The breath she took and held tasted of emptiness and mineral cold. Her fingertips grew cold and pale as strands of darkness eased from the corpse and into her, the world losing its color again.
Something didn’t look right. She could see her own body, white light and gray and the mass of dark in her center. Bastian next to her, a light so bright it nearly throbbed. But right above the heart of every corpse, there was a knot of darkness, thickly tangled, the color of a sky devoid of moon or stars. It reminded her of the leak, of the door. Anton, again.
What had the Priest Exalted done?
Her heartbeat came slow, slower. Her limbs felt heavy. She’d taken in nearly as much Mortem as she could, and she slammed her palms down on the plinth, channeling it into the rock, feeling it grow porous and brittle.
Her veins were sluggish; her lungs couldn’t pull in enough air to satisfy. She’d taken in more death than she should’ve been able to, in the short while she’d channeled. It was… was thicker than it should be, denser.
Her knees wobbled, and Bastian rushed to her, a warm arm over her shoulders holding her up and keeping her steady.
“What happened to you?” Lore murmured to the dead, her voice thin and reedy. “Who did this, and why?”
But the corpse in front of her was still and silent.
“I don’t understand.” Bastian’s eyes narrowed. “What did—”
A creaking sound cut him off as every corpse in the cavern sat up. As every corpse in the cavern twisted to look at them with dead, blank eyes.
Understanding crashed into Lore like a wave: When she’d pulled the death out of one of them, it’d somehow pulled death from them all. Those writhing knots of dark she’d seen over their hearts must connect them, somehow.
Bastian shouldered in front of Lore as if on instinct. His hand fell to his side, to a dagger hidden in his dark clothes. What he would do with it, she didn’t know—it wasn’t like he could kill them all again.
But none of the dead moved to attack. Instead, as one, their mouths dropped open, wider than human jaws should allow.
“They awaken.” It came from the first, the corpse closest to them. Blue lips didn’t move, just like the child in the vaults. “They awaken as do the new vessels.” The words became a chant, sonorous and echoing. “They awaken. They awaken as do the new vessels.”
Lore felt as cold as the corpses, as still as death.
“They awaken.” The corpses near the woman took up the chant. “They awaken as do the new vessels.”
The chant spread like a drop of ink in a pool of water, rippling out until it reached every corpse in the cavern. They spoke at different speeds, picked up the chant at different times, a symphony of voices that filled the vast space of the cavern and came upon her like a tide.
Then the words cut off, and the dead began to scream.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Wounded dogs always go back to their masters.
—Kirythean proverb
Gods, it was loud. A screeching cacophony echoing around the too-vast chamber, bouncing off stone walls, shaken into discordancy that stabbed at Lore’s ears. She stumbled back from the plinth with its screaming corpse, tripped over a loose stone, landed on her ass with her hands clapped over her ears and her teeth gritted.
Thin threads of Mortem still clung to her fingers, strung between her and the stone-like residue from a spider’s web, brushing cold against her face. An anomaly, something she’d never encountered before—once you stopped channeling, the threads should disappear. But something about this place, deep beneath the earth and inundated with death, seemed to make Mortem linger.
Next to her, Bastian knelt on the ground, the heels of his palms pressed so tightly to his ears they might leave a bruise. Neither of them tried to get to the door. It was too much; both of them focused only on staying together through the awful noise.
At least, until the bodies started moving.
Jerky at first, dead limbs waking, and all of it synchronized as if it’d been rehearsed. The right arm rising, fingers flexing. Then the left leg, swinging over the side of the plinths. All the while still screaming, mouths still hanging open.
“Shit,” Lore breathed, and scrambled up from the ground. “Shit, this shouldn’t be possible, shit—”
Bastian’s eyes were closed; he didn’t see, still hunched over his knees. Lore grabbed his shoulder and pulled him toward the door. His eyes opened as she did, widened, a curse inaudible below the din of the screaming corpses.
The door was, thankfully, still open. Lore dragged him out behind her just as the bodies in the chamber stood up. Every dead face turned to them at once, eyes black, mouths made maws, dark and opened wider than they ever should be.
Slowly, they started forward.
“Close it!” Bastian yelled, all thoughts of secrecy forgotten. Surely, all this screaming could be heard from miles away.
“I don’t know how!” Lore thrust her hands at the stone, but the trailing threads of Mortem brushed against it listlessly, useless. “The magic is… it’s clinging, I don’t understand—”
Gods, there was so much she didn’t understand. This power had lived in her for nearly twenty-four years, and it was still a mystery, unknowable, a curse diamond-faceted.
Bastian shouldn’t be able to see the strands of Mortem on her fingers—he couldn’t channel—but somehow, he did. The widening of his eyes and the way his mouth opened said he did.
One more mystery.
He rushed forward, pulled her hands away from the door. Shimmers of gold wavered in the air around his fingers, too much to be imagined, too corporeal to be a hallucination. She could see them clearly now, wrapping his palms, trailing from him the way Mortem trailed from her.
The Sun Prince gathered up the strands of death in his gold-shrouded fist and yanked.
The Mortem let go, tugging out of her like a thread through a needle’s eye. Lore gasped, her vision flaring bright. Life itself seemed to spill from where Bastian touched her, blushing her skin and rushing her pulse, every nerve alive and tingling. Mortem fled from him, but she could still feel it, still grasp it if she wanted.
There was something else, too, a sense of duality: holding a rope made of shadow and one of light at once, like she was two things pressed into one form. Just a flicker of awareness, an answer to a question she hadn’t known to ask—
The bodies in the chamber collapsed. The screaming stopped, leaving ringing silence behind.
They stood in the doorway, her hands cradled in his, breathing hard. His forehead tipped down, rested on hers; she let it. The heady feeling that had rushed through her when he pulled out the strands—life, glowing and vibrant, anathema to the magic she carried—slowly faded. And with it, that flash of knowledge, of something clicking into place. Answer and question falling away.