Chapter Thirty-Six

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Wounded dogs always go back to their masters.

—Kirythean proverb

Gods, it was loud. A screeching cacophony echoing around the too-vast chamber, bouncing off stone walls, shaken into discordancy that stabbed at Lore’s ears. She stumbled back from the plinth with its screaming corpse, tripped over a loose stone, landed on her ass with her hands clapped over her ears and her teeth gritted.

Thin threads of Mortem still clung to her fingers, strung between her and the stone-like residue from a spider’s web, brushing cold against her face. An anomaly, something she’d never encountered before—once you stopped channeling, the threads should disappear. But something about this place, deep beneath the earth and inundated with death, seemed to make Mortem linger.

Next to her, Bastian knelt on the ground, the heels of his palms pressed so tightly to his ears they might leave a bruise. Neither of them tried to get to the door. It was too much; both of them focused only on staying together through the awful noise.

At least, until the bodies started moving.

Jerky at first, dead limbs waking, and all of it synchronized as if it’d been rehearsed. The right arm rising, fingers flexing. Then the left leg, swinging over the side of the plinths. All the while still screaming, mouths still hanging open.

“Shit,” Lore breathed, and scrambled up from the ground. “Shit, this shouldn’t be possible, shit—”

Bastian’s eyes were closed; he didn’t see, still hunched over his knees. Lore grabbed his shoulder and pulled him toward the door. His eyes opened as she did, widened, a curse inaudible below the din of the screaming corpses.

The door was, thankfully, still open. Lore dragged him out behind her just as the bodies in the chamber stood up. Every dead face turned to them at once, eyes black, mouths made maws, dark and opened wider than they ever should be.

Slowly, they started forward.

“Close it!” Bastian yelled, all thoughts of secrecy forgotten. Surely, all this screaming could be heard from miles away.

“I don’t know how!” Lore thrust her hands at the stone, but the trailing threads of Mortem brushed against it listlessly, useless. “The magic is… it’s clinging, I don’t understand—”

Gods, there was so much she didn’t understand. This power had lived in her for nearly twenty-four years, and it was still a mystery, unknowable, a curse diamond-faceted.

Bastian shouldn’t be able to see the strands of Mortem on her fingers—he couldn’t channel—but somehow, he did. The widening of his eyes and the way his mouth opened said he did.

One more mystery.

He rushed forward, pulled her hands away from the door. Shimmers of gold wavered in the air around his fingers, too much to be imagined, too corporeal to be a hallucination. She could see them clearly now, wrapping his palms, trailing from him the way Mortem trailed from her.

The Sun Prince gathered up the strands of death in his gold-shrouded fist and yanked.

The Mortem let go, tugging out of her like a thread through a needle’s eye. Lore gasped, her vision flaring bright. Life itself seemed to spill from where Bastian touched her, blushing her skin and rushing her pulse, every nerve alive and tingling. Mortem fled from him, but she could still feel it, still grasp it if she wanted.

There was something else, too, a sense of duality: holding a rope made of shadow and one of light at once, like she was two things pressed into one form. Just a flicker of awareness, an answer to a question she hadn’t known to ask—

The bodies in the chamber collapsed. The screaming stopped, leaving ringing silence behind.

They stood in the doorway, her hands cradled in his, breathing hard. His forehead tipped down, rested on hers; she let it. The heady feeling that had rushed through her when he pulled out the strands—life, glowing and vibrant, anathema to the magic she carried—slowly faded. And with it, that flash of knowledge, of something clicking into place. Answer and question falling away.

Lore pulled her hands out of Bastian’s. “How did…” Her throat felt like she’d choked down a handful of gravel; Lore cleared it, tried again. “How did you do that, Bastian?”

He stared at his hands. The shimmer in the air around him had dimmed, but just barely, and it flared again when he raised his hand in her direction. Lore flinched, acting on instinct, and he let his hand drop.

“I don’t know.” He shook his head. “It must be something about being in the catacombs…”

Dawn was soon. Lore knew it, felt the certainty in her bones, just like she felt everything down here. They had to move; they didn’t have time for this.

“What about you?” he asked, his voice still thin with nerves. “Has Mortem ever done that before?”

“Clung to me like that, or made a bunch of corpses start to chase me?” Her rueful laugh came out shaky. “No, on both counts.”

“Rude of them not to answer your questions before they started screaming,” Bastian said. “What was it they were muttering? Something about awakening?”

“They awaken. Nearly the same thing the first one told me.” Lore frowned. “It’d be helpful if we had any idea who they is referring to.”

“You mean it’s not just nonsense?”

“The dead don’t lie. It’s an answer to the question I asked, if an oblique one.” She rubbed at her forehead, leaving behind a streak of dust and torch ash. “But we have no idea what it fucking means.”

Bastian turned to study the door. The sconces inside the chamber still burned, illuminating the mess of bodies littered over the floor; neither of them moved to douse the flames. The increased light revealed what their torches hadn’t—an X on the stone door, barely visible against the pockmarked gray. “Think whoever made this also wrote that charming passage a few tunnels back?”

“Possible, but I doubt it.” Lore ran her fingers over the X, then held them up, black with charcoal. “This was meant as a temporary marking, easy to remove.”

“So hopefully not made with a bone.”

“But it was locked with Mortem. Mortem used in a way I’ve only seen once.” Lore wiped the charcoal off on her thigh. “At the leak a couple of days ago.”

“Anton.” Bastian’s jaw was a tight line, his arms crossed as he stared at the door.

“Anton,” she agreed.

This entire expedition had been about proving Anton a liar. But now that they’d done it, found incontrovertible proof, it weighed heavy on Lore’s shoulders. And the blank, lost look on Bastian’s face said he felt that weight, too.

My father is a bad man, he’d said in the atrium, limned in moonlight and poison flowers. It had to sting, to know your entire legacy was corrupt.

He sighed, looked to Lore. “So my uncle and my father are killing their own citizens to provoke a war?”

“Seems likely.” Lore reached inside the chamber without actually stepping over the threshold and took one of the torches from the wall to replace the one she’d dropped. “But I don’t understand why. Kirythea is at our doorstep anyway; an eventual war is nigh inevitable. Why exacerbate it?”

“There has to be some advantage we don’t know about.” Bastian walked beside her, frowning, his hair falling over his forehead. “Something that would make a war profitable, rather than a drain on resources.”

“Not that a drain would ever be felt in the Citadel, anyway.”

He inclined his head in agreement.

Their journey back to the well was silent. Lore led them by the map in her head, retracing their steps through the tangle of tunnels. When they passed the words etched into the wall, she only allowed herself one glance.

Divinity is never destroyed.

Up ahead, a thin ray of light shone, too bright to be the moon. Dawn had sneaked up on them, and the strength of its glow after hours in the catacombs made Lore’s head ache.

Bastian stopped at the bottom of the stairs, scowling up into the sliver of sun. “He left it open,” he muttered. “Barely.”

“He’ll be there to pull it off.”

“Such faith you have in our monk.” Bastian mounted the stairs and started climbing, carefully, the muscles of his shoulders moving beneath his dusty shirt as he kept his balance with one hand on the wall. “He’s such a fickle thing; I wouldn’t be surprised if he turned tail as soon as we came down here.”

“You should have more faith in him,” Lore said to the broad expanse of Bastian’s back. Realizing she was staring, she dropped her eyes to her own feet making their careful way up the narrow stairs. “He showed up, didn’t he?”

Her answer was the lid of the well opening, sending down piercing light. Not full morning, but edged enough into dawn that the brightness made her look away.

When she turned back, Bastian was gone, the round opening ahead showing nothing but pink-washed sky. Lore rolled her eyes. Of course he would just hop out of the well once she was proven right. He and Gabe were probably spitting curses at each other right now.

But when Lore reached the top of the stairs, Bastian was on his knees between two of the Presque Mort, his head wrenched back, the tip of a bayonet denting the skin of his throat. Behind him stood Malcolm, his expression pensive, but the line of his mouth set in determination.

Before the well, Anton, his Bleeding God’s Heart pendant glinting in the thin light.

And next to Anton, Gabe.

Bastian laughed, a terrible, rueful sound, all teeth. “What was it you were saying about having faith in him, Lore?”

But Lore didn’t speak. She knew when she was caught.

A pause, the only sound the flap of Anton’s robes against his legs in the morning breeze. Then Gabe stepped up to the well, offering a hand to help her down.

She didn’t take it. She didn’t look at him. She stepped down to the cobblestones on her own, even though her legs were shaking.

Anton waved a weary hand. “Take them to the Church. Our colleagues are waiting.”

“Your colleagues?” Bastian spat. The Presque Mort hauled him up; she vaguely recognized both the guards holding Bastian from the day of the Mortem leak, and they both seemed a bit too eager to manhandle the Sun Prince. The bayonet tip never left his throat, but Bastian didn’t stop snarling. “That’s an interesting way to say fellow traitors.”

Next to her, Gabe flinched. Bastian noticed, and turned his blazing eyes toward him, mouth twisted in an ugly mess of anger and betrayal. “I guess it’s true what they say, huh, Remaut? When someone shows who they are, you’d better believe them. I thought to give you the benefit of the doubt. More fool me.”

Gabe wasn’t close enough to touch, but the very air around him seemed to vibrate with the force of keeping himself still. His fist curled by his side, white-knuckled.

“He’s right.”

All eyes snapped to Lore. She stared straight ahead, not looking at any of them, keeping her gaze locked on the thin flaring line of the sun emerging over the garden wall. “It seems like betrayal comes easily to you, Duke Remaut.”

She’d wounded him. She’d meant to. Still, the subtle deflation of his shoulders, the way his face turned so all she could see was that infernal eye patch, made all her organs tie themselves in knots.

“I’m afraid it’s a bit more complicated than you and my nephew think.” Anton peered at her, the rising sun behind him making the scarred side of his face a mass of runneled shadow. “Questions of betrayal and treason often are. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.” He turned sharply, headed toward the door cut into the wall of the garden that led back into the Church. “Come. We have much to discuss.”

The Presque Mort deposited Lore and Bastian in a large antechamber, empty other than a long table and a handful of chairs, hung with one simple tapestry of Apollius clutching His bleeding chest. It reminded Lore of the room she’d been taken to after accidentally raising Horse.

Her bonds were a bit more intricate this time. So were Bastian’s. Instead of ropes, their hands were manacled, and those manacles attached to thick iron rings in the floor. A slanted echo of the iron bars crossing the floor in the Citadel.

She supposed no one needed that particular reminder of their holy purpose in the Church. There were reminders everywhere.

It was Malcolm who locked the manacles around her wrists. “Why?” she asked as he worked, not bothering to whisper. “I thought you wanted things to change, Malcolm? I thought you were on our side?”

She didn’t mean to sound so wounded.

The head librarian took a moment to answer. When he did, it was with a sigh. “Anton will explain,” he said. “Gabe came to him, then they both came to me, and what they told me let me know that we have to work together.”

Lore scowled. Next to her, another Presque Mort shackled Bastian, but the Sun Prince stayed silent, staring at the floor.

An hour later, and that silence still held. In that hour, she’d observed that they both handled betrayal differently. Lore iced over, letting no emotion cross her face. Bastian, by contrast, cycled between looking like he might attempt to pull the iron ring out of the floor with his bare hands, and looking like he’d just lost a friend.

She supposed he had, in a way. The thing between her and Gabe and Bastian wasn’t friendship, not really—it was both deeper and less complicated than that, somehow, a primal knot none of them could untie. Gabe’s betrayal stung, but in a way, it also felt inevitable.

“I’m sorry, Lore,” Bastian murmured.

Her brows knit. “Sorry for what?”

“If Gabe betraying me feels this bad,” he said to his bound hands, “then I can’t imagine how it feels for you, when you care for him the way you do.”

“I don’t care for him like… like anything.” It came out breathy, not enough power behind the words to make them a truth or a lie. They just hung there.

The door opened. Both of them looked up.

Anton and Gabe, as expected, and Malcolm with them. The librarian darted a quick, furtive look at Lore, apprehension coiled in his expression.

The Presque Mort parted, revealing another figure behind them.

Severin Bellegarde.

“Well then,” Bastian said, sitting back in his chair with a clanking of chain. “It seems like everything we theorized is true. But what do you get out of war, Severin? Money? You’ve already got more houses than family members, and your style of dress makes it clear you care nothing for current fashion—”

“No one wants a war, Bastian.” Anton had changed out of his robes and into the close, dark clothing he’d worn the day of the leak, matching Gabe and Malcolm. He sat down at the table and crossed his arms, looking suddenly like a much younger man despite the gray shock of his hair. “That is, in fact, precisely what we’re trying to prevent.”

We.Apparently meaning him and Bellegarde.

Bastian’s eyes slid to Lore’s, the same realization hitting them both—the door to the chamber was closed. No one else was coming.

And August wasn’t here.

Bellegarde watched the thought spark on their faces, a thin smile creasing his dour face. “The only person trying to start a war is August,” he said. “And we are not in accord.”

“My brother believes we are on the same side, but we haven’t been. Not for a long time.” Anton shifted on the table, rested his elbows on his knees, and looked to Bastian. “I’m sorry, nephew.”

“Sorry for what?” Bastian had wiped all emotion from his face, donned the mask of careless prince. He tipped up his chin, dark hair falling down his back. “Bit late for regrets, isn’t it?”

“I’m sorry,” Anton said slowly, ignoring him, “that sickness and jealousy have made your father a bad man. I am sorry that you have borne the brunt.” A pause. “I’m sorry he wants you dead, when you, of all people, do not deserve his ire.”

A muscle twitched in Bastian’s jaw. His manacled hands tensed, just enough to make his chains click together, and something sorrowful flickered across his face. His father was dying; his father wanted him dead. Both things that sat heavy.

The half-tender and half-unsettling moment ended when Anton turned Lore’s way. “What happened when you tried to raise the body in the chamber?”

Her mouth opened to lie on instinct, to claim no knowledge of a chamber or a body in it. But they were long past that. Lore slumped in her seat, manacles clanking.

By the door, Gabe winced, just a bit. She thought of him that first day, loosening her restraints, trying to make her as comfortable as she could be, and pushed the memory viciously away.

“We know that’s why you went there,” Anton said wearily, taking her silence as reluctance. “And that’s why we didn’t stop you. Why we left the note, why Danielle was instructed to tell you about the docks—her family also realizes what kind of threat August has become, and is loyal to Church over Crown, to gods over humans. We need to know what happened, Lore.”

The note Bellegarde had planted, Dani at Alie’s tea. Lore had been led along like a child holding a parent’s hand; they’d been brought here so easily.

Beyond Anton, Gabe closed his eye, tilted his chin away. Had he known? Had he been part of Anton’s plan from the start?

The rest of them looked at her, the Presque Mort and Bellegarde and even Bastian, with varying levels of confusion and expectation. Lore shrank in on herself, suddenly self-conscious of her failure once again. “It didn’t work. They didn’t say anything new.”

“Nothing new,” Anton repeated. “So the same thing as last time.”

She nodded.

A quick look slid between Anton and Bellegarde, so fast she might’ve imagined it. “And what else happened, Lore?”

“I had to get past your lock, first,” she said petulantly. If he was going to talk to her like a child, she could play the damn part.

A slight smile bent the Priest Exalted’s thin mouth. “Yes. That was quite a feat. It took much practice to bend Mortem in such a way. Practice, and research.” He nodded briefly to Malcolm. “It is fortunate that we’ve kept such a wealth of knowledge in the library.”

Malcolm’s lips pressed flat. He said nothing.

“And after that?” Anton prompted.

“I raised one of them.” She didn’t mention the markings on the corpse’s hand. “But all of them got up. Every single one in the chamber.”

“Got up?” Bellegarde asked excitedly. Behind him, a slightly repulsed look spasmed across Malcolm’s face before he schooled it into neutrality again. “They were ambulatory?”

She nodded, though the nobleman’s excitement at a bunch of moving corpses made her mouth twist in the same disgusted way Malcolm’s had. “They all moved at the same time. Got up off their slabs and started coming toward us.”

“While screaming,” Bastian added. “Don’t forget the screaming.”

But the screaming aspect didn’t seem to matter to Bellegarde. He turned to Anton with barely leashed excitement. “That means the binding works. All that’s needed is—”

Anton held up a hand, and the nobleman went immediately silent.

“What binding?” Lore snapped. “What are you talking about?”

The Priest Exalted sighed. “We bound the corpses,” he said quietly. “I tied the knot yesterday, but Gabriel and Malcolm channeled the Mortem. Putting all those years of study on the properties of magic to use.”

Her eyes darted to Gabe, instinct overriding the desire not to look at him, a renewed sense of betrayal making her stomach feel hollow. Gabe’s shoulders were crooked, his head tilted so she couldn’t see his expression.

Anton noticed. A calculating look flashed in his eye. “We connected the corpses,” he continued, “so that what happened to one would happen to the others, once the Mortem in them was channeled out again. As an experiment, you understand, to see if waking one of the dead could wake them all.” He gestured to Lore. “But the waking must be done by a powerful necromancer. The most powerful we could find, and only after their power had been honed, both by nearing the age of Consecration and by proximity to Spiritum.” His gesturing hand went to Bastian. “We needed the two of you to be close together, so your powers would sharpen each other. The Law of Opposites in action.”

“I don’t have any fucking Spiritum,” Bastian hissed. “None of us do; it’s a fairy tale.”

“Apollius gives the gift to his chosen,” Anton said softly. “And that’s you, Bastian.” His fingers rose, touched the scarred side of his face. There were scars on his hand, too, Lore noticed. They looked new, still red and angry.

“I was told so by the god himself,” Anton continued. “Told that you were the Arceneaux to whom he’d bestow his power. Told that Gabriel Remaut and a child from the catacombs must stay close by you after your Consecration, and that it would pave the way for Apollius’s return.”

“What?”

Gabe’s voice, thin and quiet. His blue eye was wide, his mouth opening, then closing again.

“This has all been in motion for years,” Anton murmured. “Echoing through time. Apollius reaching down to commune with us. An Arceneaux prince, a child of treason, and the child of a Night Sister, born able to channel Mortem.” He spread his hands, smiled gently with the side of his mouth that could do such a thing. “The clearest anyone has ever heard His voice since Gerard Arceneaux himself.”

Shock made Gabe’s face taut and pale. He shook his head, slightly, like he could make Anton’s words connect in a different way, one that made sense.

Of course the thing he latched onto was her. This proof that she was something unholy. “The daughter of a Night Sister…” Gabe turned to Lore, shock transmuting to horror. “What is he talking about?”

She didn’t know what to say. All the reasons she hadn’t told him came into sharp focus: the sickened expression, the way he took a short, instinctual step back from her, though they were yards apart already. Anton had just said they’d all been used this entire time, made to play out a vision he hadn’t shared with them wholly. But the part that hit Gabe hardest was Lore the Night Sister, Lore holding death in her hands since birth.

Bastian noticed. His eyes narrowed, a cruel curve bending his mouth. “See why she didn’t tell you, Remaut?”

Gabe swallowed. “You told Bastian?”

She still couldn’t make herself speak. The Sun Prince did it for her. “Yes,” he said, leaning back in his chair, its legs creaking and his chains clanging. “She told Bastian.”

Malcolm, Bellegarde, and Anton said nothing, letting the silence drop around them like a shroud around a body. Anton’s expression was blank. He’d just dealt a blow to Gabe, and he didn’t give a single shit. He’d just completely torn apart everything they thought they knew about each other, about themselves, and not one emotion crossed his face.

Visions and prophecies and coups and wars, but all of those things paled for Lore in the face of the death they’d wrought. The justice she’d apparently never been working toward, that she hadn’t known until this moment she wanted so, so badly.

“So you killed them, then?” Lore asked. All those bodies, that child—all killed for an experiment, to see what could be done with the awful magic leaking from a buried goddess and a girl who’d been cursed with it. To the Citadel and the Church, they were all expendable, and Lore hated that more than she’d ever hated anything in her life. “You murdered all those villages?”

“No,” Anton said, almost pityingly. “No, Lore, I did not murder the villages.”

All this, and they still didn’t know. All this, and they were no closer to answers.

“But what’s killing them pales in comparison with what August is planning to do with them,” Anton continued. “He plans to use them as an army. An army that cannot be defeated.” He looked to Lore. “But it’s an army that you now control, Lore. That’s why we led you to the catacombs tonight, before the eclipse ball. So that you could take control of the armies of the dead before August could.”