Chapter Twelve

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Emperor was rumored to drink a cup of hemlock tea each morning, so that he might live longer. Still, he died in the night, though most think it was his son rather than his sickness.

—Last report of Gaspard Beauchamp, Auverrani spy in the Kirythean Empire, executed by Emperor Jax two days after message received

Gabe looked behind him at the moment August gripped Lore’s shoulder, like some extra sense told him to pay attention. When he saw August, he stopped, a rock in the eddying sea of courtiers, brow furrowed.

August waved a dismissive hand, speaking just loud enough for Gabe to hear him in the rising babble. “Your services are unneeded, Duke Remaut. We’re only going to the vaults.”

Lore shifted under August’s hand. “Could he come anyway? I’m—”

“I’ve made myself clear.” For all the force of his words, the way August took her arm was still polite. To anyone watching, he’d be the picture of a benevolent King, welcoming to even the lowest new noble in his glittering court. “You come with me. The duke does not.” He chucked a finger beneath her chin as if she were a wayward child. “The sooner we make progress on this, the sooner you’ll reunite.”

Her lips pressed into a white line, but Lore fought the urge to jerk away. Instead she ducked her head, as gracefully as she could. “Lead on, Your Majesty.”

August gave a surprised snort. “Well then,” he murmured, “it seems a weed can become a rose, if you move it from the gutter.”

She was going to wear her teeth to nubs if she kept grinding them this hard.

Gabriel watched August lead her down the aisle, worry clear on his face. Lore tried her best to look confident and reassured. This was the price of staying out of the Burnt Isles, and she could manage it without his worry.

When her eyes left Gabe, they found Bastian.

The Sun Prince loitered near the doors, joking with a knot of people she vaguely recognized from the masquerade—one of them being Cecelia, the woman who’d offered them belladonna. Her eyes were glazed this morning, but other than that, she seemed fine. Those court physicians must really earn their keep.

The now-risen sun gilded Bastian’s skin, highlighted a scar through one brow, made his eyes look closer to golden than black. There was something solemn in them as he watched his father lead Lore away.

She had no idea where the vaults were supposed to be. They were yet another mark of privilege. It was exorbitantly expensive to be laid to rest within the Citadel rather than in one of the lesser vaults on the edges of Dellaire—little more than stone boxes with bodies stacked inside. Particularly pious commoners were known to start saving for a place in the city vaults from the moment their children were born.

The Sainted King strolled slowly enough to look casual, but his jaw was tight beneath his trimmed gray beard. “Most of the bodies from the latest attack have been examined and disposed of,” he said. “But the Presque Mort were working all night, and rode hard to bring one of the bodies here, for you to… try.”

Her palm was clammy. She wiped it on her skirt. “The latest attack?”

August nodded. “There was another last night.”

Three villages, all dead. Lore swallowed past a sudden lump in her throat.

They fell into uneasy silence as August led her down the path and back into the Citadel, the double doors closing behind them. The interior dim was disorienting after the summer-morning sunlight.

Once inside, August stopped, breathing labored as if the trek across the green had worn him out. He reached inside his glimmering cloak and pulled out a flask, taking a quick nip.

An herbal scent itched at her nose, immediately familiar. It seemed like sipping poison for fun wasn’t confined only to the younger nobles.

“I hope whoever is dosing you knows what they’re doing,” Lore said quietly.

Dark eyes swung her way, cold and calculating. “You mind your affairs, deathwitch,” August said, tucking the flask away, “and I’ll mind my own.”

The Sainted King strolled down a hallway, then took a sharp turn to a small doorway between two huge oil paintings of Apollius. The paintings were pre-Godsfall—the god’s chest was whole, His heart not yet carved out by His vengeful wife.

With a quick glance around the hall, August pushed the door open to reveal a narrow corridor beyond, lined with arched recesses crowned in golden sun rays. Statues of Apollius stood in the alcoves, plain white marble, each in a different pose. Hands outstretched. Hands to chest. Head tilted up, or looking down with a benevolent smile.

Words in swirling calligraphy had been carved over the arched doorway at the hall’s end, almost too ornate for Lore to make out. She squinted in the dark.

“Our deaths remain our own,” August intoned quietly, reading it aloud.

The numb, nervous feeling at the back of her neck extended down her shoulders.

The door at the end of the hall swung soundlessly inward onto thin gray light and a bare stone staircase, leading down only a few steps before leveling out into a tunnel.

The Sainted King offered a courtly hand. “Come along.”

Lore took the King’s hand and let him lead her into the gloom.

She hated tunnels. Thankfully, this one was short. Up ahead, a lone bloodcoat guard stood at the lip of where the tunnel opened up into what looked like full sunlight.

Not just any bloodcoat, Lore noticed as they approached. Gold lapels gleamed on his red jacket, the bayonet and sword by his side polished to a high shine. He made no indication that he noticed them at all, but when August approached, he inclined his head and stepped aside.

“The Sacred Guard,” August said as they passed. “A highly sought-after position, only granted to those who show themselves worthy both physically and spiritually, and whose loyalty I can be assured of.” He gave her a sidelong look. “They don’t get much chance to use their weapons, but they certainly know how.”

If she wasn’t so completely distracted by the sight of the vaults, Lore might’ve wondered if that was a threat. The room at the end of the tunnel was wide and circular, but the ceiling soared miles above their heads, topped with a cut-glass skylight that filtered the morning sun into faceted shards. It must’ve been what Lore had seen gleaming in the center of the Citadel yesterday.

The skylight was impressive, but not nearly as impressive as the vaults themselves. They climbed like stone towers, stretching nearly all the way to the glass above. Stairs were cut into the sides of the vaults, twisting upward, broken by platforms that led to small doors—the only way to get to the bodies inside. At the tops of the vaults, overgrown rosebushes reached for the sun. The roses were the only living things inside the vaults, other than August and Lore and the guard in the tunnel.

Lore took a moment to concentrate on her mental wall, all those trees blocking out the awareness of Mortem. Trunks and leaves and blue sky beyond.

Some of the doors in the towering vaults were closed, but most remained open, small windows into the darkness inside. Those were empty. Even nobles couldn’t always afford a Citadel vault. Most of the open doors were near the top—those were for the Arceneaux family only.

“We’ve tried to keep one body from every village,” August said. He strode purposefully toward the nearest tower and the closed door at its base. Of course. No one would waste a top vault on a villager, no matter how strange their death. “The rest are destroyed.”

“How much does one of those run?” Lore asked quietly, still staring at the vaults.

The King looked up, snorted. “More than you’ve ever seen or ever will, girl. Keep your sights set on one of the body boxes outside the city.” He rapped on the stone wall. “Anton? We’re here.”

The Priest Exalted opened the door, squinting against the light. He didn’t say anything, merely stood to the side to let his brother enter. He gave Lore a polite nod, but a muscle feathered in his jaw as he did it.

Inside the vault was dark and cool. It took Lore’s eyes a moment to adjust, but when they did, she took an involuntary step back, knocking into the wall. Another stone Apollius stared down at her. The statue’s feet were placed at the rear of the vault, his back bent against the ceiling so his empty chest gaped over the plinth, eyes level with the door. His face was eerily devoid of expression, and garnets studded his palms, gesturing to the slab in the room’s center with handfuls of jeweled blood.

And on the slab lay the body of a child.

Bile clawed at the back of Lore’s throat, her vision blurring. The child on the slab looked nothing like Cedric—he was younger, nine or ten at most, and his body was whole and unblemished. But when she looked at him, that’s who she saw. Her friend, whom she’d just wanted back for a while.

Gods, and she was about to do it again.

“Horrible business,” August murmured. She couldn’t quite read his expression in the dim light, but true regret thickened his voice. “Apologies that this must be our first experiment, Lore. We thought maybe a child would be… easier… to reanimate. Since you’ve done it before.”

She winced.

Anton shook his head sadly. “So much wasted potential.”

When she raised Horse, it’d been all instinct, following a pattern that felt as ingrained into her as the map of the catacombs she could sense behind her eyes. All she had to do was follow that pattern again. Let her body take over, try not to think.

Lore clenched and released her fists, and blinked until she could be sure she wasn’t going to cry. She didn’t let herself cry about anything, as a rule. If she started, she didn’t know if she could stop.

Anton ducked out of the door for a moment, then returned carrying a rosebush in a large pot. He set it down—it was heavy for someone his age to carry, but he didn’t appear to have an issue—and stepped back between Apollius’s stone hands.

“Now, don’t worry yourself with asking the questions,” August said. “Simply command it to follow my orders, and then you’re free to wait outside.”

Lore wasn’t listening, but she nodded anyway.

The King swept a hand toward the body on the slab. “And so we begin.”

Mortem was thick here; she could almost smell it—empty, ozonic. The smell of the sky during a storm, she’d always thought. The space between thunder and lightning. Lore closed her eyes tight, imagining her forest again, a touchstone to hold on to.

The child’s corpse conflated with Cedric’s in her mind, and it constricted her thoughts, made it more difficult to concentrate. She’d been betrayed, imprisoned, conscripted into using an awful power she’d rather forget about to help a King who didn’t seem to give a shit about anyone outside his gilded walls.

But Lore had been born with the ability to channel Mortem. Born with the dark running congruent to her bones. It’d only ever been a wound, a fault, a thing to fear and run from. Maybe now she could use it for something good.

Lore opened her eyes, took a deep breath, let it empty from her lungs. Slowly, almost without her direct thought, her arms reached out, turning pale, cold, necrotic.

“Bleeding God hold us in His wounded hand,” Anton murmured. The words were shaped for fear, but his tone wasn’t. It was almost eager.

Lore didn’t have time to dwell on it. Her vision went grayscale, white light in the shape of the King and the Priest, nothing but a yawning void where the body of the child lay on the slab. The huge statue of Apollius looked monstrous in shades of gray and black, the dead stone unilluminated by any shard of light.

The moon-shaped burn on her palm glowed dark as Lore held her hands over the slab. The child’s death was distant, the instant, awful power of it long gone. She could sense it but couldn’t touch it; dim threads wavered in the air above the body, but they weren’t thick enough to grasp.

Death had gone deeper.

Lore stepped closer, until her palms hovered just barely above the corpse, almost touching. In life, there was a ring of energy around a body. Spiritum, which Apollius alone could channel—the same power He’d allegedly given the Arceneaux line. It surrounded a person like the corona of a miniature sun, and in the moment of death, it burned out, exploded, a dying star. That’s what she’d seen when Horse died, what she’d grabbed onto. Spiritum turned to Mortem, seized at the very moment of its alchemizing, the same precarious balance that could make poison lead to horrible immortality.

But that explosion of energy dissipated soon after death, sank deep into the body and eventually withered away. If Lore wanted to raise this corpse, she’d have to search out that tiny spark of Mortem still within it. Take hold of death and pull it out.

It took her a moment, her teeth clenched tight in her jaw, her necrotic fingers lowering until they rested on the still chest. For a moment, Lore didn’t think she was going to find it at all.

Then—the barest slink of darkness, a thin thread of latent death.

Lore grabbed it like a lifeline, and wound the strand of Mortem around her hand, tugging it out as deftly as threading a needle. It flowed from the body and into her, twisting through her veins, braided into herself.

Her heart froze. Tithed a beat.

Her hand thrust sideways, Mortem flowing out of her and into the rosebush Anton had brought into the vault. The blooms withered instantly, leaves dropping, the soil turning dry and pale.

Lore’s eyes opened, banishing the grayscale world in favor of the true one. Her veins were blackened to the elbow, her fingertips white and corpse-cold. The body on the slab was still, with no visible change to mark what she’d done.

This was a human, not an animal. She had to give him a direction. And though August had told her what to do, she couldn’t remember what it’d been, so she asked the question they all wanted the answer to.

“Tell us what happened,” Lore whispered, the sound hoarse and broken through her death-dry throat.

August started, rounding on her with his brows drawn low. “You are not performing this interrogation,” he said, with every scrap of regal authority he had. “I gave you instruction. Do not overstep your place.”

But it was a moot point. The body on the slab stayed still and silent.

She’d failed. She’d been the only one who could help, and she failed. “I’m sorry,” Lore said, inane in the face of the King’s displeasure. “I did the same thing as before, I think, but it’s been too long—”

She was interrupted by a the deep, rasping noise of a breath being pulled into desiccated lungs.

The sound was unmistakable. Lore and August and Anton stared at each other over the body, beneath Apollius’s impassive watching face, the gaping maw of his stone chest.

A rustle as the corpse moved. A creak as it sat up.

The dead body opened his eyes, and Lore couldn’t help but meet them, no matter how awful—her gaze was drawn there, even as terror set deep in her bones, even as the power that made this possible kept her eyes opaque and her veins inky, looking just as dead as he did.

The child’s eyes were wholly black—no white, no iris. Darkened veins stood out around them, like the veins around her own, like the scars around Gabe’s eye patch. The child opened an empty, yawning mouth.

And though his lips didn’t move, he began to whisper.