Chapter Two

CHAPTER TWO

Those born to darkness will carry it in their nature; they will carry sin in their very selves, body and mind and soul.

—The Book of Mortal Law, Tract 7

Dellaire was easy to navigate. Lore had heard tales of other cities—chaotic and winding, byways butting into themselves—and the concept seemed entirely foreign to her after half a lifetime spent in Dellaire’s well-organized roads. The Four Wards at ordinal directions, the western two coming up against the sea while the eastern led to Auverraine’s rolling farmland. The Church in the city’s center, built in a circle, guarding the Citadel within.

But if Dellaire was a grid, the catacombs beneath were a tangled web.

Weak sun radiated over the back of Lore’s neck as she stood at the entrance to a dilapidated building a few blocks from Michal’s row house. It had the look of a construction that had been many things in its time, so many that they’d all canceled one another out, so now it was nearly featureless. A slight wind off the sea rippled the torn cloth hanging in the windows.

Lore cursed softly. Being this close to the catacombs always made her twitchy.

They were empty. She could sense it, even now, standing yards away from their entrance. There was no one in the tunnels, at least not for a couple of miles.

Still, her skin prickled.

This was the skill that made her invaluable. The one she’d shocked Mari with on that day ten years ago, when she was a thirteen-year-old wandering in the streets with blank eyes and a fresh burn scar on her palm. Val’s wife had been heading to the market and had come across a young Lore staring at a ragged hole in the side of a derelict building, one that led to the catacombs.

Lore still remembered it. She’d blocked out nearly everything that came before this moment, thirteen years of life spent almost entirely underground, but her recall of meeting Mari was crystalline, perfectly preserved, as if her mind could wash over everything that had come before by saving this memory in vivid detail.

“Are you all right?” Mari’s voice was soft and low, her long, dark braids twisted up on top of her head. A moment of hesitation before her golden-brown hand settled on Lore’s shoulder. “Is something wrong?”

Lore had stared at the hole and concentrated on the sting of the still-healing burn on her palm, on the darkness beyond and how it stretched out into what had been her forever. She blinked, and the layout of the tunnels overlaid the back of her eyelids. “No one is coming,” she’d said. “Not right now.”

In the present, Lore shook her head. She’d gotten better at only tapping into her awareness of the catacombs when she needed it—even now, as the strange skill seemed to be growing in strength alongside her sense of Mortem—but standing so close made it nearly impossible to ignore, made it seep through her thoughts like ink in water. She felt the tunnels like phantom limbs, like the catacombs and the Mortem within them were part of her. Sometimes Lore thought that if you peeled off her skin and turned it inside out, there’d be a map on the slick underside, pressed into the meat of her.

With a sigh, she leaned against the side of the building. She was a little earlier than Val had told her to be, and Val was nothing if not punctual.

A minute later, Val was striding down the street toward her, with the same determined gait that equally served for a casual stroll or a charge into a knife fight. A middle-aged woman more severe than traditionally pretty, with a paper-pale face, bottle-green eyes, and a scarf that had faded to near colorlessness holding back her gold hair.

Lore raised a hand in greeting. Val took hold of her fingers and pulled her into a hug instead. “You keeping out of trouble, mouse?”

“Only the kind you don’t want me in.” Lore hugged her back, the familiar scent of beeswax candles and whiskey a soothing weight in her lungs. Val and Mari had raised her since that day when she’d emerged from the dark into a world she didn’t know. They’d protected her and given her purpose, even when it was a risk. Even when the effects of her strange childhood had manifested in terrifying ways.

None of them talked about that, though.

Val snorted and straightened her arms, hands still on Lore’s shoulders. Her gaze had always cut like a scalpel, and now was no different. “I’m pulling you out,” she said with no preamble.

Lore’s brow knit. “What?”

“We have all the info we need on Gilbert’s outfit; if he’s moving as much contraband this week as you say, he won’t be running poison for much longer, anyway. There’s always a rush of religious feeling after a royal Consecration. The Presque Mort might be distracted now, but after that ceremony, they’ll have their noses to the ground like you won’t believe.”

For all that Lore loved her surrogate mothers, there was no denying that they were cutthroat. Val and Mari had visions of being the only poison suppliers in Dellaire—once they were, they’d be nigh untouchable. Bloodcoats took any bribe you threw at them, and even the Presque Mort and the rest of the Church turned their backs sometimes. The criminal underbelly of Auverraine was only criminal until the right amount of gold crossed the right palm.

Still, Lore shook her head, telling herself that her reluctance to leave was a business decision that had nothing to do with Michal. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. There’s still more I can learn.”

One pale eyebrow rose. Val cocked her head, that scalpel look delving deeper. “You like him.”

“No.” Yes. “That doesn’t have anything to do with it.”

“Oh, mouse.” Val sighed. “I’ve told you before. You have to keep yourself apart.”

But she was always apart. The power in her veins, the awful things she was capable of kept her always, always apart. And it was nice to let the pieces of herself that could be liked—loved, even—have just a little comfort, sometimes.

Val patted her on the shoulder again. “It’s for the best, Lore. Trust me.” A pause, her teeth digging into the corner of her bottom lip. “It’s all for the best.”

And she was right. Val always was. Lore sighed, nodded.

It wouldn’t be difficult. She had scripts for this, lists of excuses she’d given other lovers over the years, lovers she’d similarly been cautioned against taking when she infiltrated their lives to find the secrets of their employers. There was the sick aunt she had to tend, the jealous spouse who’d finally found her, the sudden desire to move to a new city and start over. Typically, the excuses weren’t questioned, and Dellaire was big enough that she rarely saw those people again. On the rare occasions she did, they didn’t notice her. Lore kept her affairs quick, and poison runners moved on even quicker.

“Tell me about this drop,” Lore said, eager to change the subject.

“It’s simple.” Val’s eyes flicked away from Lore’s. “Normally, I wouldn’t bother you with it. But the client requested that the boxes be left at the catacombs entrance in the Northwest Ward’s market square.”

“So you need me to watch it and make sure no one comes near before the client can pick it up.” Vagrants often used the outer tunnels of the catacombs to move around Dellaire. Leaving anything in them was a risk.

“Shouldn’t take long,” Val said. “If you leave now and cut by the dock roads, you should get there by the time the guard is changing. It’ll be chaos, since it’s the day before a royal Consecration. Jean-Paul is bringing the contraband to the square, and if he arrives during the changeover, he should be able to slip through without getting searched. Then you can help him unload.”

Get to the square, unload the drop, watch the poison until it gets picked up. Clients didn’t like to leave their contraband sitting for long, so she shouldn’t have to be there for more than an hour. Then she could go back to Michal’s row house, jump in the rusty claw-foot tub to wash off the itchy feeling of being near the catacombs, and decide which of her lies she was going to use to break whatever they’d built between them.

She gave Val a decisive nod. “I’ll head that way, then.”

The old poison runner watched her for a moment, expression unreadable. Then she pulled her forward again, a crushing hug that made Lore nearly yelp in surprise.

“We love you like our own daughter,” she murmured into Lore’s hair. “Mari and I do. You know that, right?”

Bewildered, Lore nodded, though she couldn’t move her head much. “Of course I do.”

“And whatever we do, we do it because we have to.” Val stepped back, keeping her hands on Lore’s shoulders, her green eyes uncharacteristically soft. “I’m sorry to make you leave him, mouse.”

Lore jerked another nod, swallowing past the curious tightness in her throat.

One more squeeze of her shoulders, then Val let her go. “Now get on with you,” she said. “Don’t want to be late.” She turned and started walking back the way she’d come.

Lore closed her eyes. Sighed, the sound of it shaking only slightly. Then she turned and headed in the opposite direction, toward the dock roads.

The dock roads were a mistake. Lore had barely gone a mile before she caught a glimpse of gilt on the horizon, and at a mile and a half, it became clear that preparations for the Sun Prince’s Consecration had overtaken nearly all of the street space between here and the Northwest Ward. Colorful stalls lined the usually deserted paths, hawking figurines of the Bleeding God and greenish-copper replicas of the Sainted King’s sun-rayed crown. Bloodcoats in their crimson jackets milled around the growing crowd with shining bayonets, and Lore even saw one or two Presque Mort, clothed head-to-toe in oppressive black.

“Stupid,” she hissed beneath her breath. “Gods-damned stupid to do a drop right before a Consecration.”

She could probably weave through the crowd, but it’d take time to work around the traffic, and that would leave the contraband sitting unattended. With a string of curses, Lore turned around and started jogging back toward the building where she’d met Val.

If she couldn’t go overland, the only way to get to the drop site on time was to go through the catacombs.

Shit.

The dagger at her hip was a comforting weight as Lore ducked cautiously beneath the sagging door’s lintel, keeping an eye out for revenants. Revenants weren’t really a threat, made slow by the physical effects of too much poison and too-long lives, but Lore still wasn’t keen on meeting one. They tended to congregate around entrances to the catacombs, and her inconvenient talent only told her if someone was actually inside the tunnels.

There was always the risk of encountering leaking Mortem around catacomb entrances, too, which made going near them at best unpleasant, at worst dangerous. Unchanneled Mortem could eat straight through a body, and at the rate it leaked from the Buried Goddess’s corpse beneath the Citadel, sometimes there was too much for the Church to handle, even with the Presque Mort.

Thinking of the Mort made Lore’s mouth tighten. The elite cadre of Mortem-using monks had been created specifically to channel all the leaking Mortem and keep it from overwhelming Dellaire, but sometimes there was simply too much. And then there was the problem of what to do with it. Presque Mort usually channeled Mortem back into stone, since it was already dead matter, but it opened sinkholes all over the roads. Dellaire’s dead goddess issue was hell on infrastructure.

The other option was to channel Mortem into something living, usually plants—rumor was they had a garden full of stone flowers and rock-hewn trees. When the leaks got especially bad, the Presque Mort sometimes had to turn to the farmlands, razing entire fields, though a leak that dire hadn’t happened in ages.

The catacomb entrance was toward the back of the building, over a collection of graffitied rock and broken floorboards. Someone had helpfully painted a face with Xs over its eyes on the wall, with an arrow pointing the way.

Lore didn’t need the direction. The farther she went, the more her skin buzzed, her innate knowledge of the underground kicking to life with a sickly lurch. This close, if she shut her eyes, she could see the black lines of the catacombs in her head—a tangled maze of tunnels overlaying her thoughts, tinting them dark.

The effect always unsettled her, so she tried very hard not to blink as she approached the dilapidated door, taking deep breaths in through her nose and out through her mouth to keep her mind clear. Pushing a poison lode into the catacombs to get picked up was one thing; it was wholly another to walk through them, to feel them pressing down from all sides. It made the moon-shaped burn mark on her palm ache, and was distraction enough that she didn’t notice the person behind her until they were too close for her to escape.

An arm curled around Lore’s neck, the bite of dirty fingernails in her skin chased with the sweet, herbaceous scent of belladonna. Choking out a curse, Lore brought up her elbow, jabbing it backward into a frame that felt horribly bony.

Revenant, had to be. They always looked like walking corpses.

The revenant laughed, a breathy, wheezing sound that brought another waft of poisonous flower scent. The arm fell away, their slight weight lurching back—Lore spun on her heel, dagger drawn and held against the grimy throat.

Definitely a revenant, and one that should’ve been dead long ago. Skeleton-thin, not many teeth left, eyes sunken inches into a face the color of a fish belly and crossed with stone-gray veins. Too emaciated to make a guess at their sex. The revenant wheezed another laugh, and Lore could see the work of their lungs through their skin, laborious in a body that was more rock than flesh.

“Thought you’d hide, did you?” The revenant’s lips parted in a rictus grin. Their bottom lip split, but no fluid came out. “I could smell the death on you miles away, sweetling. Such a wealth of it. How are you so hale, so whole? A girl born to house oblivion shouldn’t be so.”

“Guess the mind goes quick even when the body lingers,” Lore hissed.

The revenant laughed, a rough, painful sound. “I got close, a few times. So close to being able to touch eternity.” One shoulder lifted, fell. “I never quite got there. But you… you have that power without even trying. How novel. How rare.” Chipped yellow teeth, bared in a smile. “They should’ve killed you when they had the chance.”

Lore’s knees locked. The tip of her dagger wavered.

“I went down there, you know.” The revenant smiled again. “Wandered for days. They’re filling up, all nice neat rows, ready for the war.”

Nonsensical rambling, the obvious sign of a mind long-gone. She felt briefly sorry for the should-be corpse, and it broke her murderous resolve. Lore sheathed her dagger and started back toward the door, legs slightly shaky. She could run. If she ran the whole way, she might be only a few minutes late to the rendezvous point.

Behind her, another laugh, a creak as the revenant laid their skeletal body on the floor. “Run, run, sweetling,” they sang softly. “You can’t outrun yourself.”

She knew she was too late before she even saw the guards.

They were hard to miss. The Protectors of the Citadel wore bright-red doublets and kept their bayonets polished to a shine, clean enough that one might doubt how many people met the business end. Lore knew better—they weren’t called bloodcoats for nothing. She also knew that with her hair tucked beneath a cap and her generous curves hidden in loose boy’s clothing, she could escape their notice as long as she kept her head down. Clearly, the guard had already changed, and she could only hope Jean-Paul had made it through while the checkpoint was unmanned.

The crowd here was even thicker than it’d been on the dock roads. Lore stood on tiptoe to watch the gate, searching for Jean-Paul’s distinctive red hair and the large, placid horse they used for drops within Ward limits. She couldn’t see him, and had to fight down a growing knot of panic in her middle as she made her way to the old storefront where they were supposed to leave the contraband. Maybe he’d already gone through the checkpoint, maybe he was waiting for her there…

Lore rounded the last corner before the old storefront came into view. Scarlet jackets, polished guns. A cart carrying mostly empty boxes. Jean-Paul’s red hair. He looked up to see her, a stocky middle-aged white man who’d been running for Val since before Lore came along, and though his expression was carefully neutral, fear sheened his eyes and made them nearly animal.

Too late, too late, too late.

For a moment, Lore couldn’t do anything but stand there. As one of the guards turned toward her, she ducked into an alley, pressing her back against the grimed brick, breathing hard enough to sting her throat.

“Shit,” she spat, quick and hoarse. “Shit.”

Holding her breath, Lore peered out of the alleyway. It looked like Jean-Paul had made it through the checkpoint without being searched, but then the bloodcoats had realized their error and caught him right when he reached the storefront. Even if she’d gotten here on time, it wouldn’t have made a difference.

Jean-Paul, to his credit, managed to keep that calm expression even as the bloodcoats poked through the boxes. The big man had his hands in his pockets and rocked back and forth on his feet, a simple trader just waiting for the search to be over. He kept his head tipped down under the brim of his hat to hide his terrified eyes.

She should abandon him. She knew that. It was one of Val’s earliest lessons. If a job went south, it was every man for himself.

But she couldn’t make herself run. Jean-Paul had a husband and a young son, and if he was caught, he’d be sent to the Burnt Isles. Lore couldn’t just leave someone to a fate like that.

“Shit.” Lore cursed one final time, landing hard on the t, then ducked out of the alley and into the crowd.

The bloodcoats didn’t pay her any attention as she sidled up, as inconspicuous as she could manage. One of them, a burly man with a curling mustache beneath his small, pale nose, held up a dummy box full of nearly sprouting potatoes and cocked an eyebrow. “If you were making my deliveries, old man,” he sneered, “I’d be very concerned you were skimming them.”

The boxes with the contraband were always on the top. The bloodcoats never expected it, always checked the boxes on the bottom first, assuming the poison would be as hidden as possible. That way, if you were found in the middle of a job, chances were the lode had already been moved to the drop point.

“Alaric needed boxes,” Jean-Paul said, deadpan. Alaric was the name they always used if stopped and asked whose business they were about. “Wanted to store something. The potatoes were just to hold them down on the cart.”

All the boxes were off the cart now. Curly Mustache’s cohorts started poking through the new ones. One, opened, full of nothing but more mealy potatoes. Two. Three.

“You’re telling me a merchant hired a cart to haul boxes of old potatoes from the Southwest Ward to the Northwest?”

Six boxes left. Three of them held mandrake. Sweat slicked Lore’s back.

“Not my concern how he spends his coin,” Jean-Paul answered.

A fifth box opened. If Lore was going to do something, it had to be now. She just didn’t know what. There were too many of them to take with a dagger, especially once she lost the element of surprise, and she’d never been much good at brawling.

A creeping feeling began in her palms, the tips of her fingers. Pins and needles, an acute awareness. Mortem waited in the stone beneath her feet, the brick and dead wood of the storefront, the cart, the poison waiting in the still-hidden mandrake. It was a low hum, a string she could grasp and pull, and it’d be so easy…

A bloodcoat reached for a sixth box, the end of his bayonet cracking open the lid. In the shadows beneath, Lore saw green.

She rushed forward, banishing the call of Mortem, speaking before she even knew what words were on her tongue. “You found them!”

Jean-Paul and Curly Mustache turned toward her, the bloodcoat she’d interrupted looking up with a curious wrinkle in his forehead. She snatched the box, open lid pressed to her chest. “Father sent me, I’m so sorry I’m late.”

Curly Mustache cocked his head. “Would your father perhaps be Alaric, girl?”

Damn her breasts. She thought this shirt would be baggy enough to obscure them, but she’d never had the kind of chest that was hidden easily. “Yes,” Lore said, standing up straighter, making her smile wider. “He’s been so upset, I’ve broken too many jars trying to load them one by one, we need the boxes immediately…”

She backed up as she spoke, rapid-fire words and smiles, inching the contraband closer to the old storefront. The trapdoor inside would lead to the catacombs, and the uncanny map in her head said the tunnels nearby were empty. If she could just get the boxes through the door—

Her foot hit a pebble and slipped sideways, throwing her off balance. The box tumbled from her hands.

Mandrake carved a green swath over the cobblestones.

For a moment, they all stood in tableau, Jean-Paul and Lore and the bloodcoats and the big, placid horse Val kept only for poison running, the one Lore affectionately called Horse because no one had ever actually named him.

Then, a heartbeat, and with a cry of triumph, Curly Mustache charged forward.

“Run!” Lore threw herself sideways toward the mouth of the alley where she’d hidden, drawing her dagger. Her foot twisted beneath her, made her fall to her knees, the crack of it whiting out her vision. Gloved hands closed roughly on her shoulders, hauled her up.

The bloodcoats were a chaos, and Horse responded, rearing and upsetting the cart, sending it careening toward onlookers. Jean-Paul yelled wordlessly, trying to grab Horse’s bridle. The creature’s whinny sharpened in fear, hooves slicing at the morning sky as bloodcoats surrounded them. Jean-Paul dove for the reins, but he wasn’t fast enough to wheel Horse around and away; a bayonet ripped through the animal’s throat, and it collapsed into a heap of shuddering meat.

Lore’s vision was still watery as she tried to throw a punch at the bloodcoat holding her, swiping out with her dagger blade between the fingers of her fist. Another bloodcoat caught her arm and twisted it back hard enough for her to feel the bones grind, a breath away from breaking. A harsh, choked noise erupted from her throat, a cry aborted by the bayonet’s cold muzzle, the pointed end grazing her windpipe. Three of them had her now—two holding her arms, and one with a gun. Not very good odds.

The pricking feeling sparked in her palms again, cold awareness slithering through her limbs.

“Move and I’ll shoot,” the bloodcoat with the bayonet snarled. “And a shot through the neck doesn’t make for a quick end.”

Her fingers trembled, the Mortem seeping out from the catacombs and Horse’s dying body making them itch. Lore hadn’t channeled it in thirteen years, had pressed it all into the back of her mind and left it there to rot. But now, the awareness of it nearly drowned her.

Awareness, and instinct. Her hands burned with the desire to call Mortem up from every dead place where it waited, to channel it through her body and make it do her bidding. Resisting made her head light, her breathing shallow.

Half the bloodcoats went for the spilled mandrake, but their leader was focused only on Jean-Paul. He caught him by the arm; Jean-Paul tried to go for the hidden dagger in his coat, hands stained with Horse’s viscera—poor Horse—but the bloodcoat brought the bayonet end to his throat before he could reach it.

“Don’t make me fire,” the bloodcoat snarled through his bloody mustache. “They could use someone like you in the mines on the Burnt Isles.” A guttural laugh. “Your girl, too. She looks strong enough for a shovel.”

A bullet would be preferable to the mines. Lore had heard of more than one poison runner who slit their own throat rather than be made to live the rest of a cut-short life in the dark and dust of the Burnt Isles.

Dark. Dust. Death. All of it swirled around her, coppery blood and an emptiness that abraded her sinuses. Black mist rose from Horse’s body, coalescing into dark threads that only a channeler could see, seeping from the eyes, the slack mouth. Mortem. Calling to her.

Use it.

Lore didn’t know if it was truly a voice she heard, or just the firing of her own brain, desperate to do something, to use whatever it could.

A distraction, that’s what they needed. Something that would allow her to run, something awful enough to pull the bloodcoats’ focus so Jean-Paul could escape. It was too late for her. Lore was caught, and what she did in these next few moments wouldn’t change that.

The choice was between the Burnt Isles or a pyre. In the end, it didn’t make that much difference, if it meant Jean-Paul could go back to his family.

Distraction it was, then. And as soon as Lore made the decision, her body went to work.

She took a deep breath and held it in her lungs, letting instinct take over, drive her as it had before. She’d been born to this, to the magic and the dark, and every part of her but her mind was eager.

One moment everything was bright and lurid, and the next she saw only the barest impression of her surroundings, the world cloaked in grayscale as her lungs began to burn, her body tipped toward death. The bloodcoats and Jean-Paul and the living bodies of the crowd were all surrounded in auras of white light. The outline around Horse’s corpse leaked slowly from white to black, life leaving as death took over. Threads of Mortem waved in the air like spider legs, the black corona of an inverted sun.

Lore didn’t look down at herself as she slowly let her breath out, keeping her grip on Mortem strong, because she was in it now and the current of instinct had pulled her under. She knew what she looked like—her fingers cold and corpse-pale, her eyes shifting from hazel to opaque white. On her palm, the moon-shaped scar blazed like a beacon, a black glow that was the absence of light and yet so bright it hurt to look at. Over her heart, a knot of darkness swirled, a black star of emptiness hidden beneath her shirt.

She knew what she looked like, and it was death walking.

Her hands curled, pulling the dark matter that was the power of death inward, as if her Mortem-touched heart were a magnet. The threads waving over Horse’s body shuddered, then flowed toward her. They braided in the air and attached to her fingers, magic easily breaching the barrier of her skin.

Horse’s death danced down her veins, swirled through her like tainted blood. Lore channeled the Mortem quickly through her system, pushing it through every vein like a half-frozen winter stream, fighting against her flagging heartbeat, her gone-shallow breath. Death magic circled her every organ, pausing them all, like frost on a bud at the edge of spring.

This was the part that was supposed to make you live longer, freezing your insides so they moved slower in time, so the years touched you more gently. Those who took poison couldn’t channel the death it brought to them back out, couldn’t make it do anything but curdle them into twisted immortality as it awakened the dormant Mortem in their bodies. To channel Mortem, you had to embrace death like a lover and hope it let you go, and hardly anyone ever got that far, not on purpose.

At least, that’s what Lore assumed. She’d been born with this. Born with death beside her like a shadow.

Slowly, slowly, Lore pushed the Mortem she’d channeled through herself back to her hands, like gathering fistfuls of black thread. Then she thrust all the death she’d taken back out.

Mortem arced from her fingers, death eager for a new home, and Lore had just enough presence of mind to direct it to a flower bed in the center of the road, already browned and limp from an unseasonable lack of rain. The blooms withered and dropped, the roots that held them up going dead and brittle, all of it turning gray. More Mortem cut into the rock, sending cracks spiderwebbing beneath scrambling feet. It didn’t open into a sinkhole, thank every god dead or dying, but still screams rose into the air.

Her heart seized in her chest, just once, tithing a beat. The instinct that had seized her ebbed away, leaving only fear and panic and disgust.

And with a grunting, pained sound, Horse stood up.