Revenant, had to be. They always looked like walking corpses.
The revenant laughed, a breathy, wheezing sound that brought another waft of poisonous flower scent. The arm fell away, their slight weight lurching back—Lore spun on her heel, dagger drawn and held against the grimy throat.
Definitely a revenant, and one that should’ve been dead long ago. Skeleton-thin, not many teeth left, eyes sunken inches into a face the color of a fish belly and crossed with stone-gray veins. Too emaciated to make a guess at their sex. The revenant wheezed another laugh, and Lore could see the work of their lungs through their skin, laborious in a body that was more rock than flesh.
“Thought you’d hide, did you?” The revenant’s lips parted in a rictus grin. Their bottom lip split, but no fluid came out. “I could smell the death on you miles away, sweetling. Such a wealth of it. How are you so hale, so whole? A girl born to house oblivion shouldn’t be so.”
“Guess the mind goes quick even when the body lingers,” Lore hissed.
The revenant laughed, a rough, painful sound. “I got close, a few times. So close to being able to touch eternity.” One shoulder lifted, fell. “I never quite got there. But you… you have that power without even trying. How novel. How rare.” Chipped yellow teeth, bared in a smile. “They should’ve killed you when they had the chance.”
Lore’s knees locked. The tip of her dagger wavered.
“I went down there, you know.” The revenant smiled again. “Wandered for days. They’re filling up, all nice neat rows, ready for the war.”
Nonsensical rambling, the obvious sign of a mind long-gone. She felt briefly sorry for the should-be corpse, and it broke her murderous resolve. Lore sheathed her dagger and started back toward the door, legs slightly shaky. She could run. If she ran the whole way, she might be only a few minutes late to the rendezvous point.
Behind her, another laugh, a creak as the revenant laid their skeletal body on the floor. “Run, run, sweetling,” they sang softly. “You can’t outrun yourself.”
She knew she was too late before she even saw the guards.
They were hard to miss. The Protectors of the Citadel wore bright-red doublets and kept their bayonets polished to a shine, clean enough that one might doubt how many people met the business end. Lore knew better—they weren’t called bloodcoats for nothing. She also knew that with her hair tucked beneath a cap and her generous curves hidden in loose boy’s clothing, she could escape their notice as long as she kept her head down. Clearly, the guard had already changed, and she could only hope Jean-Paul had made it through while the checkpoint was unmanned.
The crowd here was even thicker than it’d been on the dock roads. Lore stood on tiptoe to watch the gate, searching for Jean-Paul’s distinctive red hair and the large, placid horse they used for drops within Ward limits. She couldn’t see him, and had to fight down a growing knot of panic in her middle as she made her way to the old storefront where they were supposed to leave the contraband. Maybe he’d already gone through the checkpoint, maybe he was waiting for her there…
Lore rounded the last corner before the old storefront came into view. Scarlet jackets, polished guns. A cart carrying mostly empty boxes. Jean-Paul’s red hair. He looked up to see her, a stocky middle-aged white man who’d been running for Val since before Lore came along, and though his expression was carefully neutral, fear sheened his eyes and made them nearly animal.
Too late, too late, too late.
For a moment, Lore couldn’t do anything but stand there. As one of the guards turned toward her, she ducked into an alley, pressing her back against the grimed brick, breathing hard enough to sting her throat.
“Shit,” she spat, quick and hoarse. “Shit.”
Holding her breath, Lore peered out of the alleyway. It looked like Jean-Paul had made it through the checkpoint without being searched, but then the bloodcoats had realized their error and caught him right when he reached the storefront. Even if she’d gotten here on time, it wouldn’t have made a difference.
Jean-Paul, to his credit, managed to keep that calm expression even as the bloodcoats poked through the boxes. The big man had his hands in his pockets and rocked back and forth on his feet, a simple trader just waiting for the search to be over. He kept his head tipped down under the brim of his hat to hide his terrified eyes.
She should abandon him. She knew that. It was one of Val’s earliest lessons. If a job went south, it was every man for himself.
But she couldn’t make herself run. Jean-Paul had a husband and a young son, and if he was caught, he’d be sent to the Burnt Isles. Lore couldn’t just leave someone to a fate like that.
“Shit.” Lore cursed one final time, landing hard on the t, then ducked out of the alley and into the crowd.
The bloodcoats didn’t pay her any attention as she sidled up, as inconspicuous as she could manage. One of them, a burly man with a curling mustache beneath his small, pale nose, held up a dummy box full of nearly sprouting potatoes and cocked an eyebrow. “If you were making my deliveries, old man,” he sneered, “I’d be very concerned you were skimming them.”
The boxes with the contraband were always on the top. The bloodcoats never expected it, always checked the boxes on the bottom first, assuming the poison would be as hidden as possible. That way, if you were found in the middle of a job, chances were the lode had already been moved to the drop point.
“Alaric needed boxes,” Jean-Paul said, deadpan. Alaric was the name they always used if stopped and asked whose business they were about. “Wanted to store something. The potatoes were just to hold them down on the cart.”
All the boxes were off the cart now. Curly Mustache’s cohorts started poking through the new ones. One, opened, full of nothing but more mealy potatoes. Two. Three.
“You’re telling me a merchant hired a cart to haul boxes of old potatoes from the Southwest Ward to the Northwest?”
Six boxes left. Three of them held mandrake. Sweat slicked Lore’s back.
“Not my concern how he spends his coin,” Jean-Paul answered.
A fifth box opened. If Lore was going to do something, it had to be now. She just didn’t know what. There were too many of them to take with a dagger, especially once she lost the element of surprise, and she’d never been much good at brawling.
A creeping feeling began in her palms, the tips of her fingers. Pins and needles, an acute awareness. Mortem waited in the stone beneath her feet, the brick and dead wood of the storefront, the cart, the poison waiting in the still-hidden mandrake. It was a low hum, a string she could grasp and pull, and it’d be so easy…
A bloodcoat reached for a sixth box, the end of his bayonet cracking open the lid. In the shadows beneath, Lore saw green.