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Only when the hands closed on her arms and fingers tangled in her hair did Mollandra understand where Treecie’s concentration had been aimed.

The inexorable strength of the dead pulled Mollandra’s arms free. Sheer blind luck allowed her to surface, though the dead might not have reached them so easily if the fight had taken them out of their depth. Mollandra snatched a lungful of the foul air, blinking away slime. Two rotting husks held her, with others crowding in behind. All of them must have been acolytes she’d shared her life with. Even if they were from other years she would have passed them in the corridors, broken bread beneath the same roof at mealtimes. They were too far gone for recognition, though, turned into nightmares by soft decay.

Mollandra fought, but the dead wrapped her in their rotting arms and, slippery as she was, she found herself trapped. Where with a living foe she might break a finger, gouge an eye, or stamp on feet and let the pain create an opening, the dead had no concern for any hurt she might do them. She expected to feel their teeth at any moment, but unlike Lucia, who had woken from death’s sleep with an appetite, these acolytes seemed less eager to devour her. The stray thought that she might already have seen Lucia’s skull rolled across the furious storm of Mollandra’s thinking. The girl’s bones might have spelled out one of the symbols she’d kicked apart.

“Bitch!” Treecie surfaced, choking and spitting.

Mollandra startled despite herself.

Treecie turned this way and that for a moment, caught in distress and disgust, swinging at the air, then wiping at her eyes. As she calmed, a smile found its way onto the girl’s dripping face. “Going to kill me, were you?” The words emerged in a hoarse croaking mockery of her usual voice.

Mollandra stopped struggling, hoping her captors might relax, allowing her to jerk free. “I gave it a try.”

Treecie stumbled into shallower waters, her shoulders emerging from the filth. The smile stayed in place but the anger in her eyes made a lie of it. “Me! You were going to kill—”

“Get it over with.” One way or another Mollandra wanted to finish this fast.

“If you begged a little, I might let you go.” Treecie advanced another step, smoothing the stinking liquid from her hair.

“Begging wouldn’t have saved you.” Mollandra flexed slightly, but the many hands on her maintained their painfully tight grip.

“I did it, you know?” Treecie said. “You were right. I jammed the lock full of dirt. Why not? It’s not like we have rules.” She showed her teeth in a white line as if she were the one most likely to want a mouthful of Mollandra’s flesh. “I could have them hold you under so you could know how it was for her at the end. But I want to see you die. And besides”—she rubbed at her throat, wincing—“the old lore says an eye for an eye.”

Dead fingers clamped around Mollandra’s neck, sealing away her air.

Mollandra fought, knowing that to conserve her resources would only draw out the inevitable, and if she could unbalance her captors some chance might present itself.

It did not.

Her vision began to vanish behind a crowding blackness. She stopped being able to feel her limbs, let alone fight.

Undu had often said that the connection to the shadow realms was strongest the closer a necromancer was to it. And this could be by physically approaching death’s outer regions through such places as the Bone Garden, but more simply by being personally closer to death, be that through disease, injury, or merely age. Right now, Mollandra knew herself closer to death than she had ever been before.

She stretched her will towards the corpse with its hands about her throat, hoping to break Treecie’s control. Undu’s lessons in these arts had never meant much to her, rather like Thurli could never master the division of one number by another no matter how Instructor Clakka explained it.

Mollandra experienced something different this time. She felt the dead around her and sensed Treecie’s power wrapping them like dark, pulsing vines. Against the black flame of Treecie’s necromancy her own felt feeble. A child’s strength against an adult’s.

Even so, with the dying flutters of her heart she was ready to try when visions of Einsa returned, pushing out all sight of the unequal battle she had been about to dive into.

Mollandra, for the only time in her life that she could remember, gave up the fight. Why not spend her last moments in the company of one of the tiny number of people who had shown her any warmth, any true kindness, or charity? She reached instead for her friend.

Something opened Mollandra’s eyes and lifted her head on the half-dead muscles of her tortured neck.

Treecie stood, deep in concentration, her face twisted with violent pleasure. A dark shape broke the mottled surface behind her, it loomed above her spilling filthy water. Corruption had not yet laid its hand upon Einsa. She stood as she had in life, though deadly pale.

She wrapped an arm around Treecie’s neck, the girl understanding her peril only at the last moment…and snapped it with a sharp twist, gifting her the unearned mercy of a swift ending.

Mollandra’s sight failed her at that point, and she fell into her own darkness where the lantern’s light could never follow.

20

Rue

Kindness Undu had stressed that both geographical closeness to the deadlands and physiological closeness to death were important aids to any necromancer, allowing them to perform feats they would not normally be capable of.

She had often spoken about the importance of physical proximity to the corpse or corpses when seeking to work the black arts upon them. Her remarks on the help that emotional ties to the dead individual might provide were brief. Rue had come to believe that this was through lack of personal experience. The Academy had never encouraged having many friends. They were discouraged in the early years for obvious reasons. And Undu in particular was perhaps still, of all the people Rue had encountered in a long life, the individual she had the hardest time imagining having warm feelings for another.

The fight with Treecie long ago when they had both been children, one of them fated to never be anything else, had opened Rue’s eyes to this unsung power. Einsa’s corpse had risen in response to Rue’s unconscious will, and full of far more than just her friend’s anger, it had made an end of Treecie, saving Rue. The control exercised had, even with Rue’s weak necromancy, far exceeded that of her more talented opponent.