“I’ll go first.” Bastian rolled his shoulders, set his jaw. He stepped through the door before she could stop him.
A short, startled yelp. Lore lurched over the chamber’s threshold, apprehension forgotten, and nearly collided with Bastian’s back.
“Got you,” he chuckled.
Lore shoved a hand between his shoulder blades. “Fuck you.”
“I thought we talked about asking nicely.”
There was a current of nerves running beneath the banter, one no jokes could hide. The darkness was thick, pressing around them, but there was also a sense of space here she hadn’t felt in the tunnels, a vastness.
It was somehow worse.
“What’s this?” Bastian stepped to the side—more steps than Lore anticipated, and she scrambled to keep up—until he reached the wall. He groped along the stone, pulling down something that looked like a leafless vine. A fuse.
“Do not light that,” Lore said, at the very moment Bastian put his torch to the fuse’s end.
Flame shot down the line, but rather than leading to a stack of explosives, the fuse took the fire to another torch set into the wall. Then another, and another, light traveling around the room until the whole cavern was illuminated in flickering orange.
It was huge, as large as three of the throne room. Stone plinths were set at equal distances, reminding Lore eerily of the iron crosshatching on the floors miles above their heads.
And on every stone slab, a corpse.
All different sizes, different genders, but in death they appeared uniform. All of them were covered in dark fabric. All of them looked like they were merely sleeping, as long as you didn’t get close enough to notice their pallor, the waxy texture of their skin.
And all of them looked nearly the same age. No children, no elderly. These corpses would be in the primes of their lives, if they weren’t dead.
Bastian moved first. Tentatively, still holding the lit torch, though now they didn’t really need it. “Where are the rest of them?”
No children. No elders. It itched at the back of her neck, some formless apprehension she wasn’t sure how to parse. “They could be in another chamber, couldn’t they? Kept apart?”
“I guess.” Bastian’s brows slashed down. “But why?”
Slowly, Lore approached the nearest slab. Femme, muscular, maybe a handful of years older than her. Reddish hair, a smooth, unlined face. And not a hint of rot.
The last attack had been two days ago. Two days, with seventy-five victims. But there were far more than seventy-five bodies in this room, so these had to be corpses from all four attacked villages.
But why were they divided by age? And how had they been so well preserved?
“Lore.” Bastian’s voice was quiet, like he was afraid to disturb the dead. “Their palm.”
One of the corpse’s hands had fallen from the plinth. Lore didn’t want to touch it; instead, she crouched and craned her neck to look.
An eclipse was carved into the meat of the corpse’s palm. A sun across the top, its curve running beneath the fingers, rays stretching to where they began. A crescent moon across the bottom, completing the sun’s arc.
“I don’t understand,” she murmured, straightening, closing her own scarred hand into a fist. “What does that mean?”
“Only one way to find out,” Bastian said.
Lore placed her fingers lightly on the stone plinth before her. She closed her eyes and found the death hiding deep in the body, tugged on it gently.
The breath she took and held tasted of emptiness and mineral cold. Her fingertips grew cold and pale as strands of darkness eased from the corpse and into her, the world losing its color again.
Something didn’t look right. She could see her own body, white light and gray and the mass of dark in her center. Bastian next to her, a light so bright it nearly throbbed. But right above the heart of every corpse, there was a knot of darkness, thickly tangled, the color of a sky devoid of moon or stars. It reminded her of the leak, of the door. Anton, again.
What had the Priest Exalted done?
Her heartbeat came slow, slower. Her limbs felt heavy. She’d taken in nearly as much Mortem as she could, and she slammed her palms down on the plinth, channeling it into the rock, feeling it grow porous and brittle.
Her veins were sluggish; her lungs couldn’t pull in enough air to satisfy. She’d taken in more death than she should’ve been able to, in the short while she’d channeled. It was… was thicker than it should be, denser.
Her knees wobbled, and Bastian rushed to her, a warm arm over her shoulders holding her up and keeping her steady.
“What happened to you?” Lore murmured to the dead, her voice thin and reedy. “Who did this, and why?”
But the corpse in front of her was still and silent.
“I don’t understand.” Bastian’s eyes narrowed. “What did—”
A creaking sound cut him off as every corpse in the cavern sat up. As every corpse in the cavern twisted to look at them with dead, blank eyes.
Understanding crashed into Lore like a wave: When she’d pulled the death out of one of them, it’d somehow pulled death from them all. Those writhing knots of dark she’d seen over their hearts must connect them, somehow.
Bastian shouldered in front of Lore as if on instinct. His hand fell to his side, to a dagger hidden in his dark clothes. What he would do with it, she didn’t know—it wasn’t like he could kill them all again.
But none of the dead moved to attack. Instead, as one, their mouths dropped open, wider than human jaws should allow.
“They awaken.” It came from the first, the corpse closest to them. Blue lips didn’t move, just like the child in the vaults. “They awaken as do the new vessels.” The words became a chant, sonorous and echoing. “They awaken. They awaken as do the new vessels.”
Lore felt as cold as the corpses, as still as death.
“They awaken.” The corpses near the woman took up the chant. “They awaken as do the new vessels.”
The chant spread like a drop of ink in a pool of water, rippling out until it reached every corpse in the cavern. They spoke at different speeds, picked up the chant at different times, a symphony of voices that filled the vast space of the cavern and came upon her like a tide.
Then the words cut off, and the dead began to scream.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Wounded dogs always go back to their masters.
—Kirythean proverb
Gods, it was loud. A screeching cacophony echoing around the too-vast chamber, bouncing off stone walls, shaken into discordancy that stabbed at Lore’s ears. She stumbled back from the plinth with its screaming corpse, tripped over a loose stone, landed on her ass with her hands clapped over her ears and her teeth gritted.
Thin threads of Mortem still clung to her fingers, strung between her and the stone-like residue from a spider’s web, brushing cold against her face. An anomaly, something she’d never encountered before—once you stopped channeling, the threads should disappear. But something about this place, deep beneath the earth and inundated with death, seemed to make Mortem linger.
Next to her, Bastian knelt on the ground, the heels of his palms pressed so tightly to his ears they might leave a bruise. Neither of them tried to get to the door. It was too much; both of them focused only on staying together through the awful noise.