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She could probably weave through the crowd, but it’d take time to work around the traffic, and that would leave the contraband sitting unattended. With a string of curses, Lore turned around and started jogging back toward the building where she’d met Val.
If she couldn’t go overland, the only way to get to the drop site on time was to go through the catacombs.
Shit.
The dagger at her hip was a comforting weight as Lore ducked cautiously beneath the sagging door’s lintel, keeping an eye out for revenants. Revenants weren’t really a threat, made slow by the physical effects of too much poison and too-long lives, but Lore still wasn’t keen on meeting one. They tended to congregate around entrances to the catacombs, and her inconvenient talent only told her if someone was actually inside the tunnels.
There was always the risk of encountering leaking Mortem around catacomb entrances, too, which made going near them at best unpleasant, at worst dangerous. Unchanneled Mortem could eat straight through a body, and at the rate it leaked from the Buried Goddess’s corpse beneath the Citadel, sometimes there was too much for the Church to handle, even with the Presque Mort.
Thinking of the Mort made Lore’s mouth tighten. The elite cadre of Mortem-using monks had been created specifically to channel all the leaking Mortem and keep it from overwhelming Dellaire, but sometimes there was simply too much. And then there was the problem of what to do with it. Presque Mort usually channeled Mortem back into stone, since it was already dead matter, but it opened sinkholes all over the roads. Dellaire’s dead goddess issue was hell on infrastructure.
The other option was to channel Mortem into something living, usually plants—rumor was they had a garden full of stone flowers and rock-hewn trees. When the leaks got especially bad, the Presque Mort sometimes had to turn to the farmlands, razing entire fields, though a leak that dire hadn’t happened in ages.
The catacomb entrance was toward the back of the building, over a collection of graffitied rock and broken floorboards. Someone had helpfully painted a face with Xs over its eyes on the wall, with an arrow pointing the way.
Lore didn’t need the direction. The farther she went, the more her skin buzzed, her innate knowledge of the underground kicking to life with a sickly lurch. This close, if she shut her eyes, she could see the black lines of the catacombs in her head—a tangled maze of tunnels overlaying her thoughts, tinting them dark.
The effect always unsettled her, so she tried very hard not to blink as she approached the dilapidated door, taking deep breaths in through her nose and out through her mouth to keep her mind clear. Pushing a poison lode into the catacombs to get picked up was one thing; it was wholly another to walk through them, to feel them pressing down from all sides. It made the moon-shaped burn mark on her palm ache, and was distraction enough that she didn’t notice the person behind her until they were too close for her to escape.
An arm curled around Lore’s neck, the bite of dirty fingernails in her skin chased with the sweet, herbaceous scent of belladonna. Choking out a curse, Lore brought up her elbow, jabbing it backward into a frame that felt horribly bony.
Revenant, had to be. They always looked like walking corpses.
The revenant laughed, a breathy, wheezing sound that brought another waft of poisonous flower scent. The arm fell away, their slight weight lurching back—Lore spun on her heel, dagger drawn and held against the grimy throat.
Definitely a revenant, and one that should’ve been dead long ago. Skeleton-thin, not many teeth left, eyes sunken inches into a face the color of a fish belly and crossed with stone-gray veins. Too emaciated to make a guess at their sex. The revenant wheezed another laugh, and Lore could see the work of their lungs through their skin, laborious in a body that was more rock than flesh.
“Thought you’d hide, did you?” The revenant’s lips parted in a rictus grin. Their bottom lip split, but no fluid came out. “I could smell the death on you miles away, sweetling. Such a wealth of it. How are you so hale, so whole? A girl born to house oblivion shouldn’t be so.”
“Guess the mind goes quick even when the body lingers,” Lore hissed.
The revenant laughed, a rough, painful sound. “I got close, a few times. So close to being able to touch eternity.” One shoulder lifted, fell. “I never quite got there. But you… you have that power without even trying. How novel. How rare.” Chipped yellow teeth, bared in a smile. “They should’ve killed you when they had the chance.”
Lore’s knees locked. The tip of her dagger wavered.
“I went down there, you know.” The revenant smiled again. “Wandered for days. They’re filling up, all nice neat rows, ready for the war.”
Nonsensical rambling, the obvious sign of a mind long-gone. She felt briefly sorry for the should-be corpse, and it broke her murderous resolve. Lore sheathed her dagger and started back toward the door, legs slightly shaky. She could run. If she ran the whole way, she might be only a few minutes late to the rendezvous point.
Behind her, another laugh, a creak as the revenant laid their skeletal body on the floor. “Run, run, sweetling,” they sang softly. “You can’t outrun yourself.”
She knew she was too late before she even saw the guards.
They were hard to miss. The Protectors of the Citadel wore bright-red doublets and kept their bayonets polished to a shine, clean enough that one might doubt how many people met the business end. Lore knew better—they weren’t called bloodcoats for nothing. She also knew that with her hair tucked beneath a cap and her generous curves hidden in loose boy’s clothing, she could escape their notice as long as she kept her head down. Clearly, the guard had already changed, and she could only hope Jean-Paul had made it through while the checkpoint was unmanned.
The crowd here was even thicker than it’d been on the dock roads. Lore stood on tiptoe to watch the gate, searching for Jean-Paul’s distinctive red hair and the large, placid horse they used for drops within Ward limits. She couldn’t see him, and had to fight down a growing knot of panic in her middle as she made her way to the old storefront where they were supposed to leave the contraband. Maybe he’d already gone through the checkpoint, maybe he was waiting for her there…
Lore rounded the last corner before the old storefront came into view. Scarlet jackets, polished guns. A cart carrying mostly empty boxes. Jean-Paul’s red hair. He looked up to see her, a stocky middle-aged white man who’d been running for Val since before Lore came along, and though his expression was carefully neutral, fear sheened his eyes and made them nearly animal.
Too late, too late, too late.
For a moment, Lore couldn’t do anything but stand there. As one of the guards turned toward her, she ducked into an alley, pressing her back against the grimed brick, breathing hard enough to sting her throat.
“Shit,” she spat, quick and hoarse. “Shit.”
Holding her breath, Lore peered out of the alleyway. It looked like Jean-Paul had made it through the checkpoint without being searched, but then the bloodcoats had realized their error and caught him right when he reached the storefront. Even if she’d gotten here on time, it wouldn’t have made a difference.
Jean-Paul, to his credit, managed to keep that calm expression even as the bloodcoats poked through the boxes. The big man had his hands in his pockets and rocked back and forth on his feet, a simple trader just waiting for the search to be over. He kept his head tipped down under the brim of his hat to hide his terrified eyes.
