“That’s not reassuring.”
“It’s all I can offer.”
FOURTEEN
DROKHAR
The mark flares one final time—not with pain, but with an unfamiliar sensation. Hope. I’ve spent so long expecting the worst that hope feels like a foreign language, words I used to know but have forgotten how to speak.
I release her hands. Step back. Force myself into the posture of a death warden escorting a prisoner—blade ready, jaw set, eyes forward. The armor I’ve worn for two decades anchoring back into place around a man who no longer quite fits inside it.
“The Council chambers are in the Cinder Hall, northeast of here.” I gesture toward the narrow streets that lead away from the compound. “Stay close. Don’t speak unless spoken to. And whatever happens?—”
“Don’t try to run.” She finishes the warning for me, exhaustion and dark humor mixing in her voice. “I can barely walk. Running isn’t an option.”
“Good.”
We move through the streets of Blackreach as dawn breaks over the city.
The streets are wrong.
I feel it before I see it—the death-sense I’ve developed over years of working the pyres, the instinct that warns me whengraves are unstable, when the dead are stirring, when the balance that keeps this city alive is tipping toward catastrophe.
The entire city is stirring.
Not the violent uprising of the Undercroft. This is subtler. A tremor in the cobblestones that never quite becomes an earthquake. A whisper on the wind that never quite becomes words. A pressure in the air that makes my teeth ache and my mark burn brighter.
The streets are empty. No vendors setting up stalls, no workers hurrying to early shifts—just bare cobblestones and shuttered windows, a city holding its breath.
But today, no one is ignoring them.
The streets are empty. No vendors setting up stalls. No workers hurrying to early shifts. The cobblestones lie bare and silent, windows shuttered, doors barred. The entire city holding its breath.
Aradya feels it too. Her shoulders are tense, her bound hands clenched into fists despite the iron weighing them down.
“They’re waking up.” Her voice is barely above a whisper. “Across the whole city. I can’t hear them anymore, but I can feel the ground?—”
“Vibrating.” I stop walking. Look down at the cobblestones beneath my boots. Nothing a normal person would notice. But I’ve spent my career standing over mass graves, and I know what it feels like when the dead are pushing toward the surface.
This feels like that. But bigger. Much, much bigger.
A sound rises from the streets ahead of us. Low. Rhythmic. The scrape of bone on stone, repeated a dozen times. A hundred.
More.
My hand goes to my blade. Years of training screaming at me to draw, to cut, to burn, to silence the dead before they can spread.
But I don’t draw.
The first corpse crawls out of a storm drain twenty feet ahead.
It pulls itself onto the cobblestones with arms that have lost most of their flesh, rusted armor scraping against ancient bone. A soldier from a forgotten war, its insignia too corroded to read. It turns what’s left of its face toward us—empty sockets where eyes used to be, jawbone hanging loose, gray remnants of flesh clinging to its skull.
It stares.
And then it moves to the side of the street. Takes up position. Stands at attention, rusted sword held at rest, as if mustering for a review that ended centuries ago.
Behind it, more emerge. From storm drains and cellars and gaps in the stone. Soldiers, all of them—rotted uniforms, rusted weapons, the blank faces of the long-dead. They claw their way to the surface and arrange themselves along the street, forming ranks on either side of our path.