I stared at her, not understanding.
Until I did.
If life no longer obeyed me, then I would command death.
“Death magic.” I shook my head. “But that took me months to prepare last time. I gathered power slowly, in bodies found at the bottom of the forest. Where am I going to find the death I need for such a creature again?”
She looked at me incredulously, waving her arms around us. “We are on a battlefield!”
My eyes flitted to the dead, the bodies of the silver-armored Salt soldiers laying prone on the floor.
“I don’t know...”
Could I use the bodies here?
The rotting process would have begun, but I don’t know how much magic I could pull if they were freshly dead. The ones I had used before had always been partially decomposed, so I could access the power of the death-life cycle.
Unless I accelerated it.
The last time I had done that it had depleted me so much, I hadn’t been able to create another, to test my limits to their maximum.
Maybe now was that time.
A soldier ran to us, and I crossed blades with him, pushing him back, calling forth a tree root behind him so that he fell backward, onto an upturned scimitar on the ground. Someone else came to my side and I swung my sword up.
“Kiyan, it’s me,” shouted Mishah, her face splattered with blood, her mask askew. Her leather tunic was torn and blood ran down the side of her arm. “What are you both doing here?”
“Trying to get to Reza, but he’s got an army between us. I’m going to try something—Yas gave me the idea. But I need cover.”
“I’ll cover you—I’ll bring my unit around you.” She whistled three times, and rebels clustered around us, staving off the Salt soldiers. They extended their hands, roots rising from the ground at their call, twisting together to form a shield with me in the center.
“If I do this,” I called out to Mishah, “I need you to go with Yaseema. Make sure she’s not alone.”
“She won’t be alone.” She nodded back, then met my gaze. “Ever.”
“Good.” My eyes locked with Yaseema’s and I tried to pass everything I had felt about her in that look. She nodded and gave me a tremulous smile before whirling around and continuing toward the Viceroy with Mishah.
I concentrated, holding my hands high, starting the process of summoning death.
I could feel it, the life inside the dead, the spark of rot that had already started, desperate to return to the soil. I took those threads—hundreds already—and sent them ribboning into the void.
Until they were all mine.
I called them to me, whispering words of encouragement, coaxing it to obey, to work with me.
We will.
Something snapped into place, and this time, it felt more natural to call upon death and make it mine.
Move,I told them. Fight.
Screams sounded around me, and great thuds made me open my eyes, my hold still on the decomposing bodies that littered the field.
And now those bodies were moving, rising up from the ground, walking unnaturally, in a twisted, grotesque way.
I summoned the death in them, the beginnings of decomposition, the spark of life wrapped up in the loss of it that Reza couldn’t keep me from.
And it answered.
