It took her a moment, her teeth clenched tight in her jaw, her necrotic fingers lowering until they rested on the still chest. For a moment, Lore didn’t think she was going to find it at all.
Then—the barest slink of darkness, a thin thread of latent death.
Lore grabbed it like a lifeline, and wound the strand of Mortem around her hand, tugging it out as deftly as threading a needle. It flowed from the body and into her, twisting through her veins, braided into herself.
Her heart froze. Tithed a beat.
Her hand thrust sideways, Mortem flowing out of her and into the rosebush Anton had brought into the vault. The blooms withered instantly, leaves dropping, the soil turning dry and pale.
Lore’s eyes opened, banishing the grayscale world in favor of the true one. Her veins were blackened to the elbow, her fingertips white and corpse-cold. The body on the slab was still, with no visible change to mark what she’d done.
This was a human, not an animal. She had to give him a direction. And though August had told her what to do, she couldn’t remember what it’d been, so she asked the question they all wanted the answer to.
“Tell us what happened,” Lore whispered, the sound hoarse and broken through her death-dry throat.
August started, rounding on her with his brows drawn low. “You are not performing this interrogation,” he said, with every scrap of regal authority he had. “I gave you instruction. Do not overstep your place.”
But it was a moot point. The body on the slab stayed still and silent.
She’d failed. She’d been the only one who could help, and she failed. “I’m sorry,” Lore said, inane in the face of the King’s displeasure. “I did the same thing as before, I think, but it’s been too long—”
She was interrupted by a the deep, rasping noise of a breath being pulled into desiccated lungs.
The sound was unmistakable. Lore and August and Anton stared at each other over the body, beneath Apollius’s impassive watching face, the gaping maw of his stone chest.
A rustle as the corpse moved. A creak as it sat up.
The dead body opened his eyes, and Lore couldn’t help but meet them, no matter how awful—her gaze was drawn there, even as terror set deep in her bones, even as the power that made this possible kept her eyes opaque and her veins inky, looking just as dead as he did.
The child’s eyes were wholly black—no white, no iris. Darkened veins stood out around them, like the veins around her own, like the scars around Gabe’s eye patch. The child opened an empty, yawning mouth.
And though his lips didn’t move, he began to whisper.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
To reach for power beyond what has been given to you is the greatest sin.
—The Book of Mortal Law, Tract 78
At first, the whispering was just a soft susurrus, the bare suggestion of language without any detail filled in. The sound reminded Lore of flies buzzing, of suffocating dirt, the soft fall of flesh rotted from bone. But after a moment, words conjured themselves from the shapeless noise.
Just one phrase, over and over and stopping abruptly, stuck in a replicating loop. The words started slurred, then grew sharper edges, became crisp as an elocution exercise despite the stillness of dead tongue, dead lips. “They’ve awakened,” the unmoving corpse whispered. “They’ve awakened they’ve awakened they’ve awakened—”
The King’s face was pale. He looked surprised, almost, surprised and nervous, like he hadn’t entirely expected this to work. His head swung to his twin. “Does that mean—”
Anton held up a hand, and his brother closed his mouth, swallowing the end of his sentence. The Priest Exalted’s gaze flickered from the corpse to Lore’s face, calculating.
Lore stared into the not-dead child’s black eyes, the gape of that unmoving, whispering mouth. “Stop,” she rasped. “Please stop.”
The body fell back, eyes still open, limbs slack.
She snapped her hands closed, just like she’d done with Horse, just like she’d done with Cedric, breaking the threads of Mortem that bound her to the corpse.
Then Lore bolted.
August’s voice chased her out the door, echoing in all that stone, but Lore paid the King no mind. She tripped over her hem, hit her knees, skinning them beneath her skirt. A heaving breath in and another out, trying her best to keep the bile in her throat from surging. The white, necrotic skin on her fingers slowly leached back to living warmth, the gray of her veins fading with each breath. Her heart lurched in her chest, beating so hard it almost hurt.
“Get up, girl.”
Anton’s voice was as cold as the stone against her palms. Lore rubbed the back of her wrist over her mouth, deliberately taking her time before she straightened and glared up at the Priest Exalted. The sun through the skylight blazed his gray hair into a halo, obscured his features.
“Ready for round two?” Lore nearly spat it. As humanity suffused her again, chasing out death, so did a righteous anger she couldn’t totally explain—the thought of that child, of how she’d disturbed his peaceful rest after something terrible happened to him, made shame prick up and down her spine. “Are there any other corpses you want to disturb while we have the time? Maybe we can climb up to the top and see if I can get some dead marquess to sing the national anthem—”
“That’s quite enough,” Anton murmured, his expression still hidden in shadow. “This is exactly what we brought you here for. Don’t start having a conscience now.”
“Rich, coming from a priest.”
“I told you before. The Bleeding God understands that sometimes the rules must be bent for the greater good. For the glory of His promises to be fulfilled.” Anton’s hand lifted, a finger tracing over one of the golden rays on his pendant. “He forgives His faithful, always. For everything.”
Lore swallowed. Tightened her fists in her skirt. The shame didn’t dissipate, but she managed to shove it down, push it somewhere to stay until she dealt with it later.
“I failed,” she said, shaking her head, returning to the matter at hand instead of an existential one she couldn’t parse yet. “We learned absolutely nothing about what’s happening in the villages.”
They’ve awakened. It still reverberated in her head, that awful whisper from a dead mouth. They’ve awakened.
She’d asked the dead boy what happened to him, and she didn’t think the dead could lie. It was an answer of some kind, but not one that made any sense.
“It doesn’t matter, on this first attempt.” August waved a hand as he stepped through the small door of the vault, ducking so his crown didn’t knock into the lintel. Despite his look of confused near-terror when he heard the corpse speak, he looked in good spirits now, almost excited. “You made it talk. That’s what we wanted.”
Her brows knit. “But I didn’t—”
“In time,” August said. It might’ve been reassuring coming from anyone else. From him, it sounded like the extension of a sentence. “We’ll try again.”
“The body won’t keep,” Anton said quietly. “It will have to be moved.”