Chapter Fifteen

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Nyxara’s power was death, but death made concrete—the essence of un-living, independent of a host. Only someone who has touched death can channel its raw form, cycling it through themselves and then into something else, rendering it dormant. Channeling this raw death—which we have elected to call Mortem—into living matter can kill weaker hosts, such as plants, but cannot kill stronger hosts, such as healthy humans and animals. However, there is a way to carefully channel Mortem into a living host that does not kill it, but rather makes it appear as stone, balanced somewhere between life and death through an equilibrium of Mortem and Spiritum. This method appears to work on all living matter, if the channeler is skilled enough to do it correctly.

—From the notes of Hakem Tabbal, Eroccan naturalist, dated two years AGF (after Godsfall)

Elsewhereturned out to be a garden made of stone.

Not entirely made of stone—there were a few living flowers twined among their rocky counterparts. Bloody-crimson roses blooming out of a bank of granite doppelg?ngers; green ivy climbing up the statues of their fellows. But mostly, everything was stone.

But not dead.

Lore couldn’t make sense of it, not at first. Rock was something in which she always reliably felt Mortem: unalive and with no hope of being different. But the stone plants had a buzz of life around them, muted yet undeniably there, threaded through with just the barest hint of Mortem.

It felt… peaceful. The aura of the garden was one of rest, of sinking into a soft bed at the end of a long day.

Next to her, Gabe’s shoulders loosened, tension sieving out of him like rain down a gutter. Maybe she looked relieved, too. Maybe both of them were always walking around like there were weights tied to their feet, and they’d never even noticed until someone cut the strings.

The garden he’d brought her to was in a courtyard against the Church wall, guarded from the interior Citadel grounds by a tall, ornate fence with a tall, ornate gate. It was small enough for Lore to see every corner from where they stood by the entrance, the walkways between the flower beds laid out in a neat grid that reminded her of Dellaire’s streets. In the center stood what looked like a well beneath a peaked golden roof. The well was closed, covered with a large circle of wood. A small statue of Apollius stood on top of the wood, as if to hold it down.

Looking at the well interrupted the sense of peace from the rest of the garden, made a chill crawl down her spine. She averted her eyes.

Tentatively, Lore reached out and touched one of the stone roses. The texture was surprisingly smooth, still petal-like. “So this is what you channel all that Mortem into?” She’d heard the tales, how the Presque Mort were skilled enough to channel Mortem into plants without killing them. But hearing about a stone garden hadn’t prepared her for how uncanny seeing it would be. The expectation was harsh and brutal; this was beautiful instead.

Gabe nodded. Next to him, flowers layered on top of one another, striations of rock and leaf, the new garden continuously grown atop the old.

“How?” A gust of wind made a living rose bend her way, tiny thorns catching on her sleeve. Gently, Lore unhooked them, let the rose bob back upright. “I mean, I know how, but how did you make them… I mean…”

“Carefully.” Gabe snorted. “We channel the Mortem into the barest surface of the thing. It doesn’t overwhelm the Spiritum, just… shrouds it. Puts it in stasis, somewhere between life and death.” He gestured to the garden, almost proudly, meandering down the path. “We could reverse this, if we needed to. Channel the Mortem through us again, put it back into something dead, and release the flowers to what they were before. It’s a kind of death, but it isn’t permanent.”

Lore stared at the roses a moment longer, watching them wave back and forth in the sunlight. Then she caught up with Gabe, who was still ambling good-naturedly along the cobblestones. He walked like a different person here, like he carried less. She wondered if he looked like this all the time when he was just a monk, when he was able to exist without reminders of who he could’ve been in the eyes of every courtier.

“Seems like cheating.” Lore couldn’t match his stride, but she did her best to keep up, two steps to one of his. “Going back and forth from death to life with no consequences.”

“Consequences like what happens when you take poison?” Gabe shook his head. “Anyone who does that deserves what they get. Humans have been given the time they’re supposed to have; trying to cheat it isn’t part of Apollius’s plan.”

Lore wondered if he’d noticed the smell of August’s flask. What he made of it. “Have you ever tried this with a person, then?” She waved her hand at the garden.

He froze, a horrified light in his blue eye. “No one would do this to a person.”

Her brow furrowed, and Lore stepped back, guilt teased to life by his stricken expression, resentment rising to meet it. “I’m not implying that you have. I’m just curious, Gabriel.” She swallowed. “You’ve had years to learn about this power, with someone actually teaching you. I’ve just been trying to survive it.”

The monk looked at her for a moment that stretched, face inscrutable. Then he turned, started walking again, though it was stiffer than before. “No one knows how channeling Mortem this way into something souled would affect them,” he said finally, sidestepping the matter of Lore’s ignorance entirely. “The position of the Church is that it would send your soul to the Shining Realm—or one of the myriad hells, I suppose, depending on how you’d lived. Once you were brought back, it’d pull you out of your afterlife, with knowledge no mortal should have.”

Raising a person from the dead didn’t bring back their soul, just their body—that’s why you had to give them direction. But an insatiable curiosity about the afterlife had been what led to a rash of practicing necromancers right after the Godsfall. People who could channel enough Mortem to raise the dead did it to find out what happened after. To know the secrets of where you went once your body was done.

The Church hadn’t liked that, even though it never really worked. No one had ever gotten a straight answer from a corpse.

Her eyes flickered to Gabe. “You really believe in the Shining Realm?”

“I’m a member of the clergy. Believing in the Shining Realm is quite literally in my job description.”

Lore knocked her shoulder into his, companionably. After a moment, he gave her the smallest edge of a smile.

The path took them by the well. The statue of Apollius was more austere than most, plain stone with no garnet adornment. Lore eyed it warily. “What’s that?”

“Catacombs entrance.” He said it with such nonchalance, Lore was convinced for a moment she’d heard him wrong. But he shot her a wry look, shrugged. “We open it every eclipse, let out the Mortem, channel it into the flowers. It’s efficient, and probably why we haven’t had a significant leak in so long.”

The mention of an eclipse made her press her palm to her thigh, hiding her scar. “When’s the next one?”

“Midsummer. A solar eclipse, so the Mortem will be particularly strong. Nyxara blocking Apollius, and all that.” He raised a brow. “Isn’t that right around your birthday?”

Her twenty-fourth birthday. Her Consecration. Lore masked her unease with a guileless grin. “Are you planning to get me a cake?”

“Maybe. Depends on if you’re nice until then.”

She rolled her eyes and took his arm, falling into step with him again as they walked away from the well. Still, pensiveness made her chew her lip. “Does it worry you? When there’s a solar eclipse and the Mortem is stronger?”

“I try not to worry until Anton tells me to.”

Thatsoured her stomach. But she kept her tone light. “You seem far closer to the Priest Exalted than any of the other Presque Mort.”

“Anton was like a father to me. I know some of it was because of his vision—that I needed to be in the Presque Mort, that it was Apollius’s will—but he was also kind. Helpful. He traveled back and forth to see me, to make sure I was doing as well as I could.” Gabe shrugged. “If it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t be here.”

She didn’t know if he meant here as in part of the Church, or here as in the land of the living. She didn’t really want to.

“Why did you ask if I believed in the Shining Realm?” Gabe asked, after a long few minutes of not-exactly-comfortable silence. “Do you not?”

Lore shrugged. “I don’t often think about what happens after we die, really. There’s enough to worry about right now.”

He made a rueful noise of understanding.

“But if I do think about it…” Lore kicked at a stray pebble. “No. I don’t think I believe in the Shining Realm. At least not the way the Church teaches it.”

Gabe raised a brow, wordlessly asking for further explanation. But he didn’t brand her a heretic and run to find Anton, which seemed promising.

She sighed, tipping her head up, as if the summer sky would give her language to explain it. “Mortem, to me, feels like the absence of everything. An end. So I guess it doesn’t make sense that I would believe in an afterlife at all… but I do, I think. I believe in something, anyway. But in all honesty, the idea of the myriad hells makes more sense to me than the Shining Realm does. I think that whatever comes after this, it’s of our own making. Whatever we sowed in life is what we reap in death, good or bad.”

“The worst part of the myriad hells would be the loneliness,” Gabe said quietly. “Being trapped in the world your own sins made, and utterly alone. I understand your point, but I can’t believe that someone who lived piously would be alone in death. And it wouldn’t make sense for anyone else to be caught up in the place your own actions made.”

She trailed her hand along a bank of stone geraniums. “I don’t know. But if Mortem feels empty—lonely—doesn’t it make sense that death would be, too?”

They lapsed into silence. Voices called in the distance, courtiers at play in the inner walls of the Citadel, sowing things they must eventually reap.

“I don’t think how Mortem feels and how death feels are the same,” Gabe said finally, almost to himself. “One is twisted magic leaking from the body of a dead goddess, and one is something that awaits us all. The first comes from the second, but they aren’t the same.”

“Why is Her magic called twisted?” If it weren’t that they were alone, that the hushed stone garden felt like a place removed from reality, Lore wouldn’t have spoken. But as it was, the words came tumbling from her mouth nearly dripping venom. “She and Apollius were equals. Her magic might’ve been dark and night and death, but it wasn’t twisted, not any more than His was, or any of the elemental minor gods you like to forget existed. It was just different.”

Gabe made a hmm sound, brows drawn thoughtfully down. “Do you know the Law of Opposites?”

A Tract teaching, a simple one that children were taught soon after learning to walk. Well, children that weren’t Lore. Still, she knew of the law and gave him a curt nod.

“If something is good, then its opposite must be evil.” Gabe shook his head. “I don’t believe that.”

“You don’t believe in something from the Tracts? You’re rapidly careening toward a vacation on the Burnt Isles.”

It was his turn to knock into her shoulder. “I believe the Tracts are up for interpretation,” he said. “And in this, I feel like our interpretation has to be wrong. Opposites are not always in opposition; the day and night are equals. One isn’t good and the other bad.” He paused, mouth pursed. “But one does illuminate things, while the other obscures. And that has to mean something, too, I think.”

Lore didn’t respond. She crossed her arms, stared at her feet as they walked over the cobblestones.

“I don’t think Nyxara is evil,” Gabe continued. It sounded like he had to push it through his teeth, though, like calling the Buried Goddess Her actual name was a difficult task. “She made a mistake by trying to kill Apollius, for reasons none of us know, and She was struck down for it. I can’t think She’s in the Shining Realm with Him—that wouldn’t make any sense—but I hope, wherever She went after Her life here was done, it’s not too terrible.” He paused. “And I wish She’d taken Her magic with Her, instead of letting it leak out all over Dellaire. But I suppose that wasn’t a choice She could make.”

Lore slid her eyes toward Gabe. “I feel like hoping Nyxara’s afterlife isn’t terrible might be some kind of blasphemy.”

“If grace is blasphemous, build me a pyre.”

He said it half like a joke, but they both knew it wasn’t. They walked on in silence, both lost in thought.

“Are you hungry?” They’d made their way around the perimeter of the garden, and now Gabe headed for the gate again, the one that would lead them back into the Citadel. “If lunch still happens the way it did back when I was a child, there should be food for the taking in the front hall.”

Gabe was right. A long table stretched the length of the hall when they entered through the Citadel doors, piled with more food than Lore had ever seen in one place. The wine fountains from Bastian’s masquerade were back, and stacks of small sandwiches, and what looked like an entire roasted boar, complete with an apple in its mouth.

She gaped. “They just leave this out here?”

“Most courtiers send their staff to come make them a tray,” Gabe said, picking up a plate and carving off a piece of the boar. “But since we don’t have staff, we’re on our own.”

“Such a hardship,” Lore lisped around the macaron she’d just shoved in her mouth.

Not all courtiers delegated their lunch preparations—Alie stood at the bend of the hall, dressed in a long dress of lavender chiffon, understated and elegant. She waved when she saw them, gracefully breaking away from the other ladies she stood with to come give Lore a very tight and very unexpected hug. “You two! Where have you been? We just came from a croquet game on the back lawn; I was sure I’d see you there.” She wiggled her pale brows. “You’ll need to practice if you’re going to make it a good game when we play.”

“We were taking a walk,” Gabe answered, just as Lore said, “Bastian took us to the stables.”

Gabe’s one eye shot daggers. Lore gave him an apologetic look over Alie’s shoulder. She’d always been told that lies were more believable when you laced them with truth, so didn’t it follow that lying about as little as possible would serve them well here?

Alie’s eyes widened. “Well, then. I don’t blame you for picking Bastian over croquet.” She raised a delicate brow at Gabe. “And I assume you felt you had to go along as a chaperone? Probably wise.”

“Oh, no, it’s nothing like that,” Lore said. “He was just being courteous.”

The other woman grinned mischievously. “Bastian doesn’t really do courteous. He does, however, like to begin illicit propositions by leading his hopeful paramour to the stables.”

Lore fought down a mad giggle. Bastian might be in the habit of taking people he wanted to sleep with to the stables, but she was absolutely certain his seduction didn’t usually involve an undead horse.

Still, the mere implication was enough to give Gabe a long-suffering expression similar to the boar on the table. “Thank you for the information, Alie.”

“Anytime. I have years of court gossip to catch you up on.” Alie turned her grin from Gabe to Lore. “I’ll tell you all the best bits at our game next week. I find rumors go down best when you have a mallet to swing.”

Lore, who had not actually decided on any of the invitations in the stack back in their suite, swallowed a mouthful of wine and nodded. “We’ll be there.”

“Excellent.” Alie waved over her shoulder as she turned back to her friends, a gaggle of beautifully dressed women whom Lore was trying very hard not to make eye contact with. Cecelia was not among them, and she didn’t recognize anyone from the group taking poison at the masquerade. “See you then!”

The smile melted off Lore’s face as she turned back to the food. “At least we know Bastian wasn’t taking me to the stables for his usual reasons.”

It was a joke, and she expected Gabe to react to it with his usual eye roll, but the Presque Mort just stabbed another strawberry and knifed it onto his plate. “I wouldn’t be so sure,” he muttered.