“Wait,” Berend says as they reach the bottom of the stairs. The house is still dark, but it’s an ordinary darkness, and the streetlights are visible from the front windows. An intermittent dark stain leads from the front door toward the back of the house.
Isabel takes an instinctive step back. Is it blood? It was too dark, before, even with her candle, and she hadn’t noticed it. There are no other signs of violence that she can see, though the holy symbol of Alcos on the mantel remains corroded and black.
“We should keep moving,” she says. She doesn’t want to give Geray a chance to begin another ritual. She had sent the ghosts away, but a powerful enough draw could bring them back, and others besides.
Gods. For the briefest moment, she had held their tethers, felt them straining against her will. It was nothing like the gentle touch of the bell and her own ritual circles. The ghosts were in terrible, agonizing pain, crying out with a sound that Isabel could feel rather than hear. She had released them as soon as she had the awareness—she should have taken the time to guide them across the veil properly, but she could barely think. Still, the sensation of it lingered.
If that is what necromancy feels like, she cannot think of a reason why anyone would willingly perform it.
Just like Berend suspected, Isabel’s sword proves far more effective against the ghosts. It’s light and springy in his hand, lacking the weight and authority of his own two-handed saber, but when it cuts through the misty forms, the spirits recoil and visibly dim. Their figures remain intact; they’re not like Mikhail, broken and screaming.
Out of reach of the blade, the ghosts rally their energy, brightening and pressing forward again. Something—Geray, the house, or some mystical nonsense Berend won’t even try to understand—is giving them strength. Unfortunately for him, he is made of flesh, and can’t do the same. He’s not as young as he once was, and it’s so very cold in this hallway. The candle hisses and gutters, but for now, it stays lit.
A hand of fog rakes at him with talons like a hawk’s. He brings the sword up, but it’s no use—the ghostly arm passes right through it, and its fingers reach his chest. He feels as though he has swallowed ice, the cold moving down the inside of his body. There is no pain, no sensation of being cut, but the ghost tears through his clothing and skin, leaving bloody marks from his shoulder down to his belly. The wounds ooze, and frost collects at their edges.
They aren’t deep. Eventually, Berend guesses, the spirits will draw enough blood to kill him, or he’ll freeze to death in the aura that surrounds them, but for the moment, he is still able to fight. He’ll keep them off of Isabel until she finishes whatever she’s doing.
It is that moment when she slumps over, hat askew, her body curled around the chalk circle inscribed on the wooden floor.
Berend said that he saw only darkness when he broke their connection, and now Isabel knows he was telling the truth. She can feel her breath condensing in the frigid air, but she cannot see it. There is nothing but black.
The illusion is a powerful one. In the ordinary darkness after sunset, it wouldn’t be too complex to cast, especially if one prepared ahead of time, but she is impressed with Geray’s skill. If he had stayed with the church of Alcos, or even with the university, he could have been the most powerful magic user in Gallia, if not the world. Maybe he wouldn’t have become wealthy from the research opportunities, but at least he and Warder would not have to be begging Lady Breckenridge for an investment. Instead, he was doing…this.
What’s the point of all of this? The murders, the summonings. It would be so much easier to do anything else.
She’s distracting herself, Isabel realizes. Panic is setting in, tugging at the periphery of her thoughts like a ringing in her ears, and she is just barely keeping it at bay with these mundanities.
The house is clean, the wallpaper tamely floral. Berend was expecting filth and rot, like the Belisia estate—some clear evidence of the spirits’ rage at their imprisonment—but there is nothing worse than a little dust on the wood floor.
It is dark, though, darker than it should be. The narrow entry opens into a sitting room with windows on opposite sides, facing front and back. The curtains are all open, but no light from the street passes through the glass. Isabel’s candle casts thin light on the edges of the brick fireplace and the stiff-backed chairs. It’s bright, leaving spots in Berend’s vision whenever he chances to look at it, but the halo it casts is small and weak. Darkness hangs on the room like a thick fog, cold and heavy. It tastes like a coming storm.
Is this what dark magic is like? He’s not enjoying it, but he has seen worse—the Belisia estate, for one, and the battlefields overrun by the walking dead.
Berend has fought the undead before. It’s a hazard of the job—battlefields are home to a near-limitless supply of bodies, as well as the angry spirits to make them walk again, bent on mindless destruction. The Sons were always too expensive to call in ahead of the Sentinels, but more recently, Berend has had the opportunity to see plenty of walking corpses face to face.
He draws his sword. He wishes he had a couple of pikemen, with long winged spears to hold the relentless advance of the undead at bay while he removes their rotting limbs. It isn’t a permanent solution, leaving their trunks on the ground to writhe and gnash their teeth at anyone who comes close, but it’s good enough until the church shows up to perform their rites.
What Berend does have is a Sentinel.
He glances over his shoulder. “Any way you could turn them off? We have a professor to rescue.”
“That’s…not how it works,” she says, a bemused look crossing her face. “The energy that animates them is probably coming from the house, so I’d have to seal it off—”
Before she can finish, one of the corpses swings at Berend. Its jagged nails are thick and caked with dirt, passing within inches of his face as he jumps back. He aims for the shoulder and brings his sword down into the mouldering flesh.
It’s relatively fresh, as far as reanimated bodies go, and it takes all of Berend’s strength to sever its arm. The limb falls to the ground and spasms in the mud, its aimless, mindless will no less for having been removed.
Just as he thinks that he only has seven limbs left before these things can’t follow him into the house or endanger the people of this district, he sees two more figures shamble out of the shadows. They stagger and stumble into the street’s dim, foggy light—they are also corpses, and they’re in worse shape than the first two. One is missing the upper left quadrant of its skull, and there is nothing but wet darkness inside the broken shell.
Berend puts both hands on his sword and takes a cautious step away from the house, lining up the shambling figures in view of his good eye. They turn to him, their eyes clouded with decay, their mouths open to show broken teeth, and they reach for him with hands that smell of rot. There are chains hanging from their wrists and dangling from iron collars around their necks.
How nice, for Geray to have them here to welcome us.
The first corpse lunges for him again with its remaining arm. He brings the sword up into a guard, and the skeletal hand catches the blade and tries to pull it from him.
It almost succeeds before its thumb is severed at the joint. Berend can’t help but shudder. The undead feel no pain, and have no desire for anything, not even the preservation of their own bodies. The air fills with a raspy, voiceless sound, rather like a death rattle, as decaying lungs struggle to express the senseless, heedless rage some angry spirit has imbued into the body.
Isabel steps up into Berend’s blind spot—he can only tell where she is by the silver glint of her sword, catching the light of the street lamp at the corner. It darts forward, followed by her black-sleeved arm, and slashes the second corpse across its chest. The wound lights up, bright as flame, for a fraction of a second. Berend can smell burning flesh.
There is an enchantment of some sort on her sword. Her next strike severs and cauterizes an arm, but it doesn’t stop the corpse from lurching toward her, its mouth open to bite and its remaining fingers stretched out to rend.
It’s nothing like the stories, where Sentinels could banish the undead with a word, but having another blade in play gives Berend the chance to back up and ready a swing. He avoids another swipe of a skeletal hand and brings his sword down on the corpse’s knee. It scrapes against bone as it cuts through, sending a sickening vibration into his arms.
The corpse falls to the ground. With one leg and what remains of its arm, it pulls itself along the ground, reaching for Berend’s ankles. He moves carefully—even downed, the thing is preternaturally strong—and places the point of his sword onto the shoulder joint of the remaining arm. He drops his weight into the blade, and the arm comes off with a crunch.
Now for the last leg. He aims for just below the hip, so that nothing will remain to propel the torso forward. The flesh here is spongy, but the bone is still strong, and when Berend tries to remove his blade, it is stuck. The thing curls up, air hissing through its rotting teeth, and the sword nearly wrenches from Berend’s hand.
Another corpse, the one with the broken skull, grabs Berend by the arm. Its grip tightens down with crushing force, sending pain like lightning into his hand. His fingers loosen, slipping down the hilt, as the corpse in which the sword is still embedded thrashes on the ground.
One more motion of the writhing torso wrenches the sword from Berend’s grasp. The other corpse yanks on his arm, and his shoulder aches from the strain—is it strong enough to pull his arm from its joint? Experience tells him yes, that as long as the dead flesh and the magic animating it hold, it will keep going until either nothing of him or nothing of it remains.
He leaves the sword where it is, wobbling erratically, and reaches for his pistol. Pain makes his aim unsteady, but at this range, it doesn’t matter. He puts the barrel to the corpse’s chest, among the rotting rags that remain of this poor bastard’s clothes, and pulls the trigger.
The shot is deafening. It leaves a high-pitched whine in Berend’s ears, and the powder flash burns a bright spot into his vision. The corpse staggers backward, and its grip loosens enough for Berend to slip out.
Silver flashes through the ragged hole in the dead thing. Isabel’s sword, bright as the afterimage of the flash, severs first one arm and then the other. The corpse overbalances, dropping to its knees, and she makes quick work of its legs.
It is with no small degree of envy that Berend finally wrenches his sword free. He would like to have a blade that cuts through the undead without resistance. There are several scars he carries, deep ones that took some time to heal, that might have been avoided if he’d had a weapon like that on the ghost-ridden fields beyond the eastern border.
Another brief exchange of blades and bony arms, and the corpses lie in a writhing mass on the pavement, hissing and clacking their broken teeth. They no longer resemble anything human.
“Well done, Sentinel,” Berend says. He sheathes his sword and holsters his pistol. “I don’t suppose you’d lend me some of that enchantment on your blade, would you?”
She ignores him, rummaging in her pockets. Her brief search produces a piece of chalk, and she bends down a short distance from the dead mass.
“What are you doing?” asks Berend.
“They’re being animated by something inside the house,” she says without looking up. With a practiced hand, she begins inscribing a circle around the bodies, just out of reach of the groping, severed hands. “I need to cut them off from the source.”
“We don’t have time for that,” Berend says. He turns to the house. It’s a modest two-story home, but it seems to loom over him in the darkness, the windows black.
Isabel continues drawing. “We can’t leave them like this. It’s too dangerous.”
Why is she stalling? “We don’t have time,” Berend repeats. “Warder’s in there. We have to get him out before he ends up as one of these things.”
As if in response, the corpse with the broken skull snaps its teeth at Isabel’s drawing hand. She pulls back, moving around it to complete her circle. “This is a task for a party of high-ranking clerics, Mr. Horst, or maybe an entire detachment of Sentinels. There will be more than walking corpses in there.”
“You’ve said that before.” Berend rubs at the upper edge of his eyepatch, where the scar has begun to itch. “And here we are—no clerics, no more Sentinels, just you and me and the professor who is likely the only one who knows what broke Mikhail’s soul.”
Isabel winces at that. “You could be a little more quiet.”
At a lower volume, Berend continues, “You can come with me, or you can stay out here. I’m going in.”
As soon as he says it, he realizes: I’m going to die, aren’t I?
He shakes his head to banish the thought. He could handle the walking dead. How much worse could Geray have?
Berend’s mind travels, unbidden, back to the Belisia estate. Much like that house, this one stares down at him with windows like empty eye sockets. The door is only a short walk away.
He is going to do this—for Mikhail, who was still his sworn brother even after all these years, and for the girl in the manor, and for himself, because Berend doesn’t break his promises. He leaves Isabel in the alley and approaches the door.
It looks ordinary enough; sturdy and plain, with iron nails holding oaken boards in place, and an iron lock of middling quality. There are no visible symbols carved into it, or painted in blood, but Berend supposes that would cause suspicion. Even now, he finds the house difficult to look at. It is as though it holds no interest, and his eyes slide to the left and right no matter how hard he tries to focus. The effect is growing stronger the longer he stands here on the stoop.
There’s nothing for it. He takes one step back, lines himself up, and kicks in the door.
Pain lances from his heel all the way to the joint of his hip. The lock is broken, and the door swings inward, the iron fittings hanging from splintered pieces, but it offered more resistance than he expected. He flexes his toes inside his boot—nothing seems broken.
A gust of wind rushes down the street, tugging at his hair and his clothing and whispering through the open door. Then there is silence. The dead pieces have stopped moving, and their horrible mockery of breath and life has stilled.
The unmistakable scratch of a match being lit disturbs the quiet. Berend turns around to see Isabel touch the flame to her black candle. She stands up, smooths her skirts, and carries the light around the circle she had drawn and up to the broken door.
“Is there any way I can talk you out of this?” she asks.
Berend shakes his head. “I’m afraid not.”
She sighs, nods, and holds the candle up to eye level. “All right, then. Stay behind me and keep your hand on my shoulder. That way, we’ll be able to find each other no matter what illusions there might be inside.”
“You’re coming with me?”
“Yes. You’d have no chance of survival without my help.”
“Better be careful, Sentinel,” Berend says with half a grin. “If I didn’t know any better, I would think you actually cared about me.”
“Hmm. We may still die,” she tells him. “Are you ready?”
He draws his sword with one hand and places the other on Isabel’s shoulder. Her coat is coarse and scratchy, and beneath it, he can feel the sharp angle of her collarbone.
She gives the door a push. It creaks in protest as it opens into yawning blackness, and one of the lock’s metal fittings falls to the ground with a heavy thump. The air within is wet and stagnant, and it stirs gently, like a shallow, labored breath.
As Berend crosses the threshold, he thinks that the house may be alive—or that it might have been given false life, like the bodies outside, by some terrible ritual of blood and bone. The flame of Isabel’s candle shivers, and its halo expands and contracts as the malevolent darkness presses against it.
From somewhere within, there is the sound of footsteps.
The city is an inky, purplish blue, as though someone has poured expensive dye over Berend’s vision. The color obscures the lines of the buildings and dims the street lamps even as it provides its own eerie light. Through it runs the wake of Geray’s magic: bright green threads that dart through the air, swimming after their creator.
Geray is moving fast, much faster than he should be, dragging Warder and his device. He’s still ahead of Berend as he crosses into the university’s grounds.
I hate magic, Berend decides, as he turns a corner and a wave of dizziness nearly knocks him down. He hates Geray’s illusions and his diabolical speed, and he hates whatever Isabel did to him to make him able to see it.
“Why?” Berend asks in a hoarse whisper. “What is that?”
Isabel tucks the object from the coat into a pocket of her skirt. “A spell–prepared ahead of time to make casting faster. It’s a sort of binding ritual.”
That doesn’t sound good. “For Lady Breckenridge?”
“I don’t know.”
Berend puts a hand on his sword and turns to the parlor door, but he stops himself before he goes anywhere. Nothing will be gained by revealing himself too soon, as much as he’d like to lop Geray’s head off right now, and Lady Breckenridge will never forgive him if he gets blood all over her dining room rug.
The voice of an old commander intrudes on his thoughts. Think, Horst, think.
Isabel puts her eye to the gap between the boards. Warder is seated outside of her frame of vision, seated on a chaise by the parlor door. All she can see are his shoes, well-made of fine leather but badly scuffed at the toes, perched at the edge of the rug.
The temple is a flurry of activity—unusual, for any place dedicated to the god of the dead. Death, so the saying goes, always has time to wait. The clerics rush in and out of the wings, carrying ledgers and lists of names and figures. Incense hangs heavy in the air, and a pair of monks sing a thin, melancholy hymn.
Watcher on the wall, protect us. Master of the gate, watch over us.
It takes a moment for Berend to notice she’s spoken. He walks half a step behind her, for a better view of the Temple District, and is doing everything in his power to keep his hands clear of his weapons. Every new pilgrim who comes into his field of vision makes his hands twitch. Someone like Belisia might not have hired only one assassin, and the gods only know what sort of horrible magic the murderer has at his disposal. Could a spirit be following Berend now? Would he be able to tell?
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