At least, until the bodies started moving.
Jerky at first, dead limbs waking, and all of it synchronized as if it’d been rehearsed. The right arm rising, fingers flexing. Then the left leg, swinging over the side of the plinths. All the while still screaming, mouths still hanging open.
“Shit,” Lore breathed, and scrambled up from the ground. “Shit, this shouldn’t be possible, shit—”
Bastian’s eyes were closed; he didn’t see, still hunched over his knees. Lore grabbed his shoulder and pulled him toward the door. His eyes opened as she did, widened, a curse inaudible below the din of the screaming corpses.
The door was, thankfully, still open. Lore dragged him out behind her just as the bodies in the chamber stood up. Every dead face turned to them at once, eyes black, mouths made maws, dark and opened wider than they ever should be.
Slowly, they started forward.
“Close it!” Bastian yelled, all thoughts of secrecy forgotten. Surely, all this screaming could be heard from miles away.
“I don’t know how!” Lore thrust her hands at the stone, but the trailing threads of Mortem brushed against it listlessly, useless. “The magic is… it’s clinging, I don’t understand—”
Gods, there was so much she didn’t understand. This power had lived in her for nearly twenty-four years, and it was still a mystery, unknowable, a curse diamond-faceted.
Bastian shouldn’t be able to see the strands of Mortem on her fingers—he couldn’t channel—but somehow, he did. The widening of his eyes and the way his mouth opened said he did.
One more mystery.
He rushed forward, pulled her hands away from the door. Shimmers of gold wavered in the air around his fingers, too much to be imagined, too corporeal to be a hallucination. She could see them clearly now, wrapping his palms, trailing from him the way Mortem trailed from her.
The Sun Prince gathered up the strands of death in his gold-shrouded fist and yanked.
The Mortem let go, tugging out of her like a thread through a needle’s eye. Lore gasped, her vision flaring bright. Life itself seemed to spill from where Bastian touched her, blushing her skin and rushing her pulse, every nerve alive and tingling. Mortem fled from him, but she could still feel it, still grasp it if she wanted.
There was something else, too, a sense of duality: holding a rope made of shadow and one of light at once, like she was two things pressed into one form. Just a flicker of awareness, an answer to a question she hadn’t known to ask—
The bodies in the chamber collapsed. The screaming stopped, leaving ringing silence behind.
They stood in the doorway, her hands cradled in his, breathing hard. His forehead tipped down, rested on hers; she let it. The heady feeling that had rushed through her when he pulled out the strands—life, glowing and vibrant, anathema to the magic she carried—slowly faded. And with it, that flash of knowledge, of something clicking into place. Answer and question falling away.
Lore pulled her hands out of Bastian’s. “How did…” Her throat felt like she’d choked down a handful of gravel; Lore cleared it, tried again. “How did you do that, Bastian?”
He stared at his hands. The shimmer in the air around him had dimmed, but just barely, and it flared again when he raised his hand in her direction. Lore flinched, acting on instinct, and he let his hand drop.
“I don’t know.” He shook his head. “It must be something about being in the catacombs…”
Dawn was soon. Lore knew it, felt the certainty in her bones, just like she felt everything down here. They had to move; they didn’t have time for this.
“What about you?” he asked, his voice still thin with nerves. “Has Mortem ever done that before?”
“Clung to me like that, or made a bunch of corpses start to chase me?” Her rueful laugh came out shaky. “No, on both counts.”
“Rude of them not to answer your questions before they started screaming,” Bastian said. “What was it they were muttering? Something about awakening?”
“They awaken. Nearly the same thing the first one told me.” Lore frowned. “It’d be helpful if we had any idea who they is referring to.”
“You mean it’s not just nonsense?”
“The dead don’t lie. It’s an answer to the question I asked, if an oblique one.” She rubbed at her forehead, leaving behind a streak of dust and torch ash. “But we have no idea what it fucking means.”
Bastian turned to study the door. The sconces inside the chamber still burned, illuminating the mess of bodies littered over the floor; neither of them moved to douse the flames. The increased light revealed what their torches hadn’t—an X on the stone door, barely visible against the pockmarked gray. “Think whoever made this also wrote that charming passage a few tunnels back?”
“Possible, but I doubt it.” Lore ran her fingers over the X, then held them up, black with charcoal. “This was meant as a temporary marking, easy to remove.”
“So hopefully not made with a bone.”
“But it was locked with Mortem. Mortem used in a way I’ve only seen once.” Lore wiped the charcoal off on her thigh. “At the leak a couple of days ago.”
“Anton.” Bastian’s jaw was a tight line, his arms crossed as he stared at the door.
“Anton,” she agreed.
This entire expedition had been about proving Anton a liar. But now that they’d done it, found incontrovertible proof, it weighed heavy on Lore’s shoulders. And the blank, lost look on Bastian’s face said he felt that weight, too.
My father is a bad man, he’d said in the atrium, limned in moonlight and poison flowers. It had to sting, to know your entire legacy was corrupt.
He sighed, looked to Lore. “So my uncle and my father are killing their own citizens to provoke a war?”
“Seems likely.” Lore reached inside the chamber without actually stepping over the threshold and took one of the torches from the wall to replace the one she’d dropped. “But I don’t understand why. Kirythea is at our doorstep anyway; an eventual war is nigh inevitable. Why exacerbate it?”
“There has to be some advantage we don’t know about.” Bastian walked beside her, frowning, his hair falling over his forehead. “Something that would make a war profitable, rather than a drain on resources.”
“Not that a drain would ever be felt in the Citadel, anyway.”
He inclined his head in agreement.
Their journey back to the well was silent. Lore led them by the map in her head, retracing their steps through the tangle of tunnels. When they passed the words etched into the wall, she only allowed herself one glance.
Divinity is never destroyed.
Up ahead, a thin ray of light shone, too bright to be the moon. Dawn had sneaked up on them, and the strength of its glow after hours in the catacombs made Lore’s head ache.
Bastian stopped at the bottom of the stairs, scowling up into the sliver of sun. “He left it open,” he muttered. “Barely.”
“He’ll be there to pull it off.”
“Such faith you have in our monk.” Bastian mounted the stairs and started climbing, carefully, the muscles of his shoulders moving beneath his dusty shirt as he kept his balance with one hand on the wall. “He’s such a fickle thing; I wouldn’t be surprised if he turned tail as soon as we came down here.”