“Absolutely not.”
“Well, then.” Bastian stepped behind her, like he could offer some support. “I’ve got your back. Try not to die.”
Lore closed her eyes and tipped up her chin, probing her senses forward into the wall as she took down her mental barrier, the forest that would always make her think of Gabe. She tried to gather Mortem from the surrounding stone, but the way it’d already been worked into this hidden door kept her from pulling it forward.
She took a deep breath, held it until stars spun behind her eyes. When they opened, her vision had gone grayscale—the wall before her was a writhing tangle of black, her hand against it the dim-glowing gray of a channeler at work. More Mortem lurked in the wall behind her, in the dirt; Lore pulled it up, thin threads of darkness winding around her fingers. Lore channeled it through herself, quick with practice. Then, gently, she pushed it into the wall.
The Mortem in the wall had been fashioned into a puzzle box, a knot in the center, other strands outlining the shape of a door. To open it, she’d have to solve the puzzle box.
This had to be Anton’s work. It reminded her too much of what he’d done at the leak, twisting threads of Mortem into an intricate knot, working it in ways she’d never seen. But whatever Anton had done at the leak was simple compared with this. She’d never known Mortem could be used this way, twisted and fashioned rather than run quickly through a channeler and into dead matter. Made into a tool. It must’ve taken intense concentration to channel and shape it at the same time.
But had he channeled, at the leak? Now that she was thinking of it, Lore wasn’t sure. Anton had shaped the Mortem, but she didn’t recall seeing the opaque eyes and necrotic fingers that meant he was moving the power of death through his body.
Had he just shaped raw Mortem? Made a tangle of it, then sent it to her to channel inward? Such things had been done before, but it’d been centuries ago.
No time to wonder over it now. Lore sipped air through her lips as she probed at the puzzle box, the strands of Mortem she channeled picking at the ones from the Priest Exalted, thin fingers on violin strings.
The goal of the puzzle was clear—unravel the knot in the center, and it’d be a straight shot through the box and around the outline of the door, an easy thing to trace her own threads along and open. The untangling would take ages, probably. A series of tiny movements, one after the other, executed in exactly the right way and exactly the right order—
One of her threads slipped, the effort of pushing through stone making it go sideways. Something in the puzzle box slid into place.
The tangled knot smoothed.
For just a moment, Lore stood still, not quite able to believe she’d solved the intricate puzzle box by accident. Then, with one last push, she sent the Mortem she’d made down the line.
A crack. The wall before her swung open.
Lore stepped back, the threads of Mortem falling away as she gasped in air, color returning to her vision and blood coursing into her fingers. Cold emanated from the now-open door, and the dark beyond was tar-thick. She picked up her torch with shaky hands; even the flame-light didn’t penetrate more than a foot or two into the chamber.
“I’ll go first.” Bastian rolled his shoulders, set his jaw. He stepped through the door before she could stop him.
A short, startled yelp. Lore lurched over the chamber’s threshold, apprehension forgotten, and nearly collided with Bastian’s back.
“Got you,” he chuckled.
Lore shoved a hand between his shoulder blades. “Fuck you.”
“I thought we talked about asking nicely.”
There was a current of nerves running beneath the banter, one no jokes could hide. The darkness was thick, pressing around them, but there was also a sense of space here she hadn’t felt in the tunnels, a vastness.
It was somehow worse.
“What’s this?” Bastian stepped to the side—more steps than Lore anticipated, and she scrambled to keep up—until he reached the wall. He groped along the stone, pulling down something that looked like a leafless vine. A fuse.
“Do not light that,” Lore said, at the very moment Bastian put his torch to the fuse’s end.
Flame shot down the line, but rather than leading to a stack of explosives, the fuse took the fire to another torch set into the wall. Then another, and another, light traveling around the room until the whole cavern was illuminated in flickering orange.
It was huge, as large as three of the throne room. Stone plinths were set at equal distances, reminding Lore eerily of the iron crosshatching on the floors miles above their heads.
And on every stone slab, a corpse.
All different sizes, different genders, but in death they appeared uniform. All of them were covered in dark fabric. All of them looked like they were merely sleeping, as long as you didn’t get close enough to notice their pallor, the waxy texture of their skin.
And all of them looked nearly the same age. No children, no elderly. These corpses would be in the primes of their lives, if they weren’t dead.
Bastian moved first. Tentatively, still holding the lit torch, though now they didn’t really need it. “Where are the rest of them?”
No children. No elders. It itched at the back of her neck, some formless apprehension she wasn’t sure how to parse. “They could be in another chamber, couldn’t they? Kept apart?”
“I guess.” Bastian’s brows slashed down. “But why?”
Slowly, Lore approached the nearest slab. Femme, muscular, maybe a handful of years older than her. Reddish hair, a smooth, unlined face. And not a hint of rot.
The last attack had been two days ago. Two days, with seventy-five victims. But there were far more than seventy-five bodies in this room, so these had to be corpses from all four attacked villages.
But why were they divided by age? And how had they been so well preserved?
“Lore.” Bastian’s voice was quiet, like he was afraid to disturb the dead. “Their palm.”
One of the corpse’s hands had fallen from the plinth. Lore didn’t want to touch it; instead, she crouched and craned her neck to look.
An eclipse was carved into the meat of the corpse’s palm. A sun across the top, its curve running beneath the fingers, rays stretching to where they began. A crescent moon across the bottom, completing the sun’s arc.
“I don’t understand,” she murmured, straightening, closing her own scarred hand into a fist. “What does that mean?”
“Only one way to find out,” Bastian said.
Lore placed her fingers lightly on the stone plinth before her. She closed her eyes and found the death hiding deep in the body, tugged on it gently.