No, she was approaching, gliding fast between the wights that shambled toward their dumbstruck prey.
Viv shook herself and snatched for the saber at her hip, but it was missing. Only then did she notice the heavy weight slung across her back. Her searching fingers found the hilt of the greatsword over one shoulder and gratefully tightened on it. The leather creaked, and a current passed from the steel and into her flesh. She couldn’t have let go if she’d wanted to.
She didn’t want to.
“You have something that belongs to me,” purred Varine, looming impossibly large, empty and enormous, while the world hissed away from her like soot blown from white marble. Until there was nothing, nothing but Varine.
Viv unsheathed the blade and brought it before her, solid and right and hers.
“Blackblood.” Varine’s whisper boomed like thunder, and the necromancer was before and behind and above and, inevitably, below.
And then she was inside her like a blade between the ribs, cold and laughing.
Viv snapped awake in the darkness, clutching at her side and the fading burn of ice there.
Her other arm was flung across the bedframe, fingers tight on the greatsword’s hilt.
On Blackblood’s hilt.
* * *
Viv sat back on her haunches, her thigh burning and stretching with the motion. She recorked the bottle of bonedust and watched as Satchel boiled out of his resting place and into her room.
When his eyes lit blue, she said, “Couldn’t sleep. Do you mind?”
“You’d like some company?” he asked in his hollow, echoing voice.
“I guess so. Glad to see you’ve dropped the ‘m’lady,’ anyway.”
Satchel stared at the greatsword where it throbbed with lamplight on the bedframe.
“It has a name, doesn’t it?” asked Viv. “She has a name.”
“She does,” he replied.
“Blackblood,” said Viv.
His gaze sharpened. “Have you been dreaming?”
“So that is what she’s called,” Viv breathed. Then, “Only once,” she admitted.
The homunculus sighed, dead leaves on stone. “My Lady will come.”
“Not if Rackam finds her first,” said Viv. “But if he hasn’t done that by now … then you may be right.”
“Rackam?” asked Satchel.
So Viv told him about Rackam and Lannis and Tuck and the rest of them. It occurred to her that she’d never sat and spoken with Satchel at length, not like this. He was a good listener.
When she was done, she scrutinized him. He’d dropped into a cross-legged sitting position that looked like it would be supremely uncomfortable for someone with muscles and tendons.
“I think,” she said slowly, “that you’ve been lying to us. Just a little.”
Satchel didn’t respond for a long moment, until he said, “And what makes you say that?”
“A feeling. A strong feeling. I do think you have to keep her secrets. I truly believe that.”
“I do,” whispered Satchel, a ghostly breath.
“But I think you keep more than that. Not to help her. Not to hurt anyone else. But because you’re afraid.”
“She hears,” he said, and there was a note of anguish in his voice.
“Right now?” Viv’s pulse spiked in alarm.
He shook his head, and her heartbeat slowed.
“When she finds me,” he said, tapping the side of his horned skull. “Every moment, she can retrieve. Relive. I can hide nothing from her.” His gaze was haunted. “And even I can feel pain. She knows how to make it so.”
“That’s pretty gods-damned terrifying,” agreed Viv. She lifted Blackblood from the bedframe and laid it across her lap, trailing her fingers across the steel. “But let me ask you something.”
“Ask,” he said, and something about the way the flames flickered in his sockets communicated his fierce attention.
“Do you want to be free of her?”
He hesitated, no doubt thinking of the moment Varine might witness this admission were he to return to her possession. “I do,” he admitted quietly.
“Do you think you’re ever going to have a better chance to be free of her than this? If she comes, I’ll do my damnedest to kill her, with her own gods-damned sword if I can. Maybe I’m not at my best, but I’m still good at this. And coming behind her is the hardest man I know, and more besides. If she’s caught between us—” Viv slammed a fist into a palm.
“I am not so sure she can be killed with steel,” he said. He tapped Blackblood with one bony digit. “And I am not so sure she can be avoided either.”
“Maybe she won’t die by steel,” said Viv grimly. “But everything can be killed.”
“And if you fail,” he continued, “she will live so, so long. So very long. And there will be no release for me.”
“Well, then,” said Viv. “Maybe it’s time to improve those odds. If she can’t be killed with steel, then how?”
Satchel stroked his bony chin with two phalanges for several moments, and then the fire in his eyes brightened. “Perhaps there is a way. But it would not be easy.”
Viv smiled a predator’s smile. A smile nobody else in Murk had ever seen. “Tell me.”
32
“Whoof,” panted Maylee, flicking sweat from her forehead and flipping her braid over her shoulder. “How’d I let you talk me into this?”
Viv shaded her eyes and gazed out over the sea from their vantage atop the bluff. “The view is worth it,” she replied, smiling encouragingly. She didn’t mention the powerful need she had to survey the surrounding lands as far as the eye could see, to squint at every shadow and scrubby tree.
No advancing army on the horizon. No bloodless woman with eyes like splashes of ink. She felt some of her itch subside.
To their left, markers poked up from the long grasses of the graveyard like half-submerged boulders in a stream. Fern and Gallina shook out a green wool blanket and laid it across the bare expanse beyond the fence.
“Strange to say, but I’ve never been up here,” said Maylee, scanning north. “Huh, that’s quite the cottage, isn’t it?” She pointed to the sprawling estate visible from the promontory.
“Fern says that’s Zelia Greatstrider’s place,” said Viv.
“The one that writes all those books with the dirty bits?”
“They’re not that dirty,” protested Viv, although yes, they actually were.
“Didn’t say it was bad.” The baker grinned at her, a grin with something wicked folded into it. A grin that almost made Viv wish Rackam would take his sweet time.
Maylee set her wicker basket on the blanket. She’d insisted on carrying it herself. “Fern, you should have her come by the shop next time you’re thinkin’ about a sale. Scones and sexy books? Yes, please!”
“Ha! I’d be terrified to ask her. That mansion of hers is forbidding. But as ideas go …” Fern trailed off.
Viv unbuckled her saber and leaned it against one of the stone pillars at the corner of the graveyard. She’d seen Maylee eyeing it the whole trip up. She’d felt a frustrating combination of guilt and annoyance at that, and she was still doing her best to wrestle both of those feelings back into their boxes. Nobody would be sneaking up on them at this height, but after her dream and her midnight conference with Satchel, there was no way in all eight hells she was going to troop out of town unarmed. The greatsword—Blackblood, she thought—felt best in her hands, but she’d reluctantly left it in favor of subtlety. Or at least as close as she could come to subtle.
This trip had been markedly less taxing than the previous one. Her leg felt stable, only twinging occasionally, and she was finally able to wear her right boot again. She felt almost herself.
“Well, it’s good to get some air, anyway,” she said.
“You did kinda bully all of us into comin’,” said Gallina as she removed her boots and dug her toes into the hot sand. “Lookit you. Big, tough, woman of action, organizin’ picnics.”
“Fern needed to get out,” replied Viv.
“Oh, is that what this is? I needed to get out?” Fern pretended to be affronted.