“And after that?” Anton prompted.
“I raised one of them.” She didn’t mention the markings on the corpse’s hand. “But all of them got up. Every single one in the chamber.”
“Got up?” Bellegarde asked excitedly. Behind him, a slightly repulsed look spasmed across Malcolm’s face before he schooled it into neutrality again. “They were ambulatory?”
She nodded, though the nobleman’s excitement at a bunch of moving corpses made her mouth twist in the same disgusted way Malcolm’s had. “They all moved at the same time. Got up off their slabs and started coming toward us.”
“While screaming,” Bastian added. “Don’t forget the screaming.”
But the screaming aspect didn’t seem to matter to Bellegarde. He turned to Anton with barely leashed excitement. “That means the binding works. All that’s needed is—”
Anton held up a hand, and the nobleman went immediately silent.
“What binding?” Lore snapped. “What are you talking about?”
The Priest Exalted sighed. “We bound the corpses,” he said quietly. “I tied the knot yesterday, but Gabriel and Malcolm channeled the Mortem. Putting all those years of study on the properties of magic to use.”
Her eyes darted to Gabe, instinct overriding the desire not to look at him, a renewed sense of betrayal making her stomach feel hollow. Gabe’s shoulders were crooked, his head tilted so she couldn’t see his expression.
Anton noticed. A calculating look flashed in his eye. “We connected the corpses,” he continued, “so that what happened to one would happen to the others, once the Mortem in them was channeled out again. As an experiment, you understand, to see if waking one of the dead could wake them all.” He gestured to Lore. “But the waking must be done by a powerful necromancer. The most powerful we could find, and only after their power had been honed, both by nearing the age of Consecration and by proximity to Spiritum.” His gesturing hand went to Bastian. “We needed the two of you to be close together, so your powers would sharpen each other. The Law of Opposites in action.”
“I don’t have any fucking Spiritum,” Bastian hissed. “None of us do; it’s a fairy tale.”
“Apollius gives the gift to his chosen,” Anton said softly. “And that’s you, Bastian.” His fingers rose, touched the scarred side of his face. There were scars on his hand, too, Lore noticed. They looked new, still red and angry.
“I was told so by the god himself,” Anton continued. “Told that you were the Arceneaux to whom he’d bestow his power. Told that Gabriel Remaut and a child from the catacombs must stay close by you after your Consecration, and that it would pave the way for Apollius’s return.”
“What?”
Gabe’s voice, thin and quiet. His blue eye was wide, his mouth opening, then closing again.
“This has all been in motion for years,” Anton murmured. “Echoing through time. Apollius reaching down to commune with us. An Arceneaux prince, a child of treason, and the child of a Night Sister, born able to channel Mortem.” He spread his hands, smiled gently with the side of his mouth that could do such a thing. “The clearest anyone has ever heard His voice since Gerard Arceneaux himself.”
Shock made Gabe’s face taut and pale. He shook his head, slightly, like he could make Anton’s words connect in a different way, one that made sense.
Of course the thing he latched onto was her. This proof that she was something unholy. “The daughter of a Night Sister…” Gabe turned to Lore, shock transmuting to horror. “What is he talking about?”
She didn’t know what to say. All the reasons she hadn’t told him came into sharp focus: the sickened expression, the way he took a short, instinctual step back from her, though they were yards apart already. Anton had just said they’d all been used this entire time, made to play out a vision he hadn’t shared with them wholly. But the part that hit Gabe hardest was Lore the Night Sister, Lore holding death in her hands since birth.
Bastian noticed. His eyes narrowed, a cruel curve bending his mouth. “See why she didn’t tell you, Remaut?”
Gabe swallowed. “You told Bastian?”
She still couldn’t make herself speak. The Sun Prince did it for her. “Yes,” he said, leaning back in his chair, its legs creaking and his chains clanging. “She told Bastian.”
Malcolm, Bellegarde, and Anton said nothing, letting the silence drop around them like a shroud around a body. Anton’s expression was blank. He’d just dealt a blow to Gabe, and he didn’t give a single shit. He’d just completely torn apart everything they thought they knew about each other, about themselves, and not one emotion crossed his face.
Visions and prophecies and coups and wars, but all of those things paled for Lore in the face of the death they’d wrought. The justice she’d apparently never been working toward, that she hadn’t known until this moment she wanted so, so badly.
“So you killed them, then?” Lore asked. All those bodies, that child—all killed for an experiment, to see what could be done with the awful magic leaking from a buried goddess and a girl who’d been cursed with it. To the Citadel and the Church, they were all expendable, and Lore hated that more than she’d ever hated anything in her life. “You murdered all those villages?”
“No,” Anton said, almost pityingly. “No, Lore, I did not murder the villages.”
All this, and they still didn’t know. All this, and they were no closer to answers.
“But what’s killing them pales in comparison with what August is planning to do with them,” Anton continued. “He plans to use them as an army. An army that cannot be defeated.” He looked to Lore. “But it’s an army that you now control, Lore. That’s why we led you to the catacombs tonight, before the eclipse ball. So that you could take control of the armies of the dead before August could.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Curdled love is the most bitter medicine.
—Caldienan proverb
No,” Lore said.
Even Gabe, still stricken with the revelation of her past and Anton’s vision, looked almost proud of her for that. Almost.
“No?” Anton said mildly.
“I won’t do it. I won’t raise them.” Her eyes swung from Anton to Bellegarde to Malcolm, looking for a sign that this would work, that her refusal would mean something. “I won’t raise them, I won’t control them. I won’t do anything for August, or for you.”
Anton sighed. “My dear,” he murmured, “I’m afraid it’s too late for that.”
The sun rising in the window beat heat onto the back of her neck, a burn mirrored by the moon-shaped scar on her palm. “What do you mean?”
The Priest Exalted sighed again, as if this pained him. He raised a brow, a teacher urging along a particularly reluctant student.
But Lore didn’t want his gentle prodding. She wanted fucking answers. “What do you mean, dammit, tell me what—”
“Lore.” Gabe’s voice was hoarse. Still, it made her own vanish.