Page 10

“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.”