It wasn’t as though the royal wing was off limits—I had reappropriated one of the bedrooms myself. But I didn’t want to arouse General Faisal’s suspicions by being discovered skulking around in abandoned corridors, not yet anyway.
Not until I could properly use this new access to magic. One that could actually attack the Salt Court.
Last month Reza had complained that the stink of death had clung to me. But for the first time I’d been able to conjure something for longer than a few minutes, and I couldn’t be bothered to care about bathing.
I hope he thought that death reeked from my pores because of the bodies that piled up in his dungeons. The ones I had been responsible for.
Let him think I’d become death, if that’s what it took.
I chuckled to myself, the idea that the River peri who possessed the thread of life magic could instead be a harbinger of death.
Where Salt sucked the magic from you, River gave life.
At least, we used to.
My experiments had been a mistake at first. The anger I’d felt from my magic being so stifled finally choked me with so much rage that I tried to unleash everything I had in the forest.
But it wasn’t life that answered, but the other side of that cycle.
Instead of the living root of a tree, or the sure-footed paws of a leopard, it was the power and force in decay and death that rose to my command.
That power hadn’t been muted, like my life magic had been since Reza had taken the ancient King of River’s crown. Instead, it had thrived, full of energy. Best of all, when I accessed death magic, I could overcome the limits the Salt Court had over the peris in the River Court’s magic.
When I tested my newfound power I found that the more decayed and closer to the vibrant,aliveside of death a thing was, the better my death magic worked—a wet, rotted log, a decayed body of a khapisi (the bog hag, a casualty of a Salt soldier along the riverbank)—they were what responded to me. Not the growth of a vine anymore, but something new and dark and fierce.
And that’s how I began to harness death.
I certainly had enough around me to use. But it was hard to smuggle out peri bodies, and a certain level of decomposition was needed for me to summon the power of decay, so for now I had to be content with dead animals and sprites, with decayed wood and fetid plants.
And the creature I created now wouldn’t have to kill a Salt soldier, only to provide enough panic to let me slip away and get to the River without notice.
I focused my power on the debris, summoning that thread of life magic that sank into death, the process of rot that was a rebirth, the rise of death on my fingertips.
And it answered.
It knew me by now—I’d summoned it so many times before. But never to do something as big as this. I compiled the pieces of a newly formed beast like a macabre monster of rotted leaves and split-open rats, until the thing grew higher and fiercer, the call of death building on each one, the different levels of rot and decay merging together into a swirling mass with teeth and eyes and claws. It was larger than my other experiments—about the size of a snow leopard or a nihang from the River. I molded it to resemble the water dragon, and like the nihang it had a mane and wings and scales, but these were now made of dead leaves and decomposed animals.
Sweat poured from me, the concentration to pull such a power immense—I had to tap into every single piece of the death cycle and call on it in different ways. Unlike life, which was a pulsing, vibrant thing, calling on death felt like cutting open my veins and spilling my blood over the dark marble floors of the palace. I could feel it take its toll, the dizziness already rising up in me.
I didn’t have much time, and I needed to make it count.
The dead creature stood before me, a mass of darkness and rot. It stared at me with unseeing, dead eyes, and I felt the death inside it listening to me.
Waiting for my orders.
It was a heady feeling, creating something from the dead. More intoxicating still, being able to command it. But it didn’t feel wrong or corrupt, but rather like a side of my power I’d never been able to explore before—like seeing your reflection for the first time and realizing there was parts of you you’d never seen.
And I had given so much to death in these past few years, perhaps it owed me something after all.
“Downstairs,” I said aloud, wondering how long I could manage this. “To the courtyard.”
The creature took an awkward step, the sound of rotting animals hitting the ground like stepping through a swamp. The smell was putrid as I followed behind it, watching it fulfil my bidding from the shadows. It lumbered through the abandoned halls of the River Palace before I guided it to the large open courtyard where the majority of Salt soldiers usually were, clinging to the market stalls and looking for anyone they could arrest.
The creature trudged jerkily through the hall and into the opening of the courtyard.
The stench of it filled the air—it was a bog filled with rotting bodies, the decomposing food from the kitchens, and the decay of the underbelly of the forest. It was everything dark and foul but underneath I could sense it—that current of life that it held onto as well. It was rot, but it was also growth. And it was mine.
I hung back as the screams began, watching the dead creature I’d created lurch through the courtyard, gnashing its blackened teeth.
