With a sharp, snarling sound, Lore snapped her hands to fists. The strands of Mortem severed, and the horse toppled, the power that had reanimated it slithering into the air like smoke, then dissipating. That’s what she’d done with Cedric, when Val saw them, when Val screamed. It hadn’t been intentional then. Lore was just startled, startled and scared, and she’d snapped the threads that held them together.
It’d seemed harder then. The raising and the ending. This time, with Horse, she’d barely had to try. Channeling the Mortem out of the body had come to her so naturally, stealing death and sending it away.
The animal’s heavy corpse fell on a group of bloodcoats, dead meat once again. The crunch of bone and pained shouts echoed through the Ward, cut through with the screams of onlookers. The guards had forgotten about Lore and Jean-Paul; she saw the lick of his red hair as he disappeared into an alleyway. Curly Mustache had turned around when Horse fell, and the surge of people between him and Lore had carried him away, made him lose her in the crowd. Lore could hear him shouting, but she couldn’t see him.
She’d certainly gotten the distraction she wanted. Now if she could just make herself move.
Lore levered herself up from the ground on legs that tingled with pins and needles, cursing as she tried to hobble away. Memories of Cedric crashed through the mental barriers she’d trapped them behind, made the past and the present muddle, awful and infinite. She limped as fast as she could into the narrow space between two storefronts, huddling into the shadows. In a moment of clarity, she pulled the cap from her head and let her hair tumble free, twisted the hem of her shirt and tucked it in her trousers so it molded to her curves. Not really a disguise, but it made her look different than she had at the moment she’d raised the horse, and it might buy her enough anonymity to get away.
Someone grabbed her arm.
Lore turned with a snarl in her teeth, hand already raising to strike at whoever had touched her.
Michal.
Clearly, he hadn’t expected what he saw when she turned around; he’d seen her running to the alley, but not made the connection between her and Horse. Now she watched every piece of the puzzle lock into place, played out across his features: blue eyes narrowing before going wide and horrified. He glanced over his shoulder at the square, mouth dropping open, a flinch shuddering through his hand before it jerked back from her, fingers splayed.
“Sorry,” Lore muttered, her tongue suddenly thick. “I’m sorry.”
She shoved past him, out into the square again. Turned down the first alley she came to. Started running and didn’t stop, her head down and her vision blurred, picking directions at random and thinking only of away.
So when one of the Presque Mort stepped out of a trash-strewn alcove in front of her, she nearly ran right into him.
He loomed over her, hands outstretched, the image of a lit candle inked into each palm. His black clothing fit close to a muscular body, one blue eye gleaming at her, the other covered by the dark leather of an eye patch.
There was something almost familiar about him, a sense that she’d met him before. But that was ludicrous. Lore didn’t know any of the Presque Mort, or any other members of the clergy, for that matter.
Not anymore.
“Of course the Presque Mort would show up,” Lore spat as she stumbled away from the inked hands, fumbling for her dagger again. “Of fucking course.”
The Presque Mort didn’t respond, just watched her as she turned to run in the opposite direction, trying to backtrack the way she’d come and pick a new route. He whistled, a low note rising higher, and it was echoed by others, ringing off the stone, clear above the grown-distant cacophony of the Ward.
They had her cornered.
The first monk moved slowly forward, tattooed hands held out like she was an unfamiliar dog he didn’t want to frighten away. Unusually tall, with a crop of shorn reddish-blond hair and broad shoulders, handsomeness wasted on someone with vows of celibacy.
“We don’t want to hurt you.” Deep voice, clipped tones, like this refuse-lined alley was a Citadel ballroom.
“You have a funny way of showing it.” Lore’s feet stuttered over uneven cobblestones as she backed away, nearly sending her stumbling.
The Presque Mort made no response. Others dressed in the same plain, dark clothing emerged from the two mouths of the alley, moving slowly, implacably forward. Too many to fight off, and now there was no livestock to reanimate and call their attention.
Lore’s legs buckled; she braced her still-numb hand on the wall. Even predisposed to death magic as she was, the recovery was a bitch.
So distracted was she that when the tall Presque Mort pulled a cloth from his pocket, she didn’t have time to react before it was pressed over her airways. Chloroform. There was something almost funny about it, pedestrian chemicals in a city famous for romantic, flowery poisons.
“We don’t want to hurt you,” he murmured, “but we do need you to come with us, and something tells me you won’t do it consciously.”
“Whatever gave you that idea?” Lore slurred, then all the world went dark.
The bindings felt familiar; the rasp of rope on her skin was like an echo. For a moment she smelled stone and burning skin. For a moment she was sure there was nothing but tunnels and pale torchlight beyond the veil of her eyelids, an obsidian tomb and hazel eyes that matched her own.
So when Lore opened her eyes and saw a cell, it was almost a relief.
Someone had stuffed a gag in her mouth—it tasted sour, like it’d been used to clean up spilled wine. One rope bound her ankles to the legs of the chair where she sat, another bound her wrists together behind her back, and yet another connected the two. Whoever had tied her up had left enough slack that she wasn’t painfully contorted, but there was no chance in any of the myriad hells that she could get out of the chair unassisted.
And all of it—the chair, the bindings, the stone walls—all of it felt like death.
Lore gasped against her gag, pulling the fabric farther back in her throat, making her choke as she pressed her eyes closed. Usually, she could deal with her awareness of Mortem in dead matter. She had to; there was no escaping it. But something had changed when she raised Horse, and now it pressed in on her from all sides, heavy and thick, bearing down with a suffocating weight.
Worse than the rock and rope, things that had never lived, were the things that did. The minuscule threads of grass pushing against the cracks in the floor, the people close enough for her senses to pick them up, her own body—alive, for now, but she could feel each individual cell as it collapsed, an eternity in microcosm—
Had this happened after Cedric? If it had, she didn’t remember it. It seemed like getting older had made the raising easier and the side effects worse.