Chapter Twenty-Four
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Mortem is invisible to all but those who can channel it—those who have come close enough to death to harness its power. No one else can see its threat until it is atop them, and that is why we cannot simply pray and hope it goes away.
—Phillipe Deschain, Auverrani scientist, presenting notes to the Church, 1 AGF (just before Apollius’s disappearance)
I’m coming.”
“You’re not.”
There’d been a moment of frozen silence after Malcolm ran into the throne room, but it’d been just that. A moment, a heartbeat, a split second of change when the atmosphere turned from familial dispute to clinical action. Anton had strode from the room, moving as fast as he could without running. Malcolm, still gulping lungfuls of air, followed behind. August stood from his throne and yelled for guards, giving instructions on closing down the Citadel, not letting anyone in or out of the walls, locking everything that could be locked. Lore thought about telling him that a locked door meant nothing to raw Mortem—it’d seep through the cracks in the stone, the wood and iron, death wasn’t something you could hide from—but before she could, she saw Gabe turning on his heel to follow Anton and Malcolm, and hurrying after him seemed more important than telling off August.
So now she scampered down the halls, his too-long stride forcing her to jog. “I can help.”
“Or you could die.” Gabe shook his head once, sharp. “Not odds I’m keen on playing.”
“This is the first true Mortem leak in… in… I don’t know, exactly, but a long damn time, and you need me, Gabe.”
His teeth ground in his jaw. He said nothing, just kept moving ahead at that punishing pace.
Anton and Malcolm were a few feet ahead of them, too focused on making their way to the Church to hear their hissed exchange. Just as well, since Lore couldn’t be sure they’d side with her—her plan was simply to follow along behind the Presque Mort like a shadow and hope they didn’t notice until it was too late.
“And the odds of dying aren’t only mine,” she whisper-yelled at Gabe’s back. Bloodcoats ran down the halls; distantly, she heard surprised cries as courtiers were startled by their flight. “The Presque Mort may not be able to channel it all.”
Real leaks—not just the little wisps of Mortem that sometimes escaped into the stone garden when the well was opened, but leaks, waves of power seeping out of the catacombs—were exceedingly rare. Not counting the first few years after the Godsfall, when magic had flowed from the Buried Goddess’s tomb like opened floodgates, there’d only been three Mortem leaks on record. All of them had claimed significant casualties. All of them had made it beyond the borders of Dellaire before they petered out, the Presque Mort unable to channel it all safely into stone flowers and trees.
Gabe ignored her. The door that led to the front gardens and the bulk of the Church and South Sanctuary loomed ahead, all gilt and garnet in afternoon light. Bloodcoats stood on either side, ready to close and lock it as soon as the Presque Mort had left the building.
“I don’t want you to get hurt,” Lore said, voice a low rasp, out of breath. “All right, Gabe? I don’t want you to get hurt, so let me go and help you, because otherwise you are absolutely going to get hurt.”
He stopped. Turned. Stared down at her with that one blazing blue eye.
“Fine,” Gabe said, and then he was stalking toward the open door, and she was running after him, and it was closed and locked behind her before her foot fully left the threshold. The door wouldn’t open again until the Mortem leak was taken care of.
Either Anton would lock her in the Church instead, or he’d let her come. And Lore didn’t think he’d turn down another set of Mortem-channeling hands.
Her assumption was proven correct as they all rushed to the Church door on the other side of the gardens. Anton looked behind him, did a double take when he saw Lore. “What—”
“You know you don’t have enough channelers to handle a leak of any significant size,” she said, brushing past him and through the second interior door that Malcolm held open. “I’m coming.”
The Priest Exalted didn’t try to argue. He stared after her, the scarred side of his face in shadow, dark eyes glittering. “Yes,” he murmured, after a moment. “I think that might be a good plan.”
Lore didn’t pay attention to the Priest Exalted. She walked past Malcolm and into the cool darkness of the Church. It smelled like polished wood and incense, a scent that reminded her of Gabe’s.
“You’re sure you want to do this?” Malcolm murmured, falling into step beside her. Anton passed them both and led them away from the double doors of the South Sanctuary, down a gray stone hall toward what looked like cloister rooms. “To say it’s not pretty is an understatement.”
Lore nodded, resolutely ignoring the flip of fear in her middle. “You need me.”
“I won’t argue there,” Malcolm replied.
Anton led them at a brisk pace, winding through hallways that felt nearly as labyrinthine as the ones in the Citadel, finally stopping at a wide, doorless room full of other scarred people—the Presque Mort. There were only around a dozen, all of them in varying states of undress, changing out of white robes that mirrored Anton’s for dark, close-fitting shirts and leather harnesses. The harnesses held daggers, but only two, on the off chance they needed to defend against a human element rather than a magic one. The Presque Mort stayed armed, but that wasn’t their purpose. Inked candles flashed in all their palms.
Every eye in the room locked on Lore, some in curiosity, others in outright suspicion. She tipped up her chin and stared right back.
Anton waved a hand as he descended the short set of stairs. “Another Mortem channeler,” he said dismissively, as if Lore were of no consequence. “We’ll need all the help we can get.”
They didn’t run to the Southeast Ward—they rode. A phalanx of black horses, cantering over the cobblestones, rushing around corners so close that Lore was afraid she’d gash her head. Everyone moved out of the way with a quickness, the news of the Mortem leak having spread through the city at a blessedly faster pace than the magic itself. Most civilians wouldn’t be able to see the Mortem, and that added an extra edge of panic. The closer they drew to the Ward, the emptier the streets became, everyone who was able fleeing to the opposite side of the city.
Lore pressed her chest against Gabe’s back and held on to his waist for all she was worth. She’d never been very comfortable riding horses. Her own feet or a cart were infinitely preferable.
But there was no denying the speed. They were in the Ward within half an hour.
And the very air tasted wrong.
Gabe dismounted, then reached up and grasped her waist, swinging her down behind him. Lore nearly stumbled. The ground felt unsteady, almost, a thin membrane over something decayed, ready to break at any moment. A sour, fetid smell permeated the air and made her stomach twist in on itself.
“Do you feel that?” Lore’s voice sounded as shaky as her legs. “Smell it?”
“What is it?” Gabe narrowed his eye as he handed off the horse’s reins to a waiting clergyman—not one of the Presque Mort, just a plain acolyte, who looked like he’d rather be anywhere else. “I don’t smell anything.”
Gabe’s face looked blurry. The edges of him weren’t clearly defined, as if he might morph into something else at any moment. His tattooed hands were slightly outstretched, like he thought he might have to catch her, steady her.
“Nothing.” Probably just nerves. Lore shook her head and started walking, following Anton.
Nothing else looked blurred, she noticed as she walked, concentrating on keeping her gait steady. Only Gabe seemed like something in flux, caught in a state of unbecoming.
Just nerves.
The Southeast Ward was the part of Dellaire closest to the countryside, where farmers came to sell their crops. Farmland was visible past the houses lining the square, rolling green hills dotted with small barns and the faraway specks of livestock. It was the least-populated Ward in the city, but now it was completely barren, everyone either fled to western Wards or locked in their homes.
The only sound was boots on empty streets as the Presque Mort followed Anton toward the leak. He’d changed, too, swapping out the white robe of the Priest Exalted for dark clothes and a leather harness like the rest of them. It looked strange on Anton, like someone playing dress-up. He still wore his huge Bleeding God’s Heart pendant, though, glinting gold and garnet in the falling evening light.
Lore felt the leak before she saw it. Her middle curdled, her steps faltering into a near-stumble as the sour smell in the air grew stronger. She caught herself before she could fall, though the sharp look Gabe shot her way said he still noticed.
The awareness of death pressed around her, like smoke searching for a crack to seep through. She tried to think of forests, of trees and blue sky. It kept the awful feeling at bay, but only just.
Up head, Anton stopped. “There.”
The leak came from an abandoned storefront, similar to the decrepit building by the harbor where Lore had met the revenant nearly a week ago, when she raised Horse and got herself into this mess. Darkness rolled from the gaping, uneven doorway, seeped down the stairs and out into the street. It looked, somehow, like smoke and water at once—cohesive and flowing, yet with an insubstantial, eddying quality that made it hard to focus on. Small bones littered the edges of the strange black river, mice and other tiny creatures the Mortem had already eaten down to nothing.
Lore’s stomach dipped.
The Presque Mort all did an admirable job of trying to hide their fear, but it was palpable in their nervous stances, their widened eyes. None of them had seen a leak like this before.
Malcolm stepped up first, standing next to Anton. He took a deep breath and held out his hands, the candles inked on his palms facing the river of Mortem. “Put as much as you can in the rock, first, but not too much, or it will break. If there’s still some left, direct it there.” Malcolm inclined his head toward the center of the square, where a garden had been planted in the midst of the cobblestones, shaded by thick trees and wild with summer blooms. “Once that’s used up, go for the farmland. Don’t use the horses unless you have to.”
Lore looked behind her, where the terrified younger clergyman stood with all the placid horses. Why did it always come back to horses?
The rest of the Presque Mort fell into formation, making three lines on the left side of the leak. Gabe went to stand next to Malcolm and Anton, and Lore followed, the four of them forming the first line while the rest of the monks filed in behind. All of them raised their palms to the seeping pool of death magic, hands inked with symbols of the Bleeding God’s light.
And almost completely useless.
It took Lore a moment to even realize they were channeling. Tiny licks of Mortem drifted up from the stream like smoke, dissipating into the air, never getting strong enough to actually connect with anyone and become the long threads Lore dealt with. The larger mass didn’t shrink at all, despite the fact that every person behind her had necrotic, pale fingers, opaque eyes. One of them stumbled, tithing a heartbeat, but it didn’t make a difference. None of them could channel this volume of Mortem.
This felt wrong, in a way she couldn’t quite nail down. The bones littered on the cobblestones reminded her of mousetraps, of stepping into spring-loaded death with no idea an end was waiting.
Only Anton wasn’t holding his hands toward the mass, wasn’t looking at the river of Mortem at all. His one dark eye was fixed on Lore, narrow and unreadable, staring her down as death flowed before them.
He stared at her a moment longer. Then he turned to the leak, raised his hands.
The difference was night and day. Mortem rose from the dark river, coalesced in the air. It looked like the threads Lore could spin from death, but instead of going straight to Anton’s hands, they knitted together in the air, twisting into an intricate, spiking knot. She’d never seen anything like it before. Surely, tying Mortem up like that would make it harder to channel into plants or stone—
“Lore.”
Her name came like a wheeze of dying breath; she whipped her head around to Gabriel. He looked at her with a completely whited-out eye, no color at all where blue had been. His lips pulled back from his teeth, his cheeks sunken in, skin molded to the skull below. “You said you wanted to help,” he rasped, “so help.”
The air still smelled sour. Her feet still felt wobbly. Anton was still knitting Mortem into some unfathomable tangle, shaping it in a way Lore didn’t understand. But Gabe was right, and it was clear from the pathetic wisps of Mortem curling up from the leak that the Presque Mort wouldn’t be able to channel all of this away on their own.
So Lore raised her hands, closed her eyes. Held her breath, let the world go black-and-white, and called death into her.
Her vision grayed out, but something was different. She could see the knot Anton had made, pulsing in the air above the leak. Lore tried to avoid it as she reeled in threads of death, but she wasn’t sophisticated enough for that, hadn’t learned how to be careful.
As she pulled in Mortem, Anton’s knot unraveled, the dark threads curling free into the stagnant air.
She anticipated him shouting at her, doing something to stop her, trying to gather up that magic into its tangle again. But the Priest Exalted merely stepped aside, the corona of white light around him turning to face her.
Lore tried to stop, but the instinct was too strong now, and she was caught in its current like sand in the tide. The threads of Mortem that Anton had altered flowed to her hands, breached her skin, found her heart.
It felt different. Stronger, somehow, slithering through her veins in a torrent. And it didn’t come back out.
Panicking, Lore planted her feet and flexed her fingers, trying to hold up against the onslaught—
That’s when the screaming started.
Her body wouldn’t obey when Lore tried to close her hands, frozen like the corpse she undoubtedly resembled. Everything in her was cold, a deep, numbing wave coursing from her outstretched fingers and all the way down her spine, her heart stopped and stilled as if a giant fist had closed around it.
And still, the screaming. The screaming that, somehow, was her fault.
But it was hard to hear over the voice in her head.
This isn’t something you can escape. Haven’t you figured that out by now?
It echoed in every one of her bones, danced on every icy nerve. The voice was alien and familiar at once, and sounded strange, like two throats twined together and speaking as one, harmonizing with itself.
One of those voices sounded like Lore’s.
Every day, it grows stronger. Growing in you like rot as you come nearer to ascension.The voice felt like oil poured over the grooves of her brain, slipping into every empty surface. It reminded her of the voice that had told her to use her power, that day in the square with Horse, but stronger, more sure. You can’t flee from what you are, daughter of the dark. Death is the one thing that will always find you, and you are its heir. The seed of the apocalypse, end-times walking. You are the wildfire necessary for the forest to grow, the destruction that brings rebirth.
Lore felt death clenching at her lungs, her heart, every organ that was ripe and vital turning shriveled and dry. She hadn’t been able to channel any Mortem out, only draw it in. It wasn’t killing her—that’d be too simple—but it was doing something.
Changing her. Taking her capacity for power and burrowing into it, making it wider, so it might swallow her up. Hollowing her out to be filled again by something vast, something dark.
Her eyes wouldn’t open, as if her lids had been sutured together. Lore bared her teeth, pulling up strength she didn’t know she had. With a roar, she forced the Mortem out of her, through veins that felt like they might burst, through bones that wanted to break against the pressure.
The rock beneath her feet was too brittle already, but Lore could feel the life surrounding her the same way she could feel death—the two of them inverted, different streams from the same source. She felt the heaving bodies of the terrified horses, the fear-curdled heartbeats of the other Presque Mort. The placid, unthinking life of the garden, still green and blooming, and beyond that, the farmland.
There was too much Mortem to direct it with any kind of finesse. So Lore let it loose into both, funneling death into living roots both close by and far away, the death in her veins guiding her to life.
Law of Opposites, she thought distantly. Death and life strengthening each other, death and life entwined.
Spiritum fled every bloom and leaf in the garden, replaced not by death, but by stasis, freezing them in time. Mortem wove into the aura of every scrap of life both seen and unseen—cocooning tiny bugs, larvae, the aphids invisible to the naked eye. Then it went deeper, spearing through the cobblestones of the road, turning to rock the tiny shoots of grass that tried to find cracks of sun, the earthworms waiting for rain, the bulbs of fall-blooming flowers that hadn’t yet broken the surface. Then the farmlands: wheat turning to spears of thin rock, roots becoming intricate statues beneath the earth. She managed to spare the livestock, but only just; the panicked lowing of cattle came loud enough to hear, a deeper counterpoint to the human screams.
Everything, stone, their lives frozen as Lore let herself be death’s causeway, let Mortem flow through her like water in a mill wheel. Gabe had told her this kind of channeling required care, but it came through her like chaos.
Lore didn’t realize her own screams had joined the rest until all the magic was gone.
They want your power, the voice said quietly, fading along with the Mortem as her body slowly clawed its way back to living, dwindling to nothing but the barest whisper. They’ll force you to be stronger, and then break you down. Reduce you to nothing but a womb for magic they can’t make. But only if you let them. Even when you ascend, you must remember that you are wholly your own.
Lore opened her eyes.
The leak was gone. That was good. But it hadn’t gone quietly. One of the Presque Mort, a man whose name she didn’t know, was now on the ground, staring at his foot. What had been his foot. Now it was only bone, the flesh eaten away, the muscle gone, and even the bones weren’t in the right shape—just a pile, a discarded jumble. They gleamed wet ivory in the sunlight, and he stared, and screamed and screamed and screamed.
Lore whipped around, searching for more casualties, but it appeared only the one man had been caught in the Mortem leak. So preoccupied was she with looking for more bony limbs that she didn’t notice at first the way all the other Presque Mort were looking at her.
With shock. With horror. With revulsion.
Anton stood at the front of the company, his face still blank. The knot of Mortem he’d made was gone. He watched her like someone might look at an animal they didn’t recognize, curious and wary, seeing what they might do.
Next to her, Gabe stood still, his one blue eye wide and staring at the fallen Presque Mort. He hadn’t moved away from her, but when Lore reached for him, desperate for something to hold on to, he flinched.
Her hand crumpled in on itself like a dying spider.
“Did I do that?” It came out small and fragile, almost childlike. Immediately, she wanted to swallow it back down, but she had to have an answer.
Gabe didn’t give her one.
The Mort on the ground had stopped screaming, and that was somehow worse. He just stared at the place where his foot had been, now only that mess of picked bones.
Her legs were unsteady. Her vision blurred—on everything, now, not just Gabe. The sour-empty smell of Mortem lay thick in the air, even though the leak was gone, and it drowned her with every gulping breath she took.
“Did I do it, Gabe?” she asked again, but the words were slurred, and she fell into the dark before she heard him try to answer.