Bind some of them, he snapped. I would have speech with a few.
We cannot, said the serpents together. They are all empty.
Empty. Empty of life, in any conceivable form. ‘Tash,’ he said aloud. ‘I have to be sure. These are not your people, are they?’
‘No.’
‘You’re sure? You can tell?’
‘I can tell, and I am sure. These are nothing but dead meat.’
Diana had said nothing. Neither had Lev or Anichka, Konrad realised; not in all the time they had wandered down here. The two of them were impassive, absolutely focused upon whatever duty Diana had laid upon them when she had brought them with her.
Konrad felt they had been silent for long enough. ‘Mr. Antonov,’ he said. ‘Miss Zima. Considering that we seek a group said to practice the same arts as your own: what does this look like to you?’
They both looked at Diana, who looked sideways at Konrad. ‘You can tell them,’ she said, after a moment’s thought.
Lev Antonov nodded. ‘There is more than one possibility. Some of our people envy the lamaeni, and try to emulate them. It is rarely productive of very much. Usually they fail to return to their physical forms. Or, in other words, they die.’
‘Sometimes they are subsequently reanimated,’ put in Anichka. ‘Instead of being able to choose between a physical form and a spirit form at will, they become simply undead.’
‘Why would anybody make such an attempt?’ asked Alexander, his eyes wide and a bit wild as he took in the sheer quantity of inanimate bodies littering the room. There must have been at least twenty. ‘If it always fails?’
Anichka hesitated. It was Lev who said: ‘There is a myth about the lamaeni. Some say that the state is not a curse, as some believe. It is said that the first of them were necromancers, able to manipulate not only the bodies and souls of others after death, but their own as well. Some still believe that a necromancer of sufficient talent and vision can achieve the same.’
Konrad suspected all such necromancers of incurable stupidity, but kept the thought to himself. ‘It seems unlikely that so many would make any such attempt all together like this, surely?’
‘Most unlikely,’ Lev agreed. ‘The second possibility…’ He looked, again, at Diana.
She gave him a nod. ‘Go on.’
‘There have been some troubling rumours circulating in the past month,’ said Lev. ‘There have been… incidents. Of possession.’
Konrad blinked. ‘How many incidents?’
‘Too many. You’ll know, Malykant, how important it is to the Order to stamp out this practice. It is among your own sacred duties to rid the world of those spirits, wraiths and ghosts who fail to find their way into The Master’s care. Sometimes, should they linger too long and grow too unquiet, they… cling to anything they can find that is alive. Usually to another person. In some cases, a powerful and unhappy ghost has succeeded in pushing aside the consciousness of a living person and taking control of their body, at least intermittently. Several such cases have been reported across Ekamet in the last few weeks. This is almost unheard of. Something has changed, and we have been seeking the source.’
That was why Diana had brought these two, then. Had she hoped to find the source down here?
But this train of thought unravelled, swept away by another burgeoning idea. One which took hold with frightening rapidity, and he felt a growing horror as it unfolded, for everything fit. Everything fit far too neatly.
‘Diana,’ he said softly. ‘I think I know why neither Tasha nor my serpents ever found anybody alive down here — not now, not when they searched before. It isn’t because the coven is gone, or hiding somewhere we have yet to find. It is because they are dead. All of them. They have been dead for years.’
Chapter Six
Konrad gestured at the neat rows of bodies lying, waiting, upon their slabs of stone. ‘These are vehicles. Ready to be taken up at need, and used as necessary to commit whatever deeds they see fit.’ Like murdering all the residents of the Vasilescu family mansion; building its replica in snow; and hanging Eino Holt and his mother from the walls.
‘I agree with your first surmise,’ said Diana slowly. ‘But not, I think, your second.’
Anichka was shaking her head. ‘Dead flesh makes a poor vehicle for possession. It fails to respond the way it needs to, because it’s — well, because it is dead. Only live flesh can think and move and react. Ask the lamaeni.’
‘Correct,’ said Tasha. ‘If a lamaeni is separated from his or her body for too long, the flesh will deteriorate and die and they will no longer be able to return to it. Many of us have been… stranded, that way. If that happens, an alternative vehicle — as you put it — must be found, and a nice, live body is preferred. Or a really fresh corpse.’
These, Konrad saw at a glance, were not very fresh. Nor were they much decayed. He walked down a row or two, examining them more closely. They were varied; a mix of men and women, ranging from early youth to advanced age. Their garments proclaimed their backgrounds to be equally varied: some wore the silks and lace of gentry, others wore the coarser, plainer garb of labourers or tradesmen. There was no consistency to their styles of clothing; if their funeral attire was to be believed, they had all died at different times over the past century at least.
‘They’re preserved,’ Konrad said thoughtfully. ‘Somehow. They look recently deceased, but they are not.’
‘A coven of dead necromancers,’ said Diana. ‘I have never heard of such a thing, but…’ She lifted a brow in Lev’s direction.
‘I have,’ he said. ‘Though not recently. There is an old Marjan tale of such a coven.’
‘I’ve heard it,’ murmured Nanda.
Lev nodded. ‘They were said to be more powerful dead than alive, given to possessing the minds and bodies of small children.’
‘And lo, many a night’s sleep has been ruined by these stories,’ said Nanda, with a tiny quirk of a smile. ‘It has been my lifetime’s mission to believe them just that: stories.’
‘Some part of the tales are likely exaggerated,’ said Lev. ‘But there is much truth to it.’
Konrad was only half listening, his mind busy. ‘Why preserve their bodies, if they are more powerful dead than alive, and they cannot go back to their corpses anyway?’ he said. ‘And for that matter, where are they now? If their ghosts were here, the serpents would have seen or sensed them by now.’
‘I wonder,’ said Alexander, ‘whether they intended to die.’
Konrad looked sharply at the inspector. ‘Go on.’
‘Well.’ Alexander stood with his hands in his pockets, staring out over the small sea of corpses with a bleak expression on his mild face. ‘How do you suppose Jakub Vasilescu died?’
‘Yes,’ said Konrad. ‘He was not young, but nor was he elderly and frail.’
‘Absolutely neither. If he died before his time, perhaps that explains the urgency of his descendants to keep him, in some sense, around. Well, what if it was not just him? What if the whole coven was cut down, years ago?’
Nanda said, ‘That would go some way to explaining why they used Denis Druganin to bring them bodies. If they are both dead and barred from returning to their own forms, however well-preserved these are…’ She stopped, frowning at the nearest example — a stout, middle-aged woman in a worn wool dress.
‘It might,’ Konrad agreed. ‘But you are also right to doubt. The explanation is too simple. If preserving their erstwhile physical forms is of no use to them, why are they doing it?’
‘And how are they performing their organ-replacing procedures?’ said Diana. ‘As they did on Eino. There must be some left alive.’
Konrad thought back to his encounter with Jakub Vasilescu. If Alexander was right, and he and several of his fellows had been prematurely swept away, then perhaps it was not just Jakub upon whom the living coven members were practicing their questionable arts. Near to hand lay the body of a man in, perhaps, his sixties, his grey hair f
anned around his serene face. Konrad quickly opened the well-cut black coat he wore, and the white linen shirt underneath.
Like Jakub, this man had an incision from throat to navel. It looked fairly fresh, and newly stitched up again. Had something been removed from his torso? No. Judging from the state poor Kati Vinter and Alen Petranov had been left in, no one would trouble to sew closed the wound if he had merely been harvested of parts. No, something had been put in. This man, like Jakub, had been the recipient of fresh, living organs — and recently.
But that did not make sense either. For one thing, replacing a few dead organs with equally dead — if more recently deceased — examples could hardly achieve much. It did not make the corpse any less dead. For another, at least Jakub’s spirit had still been demonstrably present; there was no sign of a resident ghost haunting any of these corpses. Were their spirits only temporarily absent, or had they passed on into The Malykt’s care? If the latter, no amount of tinkering with their physical forms could possibly bring them back.
‘What is all this for,’ said Konrad in frustration. ‘The signs suggest someone wants to bring all these people back, but that is impossible. It cannot be done. Is that not true?’ He looked for confirmation to Lev and Anichka.
‘I have never heard of any such thing,’ said Lev.
‘Nor I,’ Anichka added. ‘Dead necromancers retaining some portion of their powers even after severance from their physical forms, yes. Even tales, reasonably credible ones, of their being still more empowered in that state. But of reversing death completely, even long after life has faded? It is one of the biggest, and most tragic, misconceptions about necromancy: that the art can restore true life to the dead. It cannot. A reanimated corpse might move and speak and act, but it is not alive.’
‘How does that work?’ said Konrad. ‘Does it move and speak at the pleasure of the necromancer — like a puppet — or is the original spirit in some fashion restored to reanimate the husk?’
‘Both are possible. The former is more common, the latter more difficult — and transitory. Undeath is a fragile, unpleasant state and it does not last. The lamaeni being the only known exception.’ Anichka nodded her respect to Tasha.
Tasha, however, was characteristically ungracious. ‘You are all being dense,’ she said. ‘It is completely impossible to bring the dead back to life, yes — except when it isn’t.’
Konrad blinked. ‘What?’
She sighed. ‘More specifically: it is impossible for you or me to restore life, but there is more in the world than living people and undead lamaeni.’
‘Oh,’ Nanda breathed, and turned horrified eyes upon Konrad.
‘Exactly,’ said Tasha. She folded her arms, and said with a glower: ‘Who do we know who’s been dead once or twice before?’
Konrad swallowed.
‘Mm. And look how alive you are.’
That, Konrad thought, had proved to be a matter for some debate, in the past. There had been one or two lamaeni who had called his precise state of being into question — implied, horrifyingly, that he was not quite alive anymore, though he had not passed into a state of undeath either. What that meant, he had decided not to think about.
Nonetheless, Tasha was right.
He had wondered why the coven of Divoro had so obviously wanted to lure the Malykant back to their caves. Was this his answer?
‘We must leave,’ said Diana crisply. ‘You were right, Konrad. This is a trap, but a far worse one than we imagined possible. Lev, Anichka. Get Konrad out of here.’ She was moving as she spoke, alert for trouble, her keen eyes scanning the low-lit chamber.
‘No,’ said Konrad. ‘We came here to get to the bottom of this, and to dispense with the coven once and for all. I will not leave until we have accomplished that.’
‘We will accomplish that,’ said Diana. ‘You are not only in a great deal of personal danger, you are likely to become a danger yourself if we let them get hold of you.’
‘Why? What can they possibly do to me?’
But as he spoke, the word possession floated through his memory, and he blanched.
Suddenly, the long silence of his serpents began to seem sinister.
Eetapi, he called, sending the word as far and as fast as he was able. Ootapi!
He thought he heard a call in reply, a thin, distant sound that vibrated with distress.
‘Martita?’ he said to Diana.
She shook her head, mouth set in a grim line. ‘Something is wrong.’
‘I’ll find them.’ Tasha did not waste time lying down. She keeled over backwards, apparently stone dead, as her shade separated from her body and sped away in pursuit of the absent spirit-familiars. It was a trick she had pulled on Konrad before, but only in jest. The sight was much more horrific now.
Be careful— he called after her, but too late. She was already gone.
For his own part, he shed his habitual caution and reached for the strength, speed and resilience that was his due as the Malykant. Please, do not let these fail me too, he prayed, thinking of locks no longer responding to the touch of his fingers.
To his relief, they came. He stood taller, radiating dark magic, his vision sharpened and his resolve strengthened. When he moved, he knew he would move at three, four times his usual pace, his long strides eating up the ground.
It was not enough. When the strike came, it came without warning, and hit him with the colossal power of a united coven behind it.
It felt, he thought later, as though a hammer had been applied with skull-splitting force, felling him in a single blow. Only the effect was spiritual, not physical; it was not his body, but his mind, that fell. A searing pain lanced through his head, stealing his breath, drawing from him a bellow of agony — and then he was shunted aside, packed into a too-small space inside his own skull, and his thoughts were no longer his own.
A presence invaded his mind, a presence too powerful to resist. That intruder harvested Konrad’s thoughts, harnessed his will, and took control of his limbs, leaving Konrad’s own consciousness an enervated, emaciated shadow. He could only scream, wordless, useless frustration, as his stolen body surged into motion and he was helpless to stop it. What had he done but put his Malykant’s powers at the disposal of his attackers? He, Konrad, was the Malykant no longer. Someone else had taken possession of his role.
Chapter Seven
Konrad’s body began to move, though it was not he who had bid it do so. The motions were not his own, either; an odd sway to his hips suggested that his captor was a woman, or had been in life.
He could see, but his vision was distorted — doubled. A glance at Nanda showed him two women: the Nan he knew, familiar and loved, beautiful in every feature; and a second Irinanda, tall, icy and haughty, the planes of her face angular and unpleasing. His possessor’s view of Nanda was quite different from his own.
‘Konrad?’ she said, watching him warily. ‘Where are you going?’
He tried to answer, but she who had taken control of his limbs kept his lips pressed tightly together, and no words emerged. He fought, and for a time, sight and sound faded altogether as he threw everything he had at the interloper. For a moment he thought he might succeed; she stopped, and staggered, her concentration broken.
Yes! Konrad exulted, and surged up in triumph. He would reclaim himself, and then he would wipe every last one of the ghosts of Divoro off the face of the—
Iron bands clamped around his skull, or so it felt. They tightened, and squeezed; something splintered, and he screamed.
Do not fight me, said a low, female voice, echoing through his thoughts like a sharp sound in an empty room. Our alliance is temporary.
Olya, he spat. It is Olya Vasilescu, is it not?
Who else could have power enough?
Why then do you need mine?
Because I cannot do all that I would wish.
Vision returned, and hearing. He had passed out of the cavern of corpses and proceeded some way back along the passage, w
ending steadily upwards. What had become of Nanda, Alexander and the others? Distantly, he heard a pounding, as of someone hammering upon a locked door.
They need not be killed, Olya remarked conversationally, as Konrad’s body proceeded onward at a measured pace.
Konrad needed no assistance to read the implied threat in her words. You could not have asked for our aid?
You would not have given it.
She was right, for another few steps brought Konrad in his usurped body back into the little room in which Jakub lay. Konrad — Olya — knelt by the divan upon which he reclined, and took his hand. ‘Dedushka,’ said Konrad’s voice, with a timbre and inflection not his own. ‘Today you rise.’
He cannot rise, Konrad snapped. He is gone.
Thanks to you, so he is. But what you have done, you will undo.
I cannot. His soul lies in The Master’s care now.
He felt his lips curve in a smile. ‘Bring the serpents here,’ said he/Olya aloud.
What. Muffled as his senses were, Konrad became belatedly aware that they were not alone in the room. Lev and Anichka came into view, both walking with odd, slightly stiff movements, as though they, too, were directed by others. Each bore one of his serpents wrapped around one arm. The tight embrace might have looked affectionate, except that Konrad could feel rage and agony radiating from them both. They were bound there.
Konrad felt his lips move again; Olya was speaking. ‘It was you who carried away this man’s spirit. You will fetch it back.’ She pointed at Jakub; Konrad’s arm rose and fell.
We cannot, gasped Ootapi. The Master will never permit it.
‘You will have to find a way to do it without his knowledge.’
You cannot compel us, spat Eetapi. We do not obey!
Olya said, with chilling calm, ‘Then your Malykant will never be restored to you.’
Konrad made another futile attempt at escape. But wrest though he might, every struggle only entangled him more thoroughly; with every straining effort, his bindings tightened. Diana will deal with you, he informed Olya.
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