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It was honestly astonishing that Val hadn’t killed her then. After seeing what she was. What she could do.
And it was with that memory flashing through her head that Lore watched Horse rise from the ground, clearly dead and yet moving. Animals were different from people, apparently. She hadn’t had to tell Horse what to do.
“Shit.” It came out of her mouth thin and breathy; Lore’s legs felt like limp pieces of string, the death she’d channeled manifesting in numb limbs and a straw-thin throat. She fell to her knees, the cold tip of the bloodcoat’s bayonet slipping away from her neck with a slight scratch, not deep enough to draw blood. “Shit on the Citadel Wall.”
For a second, Lore thought her dear-bought distraction was pointless—the bloodcoats still held her and Jean-Paul, not sparing so much as a glance for the horse rising from the dead in the center of the market square. She’d given in, succumbed to the call of Mortem, and for what?
A broken, furious sound wrenched from her mouth.
The bloodcoat holding her arms tried to haul her back up, but then he caught a look at her eyes, still death-white and opaque. Lore watched him take in her blackened veins and corpse-like fingers, watched the color slowly drain from his face as he put together what it all meant. The guard retreated until his spine met brick, his hands springing open to release her. “Bleeding God save us,” he muttered in a tone of quick-rising panic. “Bleeding God save us!”
That was more like it.
The other bloodcoats finally noticed the undead livestock situation. Curly Mustache slashed at the animal’s now-fully-risen corpse, but Horse didn’t mind, being already dead. If anything, he seemed curious, nuzzling at his gore-caked shoulder with a bloody nose, neck hanging open like a second mouth. The long lashes around his opaque eyes fluttered, dislodging a fly that had landed there.
“Sorry, Horse,” Lore mumbled, then heaved up her coffee on the cobblestones.
When she looked up, Curly Mustache was staring at her, at all the ways channeling Mortem had made her monstrous, his face gone nearly as pale as her own.
“Heresy,” he said, voice hoarse from shouting. “Evil!”
“Melodrama.” Lore’s lips felt numb, and so did the rest of her.
Chaos erupted then, as if time had suspended for the few seconds after Lore raised Horse from the dead and now had returned to normal. Curly Mustache brandished his bayonet, bellowing for backup, ordering his company to surround the horse and apprehend the deathwitch.
It took Lore a moment to realize that was her. Deathwitch was what they’d called necromancers, back before everyone who could channel that much Mortem had been executed or sent to the Burnt Isles. Now there was only her. A deathwitch alone.
Channeling Mortem left her fingers waxy and pale, her skin nearly translucent, the tracery of her sluggish veins an easy map against her skin—she looked worse than a revenant, which was really saying something. Strands of death tied her to Horse, a dark braid that could be seen only from the corner of her eye, when she didn’t look directly at it.
With a sharp, snarling sound, Lore snapped her hands to fists. The strands of Mortem severed, and the horse toppled, the power that had reanimated it slithering into the air like smoke, then dissipating. That’s what she’d done with Cedric, when Val saw them, when Val screamed. It hadn’t been intentional then. Lore was just startled, startled and scared, and she’d snapped the threads that held them together.
It’d seemed harder then. The raising and the ending. This time, with Horse, she’d barely had to try. Channeling the Mortem out of the body had come to her so naturally, stealing death and sending it away.
The animal’s heavy corpse fell on a group of bloodcoats, dead meat once again. The crunch of bone and pained shouts echoed through the Ward, cut through with the screams of onlookers. The guards had forgotten about Lore and Jean-Paul; she saw the lick of his red hair as he disappeared into an alleyway. Curly Mustache had turned around when Horse fell, and the surge of people between him and Lore had carried him away, made him lose her in the crowd. Lore could hear him shouting, but she couldn’t see him.
She’d certainly gotten the distraction she wanted. Now if she could just make herself move.
Lore levered herself up from the ground on legs that tingled with pins and needles, cursing as she tried to hobble away. Memories of Cedric crashed through the mental barriers she’d trapped them behind, made the past and the present muddle, awful and infinite. She limped as fast as she could into the narrow space between two storefronts, huddling into the shadows. In a moment of clarity, she pulled the cap from her head and let her hair tumble free, twisted the hem of her shirt and tucked it in her trousers so it molded to her curves. Not really a disguise, but it made her look different than she had at the moment she’d raised the horse, and it might buy her enough anonymity to get away.
Someone grabbed her arm.
Lore turned with a snarl in her teeth, hand already raising to strike at whoever had touched her.
Michal.
Clearly, he hadn’t expected what he saw when she turned around; he’d seen her running to the alley, but not made the connection between her and Horse. Now she watched every piece of the puzzle lock into place, played out across his features: blue eyes narrowing before going wide and horrified. He glanced over his shoulder at the square, mouth dropping open, a flinch shuddering through his hand before it jerked back from her, fingers splayed.
“Sorry,” Lore muttered, her tongue suddenly thick. “I’m sorry.”
She shoved past him, out into the square again. Turned down the first alley she came to. Started running and didn’t stop, her head down and her vision blurred, picking directions at random and thinking only of away.
So when one of the Presque Mort stepped out of a trash-strewn alcove in front of her, she nearly ran right into him.
He loomed over her, hands outstretched, the image of a lit candle inked into each palm. His black clothing fit close to a muscular body, one blue eye gleaming at her, the other covered by the dark leather of an eye patch.
There was something almost familiar about him, a sense that she’d met him before. But that was ludicrous. Lore didn’t know any of the Presque Mort, or any other members of the clergy, for that matter.
Not anymore.
