Chapter Thirty-Five

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Nothing is new.

—The Book of Mortal Law, Tract 135

Lore could tell the first chamber they came to wasn’t the one they were searching for. The map in her head told her to walk straight past it, to keep winding farther into the dark.

But Bastian paused, raising his flickering torch to the splintered wooden door. “Should we check this one out?”

“It isn’t the right one,” Lore said, pushing ahead. It was cold this deep beneath the earth, and numbness tingled in her fingertips. “And we need to keep moving if we want to be back by sunrise.”

“How can you tell?” Bastian gave the door one more glance before ambling after her. “I don’t think we’ll be able to see when the sun rises down here. Bleeding God, I don’t think we’d be able to tell if the whole world ended.”

Hyperbole, but Lore’s shoulders still inched toward her ears. “I can tell.” Her intuition was a spark in her chest, a torch that didn’t lead her wrong. Part of her was at home in the catacombs in a way she never was anywhere else.

All she’d ever wanted was to find somewhere she fit that wasn’t in the dark. But shadows and death were the only things that held space for her.

“You never did tell me exactly how this navigation thing works.” Bastian stepped up so they were level, adjusted his longer stride to keep it that way. “I assume it has something to do with being born here?”

Lore shrugged, studying the dark before her rather than the Sun Prince beside. “I assume so.”

“Then you’re the only one who knows the catacombs like this, because you were the only one born in the catacombs.”

“No, I wasn’t.”

His brow cocked.

Lore sighed, rubbed at her eyes. It was a good thing Bastian was the one to come down here with her; she didn’t have the energy to keep secrets. “There were other babies born to the Night Sisters,” she said. “More than one unmarried pregnant person thought hiding in the catacombs was preferable to dealing with their families on the surface.”

“Doesn’t say much for their families.”

“Or society in general. It takes more than one person to make a baby, but the onus always falls on the one who bodily carries the proof.”

“True.” Bastian dipped his chin in acquiescence. “But I assume children born here aren’t all able to use Mortem?”

“Nope.” Lore gave a halfhearted attempt at a laugh. “I just got lucky, I guess.”

He snorted, then inclined his head to her moon-marked hand, swinging by her side as the other held her torch. “Did all children born to Night Sisters get marked?”

Her hand curled closed. “No. Only those chosen to go into the tomb on the eclipse and see if Nyxara’s body has stirred.”

His eyes darkened at the word eclipse, knitting it together with the planned ball, synchronicities that itched.

A few steps of silence. Then Bastian swallowed. “You shouldn’t go to the ball on the eclipse, Lore.”

“I have to. If I don’t, it will be obvious that we—”

“No, you fucking don’t.” The words shredded in his teeth, vehement and bladed. “You don’t have to jump when August or Anton says jump. Remaut and I can come up with cover if we have to. Pretend you’re sick, lock yourself in your room, hells, run through the storm drain and go find a tavern to get raging drunk in, but I don’t think you should come.”

She stopped. “Do you know something?”

“Of course I don’t know something.” Bastian looked irritated. “But I don’t have a good feeling about it, and when it comes to you, that’s enough for me.”

“Why do you care so much about protecting me?” She planted her feet in dry dirt and bone dust, faced him like an oncoming cavalry. “Why do I care so much about protecting you?”

“I don’t know.” Rounding the bend to what they’d said before, this feeling of knowing each other, of being pulled along by strings they didn’t tie. “I don’t know.”

Lore sighed, looked away. “Fine. I will try to get out of going to the eclipse ball.” But even as she gave the promise, it sat heavy on the back of her throat, and tasted like a lie. Her thoughts turned to Gabe, to how he’d take it if she suddenly decided to completely defy Anton. He’d gone along with all this so far because of the threat of the Burnt Isles—the threat to her, specifically, since his connections and title could probably get him out of it. But after last night, she didn’t want to test how far he’d go for her, whether that line had finally been crossed.

Bastian nodded. “Thank you.”

“You shouldn’t go, either,” Lore said, ripping her mind away from Gabe. “What with your father trying to get rid of you, and all.”

“I’ve been bringing in my own food,” Bastian said. “And I won’t drink or eat anything at the ball, so that rules out overdosing me with one of his poisons. If I were someone who partook in such things, it would make his job easier, but I’ve always had a distaste for it.” The corner of his mouth lifted, his bared teeth gleaming in the light of his torch. “And if he tries to kill me in a less subtle way, who can blame me for returning the favor?”

Disquiet thrummed in her temples. “Let’s hope he behaves, then.”

The look in Bastian’s eyes said part of him didn’t hope for that at all. Part of him wanted a bloodbath.

Up ahead, the catacombs branched again, a T of tunnels leaving no option other than left or right. The path she’d traced in her head said to go right, but as she turned, the light of her torch flickered over something on the wall. Words.

She stopped, frowned.

Bastian came up beside her, the light of his torch illuminating the words further. The lettering was shaky, deep in some places and barely there in others. “Looks like gibberish,” he said. “Maybe a revenant got loquacious right before they died.”

“I don’t think a revenant is going to go this deep.” It’d been half an hour at least since they’d passed remains. Lore held her torch closer to the wall.

She squinted, puzzling through the inscription aloud. At least it was in Auverrani. “Divinity is never destroyed,” she murmured. “Only echoed.”

“My vote is still on gibberish.” But there was a ribbon of disquiet in Bastian’s voice that said the words felt just as heavy to him as they did to her. “Revenant or not, how did someone manage to write on a stone wall?”

Something pale was half hidden in the dirt. Lore nudged it with her toe—a bone, the end sharp. The surface was pockmarked and pitted, as if it’d been here a long time. “Maybe you were right about the revenant.”

Bastian’s nose wrinkled. “Good for me.” He nodded down the branching tunnels. “Which way?”

She jerked her head to the right and continued on, a little quicker than before. She kicked the bone into the dark.

They kept up the faster pace, torches sputtering. Lore thought it’d been a little over two hours since they descended through the well—still plenty of time before sunrise, but Gabe would be worried. He’d be pacing, she was nearly sure of it. Pacing and pulling at his eye patch.

“Do you think he’s all right?” It pushed past her lips without her conscious thought to voice it.

“Remaut?” Beside her, Bastian stiffened, but his voice was even. “I’m sure he’s just fine. Maybe he’s taking the opportunity to get some sleep. He’s looking less than well rested these days.”

“He sleeps in front of our door,” Lore said. “To guard it.”

“Always one for dramatic shows of chivalry.”

“Maybe you could learn something from him.”

A stretch of silence. Then, “Would you like me to, Lore?”

It could’ve been flirtatious, easily said in his usual flippant tone. But it wasn’t. It was earnest, and Lore didn’t answer.

Her mental map guided them through a handful of turns, torches flickering against the damp stone. In her mind, the white lights of her and Bastian drew closer to the knot of Mortem, until the two were on top of each other. They’d reached their destination.

Which was, apparently, a solid wall.

“Dammit.” Lore slammed her hand against the rough stone. “Fuck!”

“There has to be a door somewhere.” Bastian waved his torch, casting shuddering light in either direction. “Maybe there’s a trick latch or something?”

“There’s not.” The hall was narrow; Lore could lean backward and hit the opposite wall. She slid down it, pressing the heel of her hand against her forehead. “There’s nothing here.”

“There has to be. You led us—”

“I led us wrong, Bastian.” She dropped her hand, looked up at him with daggers in her eyes. “I was wrong. Maybe we’re wrong about this whole damn thing. Maybe we should just leave it.”

“Leave it,” he repeated, cold. He stared down at her, the firelight making him look as regal and distant as a statue of Apollius. “Just let my father and my uncle collect bodies for who-knows-what purpose and march us into war?”

Lore didn’t drop her gaze from his, but neither did she respond. She was tired. Tired of trying to fix something she didn’t fully understand. Tired of being yanked along in one direction or another, used from every angle. Maybe some of those angles were justified, but they still stung.

Bastian cursed, pushing his torch into a small pile of rocks to keep it upright, then slowly ran his hands over the wall. Still searching for that hidden latch.

She watched him for a moment, unable to make herself stand. Then, with a sigh, she pushed up and did the same.

He glanced at her sideways but stayed quiet. Smart man.

As predicted, there was no hidden latch. But as Lore’s hand passed over one section of rough stone wall, her palm… stopped.

She frowned. She could move her hand if she tried, but her skin seemed drawn back to that one spot—smoother than the rest of the rock, and colder, too. At first Lore thought that was the reason her hand strayed there, a simple matter of texture. But as she pressed her palm to the stone, she felt something thrum. A swirl of winter, slow-clotted blood.

Mortem. Mortem, calling to her. Gathered here and knotted.

“I think I figured it out,” she murmured.

Bastian stopped running his hands over the wall, his dark hair gilded with dust. He stepped back, palms open before him as if in surrender. “What do we have to do?”

“It’s a lock,” she said, hand still pressed to the stone. “But with no key. A mechanism that has to be tripped with magic, not something physical.”

“Magic is all you, unfortunately.” He swallowed, narrowing his eyes at the wall. “Is it safe?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Well, then.” Bastian stepped behind her, like he could offer some support. “I’ve got your back. Try not to die.”

Lore closed her eyes and tipped up her chin, probing her senses forward into the wall as she took down her mental barrier, the forest that would always make her think of Gabe. She tried to gather Mortem from the surrounding stone, but the way it’d already been worked into this hidden door kept her from pulling it forward.

She took a deep breath, held it until stars spun behind her eyes. When they opened, her vision had gone grayscale—the wall before her was a writhing tangle of black, her hand against it the dim-glowing gray of a channeler at work. More Mortem lurked in the wall behind her, in the dirt; Lore pulled it up, thin threads of darkness winding around her fingers. Lore channeled it through herself, quick with practice. Then, gently, she pushed it into the wall.

The Mortem in the wall had been fashioned into a puzzle box, a knot in the center, other strands outlining the shape of a door. To open it, she’d have to solve the puzzle box.

This had to be Anton’s work. It reminded her too much of what he’d done at the leak, twisting threads of Mortem into an intricate knot, working it in ways she’d never seen. But whatever Anton had done at the leak was simple compared with this. She’d never known Mortem could be used this way, twisted and fashioned rather than run quickly through a channeler and into dead matter. Made into a tool. It must’ve taken intense concentration to channel and shape it at the same time.

But had he channeled, at the leak? Now that she was thinking of it, Lore wasn’t sure. Anton had shaped the Mortem, but she didn’t recall seeing the opaque eyes and necrotic fingers that meant he was moving the power of death through his body.

Had he just shaped raw Mortem? Made a tangle of it, then sent it to her to channel inward? Such things had been done before, but it’d been centuries ago.

No time to wonder over it now. Lore sipped air through her lips as she probed at the puzzle box, the strands of Mortem she channeled picking at the ones from the Priest Exalted, thin fingers on violin strings.

The goal of the puzzle was clear—unravel the knot in the center, and it’d be a straight shot through the box and around the outline of the door, an easy thing to trace her own threads along and open. The untangling would take ages, probably. A series of tiny movements, one after the other, executed in exactly the right way and exactly the right order—

One of her threads slipped, the effort of pushing through stone making it go sideways. Something in the puzzle box slid into place.

The tangled knot smoothed.

For just a moment, Lore stood still, not quite able to believe she’d solved the intricate puzzle box by accident. Then, with one last push, she sent the Mortem she’d made down the line.

A crack. The wall before her swung open.

Lore stepped back, the threads of Mortem falling away as she gasped in air, color returning to her vision and blood coursing into her fingers. Cold emanated from the now-open door, and the dark beyond was tar-thick. She picked up her torch with shaky hands; even the flame-light didn’t penetrate more than a foot or two into the chamber.

“I’ll go first.” Bastian rolled his shoulders, set his jaw. He stepped through the door before she could stop him.

A short, startled yelp. Lore lurched over the chamber’s threshold, apprehension forgotten, and nearly collided with Bastian’s back.

“Got you,” he chuckled.

Lore shoved a hand between his shoulder blades. “Fuck you.”

“I thought we talked about asking nicely.”

There was a current of nerves running beneath the banter, one no jokes could hide. The darkness was thick, pressing around them, but there was also a sense of space here she hadn’t felt in the tunnels, a vastness.

It was somehow worse.

“What’s this?” Bastian stepped to the side—more steps than Lore anticipated, and she scrambled to keep up—until he reached the wall. He groped along the stone, pulling down something that looked like a leafless vine. A fuse.

“Do not light that,” Lore said, at the very moment Bastian put his torch to the fuse’s end.

Flame shot down the line, but rather than leading to a stack of explosives, the fuse took the fire to another torch set into the wall. Then another, and another, light traveling around the room until the whole cavern was illuminated in flickering orange.

It was huge, as large as three of the throne room. Stone plinths were set at equal distances, reminding Lore eerily of the iron crosshatching on the floors miles above their heads.

And on every stone slab, a corpse.

All different sizes, different genders, but in death they appeared uniform. All of them were covered in dark fabric. All of them looked like they were merely sleeping, as long as you didn’t get close enough to notice their pallor, the waxy texture of their skin.

And all of them looked nearly the same age. No children, no elderly. These corpses would be in the primes of their lives, if they weren’t dead.

Bastian moved first. Tentatively, still holding the lit torch, though now they didn’t really need it. “Where are the rest of them?”

No children. No elders. It itched at the back of her neck, some formless apprehension she wasn’t sure how to parse. “They could be in another chamber, couldn’t they? Kept apart?”

“I guess.” Bastian’s brows slashed down. “But why?”

Slowly, Lore approached the nearest slab. Femme, muscular, maybe a handful of years older than her. Reddish hair, a smooth, unlined face. And not a hint of rot.

The last attack had been two days ago. Two days, with seventy-five victims. But there were far more than seventy-five bodies in this room, so these had to be corpses from all four attacked villages.

But why were they divided by age? And how had they been so well preserved?

“Lore.” Bastian’s voice was quiet, like he was afraid to disturb the dead. “Their palm.”

One of the corpse’s hands had fallen from the plinth. Lore didn’t want to touch it; instead, she crouched and craned her neck to look.

An eclipse was carved into the meat of the corpse’s palm. A sun across the top, its curve running beneath the fingers, rays stretching to where they began. A crescent moon across the bottom, completing the sun’s arc.

“I don’t understand,” she murmured, straightening, closing her own scarred hand into a fist. “What does that mean?”

“Only one way to find out,” Bastian said.

Lore placed her fingers lightly on the stone plinth before her. She closed her eyes and found the death hiding deep in the body, tugged on it gently.

The breath she took and held tasted of emptiness and mineral cold. Her fingertips grew cold and pale as strands of darkness eased from the corpse and into her, the world losing its color again.

Something didn’t look right. She could see her own body, white light and gray and the mass of dark in her center. Bastian next to her, a light so bright it nearly throbbed. But right above the heart of every corpse, there was a knot of darkness, thickly tangled, the color of a sky devoid of moon or stars. It reminded her of the leak, of the door. Anton, again.

What had the Priest Exalted done?

Her heartbeat came slow, slower. Her limbs felt heavy. She’d taken in nearly as much Mortem as she could, and she slammed her palms down on the plinth, channeling it into the rock, feeling it grow porous and brittle.

Her veins were sluggish; her lungs couldn’t pull in enough air to satisfy. She’d taken in more death than she should’ve been able to, in the short while she’d channeled. It was… was thicker than it should be, denser.

Her knees wobbled, and Bastian rushed to her, a warm arm over her shoulders holding her up and keeping her steady.

“What happened to you?” Lore murmured to the dead, her voice thin and reedy. “Who did this, and why?”

But the corpse in front of her was still and silent.

“I don’t understand.” Bastian’s eyes narrowed. “What did—”

A creaking sound cut him off as every corpse in the cavern sat up. As every corpse in the cavern twisted to look at them with dead, blank eyes.

Understanding crashed into Lore like a wave: When she’d pulled the death out of one of them, it’d somehow pulled death from them all. Those writhing knots of dark she’d seen over their hearts must connect them, somehow.

Bastian shouldered in front of Lore as if on instinct. His hand fell to his side, to a dagger hidden in his dark clothes. What he would do with it, she didn’t know—it wasn’t like he could kill them all again.

But none of the dead moved to attack. Instead, as one, their mouths dropped open, wider than human jaws should allow.

“They awaken.” It came from the first, the corpse closest to them. Blue lips didn’t move, just like the child in the vaults. “They awaken as do the new vessels.” The words became a chant, sonorous and echoing. “They awaken. They awaken as do the new vessels.”

Lore felt as cold as the corpses, as still as death.

“They awaken.” The corpses near the woman took up the chant. “They awaken as do the new vessels.”

The chant spread like a drop of ink in a pool of water, rippling out until it reached every corpse in the cavern. They spoke at different speeds, picked up the chant at different times, a symphony of voices that filled the vast space of the cavern and came upon her like a tide.

Then the words cut off, and the dead began to scream.