“Will he remember?” she asked Gabe quietly. “When he’s… un-stoned?”
His answer came low, and chilly as the wind soughing off the sea. “In the few times this has happened before,” he said, with a deliberate tone that said he highly disapproved of every single time, “the victim hasn’t remembered much from the last few hours before they were attacked. He likely won’t recall seeing us at all.”
Victim. Attack. Deliberate choices of language. Lore’s shoulders hunched.
Gabe’s fingers flexed in and out of fists, an unreadable look in his one visible eye. “So how do you want to do this?”
She’d hoped he would have an idea, but that must’ve been a bridge too far. Lore swallowed, bending her hands back and forth in preparation for pins and needles. “I guess the same way I fixed the corpse in the vaults,” she said finally. “Just try to… reverse it.”
He nodded, one hard jerk of his chin. “I’ll help.”
It didn’t sound like an offer of assistance, though. It sounded more like an order. Like he didn’t trust her to do it on her own. And even though Lore didn’t really trust herself, either, it still felt like salt in a cut.
Bastian noticed the tension hovering between them, so thick it was nearly visible, and herded Val and Mari back toward the office, still talking. Val looked irritated, Mari bemused. Still, both of them seemed to sense that this was something done better without an audience, and let Bastian lead them away.
Good. She didn’t want them to watch this.
Banishing thoughts of her childhood and her surrogate mothers, Lore turned to Milo and his terrified stone eyes. “All right,” she murmured. “Here we go.”
Tentatively, she stretched out her hands. She felt the air displace next to her as Gabe did the same. A breath into two sets of lungs, taken and held, dropping them into the space where Mortem and Spiritum became tangible.
Lore’s senses flooded with death immediately. This wasn’t like with Horse, a natural expansion of Mortem as the body died, a widening corona of darkness. The entropy surrounding Milo was thick as tar, a conundrum of nothingness made nearly solid by its sheer mass. The contradiction of it made Lore’s mind slippery.
She gritted her teeth. This wasn’t about thinking—the two times she’d done this, it’d been on pure instinct. It was about feeling.
Her eyes stayed open, her vision graying out into the black-and-white that showed life and death in stark contrasts. The man before her was all in black, a nimbus of blazing dark outlining his form. Dark threads spun from her fingers, thin filaments like spiderwebs, connecting her to the Mortem she’d channeled into his body, the shell of it she’d spun.
But at his center was colorless light, a kernel of life untouched. He could be saved.
To turn living matter to stone, she’d knit death into the cells, like a cocoon around a butterfly. Lore could sense the places where that death waited now, delicately entwined with life, separated by the thinnest membrane. Two sides of one coin, unable to exist without the other. Strengthening one strengthened them both.
She thought of the Law of Opposites.
“Can you see where the Mortem starts?” She looked at Gabe. His one eye was opaque, his veins tarry, his extremities necrotic. The skin of his lips had shrunk, revealing more of his teeth, making it look like he snarled.
Monstrous, just like her.
“I can,” he said, quiet and matter-of-fact.
“Let’s unravel it, then. Slowly.”
Deft work, careful work. Hands still outstretched, Lore twitched her finger, and the dark filament attached to it quivered. Slowly, she swiveled her finger as if she were winding thread back onto a spool. The Mortem spun away from the assassin, back toward her. Her lungs felt emptied, her heart growing still and dull as she channeled it through herself, then directed the threads toward the stone floor, funneling death back into already-dead matter. The floor here was thick enough to take it without getting too brittle.
Gabe did the same beside her, silently, and with markedly fewer threads. Together they unspooled death from the man before them, unraveling Mortem to free the kernel of light still within.
The whole time, Lore expected the disembodied voice, the murmurings that sounded both like her and wholly different. But none came.
It should’ve been reassuring. It wasn’t.
When all the death was gone and the light in Milo’s center sluggishly radiated outward to the rest of him, Lore dropped her hands, gasping in air. Her heart tithed its beat; more painful than usual, a lurching thump that rattled her rib cage. She grimaced, pressed still-necrotic fingers to her chest. Slowly, her monotone vision faded to normal colors, and she faced what they’d done.
Milo looked normal again. Markedly healthier than before, even. His skin glowed pinkish; veins that had been solid charcoal faded to a smoky gray, all the way back to blue in some places. His limbs were limp, and the dagger fell from his hand with a soft clink.
His eyes had closed, at some point. His mouth, too. He looked like he was asleep.
Gabe stepped forward, licked the side of his finger, held it beneath the still man’s nostrils. “He’s breathing.”
Relief made her knees go watery. “So we fixed him?”
Gabe turned, not meeting her eyes, and started toward the office. Bastian’s arms cut swaths of shadow through the lamp-glow, telling some story or other, and Mari’s tinkling laughter seeped from the crack beneath the door. He didn’t answer.
Milo showed no signs of waking up, not even when Gabe and Bastian heaved him up by his arms and legs and carried him out of the warehouse. Mari had suggested letting him stay in one of the cots, but Val refused. “He’s poison-addled, and there’s plenty here to steal,” she retorted, and said that there was a warehouse down the alley where people often went to sleep off too much drink. “If he remembers anything, hopefully he’ll think it’s a hallucination. Gods know he’s familiar with them.”
Grumbling, Gabe and Bastian lugged the man’s deadweight over the rough cobblestones, their breaths pluming in the air. Their boots on the street and the huff of exertion harmonized with the gentle sound of the tide coming in, distant bells on ship prows.
Val led them down the narrow lanes, approaching a dark warehouse and gently pushing open the door. It creaked, but if the sound woke anyone inside, they didn’t protest. Bastian and Gabe settled Milo on the floor, then left quickly, soundlessly. He didn’t stir.
“You’re a sneaky lot,” Val commented once they were all outside. “Have either of you considered poison running?”
Gabe looked stricken, but Bastian shrugged. “Not as such, no, but never say never. Although my current schedule wouldn’t allow for it.”
“That’s a shame.” Mari shook her head. “Our crew is dwindling rapidly these days.”