The bodies in the chamber collapsed. The screaming stopped, leaving ringing silence behind.
They stood in the doorway, her hands cradled in his, breathing hard. His forehead tipped down, rested on hers; she let it. The heady feeling that had rushed through her when he pulled out the strands—life, glowing and vibrant, anathema to the magic she carried—slowly faded. And with it, that flash of knowledge, of something clicking into place. Answer and question falling away.
Lore pulled her hands out of Bastian’s. “How did…” Her throat felt like she’d choked down a handful of gravel; Lore cleared it, tried again. “How did you do that, Bastian?”
He stared at his hands. The shimmer in the air around him had dimmed, but just barely, and it flared again when he raised his hand in her direction. Lore flinched, acting on instinct, and he let his hand drop.
“I don’t know.” He shook his head. “It must be something about being in the catacombs…”
Dawn was soon. Lore knew it, felt the certainty in her bones, just like she felt everything down here. They had to move; they didn’t have time for this.
“What about you?” he asked, his voice still thin with nerves. “Has Mortem ever done that before?”
“Clung to me like that, or made a bunch of corpses start to chase me?” Her rueful laugh came out shaky. “No, on both counts.”
“Rude of them not to answer your questions before they started screaming,” Bastian said. “What was it they were muttering? Something about awakening?”
“They awaken. Nearly the same thing the first one told me.” Lore frowned. “It’d be helpful if we had any idea who they is referring to.”
“You mean it’s not just nonsense?”
“The dead don’t lie. It’s an answer to the question I asked, if an oblique one.” She rubbed at her forehead, leaving behind a streak of dust and torch ash. “But we have no idea what it fucking means.”
Bastian turned to study the door. The sconces inside the chamber still burned, illuminating the mess of bodies littered over the floor; neither of them moved to douse the flames. The increased light revealed what their torches hadn’t—an X on the stone door, barely visible against the pockmarked gray. “Think whoever made this also wrote that charming passage a few tunnels back?”
“Possible, but I doubt it.” Lore ran her fingers over the X, then held them up, black with charcoal. “This was meant as a temporary marking, easy to remove.”
“So hopefully not made with a bone.”
“But it was locked with Mortem. Mortem used in a way I’ve only seen once.” Lore wiped the charcoal off on her thigh. “At the leak a couple of days ago.”
“Anton.” Bastian’s jaw was a tight line, his arms crossed as he stared at the door.
“Anton,” she agreed.
This entire expedition had been about proving Anton a liar. But now that they’d done it, found incontrovertible proof, it weighed heavy on Lore’s shoulders. And the blank, lost look on Bastian’s face said he felt that weight, too.
My father is a bad man, he’d said in the atrium, limned in moonlight and poison flowers. It had to sting, to know your entire legacy was corrupt.
He sighed, looked to Lore. “So my uncle and my father are killing their own citizens to provoke a war?”
“Seems likely.” Lore reached inside the chamber without actually stepping over the threshold and took one of the torches from the wall to replace the one she’d dropped. “But I don’t understand why. Kirythea is at our doorstep anyway; an eventual war is nigh inevitable. Why exacerbate it?”
“There has to be some advantage we don’t know about.” Bastian walked beside her, frowning, his hair falling over his forehead. “Something that would make a war profitable, rather than a drain on resources.”
“Not that a drain would ever be felt in the Citadel, anyway.”
He inclined his head in agreement.
Their journey back to the well was silent. Lore led them by the map in her head, retracing their steps through the tangle of tunnels. When they passed the words etched into the wall, she only allowed herself one glance.
Divinity is never destroyed.
Up ahead, a thin ray of light shone, too bright to be the moon. Dawn had sneaked up on them, and the strength of its glow after hours in the catacombs made Lore’s head ache.
Bastian stopped at the bottom of the stairs, scowling up into the sliver of sun. “He left it open,” he muttered. “Barely.”