Chapter Thirty-Four

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

In our observation of the captured necromancers who worked in pairs, the more powerful necromancer would channel the Mortem, while the less powerful one would direct it. In this way, they were able to raise more of the dead using less energy by binding them together. Some necromancers were also able to shape raw Mortem before channeling it through themselves, causing things like increased strength or stamina once this shaped Mortem was finally taken in. Theoretically, this practice could be harnessed for military purposes, but so few are capable of it that further research into the possibility is impractical.

—Notes from Thierry LeMan, researcher working in the Burnt Isles circa 10 AGF

With all three of them working, moving the statue was fairly easy. Gabe directed them—the statue was on a track, barely visible against the wood grain in the dark—and they inched the statue forward until it slotted into a notch carved into the top of the well wall.

“Upon reflection,” Bastian said, hooking his hands on his hips and scowling at the statue, “moving it toward the notch seems obvious.”

“What an auspicious start we’re off to,” Gabe muttered.

Lore was too out of breath to say anything. Even sliding along a track, the damn statue was heavy.

Bastian moved the wooden piece covering the top of the well, now unencumbered by stone gods. Inside, a perfect ring of pitch-black, so thick it looked almost liquid. Cold emanated from the depths of the well, and all three of them took a tiny, instinctual step back.

“Do you have a key?” Gabe’s voice was low and dark, still suspicious. He arched a brow at Bastian, who looked utterly confused.

“A key for what?”

“The chambers,” Gabe said. “The chambers within the catacombs. They aren’t just left open.”

“Well.” Bastian pushed back his hair. “Fuck.”

“I can get in.”

Lore didn’t look at either of them. She looked at that vast well of darkness, an entry to deep parts of the earth where the living weren’t meant to go. “I can get in,” she repeated.

Gabe’s brows knit. “How?”

Behind him, Bastian said nothing.

A swallow worked down her dry throat. “I can get into any chamber we find. Just trust me.”

She knew it like she knew the shape of the catacombs, like she knew her name and the crescent edges of the scar on her palm. No part of that world beneath the earth would remain closed to her.

The war in Gabe’s mind played out on his face, cut through in silver moonlight. They circled trust, but never quite landed, carrion birds with a body dying slowly.

“She was a poison runner,” Bastian said, cast in darkness beneath the lip of the well’s roof. His arms were crossed, his voice low. “She knows how to pick a lock.”

Gabe could tell there was more to it, and could tell she wasn’t going to share. Lore could read it in the line of his mouth, hard and unyielding and shaped like well-hidden hurt.

Gabriel Remaut had lived a lifetime of subtle wounds, and she just kept giving him more.

But he shook it off. Nodded. “Fine.”

Bastian’s eyes never left Lore. The moment she felt steadier, tamped down the guilt in her gut, he seemed to know. A tiny inclination of his head, then he stepped up to the well. “Right. Lore and I will go in and search. I don’t know how long it will take to find the bodies, but I would imagine we’ll be back before dawn. Remaut, you stay here and—”

“Absolutely not.” It was near a growl. “You think I’ll let you take her down there alone?”

“I think you’re going to have to,” Bastian said, his voice smooth and courtly and more weapon-like for it. “Someone has to keep watch, and you make the most sense.”

“Why do I feel like you planned this?”

“I can assure you I didn’t, Mort, seeing as neither of us knew until five minutes ago that you were even coming. You left Lore alone all day.”

“I’m sure you didn’t.”

Bleeding God and His absent heart, these two were going to drive her mad.

“Bastian is right. Someone has to stand watch.” Lore said it quick and firm. Whatever territory Gabe and Bastian were edging into, she wanted them out of it. “And people will question you being here a lot less than they’ll question him, Gabe.”

The moon reflected off the gilded roof of the Citadel, gleamed in Gabe’s blue eye. He stared at her a moment, then rubbed at his patch. “Think, Lore,” he murmured. “If I have to stand watch, so be it, but I’d honestly feel better if you went on your own instead of with him.”

“You left.” The words recalled the wordless—her dark room, bodies fitting together before coming decidedly apart. “I know you prefer me alone, Gabriel, but I don’t.”

He shifted back, away from her. The gleam of moonlight left his eye; shadow fell over him like a cloak.

Bastian hopped up onto the lip of the well, then crouched down to peer into the dark. A click, his pearl-handled lighter flaring to life in his fist. The tiny flame didn’t do much, but it did illuminate a short, narrow staircase, spiraling down the side of the well. “Any idea how far this goes before you reach the bottom?”

“The well is about ten yards deep.” No emotion in Gabe’s voice. It was flat as placid water.

“Excellent.” Carefully, Bastian stepped onto the first stair. “See you at dawn.”

Lore could feel Gabe’s eyes burning into the back of her neck, scrutinizing, knowing there was something she hadn’t told him.

Something she wouldn’t. Even if his silence, his unwillingness to ask, made her conversely feel like maybe she should.

The top of Bastian’s head slowly disappeared as he wound around the stairs. Lore climbed up on the well’s lip.

“Lore.”

She half turned. Gabe stood with his arms crossed, a handful of inches shorter than her from this new vantage.

“I didn’t want to leave,” he said finally. “Last night. I didn’t want to stop.”

Her fingers twitched, half a reach. She clenched them tight. “Then why did you?”

His eye flickered away. “Because it didn’t feel… right, being with you. It felt dangerous. Something I should get away from while I had the strength to do it.” He worried the corner of his lip with his teeth, as if he wasn’t sure how to phrase it. “It felt like a mistake, but one I’d made before. One I knew would end badly.”

And he was trying to tell her something, here, something that skirted the edges of what she’d felt since she met him—the instant connection, the ways it felt like she knew him and Bastian both on some cell-deep level that couldn’t be explained. But only one word stuck out to her, and that one word made her recoil.

“A mistake,” she repeated softly.

Gabe flinched, as if he hadn’t realized how it sounded until he heard it in her voice. “Lore, I didn’t mean—”

“You made it very clear what you mean.” She put her foot on the first step and climbed down, chased by the sound of Gabe’s sigh.

Every part of the catacombs looked the same. The walls, stone-built and old-bone-dry, narrowing and expanding with no rhyme or reason, as if someone had marked them out to the pattern of sick lungs breathing. The dirt floor, ground up with bits of rock. The scent. Empty and ozonic and stinging her nose.

She could feel Mortem, sense it phantom-limb-close; death in all this stone, death from the bones of revenants who’d crawled here to die. People with no one who cared enough to burn their bodies.

It surprised her, to sense so much Mortem with Bastian close by. But whatever dampening effect he’d had on her ability seemed to have lessened in recent days, until it was barely a concern at all. Instead, his presence seemed almost to clarify her senses, make Mortem seem sharper, like he was a whetstone to its blade.

Her mind turned, inexplicably, to her birthday. Consecration. The darkness of the moon covering the sun. She glanced at Bastian; there, in the corner of her eye, a glimmer of gold that slid away from her gaze when she tried to concentrate on it.

Lore shook her head.

A haphazard pile of old wood, dried-out plant stalks, and twine waited at the end of the narrow stairs. Bastian lashed the material together into a torch and held the pearl lighter to its end, catching flame. He passed it to her wordlessly.

Lore took the proffered torch. Panic bubbled just beneath her breastbone, oil in a too-hot pan, leaping up to burn her. Now that she was here, in the dark, every sense screamed for her to turn around, clamber back up the stairs to open sky and clear air—

“Lore.” Hands on her shoulders, warmth and the scent of wine. “Breathe.”

She did, slowly. In and out, keeping her eyes on his, whiskey-brown and very close.

When she had herself under control, she stepped back. His hands fell.

Bastian nodded, picking up material to make his own torch. “So. Which way?”

Lore closed her eyes and let her interior map of the catacombs fall into place. It was like a grid laid over the inside of her eyelids, a dark spiderwebbing tangle. One spot in the map throbbed, a darkened heart of Mortem concentrated in a single place. That’d be where the bodies were. Close to that knot, two sparks of white light—she and Bastian. So all she had to do was find a path in all those jagged lines that connected them.

Looking at her map was like looking at a maze from above, gazing down into a pit of tangled string or exposed vein. Far below, barely a glimmer, she saw another handful of white lights, so few of them now. Another knotted, throbbing storm of Mortem.

The Night Sisters. Nyxara’s corpse. There in the strange subterranean cathedral at the bottom of the catacombs, there next to that obsidian tomb. Lore could see it, now that she had it fixed in her mind, see it as if she stood beneath the crystalline stalactites herself, the walls flecked in constellations of mica, the gleaming block of the tomb, a deeper dark than even the catacombs themselves…

But that’s not why she was here. Lore pulled back, rearranging her mind’s eye, tracing a path between her and Bastian and the bodies.

“This way.” She started forward. Behind her, Bastian quickly lit his own torch and followed.

It didn’t take them long to come across the first piles of bones, old and dry and wrapped in a ratty cloak of indeterminate color. Bastian frowned, toeing aside what looked like a femur. “Foul,” he murmured. “I’ve already had quite enough of corpses, and we haven’t even found the stash yet.”

“Imagine how I feel,” Lore replied.

They lapsed into silence. When she glanced over her shoulder, Bastian’s brows were knit, the flames of his torch casting his face in wavering shadow. “You haven’t told Gabe, have you? About growing up down here?”

“Does it matter?” The question came out sharper than she intended.

“No. It’s your business, you tell whoever you want.” He shrugged, but it didn’t quite mask the pointed look in his eye, a spade delving into dirt for answers buried. “It’s just interesting, is all. Since you two are so clearly pining after each other.”

“I am not pining after Gabriel Remaut.”

“Well, he’s certainly pining after you.”

“No.” Her laugh was short and harsh. “He isn’t.”

“Could’ve fooled me.”

“Fooling you is not a difficult task.”

Now it was his turn to bark a harsh laugh. “Not for you, maybe.” A pause. Then, softer, “Why’d you tell me, then?”

“Because you threatened to send me to the Burnt Isles if I didn’t.” The path ahead forked, split into uneven halls. Lore stopped, breathed. Hung left.

“That isn’t all of it,” Bastian said behind her. There was a quality to his voice she hadn’t heard before, though. Doubt. “You trust me, Lore. Despite everything, despite yourself, you trust me.”

“You haven’t given me much choice.” But it didn’t come out like an accusation.

“I didn’t feel like I had much choice, either.” The doubt in Bastian’s tone grew a harder edge. “I keep trying to figure out why I wanted to know about your childhood, about who you were. Why I needed to know. To protect myself from August, sure, but it was more than that. It was like… like something pushed me. Like it had happened before, it would happen again, and I was part of it whether I wanted to be or not.”

They weren’t the same words Gabe had used by the well, but they were an echo all the same. The sense of things falling into place around them, the sense of being moved into position by forces so much bigger than themselves, bigger even than kings and wars. She and Bastian and Gabe, comets that couldn’t help colliding.

Lore turned around. Bastian’s eyes glittered, angry and lost.

“I know you.” Bastian said it like a sentencing. “And you know me. Why is that, Lore? Why does it seem like I’ve always known you?”

It could’ve sounded romantic, in any other context. But here, it just sounded like pain and confusion, one more unquantifiable thing. Lore stared at him and said nothing.

“Tell me I’m not alone in that.” The Sun Prince wasn’t one to beg, she knew; Lore thought this was probably the closest he’d ever gotten. It splintered in her, a wound that had been healed and reopened time and time again. “Lore, tell me I’m not alone here.”

And wasn’t that all she’d ever wanted? Not to be alone?

She stared at him across the dark and the torchlight, the rocks and bones. “You aren’t.” It came out hoarse; she swallowed. “You aren’t alone, Bastian. I feel it, too.”

Then she turned and started forward again. Behind her, Bastian pulled in a ragged sigh, and followed.