Chapter Three

CHAPTER THREE

Death, for mortals, is inviolable: Any who would raise a body from the dead is guilty of the worst heresy and must be executed, so they may suffer forever in their own hell.

—The Book of Mortal Law, Tract 1

Cedric had been a year older than Lore, fourteen and worldly as a prince for it. The son of a runner on Val and Mari’s team, he’d been the only child Lore spent much time around, in those months after Mari found her. Warm and kind, with wide brown eyes and messy hair that was always falling in his face. He’d taught her to swim down by the docks.

Then he got run down by a bloodcoat’s horse during a raid.

His body was a horror. Lore remembered it in vivid detail. Things sunken where they shouldn’t be, other things sticking up, making tents of torn flesh and valleys of mashed bone and organ. But his face had been untouched, those brown eyes staring into the sky as if transfixed.

She hadn’t thought. She just acted, gave in to instinct. Lore had wound Cedric’s death around her fingers like the games of cat’s cradle he’d taught her to play, spun it out of him and into her. She’d channeled it through her body and sent it down into the rock, down to where the roots of trampled grasses strove toward the sun, planting his death in the earth instead of in his body.

And he’d sat up. There’d been a terrible sound when he did—nothing within him was where it was supposed to be, and all of it squished—but he’d sat up, then turned to look at her. His eyes weren’t brown anymore. They were black, without iris or pupil.

It was clear he wasn’t going to do anything until she told him to; he was an automaton that needed winding up, needed direction. So she’d taken the ball of string they used for cat’s cradle from her pocket. “Play with me.”

That was how Val found them. A girl and a dead boy with thread woven through their fingers, acting as though nothing was amiss.

It was honestly astonishing that Val hadn’t killed her then. After seeing what she was. What she could do.

And it was with that memory flashing through her head that Lore watched Horse rise from the ground, clearly dead and yet moving. Animals were different from people, apparently. She hadn’t had to tell Horse what to do.

“Shit.” It came out of her mouth thin and breathy; Lore’s legs felt like limp pieces of string, the death she’d channeled manifesting in numb limbs and a straw-thin throat. She fell to her knees, the cold tip of the bloodcoat’s bayonet slipping away from her neck with a slight scratch, not deep enough to draw blood. “Shit on the Citadel Wall.”

For a second, Lore thought her dear-bought distraction was pointless—the bloodcoats still held her and Jean-Paul, not sparing so much as a glance for the horse rising from the dead in the center of the market square. She’d given in, succumbed to the call of Mortem, and for what?

A broken, furious sound wrenched from her mouth.

The bloodcoat holding her arms tried to haul her back up, but then he caught a look at her eyes, still death-white and opaque. Lore watched him take in her blackened veins and corpse-like fingers, watched the color slowly drain from his face as he put together what it all meant. The guard retreated until his spine met brick, his hands springing open to release her. “Bleeding God save us,” he muttered in a tone of quick-rising panic. “Bleeding God save us!”

That was more like it.

The other bloodcoats finally noticed the undead livestock situation. Curly Mustache slashed at the animal’s now-fully-risen corpse, but Horse didn’t mind, being already dead. If anything, he seemed curious, nuzzling at his gore-caked shoulder with a bloody nose, neck hanging open like a second mouth. The long lashes around his opaque eyes fluttered, dislodging a fly that had landed there.

“Sorry, Horse,” Lore mumbled, then heaved up her coffee on the cobblestones.

When she looked up, Curly Mustache was staring at her, at all the ways channeling Mortem had made her monstrous, his face gone nearly as pale as her own.

“Heresy,” he said, voice hoarse from shouting. “Evil!”

“Melodrama.” Lore’s lips felt numb, and so did the rest of her.

Chaos erupted then, as if time had suspended for the few seconds after Lore raised Horse from the dead and now had returned to normal. Curly Mustache brandished his bayonet, bellowing for backup, ordering his company to surround the horse and apprehend the deathwitch.

It took Lore a moment to realize that was her. Deathwitch was what they’d called necromancers, back before everyone who could channel that much Mortem had been executed or sent to the Burnt Isles. Now there was only her. A deathwitch alone.

Channeling Mortem left her fingers waxy and pale, her skin nearly translucent, the tracery of her sluggish veins an easy map against her skin—she looked worse than a revenant, which was really saying something. Strands of death tied her to Horse, a dark braid that could be seen only from the corner of her eye, when she didn’t look directly at it.

With a sharp, snarling sound, Lore snapped her hands to fists. The strands of Mortem severed, and the horse toppled, the power that had reanimated it slithering into the air like smoke, then dissipating. That’s what she’d done with Cedric, when Val saw them, when Val screamed. It hadn’t been intentional then. Lore was just startled, startled and scared, and she’d snapped the threads that held them together.

It’d seemed harder then. The raising and the ending. This time, with Horse, she’d barely had to try. Channeling the Mortem out of the body had come to her so naturally, stealing death and sending it away.

The animal’s heavy corpse fell on a group of bloodcoats, dead meat once again. The crunch of bone and pained shouts echoed through the Ward, cut through with the screams of onlookers. The guards had forgotten about Lore and Jean-Paul; she saw the lick of his red hair as he disappeared into an alleyway. Curly Mustache had turned around when Horse fell, and the surge of people between him and Lore had carried him away, made him lose her in the crowd. Lore could hear him shouting, but she couldn’t see him.

She’d certainly gotten the distraction she wanted. Now if she could just make herself move.

Lore levered herself up from the ground on legs that tingled with pins and needles, cursing as she tried to hobble away. Memories of Cedric crashed through the mental barriers she’d trapped them behind, made the past and the present muddle, awful and infinite. She limped as fast as she could into the narrow space between two storefronts, huddling into the shadows. In a moment of clarity, she pulled the cap from her head and let her hair tumble free, twisted the hem of her shirt and tucked it in her trousers so it molded to her curves. Not really a disguise, but it made her look different than she had at the moment she’d raised the horse, and it might buy her enough anonymity to get away.

Someone grabbed her arm.

Lore turned with a snarl in her teeth, hand already raising to strike at whoever had touched her.

Michal.

Clearly, he hadn’t expected what he saw when she turned around; he’d seen her running to the alley, but not made the connection between her and Horse. Now she watched every piece of the puzzle lock into place, played out across his features: blue eyes narrowing before going wide and horrified. He glanced over his shoulder at the square, mouth dropping open, a flinch shuddering through his hand before it jerked back from her, fingers splayed.

“Sorry,” Lore muttered, her tongue suddenly thick. “I’m sorry.”

She shoved past him, out into the square again. Turned down the first alley she came to. Started running and didn’t stop, her head down and her vision blurred, picking directions at random and thinking only of away.

So when one of the Presque Mort stepped out of a trash-strewn alcove in front of her, she nearly ran right into him.

He loomed over her, hands outstretched, the image of a lit candle inked into each palm. His black clothing fit close to a muscular body, one blue eye gleaming at her, the other covered by the dark leather of an eye patch.

There was something almost familiar about him, a sense that she’d met him before. But that was ludicrous. Lore didn’t know any of the Presque Mort, or any other members of the clergy, for that matter.

Not anymore.

“Of course the Presque Mort would show up,” Lore spat as she stumbled away from the inked hands, fumbling for her dagger again. “Of fucking course.”

The Presque Mort didn’t respond, just watched her as she turned to run in the opposite direction, trying to backtrack the way she’d come and pick a new route. He whistled, a low note rising higher, and it was echoed by others, ringing off the stone, clear above the grown-distant cacophony of the Ward.

They had her cornered.

The first monk moved slowly forward, tattooed hands held out like she was an unfamiliar dog he didn’t want to frighten away. Unusually tall, with a crop of shorn reddish-blond hair and broad shoulders, handsomeness wasted on someone with vows of celibacy.

“We don’t want to hurt you.” Deep voice, clipped tones, like this refuse-lined alley was a Citadel ballroom.

“You have a funny way of showing it.” Lore’s feet stuttered over uneven cobblestones as she backed away, nearly sending her stumbling.

The Presque Mort made no response. Others dressed in the same plain, dark clothing emerged from the two mouths of the alley, moving slowly, implacably forward. Too many to fight off, and now there was no livestock to reanimate and call their attention.

Lore’s legs buckled; she braced her still-numb hand on the wall. Even predisposed to death magic as she was, the recovery was a bitch.

So distracted was she that when the tall Presque Mort pulled a cloth from his pocket, she didn’t have time to react before it was pressed over her airways. Chloroform. There was something almost funny about it, pedestrian chemicals in a city famous for romantic, flowery poisons.

“We don’t want to hurt you,” he murmured, “but we do need you to come with us, and something tells me you won’t do it consciously.”

“Whatever gave you that idea?” Lore slurred, then all the world went dark.

The bindings felt familiar; the rasp of rope on her skin was like an echo. For a moment she smelled stone and burning skin. For a moment she was sure there was nothing but tunnels and pale torchlight beyond the veil of her eyelids, an obsidian tomb and hazel eyes that matched her own.

So when Lore opened her eyes and saw a cell, it was almost a relief.

Someone had stuffed a gag in her mouth—it tasted sour, like it’d been used to clean up spilled wine. One rope bound her ankles to the legs of the chair where she sat, another bound her wrists together behind her back, and yet another connected the two. Whoever had tied her up had left enough slack that she wasn’t painfully contorted, but there was no chance in any of the myriad hells that she could get out of the chair unassisted.

And all of it—the chair, the bindings, the stone walls—all of it felt like death.

Lore gasped against her gag, pulling the fabric farther back in her throat, making her choke as she pressed her eyes closed. Usually, she could deal with her awareness of Mortem in dead matter. She had to; there was no escaping it. But something had changed when she raised Horse, and now it pressed in on her from all sides, heavy and thick, bearing down with a suffocating weight.

Worse than the rock and rope, things that had never lived, were the things that did. The minuscule threads of grass pushing against the cracks in the floor, the people close enough for her senses to pick them up, her own body—alive, for now, but she could feel each individual cell as it collapsed, an eternity in microcosm—

Had this happened after Cedric? If it had, she didn’t remember it. It seemed like getting older had made the raising easier and the side effects worse.

Swallowing hard, Lore opened her eyes again, making herself actually look at her surroundings.

Not a cell, technically. Just a bare stone room, with the chair she was bound to and a wooden table as the only furniture. On the wall hung a tapestry, its vibrancy made garish for being the only spot of color. The tapestry depicted a man with gleaming brown hair and milk-pale skin, blood-smeared hands outstretched, blood seeping from a gaping wound in His chest and dripping into the mass of darkness below Him. In the background was something that looked like a fountain, edged in gold, and above the man’s head, a message was picked out in silver-gilt thread.

Apollius, may we hold fast Your Citadel, protecting the world from Death and living in purity until Your return, when the world shall rise in the Light of a New Age.

The nebulous form below Apollius’s feet appeared to be a shadow at first glance. But if you looked closely, you could almost pick out the shape of a woman, see where the weaver had used threads of varying darkness to suggest a moon-crowned head, feminine curves. The Bleeding God’s feet were directly above the points of the vague woman-shape’s crescent crown, turned on Her forehead so the points speared up like horns. It gave the impression of the god stomping Her into the earth.

The Buried Goddess, Nyxara.

The Church, then. Of course the Presque Mort had brought her to the Church.

The thought made panic spike anew. The one who’d drugged her said they meant her no harm, but that could be semantics, a cruel game. The Presque Mort might not be authorized to execute her themselves, but the Priest Exalted certainly was. Or maybe the King would want to do the honors. It’d been ages since they’d had a real necromancer to burn. All of them had been killed in the year of the Godsfall and the decade afterward, when Mortem leaked from the Buried Goddess’s body like blood from an arterial wound.

A deep breath, an attempt to quell the fear. She wondered how her captors might react if she asked for chloroform again. A drugged sleep was preferable to this churn of anxiety, especially when her fate was all but sealed.

Her stomach gurgled, hunger making it twist in on itself. How long had she been down here? There were no windows, nothing to help her mark the time, but the stiffness of her limbs and the emptiness of her stomach made her think it’d been hours.

Lore barely reacted when the Presque Mort filed in, only two of them: the one who’d drugged her and another she didn’t recognize, with a shaved head and walnut-brown arms marked in deep, silvery scars.

The one with the scarred arms looked her way and cocked a brow. “You might’ve gone overboard with that chloroform, Gabriel. She looks a moment away from losing her lunch.”

“I didn’t use that much.” The tall Presque Mort—Gabriel, apparently—looked curiously at her from his one working eye, then grimaced at the air. “It’s still so thick in here, even after a day.”

A day? Gods dead and dying, she’d been knocked out for a whole day?

“She channeled so much…” Gabriel turned to his companion. “Do you feel it?”

The other’s expression darkened. “A bit,” he said, almost begrudgingly. “Not as much as you do. Some of us have to pay our dues in Dellaire, instead of out in one of the country monasteries. We’re used to Mortem being thick here.”

There was a bite of defensiveness to his tone, for all that it sounded like he’d meant it as a joke. Gabriel raised a candle-inked hand. “I meant no offense, Malcolm.”

“None taken,” Malcolm replied. He rubbed his scarred arms and scoffed good-naturedly, as if trying to lift the mood. “If I’d had to spend my entire training period in one of the country monasteries, I would’ve gone raving mad with boredom. I nearly did in just the two months a year I did have to spend there.”

“They certainly aren’t barrels of fun,” Gabriel agreed. “Though the two days I’ve spent in the city have me wishing to return.”

“You’re on your own there. The library in Dellaire is far superior.”

“And we all know that’s what you care about,” Gabriel snorted. “Don’t worry, we’ll finish this quickly and you can get back to your true love.”

“Good. I only agreed to come along since we’re short-staffed. Running about the Wards doesn’t agree with my constitution.”

Gabriel turned his attention back to Lore, a thoughtful crease to his brow. “I think that’s the problem here,” he said softly, with an air that could be mistaken for sympathy if Lore didn’t know better. “If we can sense so much Mortem, imagine what she can sense.”

“Too much,” Lore tried to say, though it came out garbled from behind her gag.

It startled them both, made them flinch back, as if she were a piece of furniture that had suddenly decided to speak. For her part, Lore was barely aware that she’d managed to make a sound. Her head was full of death, her nerves vibrating against the onslaught of so much entropy.

Gabriel nodded, as if something had been decided. Malcolm just looked more confused. “I don’t understand,” he said slowly. “Does it… can it hurt you? Some of the others report discomfort, but all I ever get it a little numbness—”

“It can hurt,” Gabriel said, almost rueful. “It can really, really hurt.”

Something flashed across Malcolm’s face, halfway between fear and jealousy. He rubbed at his scarred arms again.

Gabriel crossed the room and knelt by Lore’s chair. Even on his knees, the top of his head was nearly level with her nose, and his short hair wafted a scent of Church incense. That taut feeling in her middle pulled tight again, that sense that she knew him, somehow.

Gently, he reached behind her head, untied the gag so it fell out of her mouth. “Listen to me,” he said quietly, a command. “The sense of death, it’s all in your head. You can block it out.”

“How?” Her mouth still tasted like sour cotton. Behind Gabriel, Malcolm stood with his arms crossed, expression equal parts intrigued and disturbed.

“It’s your head.” His one-eyed gaze was stern. “Nothing can stay there unless you let it. You make it leave.” The words came out like a lesson often repeated.

Lore tried to laugh, but panic still had its teeth in her, and it sounded more like the start of a sob. “You’re gonna have to give me step-by-step instructions, Mort.”

He nodded smoothly, like this was a perfectly normal request. “Imagine a wall. Make it a thick one, soundproof. Imagine a barrier around your mind until it’s so solid you feel like you could touch it. And then don’t let the sense of death in. There’s no way to not be aware of it, not when you can channel so much Mortem. But it doesn’t have to take you over. It doesn’t have to rule you.”

It sounded too simple, but desperate times and all that. Closing her eyes tight, Lore imagined a wall. At first it was stone, and she quickly discarded it—she’d had enough stone walls to last a lifetime, and stone was dead, and she’d had enough of that, too. So trees, instead, thick trunks growing close.

Lore had never seen a forest up close. Her power wouldn’t let her get too far from the catacombs, and there were certainly no forests in Dellaire, just ornamental copses of manicured trees in some of the more affluent districts. But she could imagine a forest, a real one, full of green and growth.

So her mental barrier wasn’t a wall, exactly. It was just her, in the middle of a forest. A peaceful one, with a blue sky beyond the leaves, and the bizarrely comforting scent of a fire. It felt natural for her head to settle here, like this forest had been waiting for her.

Slowly, the sense of imminent death crowding all around her faded away, became the background buzz she was used to.

Lore opened her eyes. The Presque Mort stared into them with a gaze made fiercer for having only one outlet. His right eye was very, very blue.

“Thank you.” She wanted to say something cutting. She should—helping her before turning her over to a pyre was a special kind of cruel. But the thank you was all Lore could muster.

Gabriel nodded, once. “It’ll be a useful tool for you.”

She huffed that half laugh again. “I don’t think I’m going to get another chance to channel much Mortem before I get executed for necromancy.”

His brow furrowed over his eye patch, an expression she couldn’t quite make out, but he didn’t comment on her fate. Instead he held up the gag. “This was on the Priest Exalted’s orders.” Apology was thick in his tone. “I’m going to have to put it back.”

She thought about fighting, but she was too tired. Lore nodded.

Carefully, Gabriel refastened the gag, though she noticed it was looser this time. Then he stood, towering over her, and stepped back to Malcolm. The other monk’s face remained unreadable.

“Do you have to do that?” he murmured to Gabriel. “To… to make the awareness stop?” Malcolm’s gaze darted to Gabriel’s eye patch, then away, as if he was embarrassed.

“Sometimes. Anton taught me that trick with the wall. Right after my initiation.” Gabriel paused, reaching up to itch at his eye patch. “Since my injury was nearly as severe as his own, he knew that the potential for me to channel large amounts of Mortem was high.”

Malcolm shook his head and itched at his own eye, almost like an afterthought. “Damn.”

Gabriel said nothing.

Lore cringed. The Presque Mort attained their power to channel Mortem the same way anyone else might: dying, just for a moment, and then coming back. Usually, it was due to accident, injury, or illness. Because channeling Mortem was against holy law, someone who’d survived such an experience had two choices—avoid Mortem as best they could, or join the Presque Mort. The manner of the near-death experience mattered, though. Those who’d sought death out—gone to deathdealers—weren’t eligible, since the Presque Mort were technically part of the clergy.

In the first few years after the Godsfall, there’d been another option. There still was one, far beneath the earth, in the deepest tunnels of the catacombs. But no one talked about the Buried Watch anymore, not since the last Church-recognized Night Priestess went mad.

Malcolm jerked his thumb toward the door. “When should we expect him?”

“Any minute now.” Gabriel crossed his arms. “He had to collect the informant first. So she could make sure we had the right one.”

“We definitely have the right one,” Malcolm scoffed.

Lore frowned, the expression twisted to grotesquerie by the gag. An informant?

The door opened. An older man with iron-gray hair and a long white robe glided in first, a golden pendant formed like a heart with sun’s rays hanging around his neck, a large teardrop-shaped garnet at the heart’s apex. He turned to face her, and Lore bit down on the gag, hard.

One side of the man’s face was handsome, almost angelically so. But the other side was a mass of burn scars, dark purple with age, carving twisted runnels from chin to hairline and turning that side of his mouth to a permanent smirk.

She’d heard of this man’s face, though she’d never seen it up close. The Priest Exalted, Anton Arceneaux, leader of the Church and the Presque Mort. King August’s twin brother.

And behind him, a woman with graying blond hair under a familiar faded scarf. A woman who wouldn’t look at Lore, even when she made a sharp, disbelieving sound behind her gag.

Val.

She must be dreaming. With all the drugs and Mortem still in her system, the Bleeding God Himself must somehow have reached into her brain to play out a nightmare.

Val flinched. “You didn’t have to gag her,” she snapped, eyes shooting daggers at the Priest Exalted. “Afraid she’ll make fun of your face?”

The Priest Exalted simply arched his unscarred brow. “Supplicants are making prayers upstairs in the South Sanctuary.” His voice was silk-smooth, cultured tones that made sense for the Sainted King’s brother. “And the Church is more crowded than usual as we prepare for my nephew’s Consecration this evening. I’d rather not have them disturbed.”

“Then tell her you’ll stick her if she makes noise.” Val stood directly between the Bleeding God’s tapestried hands on the wall, as if He was welcoming her home, reward for a job well done. “Don’t gag her.”

A pause, then the Priest Exalted—Anton—nodded. Gabriel moved behind Lore, untying the knot that held the gag in place.

“I’m sorry,” he said quietly, then moved away.

Even ungagged, Lore didn’t have anything to say. Words had left her. She just sat there, sore mouth agape, staring at Val.

Val, who still wouldn’t look at her. “It’s her,” she sighed wearily. “Just like I said.” Her piercing gaze went from the floor to Anton. “Is that all you needed?”

The Priest Exalted nodded once. “Your inventory will be returned to you,” he said, “and the certificate of pardon can be picked up from the court justice in the Northwest Ward at your convenience.” The side of his mouth that could move quirked up. “The first official crown-sanctioned poison runner. What an honor.”

“Eat shit,” Val muttered.

“Same to you,” Lore spat. She knew how to bury sadness, but anger was a tool, fresh and near at hand. “So you’re going to be a privateer, Val? You turned me over for a contract?”

She expected answering vitriol, but Val’s shoulders sank. “I didn’t have a choice. They knew about Cedric.”

Her fingers were already numb from being tied behind her. But Val’s words were enough to make that numbness spread up her spine, through her chest.

Val finally looked at her. Tears brimmed in her eyes. “Mouse, I—”

“Don’t call me that.” Tunnel mouse, Val had called her when she was young, for her hair that couldn’t decide whether it was brown or blond and landed somewhere indiscriminate, for the place where Mari had found her, at the mouth of the catacombs. Even after Lore grew up, she was still mouse. “Does Mari know? Did she decide that a contract was worth killing me for, too?”

Val’s chapped lips pressed flat, her eyes blinking closed before opening again. “I’ll explain to Mari,” she said quietly. “She’ll understand.”

“Good for her.” The break in Lore’s voice was too raw to hide. “Because I sure as fuck don’t.”

Val sighed. A pause, then she walked over, crouched next to the chair. She raised a hand like she would smooth Lore’s hair away, but Lore jerked her head back. “I know what this looks like,” Val said softly. “But, Lore, this could be an opportunity. This will keep you safer than Mari and I ever could.”

Lore didn’t say anything. She stared straight ahead, until the colors in the tapestry whirled together in her wet eyes. Finally, Val stepped away. The door shut softly behind her.

“For what it’s worth,” the Priest Exalted said, coming to sit before her in the chair Gabriel hastily provided, “none of us have lied to you. We don’t want to hurt you, Lore.”

“Then what do you want?” Her voice still sounded scraped-up, like her throat was made of rock. Lore swallowed.

A smile crinkled the handsome side of Anton’s face. “We need assistance,” he said. “And it appears you’re the only one who can provide it.”