Anton waved a hand as he descended the short set of stairs. “Another Mortem channeler,” he said dismissively, as if Lore were of no consequence. “We’ll need all the help we can get.”
They didn’t run to the Southeast Ward—they rode. A phalanx of black horses, cantering over the cobblestones, rushing around corners so close that Lore was afraid she’d gash her head. Everyone moved out of the way with a quickness, the news of the Mortem leak having spread through the city at a blessedly faster pace than the magic itself. Most civilians wouldn’t be able to see the Mortem, and that added an extra edge of panic. The closer they drew to the Ward, the emptier the streets became, everyone who was able fleeing to the opposite side of the city.
Lore pressed her chest against Gabe’s back and held on to his waist for all she was worth. She’d never been very comfortable riding horses. Her own feet or a cart were infinitely preferable.
But there was no denying the speed. They were in the Ward within half an hour.
And the very air tasted wrong.
Gabe dismounted, then reached up and grasped her waist, swinging her down behind him. Lore nearly stumbled. The ground felt unsteady, almost, a thin membrane over something decayed, ready to break at any moment. A sour, fetid smell permeated the air and made her stomach twist in on itself.
“Do you feel that?” Lore’s voice sounded as shaky as her legs. “Smell it?”
“What is it?” Gabe narrowed his eye as he handed off the horse’s reins to a waiting clergyman—not one of the Presque Mort, just a plain acolyte, who looked like he’d rather be anywhere else. “I don’t smell anything.”
Gabe’s face looked blurry. The edges of him weren’t clearly defined, as if he might morph into something else at any moment. His tattooed hands were slightly outstretched, like he thought he might have to catch her, steady her.
“Nothing.” Probably just nerves. Lore shook her head and started walking, following Anton.
Nothing else looked blurred, she noticed as she walked, concentrating on keeping her gait steady. Only Gabe seemed like something in flux, caught in a state of unbecoming.
Just nerves.
The Southeast Ward was the part of Dellaire closest to the countryside, where farmers came to sell their crops. Farmland was visible past the houses lining the square, rolling green hills dotted with small barns and the faraway specks of livestock. It was the least-populated Ward in the city, but now it was completely barren, everyone either fled to western Wards or locked in their homes.
The only sound was boots on empty streets as the Presque Mort followed Anton toward the leak. He’d changed, too, swapping out the white robe of the Priest Exalted for dark clothes and a leather harness like the rest of them. It looked strange on Anton, like someone playing dress-up. He still wore his huge Bleeding God’s Heart pendant, though, glinting gold and garnet in the falling evening light.
Lore felt the leak before she saw it. Her middle curdled, her steps faltering into a near-stumble as the sour smell in the air grew stronger. She caught herself before she could fall, though the sharp look Gabe shot her way said he still noticed.
The awareness of death pressed around her, like smoke searching for a crack to seep through. She tried to think of forests, of trees and blue sky. It kept the awful feeling at bay, but only just.
Up head, Anton stopped. “There.”
The leak came from an abandoned storefront, similar to the decrepit building by the harbor where Lore had met the revenant nearly a week ago, when she raised Horse and got herself into this mess. Darkness rolled from the gaping, uneven doorway, seeped down the stairs and out into the street. It looked, somehow, like smoke and water at once—cohesive and flowing, yet with an insubstantial, eddying quality that made it hard to focus on. Small bones littered the edges of the strange black river, mice and other tiny creatures the Mortem had already eaten down to nothing.
Lore’s stomach dipped.
The Presque Mort all did an admirable job of trying to hide their fear, but it was palpable in their nervous stances, their widened eyes. None of them had seen a leak like this before.
Malcolm stepped up first, standing next to Anton. He took a deep breath and held out his hands, the candles inked on his palms facing the river of Mortem. “Put as much as you can in the rock, first, but not too much, or it will break. If there’s still some left, direct it there.” Malcolm inclined his head toward the center of the square, where a garden had been planted in the midst of the cobblestones, shaded by thick trees and wild with summer blooms. “Once that’s used up, go for the farmland. Don’t use the horses unless you have to.”
Lore looked behind her, where the terrified younger clergyman stood with all the placid horses. Why did it always come back to horses?
The rest of the Presque Mort fell into formation, making three lines on the left side of the leak. Gabe went to stand next to Malcolm and Anton, and Lore followed, the four of them forming the first line while the rest of the monks filed in behind. All of them raised their palms to the seeping pool of death magic, hands inked with symbols of the Bleeding God’s light.
And almost completely useless.
It took Lore a moment to even realize they were channeling. Tiny licks of Mortem drifted up from the stream like smoke, dissipating into the air, never getting strong enough to actually connect with anyone and become the long threads Lore dealt with. The larger mass didn’t shrink at all, despite the fact that every person behind her had necrotic, pale fingers, opaque eyes. One of them stumbled, tithing a heartbeat, but it didn’t make a difference. None of them could channel this volume of Mortem.
This felt wrong, in a way she couldn’t quite nail down. The bones littered on the cobblestones reminded her of mousetraps, of stepping into spring-loaded death with no idea an end was waiting.
Only Anton wasn’t holding his hands toward the mass, wasn’t looking at the river of Mortem at all. His one dark eye was fixed on Lore, narrow and unreadable, staring her down as death flowed before them.
He stared at her a moment longer. Then he turned to the leak, raised his hands.
The difference was night and day. Mortem rose from the dark river, coalesced in the air. It looked like the threads Lore could spin from death, but instead of going straight to Anton’s hands, they knitted together in the air, twisting into an intricate, spiking knot. She’d never seen anything like it before. Surely, tying Mortem up like that would make it harder to channel into plants or stone—
“Lore.”
Her name came like a wheeze of dying breath; she whipped her head around to Gabriel. He looked at her with a completely whited-out eye, no color at all where blue had been. His lips pulled back from his teeth, his cheeks sunken in, skin molded to the skull below. “You said you wanted to help,” he rasped, “so help.”
The air still smelled sour. Her feet still felt wobbly. Anton was still knitting Mortem into some unfathomable tangle, shaping it in a way Lore didn’t understand. But Gabe was right, and it was clear from the pathetic wisps of Mortem curling up from the leak that the Presque Mort wouldn’t be able to channel all of this away on their own.
So Lore raised her hands, closed her eyes. Held her breath, let the world go black-and-white, and called death into her.
Her vision grayed out, but something was different. She could see the knot Anton had made, pulsing in the air above the leak. Lore tried to avoid it as she reeled in threads of death, but she wasn’t sophisticated enough for that, hadn’t learned how to be careful.