtered in through the now-open door, dawn blushing the sky beyond the glass-domed roof. They needed to get out of here. She’d done what she had to do.
But Gabe didn’t move, still holding her shoulders, eyes moving from her face to the body on the slab. “What did he mean?” he asked quietly. “When he said find the others, that they weren’t destroyed?”
“He had to be talking about the other bodies from the villages,” she murmured, voice hoarse. She knew she was right, knew it with the same cell-deep awareness that pulled her to Gabe, pulled her to Bastian. “They weren’t burned. August and Anton are keeping them somewhere.”
Footnotes
1 Earliest Compendium translation. Modern Compendiums have eliminated Tracts 690–821; these Tracts can only be found in Compendiums made immediately after being dictated by Apollius (1 AGF).
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Catastrophes come in waves.
—Auverrani proverb
Sleep clawed at the corners of Lore’s eyes, but she didn’t let them droop. At least she tried not to; every few moments, her view of the sitting room in her and Gabe’s apartments would dim, and she had to remind herself to stay awake.