by Beth Revis
Wellebourne had left the crucible cage with his family, along with instructions for his descendants to protect it, giving them the task that, almost two centuries later, Master Ostrum would uphold. As long as that crucible cage existed, Bennum Wellebourne could never truly die.
It did not matter to him at all when they hung his body, when they burned his corpse.
His soul was free.
“How many?” I asked. I felt Grey shift beside me, so I added for his benefit, “How many bodies have you lived in?”
Wellebourne rolled his hand dismissively. “I’ve lost track. Emperor Aurellious was the first, of course.”
Of course he had—how had I been such a fool not to realize sooner? Hadn’t I seen the municipal building in Miraband, the one where Aurellious conquered death? That hadn’t been Emperor Aurellious at all. That had been Wellebourne. And he had been right. He had conquered death.
He had originally wanted Lunar Island to be free from the Empire, but once he ruled the Empire, his goals changed.
“I’ve been several emperors, and quite a few empresses,” Wellebourne said, a note of pride in his voice. “But politics grow tedious.”
Grey’s brow was furrowed. “That’s why the Empire is always expanding. You fight wars when you get bored,” he said.
Wellebourne smiled as if pleased Grey understood. “Exactly,” he said. “Sometimes I bounce between the sides, general to general. It’s more fun that way.”
My mind battled with my memories and his; touching his black soul had stained my own. I remembered, as Wellebourne, flitting between bodies. Sometimes a woman, sometimes a man. Gender didn’t matter to him; flesh was flesh. He took lovers. He married. He had children—those he sired, and those he bore.
And when he was done with that life, that experience, he disposed of the body and took another.
He learned. Languages, art, music.
War.
“That’s why you’re a war hero,” Grey snarled. “It’s easy to risk everything and charge into battle, knowing you cannot truly die.”
He can’t die, I thought. But like my revenants, he’s fading. He had more power than them, more control, but a soul was meant for one body alone, and once that body was gone—or once that soul was in someone else—it was an imperfect fit. The soul grew tired. It’s what Bunchen and the Collector had both warned me about. The trade-off of the immortality a reliquary provided was a soul that would grow weaker over time.
I could see it all in my mind’s eye. As time wore on, Wellebourne’s soul had grown thin. He pored over the books in his private library. His reliquary was safe—he even checked on it occasionally, ensuring that his descendants took seriously the responsibility of protecting the crucible cage that contained his soul. Even so, his soul was weakening, and with it, his power.
He needed replenishing.
Wellebourne cocked his head. “I tried, at first, to take younger bodies, even though that was foolish. No matter how young the body, my soul is old.”
I looked at the body he was in now, Emperor Auguste’s. So much about him made sense now. A celebrated strategist and war hero against some of the rebellious tribes—he was hailed as a prodigy by everyone who didn’t know he’d already had centuries of practice at war.
“How young was Auguste when you took him?” Grey asked, his voice tight with anger.
“A few years,” Wellebourne said. “Childhood is tiresome, but it can be entertaining. No one ever suspects the innocent toddler of sabotaging his playmates.”
I wondered then at what horrors his nursemaids had seen, and how they had to hold their tongues. Their young charge was richer and more powerful than they ever would be. The child they bathed could put them to death.
I felt Grey tense beside me. “You have everything. You’re the Emperor, for Oryous’s sake! And immortal. What more could you possibly want?”
My hand gripped the crystal knife.
Wellebourne saw.
“Yes, exactly,” he answered me.
“He needs power,” I said aloud for Grey.
“Especially after all my plans with Adelaide fell apart,” Wellebourne said. “I was . . . disappointed by the way she went rogue. But of course, I had learned long ago to never put all my hopes in one person.”
I recalled, as if it were my own memory, getting a letter from a poor book merchant who lived in a remote village in the northern part of Lunar Island. Papa’s letter, the one he’d written about me, begging for a chance to send me to Yūgen Alchemical Academy. Bennum saw the potential in me even if my father didn’t. No. He saw the desperation. Because that was what he had been when he became a necromancer. Desperate.
What struck me the most was that I wasn’t the first. There were others—a boy in Siber, a teenager in Enja, a rebel leader on the mainland near Roc Wynt. They had all shown my same potential. They had all been tested.
And so had I. The alchemists who came through the village with their golden crucibles and entertained my curiosity had been sent by the Emperor. One of the village Elders was interviewed and paid for his assessment of me.
And I had been found lacking.
Bennum had focused on Adelaide. He’d given her everything she needed to become a necromancer. My stomach twisted with rage. She had not had to sacrifice anything, anything at all. Knowledge, guidance—even a crucible had simply been handed to her.
“The plague,” I gasped.
“Of course,” he said.
I looked around me, at the graves sprinkled with iron rings, forcing the souls of the dead to lie waiting beneath the earth. All those iron rings—they had been Wellebourne’s idea, not Governor Adelaide’s.
All those trapped souls were for him.
FIFTY-SEVEN
Grey
“AND NOW, IT’S time for the end,” the Emperor who was really Bennum Wellebourne said, in a booming, theatrical voice. He gave a little bow to Nedra, one that I wasn’t sure was mocking or sincere. “You’ve risen above my expectations, certainly. I gambled poorly with Adelaide. I had to scramble to ensure you could adequately replace her.”
“Replace her?” Nedra said. Her entire body was tense. Wellebourne watched her the way an awlspring watches a baby mouse.
“I need that knife,” he said. He coughed lightly, and in the growing twilight, the shadows under his eyes seemed darker, his cheeks hollower.
Nedra raised her hand—not her right hand, but her left one. I gaped at it. Where her limb should have ended from amputation was now a black obsidian arm and hand gripping a knife made of what appeared to be crystal. Her cloak fell away, exposing the dark veins of inky black that ran over her shoulder, across her clavicle, and down her chest where her shirt blocked my view. It looks like the plague, I thought, my stomach dropping.
“This is not for you,” Nedra said, twisting her wrist so the facets of the blade caught the last rays of the sun.
“What is that?” I asked in a low voice.
Wellebourne heard me. “A lich blade,” he answered.
“It will restore Nessie’s life.” Nedra reached out for her sister with her right hand. The silent twin’s eyes moved, as if hypnotized, watching the glittering blade.
“It won’t work.” Wellebourne spoke in a bored tone.
“It has before,” Nedra hissed at him.
“For a few minutes at most, yes?”
“I’ll have a thousand souls,” Nedra said fiercely.
“Yes,” Wellebourne allowed, drawling out the word. “But even with thousands of souls, you’ll only give her a week, maybe. That sort of energy doesn’t help revenants. Burns right through them. The dead aren’t meant to live like you and me, little girl.”
“A year,” Nedra insisted.
Wellebourne raised his eyes. “Do you really think you can negotiate with Death?” He chuckled, the sound raising Nedr
a’s ire even more. “I don’t make the rules.”
He took a step closer to Nedra. “Stay back!” she screamed, brandishing the knife. My hand went directly to the sword at my waist, whipping it from the sheath and stepping between Nedra and Wellebourne before I had a chance to think twice.
Wellebourne reached out to me, pushing the edge of my blade away, swatting at it as if I were a bothersome fly.
“Do you really think I would have given you a weapon that could hurt me?” he asked.
I whirled around, raising the sword again, but he wasn’t talking to me. He was talking to Nedra.
She looked down at the knife in her hand. “You didn’t give this to me.”
“Didn’t I?” he asked, smiling at her in a way that made my blood boil.
She looked up at him, her eyes wide. “You’re the other necromancer.”
“Obviously.”
Ned’s brow furrowed, her nose scrunched in the same way she’d looked when she was studying at Yūgen. Her mind was piecing together a puzzle, and the final image it created made the blood drain from her face.
She opened her mouth to speak, but Wellebourne cut her off. “I made sure the copper crucible was prepared for—well, I’d originally prepared it for Adelaide, but she didn’t follow the path I’d built for her. Fortunately, you did. I paid the Collector handsomely to ensure no one but the necromancer I sent him would get the box that contained that blade.”
How could he have been so sure of his plan? I wondered. But then the answer came to me. The captain of the ship . . . I cursed under my breath. I had known that the captain had been following Nedra—he’d admitted it flatly—and the Emperor had told me that the captain had reported to him. But what if the captain had gone first to the Collector, to warn him of Nedra’s impending arrival? No wonder he had been so easy to bribe at the start of the journey.
And no wonder the Emperor had chosen me for the mission to Miraband. I had been grossly unqualified for the position, but I’d allowed myself to believe I was the right man for the job. Instead, I had been selected because the Emperor knew I would use the opportunity to try to save Nedra. Hadn’t he steered our initial conversation back to her and the potential execution she faced? I had been a pawn from the very start.
Nedra took a step back, bumping into her sister. “Why didn’t you just get it yourself? You live in Miraband.”
For the first time, Wellebourne looked angry. His teeth bared as he snarled, “Can’t you see, little girl?”
Nedra’s pupils flashed silver as she focused on Wellebourne. “Your soul is black.”
“My soul is weak.”
Nedra shuddered. “You can’t raise the dead.” She paused. “And if you can’t raise the dead, you can’t open the box.”
“I can barely keep myself alive,” Wellebourne growled. “And besides, even if I could have opened the box and taken the knife, I couldn’t have used it without you.”
Confusion flashed over Nedra’s face. She took another step back, pushing into her sister.
“I grow bored,” Wellebourne said. “These plans have been in place longer than you know, little girl. Let’s just get on with it. I will use you to take the energy from the knife and replenish my soul, and you will become nothing more than a scary story the children of Lunar Island hear at bedtime.”
Nedra dropped to her knees. She was a supplicant at the Emperor’s feet, her head bowed, defeated. He smiled down on her beneficently.
The ends of her paper-white hair started to rise, wafting around her like a halo. When she looked up at him, her pupils were silvery, her grin triumphant.
FIFTY-EIGHT
Nedra
I PULLED.
And from the earth arose the dead.
They clawed their way out of the ground, their fingers broken stumps by the time they emerged from the red clay. They could not walk; they shambled. Their jaws were slack, their tongues fat and lolling, some eaten away by worms. I turned in circles, and I saw more and more, each of them drawn to me, to my power.
The wards Adelaide had placed on the graves—the iron rings—slowed the decomposition process, but the inevitable could not be put off forever. They were rotting. They were broken.
But they were standing.
And moving closer.
Hundreds—a thousand or more.
More, more, my blood sang.
The skin drooped under their eyes, sagging low, exposing the underside of their dull, red-rimmed eyeballs. Their faces were like melting wax. The one closest to me twitched its lips, spasming over the yellowed, dirt-encrusted teeth and white-pink gums. It made a grunting-moaning sound, nothing at all human or even animal-like, the sound akin to air being forced out of a bellows.
They waited. For my command.
Black, raw energy poured from my crucible. A spiderweb of black crept from my heart, down my shoulder, then spilled over my ghostly arm, forging an obsidian limb that felt more powerful than any muscle of flesh in my weak corporeal body.
“Ned?” Grey’s voice quaked. His fear was primal, based on the living’s anathema to death. The dead were nothing to fear. Flesh and bone were nothing.
Nothing at all next to my rage.
The dead all turned, as one, to face Bennum Wellebourne.
“Nedra,” he called, his voice high-pitched. “You don’t want to do this.”
I licked my lips. “Oh,” I breathed, my voice crackling with power. “But I do.”
I thought of my revenants, my beloved friends, who had been ripped apart, their flesh shredded, their bones splintered, their skulls fractured. My nostrils flared, remembering the sickly sweet and coppery smell of rotting meat that had once been a person. He had done that, I was sure of it now. He needed undead blood to open the box that held the crystal knife, and there had been gallons of it congealing on the black-and-white tiled floor.
It was this image that I pushed into the minds of the thousand dead plague victims. It was this idea.
They descended upon the Emperor’s body with cold, methodical glee.
His screams were quickly drowned out by the sound of flesh being torn from his bones with teeth and hands crooked like claws. My new revenants pulled at his arms and legs until they burst from the sockets. They rended his flesh. They trampled his rib cage, mangling the twisted heart, squishing the soft organs. They dug at his body like a dog digs in the sand, clawing through the gore, blood spattering in arcs through the air.
It was done all too quickly. But it was done.
I breathed out a sigh, tilting my head back up to the darkening sky. “It’s over,” I said aloud.
And then I turned to Grey.
His head was cocked oddly, his eyes alight, a teeth-baring grin spread across his face. “You silly little girl,” Grey said in a voice that wasn’t entirely his own. “You think I can be killed? My soul is immortal. All I need is a body. Any body. And this one will do just fine.”
FIFTY-NINE
Grey
NEDRA STARED AT me in horror.
My mouth opened. “You don’t like me inside the boy, do you?”
Get out, get out, get out. My soul pleaded with this alien presence inside of me, but I might as well have been speaking to a wall. I felt—an absence. That was the only way to describe it. I had been whole, but now I wasn’t.
Now my soul was pushed to the side.
But two souls cannot occupy one body without knowledge passing between them. I felt Wellebourne’s intent. Nedra had never been anything more than a possible source of power for him, nothing more, nothing less. He was a spider, and she was one of many flies. Wellebourne looked through my eyes at Nedra, and he saw nothing worthwhile.
You’re wrong. My quivering, cowering, fading soul could see Nedra, too, and it saw something different.
We had fought—often and bitterly—over what she had
become. I didn’t need a field of dead bodies to remind me that what she had done was wrong. But I still loved her. Love didn’t have to make sense. It didn’t have to agree with everything. It just had to exist, and, when my entire life was spread before me, I knew, I knew, that our love was the only thing I truly believed in.
Be quiet! Wellebourne’s soul raged at mine. In response, my soul flared up, trying to wrest control of my body back from Wellebourne. But my anger wasn’t strong enough. I could do nothing as Wellebourne forced me to stride toward Nedra, shoulders back, sneering down at her.
I felt my soul growing smaller, weaker. I knew, through Wellebourne’s triumph, that he had done this before. He’d expelled dozens of souls from dozens of people, claiming their bodies and using them up.
You can’t win, he taunted me.
I don’t have to.
My body’s steps faltered.
I didn’t have to win. I just had to hold out long enough for Nedra to defeat him. Wellebourne might control my body, but I still controlled my heart.
I love her. And I would do everything in my soul’s power to help her triumph now.
Wellebourne sent me feelings, images, flashes of the torture he would put my soul through for daring to fight back. I knew—I knew—I would never have my body again. This was a sort of death I had never envisioned before, but it would be as sure as the one Nedra’s twin suffered.
I would do it anyway.
I could see now that I had let myself become the monster she had accused me of being. I had let myself fall into the spider’s trap, just as she had. All her life, Nedra had never been in a position to win. Raised by poor villagers in a poor village, she had no hope of rising above her station.
She had done it anyway.