Page 66

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

ALIE

In every trial, You are with us. You are as inescapable as the sun.

S he had no weapon. Not that it would help her much if she did; Alie didn’t know how to use a dagger or a pistol, had never been taught the finer points of self-defense.

And now she didn’t even have her magic. Had that been a mistake?

She couldn’t decide if she thought so or not.

It felt both awful and necessary, a decision that wasn’t really a decision at all.

The ships were in the shallows; sailors stumbled into the water, fighting off the attacking dead. Alie wondered if they’d come to the same conclusions about who the winged being in the sky was, if they thought that reaching the shadows of those wings would somehow save them.

She envied anyone whose thinking could remain that simple.

“Here.” Val, always ready for a fight, had already turned toward the water in a half crouch, waiting for the first onslaught to hit the shore.

She took a knife from her boot and tossed it to Alie, who nearly sliced her hand open trying to catch the hilt instead of the blade.

“Looks like a gun won’t do you much good against living corpses. ”

“Not unless you have lots of bullets and very, very good aim.” Mari pulled her own pistol from her belt, running her hands briefly over the fully stocked bandolier she wore on one shoulder.

“We should follow Gabe.” Even though she knew that would be no safer.

Alie looked up again, at Apollius in the sky.

At least, she thought it was Apollius, didn’t know how it could be anyone else.

But there was a familiarity about the form she could see so clearly outlined in all that harsh light, a softness that didn’t seem like the god…

Lilia, next to her with her own dagger in her fist, also stared up at the winged creature. “We should,” she said quietly.

But at the moment Alie turned to run toward the forest, to hide from the horror on the ocean, something grabbed her ankle.

A corpse, bloated and rotting, seeping dirty water out of every orifice to stain the white sand.

Its mouth hung open, a yawning void of stinking black dropped all the way to its chest, chin resting on exposed ribs.

The hand gripping her ankle was the only one it had, the other arm ending at the elbow, dripping fluid.

Her vision went white with terror. Alie didn’t know whether any of the screams she heard were her own, though she tried; her voice seemed unable to free itself from her throat as she stabbed wildly at the undead thing’s fingers, horrifically strong, nicking her own skin in her desperation so that fresh blood mixed with fetid salt water.

Alie didn’t feel it, driven only by the instinct to go get away escape run .

The instinct was so strong that it took her a moment to realize the corpse wasn’t trying to hurt her. Just stop her.

The corpse that had tried to climb up onto the ship had been silent, and she’d heard nothing but screams through the soundscreen of her winds as Jax’s ship flew through the tangle of fleets to get to the Mount.

But now, closer, the dead body was speaking.

Not speaking, no—whispering, sound leaking from it as surely as water and rot, though the stretched-open mouth didn’t move.

“Keep away.” The words were stilted, as if the beginnings and endings had been shaved down, even this uncanny speech too much for a long-dead, unmoving tongue. “Keep away.”

And every corpse, all of them littering the shoreline and climbing over the railings of the ships, whispered the same thing. It was a low susurrus beneath the clamor of fighting, not so much a sound as a drumbeat in her ears, barely heard but undeniably there.

With another plunge of Val’s knife, Alie managed to finally sever the thing’s wrist. The fingers still wrapped her ankle, but the rest of the corpse fell away, flailing in the surf as she scrambled up the beach, ripping at her skin in her desperation to get the gripping fingers off her.

They let go, finally, leaving brackish prints.

The hand convulsed on the white sand, still grasping at empty air.

The horrible strength of the dead things was evident all around her.

While Alie was trying to free herself from one raised corpse, sailors had stumbled up onto the beach, bringing the hordes of dead with them.

A Kirythean soldier fell to his knees only a yard away, hacking at a corpse clinging to his back as if in a macabre wrestling match.

The soldier bled profusely from his shoulder, his laurel-embroidered tunic clotted with red.

Desperately, he pulled a pistol from his waist, barely bothered to aim.

He hit the reanimated corpse, but he also hit the Auverrani sailor behind him, trying desperately to run for the burnt forest. The Auverrani soldier went down; the corpse did not.

Alie could see the horizon line through the hole in its head.

Another soldier, in Caldienan emerald, flailed in the shallows, trying to scream and swallowing mouthfuls of sea.

He choked, but it was due more to the corpse squeezing rotting hands around his neck than to drowning.

Another corpse held his legs, tugging him back into the surf anytime he almost clawed his way to shore.

The two corpses pulled the man in opposite directions.

Alie knew what would happen, her brain putting together the puzzle of their opposing forces and their unnatural strength, but she found herself unable to look away.

Things fell to slow motion, her mouth opening in a soundless, maddening shriek that mirrored the sailor’s as the dead things pulled, and pulled, as his torso began to stretch—

Scratchy fabric against her cheek, smelling of gunpowder and blood. Darkness over her eyes, a hand pushing her face into a muscled, unfamiliar chest, hiding her away from the evisceration she could still hear, even muffled by this palm.

“Don’t look.” Finn. It took her a moment to place his voice, the musical lilt of his accent. “Don’t look. Run.”

Then he was gone, pelting down the beach with his pistol in one hand and a sword in the other, dripping salty gore. He hacked apart another corpse as he went, dismembering it in violent, wild strokes.

Run , he’d said, and what else could Alie do? She stumbled up on numb legs, still gripping her completely useless dagger, and lurched toward the tree line.

Malcolm was close to it but not trying to enter the woods.

Michal stood behind him, facing the shore, blood spattered across his face.

Pieces of corpses littered the sand around him, horrific confetti; his eyes were wild as he spun, looking for more.

Alie ran to them, mostly because they were familiar, and she felt safer with another living person by her side.

“Go!” she yelled as she ran, waving a hand at the spindly forest, the trees nothing more than skeletons sucked dry by the long-ago apocalypse, standing watch as this new one began. “Get in the woods!” Surely the Mount was safer than this, even with Apollius looming in the sky like a sickened sun.

But Malcolm shook his head, eyes wide and unseeing. He gestured toward the woods, too, not wildly like she had, but with an air of resignation.

When Alie reached his side, she saw why.

A barricade of the dead, just inside the tree line.

Stretching as far as she could see, from one end of the island to the other, guarding the path to the Mount.

All of them dripped, summoned from the sea, though Alie didn’t know when they’d managed to creep up here, to make a wall of corpses against anyone who might try to reach the Fount.

“Keep away.” Said at all different times, a twisted round. “Keep away.”

Whether the order had been given to them, or they were ordering the living, the result was the same. Every living thing on the island that wasn’t already on the path to the Mount was trapped here to be pulled apart by the living dead.

The god didn’t want an audience.

“Fuck.” Alie whirled away, a sob rising in her chest. “Fuck!”

The beach was a horror. The broken remains of sailors littered the sand, clotted and black with blood, sharp spires of bone poking through skin. The dead went about their business dispassionately, breaking the living apart, still droning their imperative in that low, sonorous dirge.

The line of corpses in the trees didn’t move.

Malcolm grasped her hand, his own slick with cold sweat.

“Gabe must have made it to the path before they blocked it. That, or he burned his way through.” He kept his hand on Michal, as if afraid the other man would fall into the clutches of the dead if he didn’t keep touching him.

“If we don’t try to go up to the Mount, maybe they’ll leave us alone. ”

“They weren’t trying to go to the Mount.” Alie’s voice was a saw in her throat, her hand cutting back to the beach to indicate the fallen soldiers. “And the dead certainly didn’t leave them alone.”

Michal looked up at the winged shape in the sky, still motionless, still blazing with all the light of the sun. “It isn’t moving,” he murmured. “Why isn’t it moving?”

The shoreline was too full of ships to let others wash up onto the sand; from out on the water came the sounds of battle, still, both against the dead and against one another.

Nearly every sailor on the beach was torn apart by inhuman strength.

Thankfully, none showed signs of reanimating, Apollius keeping His army only to the sea-dead, old bones and rotted flesh.

Some of the Mortem-raised corpses slipped back into the ocean, their job here done, mortals kept away from the Fount.

They headed toward the ships and the other living people they had been divinely told were enemies.

Finn stood at the tide line, salt water frothing red washing up over his boots. He looked behind him once, made eye contact with Alie. With a nod, he waded out into the ocean, climbed up onto his ship.

Val ran up the beach, blood both fresh and rotted staining her shirt, though none of it appeared to be hers. Mari came behind her, a gory handprint on her leg the only sign of any trouble. Lilia was farther away, her face and hair streaked in slimy sea-leavings, a hacked-apart corpse at her feet.

Everyone accounted for, except Bastian. The last Alie had seen him, he was following Gabe into the trees, insisting on going to the Mount. He’d gotten into the forest before the dead took their places; hopefully, that had kept him safe.

She looked up at the sky again. As safe as any of them could be.

“What in every hell?” Val stopped short, breathing hard, staring at the line of corpses.

“Apollius doesn’t want anyone but Gabe getting to the Golden Mount,” Alie said.

“Fuck what Apollius wants.” Val started toward the tree line. “If my daughter is up there, I’m going, too.”

“Love—” Mari started, holding out her hand. But she was too late.

As soon as Val set foot in the forest, the dead dove. One of them grabbed her arm, another her leg, all of them latching like leeches, pushing her backward. Val spat and cursed, hacking at them with her blood-gummed dagger, still fighting toward the trees.

Mari screamed, a feral sound that hit Alie’s ears like an ice pick.

She jumped in after her wife, firing off shots that miraculously didn’t hit Val, so many that some of the dead’s limbs were shot to pieces.

The two of them fought four of the dead, the rest of the corpses staying in their line, as if they knew more wouldn’t be needed.

Alie didn’t have the conscious thought to join in.

But she did, and so did Malcolm and Lilia and Michal, all of them grappling to try to free Val, who still pushed for the path to the Fount with single-minded determination.

Alie cut herself again hacking at a corpse’s arm; she didn’t feel it. It didn’t matter.

They were going to lose.

A horrible popping sound, a sickening tear. Val’s arm came off in the grip of one of the dead, spurting blood, the bone of her shoulder an ivory island in a sea of raw meat.

And finally, at the same time as her visceral, throat-tearing scream, the god in the sky moved.

Not just moved— roared , a sound to break an eardrum, to end a world. The stark shadows on the ground cut sideways as those wings folded inward, then thrust out, and the god dove downward, back to the Fount.

Gabe must have arrived.

At the moment Apollius dove, all the dead collapsed, as if they were puppets and He’d been holding their strings.

The gaping mouths closed, the whispers stopped; they were nothing but bone and meat and rot again, shuddering to the burnt forest floor.

Some of them oozed apart, the magic that had held them together gone.

When the god moved, He took the light with him.

Never mind burning like a second sun; it seemed He was the sun, like He’d swallowed its light and kept it to Himself, and when He wasn’t in the sky the world couldn’t have it.

The island plunged into darkness, amplifying the sounds of Val’s blood hitting the ground, her pained breaths hissing through her teeth.

“We have to cauterize it.” Mari, her voice dazed. She held her dagger in her hand, searched around on the ground as if she might find a ready-made fire. “We have to right now.”

Michal nodded, pulling a flint from his pocket with shaking hands. He gathered up a small pile of deadfall and sparked the starter, the dry twigs smoking as he blew on them to fan the flames. Mari handed over her dagger, her eyes flat as some hunted thing.

“I’ll do it,” Malcolm said quietly. “I know some doctoring.”

Val’s chest shuddered.

Alie looked away, wincing at all the blood, glancing toward the trees instead.

The way to the Mount was clear.

“Go.” Malcolm, still heating the knife, his form nebulous in the sudden dark. “I have to stay and take care of Val. But if you want to go, you should.”

Val was alive, for now. Mari wouldn’t leave her, pressing an already-soaked cloth to the stump of her shoulder, lips white and thin. Michal knelt beside them, giving whispered instructions, as Malcolm twisted the orange-glowing knife in his hand and approached with his jaw clenched.

That only left Lilia.

Alie turned in a wide circle, searching. But Lore’s mother was gone.