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Lore took a moment to concentrate on her mental wall, all those trees blocking out the awareness of Mortem. Trunks and leaves and blue sky beyond.
Some of the doors in the towering vaults were closed, but most remained open, small windows into the darkness inside. Those were empty. Even nobles couldn’t always afford a Citadel vault. Most of the open doors were near the top—those were for the Arceneaux family only.
“We’ve tried to keep one body from every village,” August said. He strode purposefully toward the nearest tower and the closed door at its base. Of course. No one would waste a top vault on a villager, no matter how strange their death. “The rest are destroyed.”
“How much does one of those run?” Lore asked quietly, still staring at the vaults.
The King looked up, snorted. “More than you’ve ever seen or ever will, girl. Keep your sights set on one of the body boxes outside the city.” He rapped on the stone wall. “Anton? We’re here.”
The Priest Exalted opened the door, squinting against the light. He didn’t say anything, merely stood to the side to let his brother enter. He gave Lore a polite nod, but a muscle feathered in his jaw as he did it.
Inside the vault was dark and cool. It took Lore’s eyes a moment to adjust, but when they did, she took an involuntary step back, knocking into the wall. Another stone Apollius stared down at her. The statue’s feet were placed at the rear of the vault, his back bent against the ceiling so his empty chest gaped over the plinth, eyes level with the door. His face was eerily devoid of expression, and garnets studded his palms, gesturing to the slab in the room’s center with handfuls of jeweled blood.
And on the slab lay the body of a child.
Bile clawed at the back of Lore’s throat, her vision blurring. The child on the slab looked nothing like Cedric—he was younger, nine or ten at most, and his body was whole and unblemished. But when she looked at him, that’s who she saw. Her friend, whom she’d just wanted back for a while.
Gods, and she was about to do it again.
“Horrible business,” August murmured. She couldn’t quite read his expression in the dim light, but true regret thickened his voice. “Apologies that this must be our first experiment, Lore. We thought maybe a child would be… easier… to reanimate. Since you’ve done it before.”
She winced.
Anton shook his head sadly. “So much wasted potential.”
When she raised Horse, it’d been all instinct, following a pattern that felt as ingrained into her as the map of the catacombs she could sense behind her eyes. All she had to do was follow that pattern again. Let her body take over, try not to think.
Lore clenched and released her fists, and blinked until she could be sure she wasn’t going to cry. She didn’t let herself cry about anything, as a rule. If she started, she didn’t know if she could stop.
Anton ducked out of the door for a moment, then returned carrying a rosebush in a large pot. He set it down—it was heavy for someone his age to carry, but he didn’t appear to have an issue—and stepped back between Apollius’s stone hands.
“Now, don’t worry yourself with asking the questions,” August said. “Simply command it to follow my orders, and then you’re free to wait outside.”
Lore wasn’t listening, but she nodded anyway.
The King swept a hand toward the body on the slab. “And so we begin.”
Mortem was thick here; she could almost smell it—empty, ozonic. The smell of the sky during a storm, she’d always thought. The space between thunder and lightning. Lore closed her eyes tight, imagining her forest again, a touchstone to hold on to.
The child’s corpse conflated with Cedric’s in her mind, and it constricted her thoughts, made it more difficult to concentrate. She’d been betrayed, imprisoned, conscripted into using an awful power she’d rather forget about to help a King who didn’t seem to give a shit about anyone outside his gilded walls.
But Lore had been born with the ability to channel Mortem. Born with the dark running congruent to her bones. It’d only ever been a wound, a fault, a thing to fear and run from. Maybe now she could use it for something good.
Lore opened her eyes, took a deep breath, let it empty from her lungs. Slowly, almost without her direct thought, her arms reached out, turning pale, cold, necrotic.
“Bleeding God hold us in His wounded hand,” Anton murmured. The words were shaped for fear, but his tone wasn’t. It was almost eager.
Lore didn’t have time to dwell on it. Her vision went grayscale, white light in the shape of the King and the Priest, nothing but a yawning void where the body of the child lay on the slab. The huge statue of Apollius looked monstrous in shades of gray and black, the dead stone unilluminated by any shard of light.
The moon-shaped burn on her palm glowed dark as Lore held her hands over the slab. The child’s death was distant, the instant, awful power of it long gone. She could sense it but couldn’t touch it; dim threads wavered in the air above the body, but they weren’t thick enough to grasp.
Death had gone deeper.
Lore stepped closer, until her palms hovered just barely above the corpse, almost touching. In life, there was a ring of energy around a body. Spiritum, which Apollius alone could channel—the same power He’d allegedly given the Arceneaux line. It surrounded a person like the corona of a miniature sun, and in the moment of death, it burned out, exploded, a dying star. That’s what she’d seen when Horse died, what she’d grabbed onto. Spiritum turned to Mortem, seized at the very moment of its alchemizing, the same precarious balance that could make poison lead to horrible immortality.
But that explosion of energy dissipated soon after death, sank deep into the body and eventually withered away. If Lore wanted to raise this corpse, she’d have to search out that tiny spark of Mortem still within it. Take hold of death and pull it out.
It took her a moment, her teeth clenched tight in her jaw, her necrotic fingers lowering until they rested on the still chest. For a moment, Lore didn’t think she was going to find it at all.
