We Are Blood and Thunder

by Kesia Lupo

  ‘I can’t allow it.’ Her annoyance was obvious now. ‘Lena and I have to go into the crypts. What you would see down there—’

  ‘Can it be worse than the dead rising, Constance? I’ve seen that already.’ His jaw had set determinedly, and Lena could tell there would be no arguing with him.

  ‘Winton—’

  ‘I will not take no for an answer – I can’t risk you dying too. Not after all we’ve lost already.’

  Lena looked down at the reed-strewn floor, feeling as if she were intruding.

  Constance’s voice softened a little. ‘Fine,’ she said.

  He nodded. ‘Then let’s go.’ And he picked up an oil lantern hanging on the wall, lit it with a flick of the contraption at its base and led the way towards the trapdoors.

  Constance tapped her cane on the ground – a pale purple light emanated from its pommel. ‘Winton,’ she said.

  He stopped on the top step.

  ‘The spell’s heart is inside Lena. The ritual will allow her to control and dispel the storm, but it’s not pretty. We’ll be going deep inside the crypts – we can’t risk being disturbed. And it won’t be easy. If you’re coming, you have to promise me that whatever happens, you will not interfere. All right? You will do as I say, guard the door and make sure nobody stops us. I don’t want to put you in any more danger than necessary.’ Her tone was businesslike, completely uncompromising. Lena wondered with a chill what exactly would be so difficult and secretive about this ritual.

  Winton nodded his agreement. ‘I won’t pretend to understand, but I promise not to interfere.’ He glanced across at Lena, meeting her eyes properly for the first time since she had ruined his mother’s Descent. Pain flashed in his expression, but he smiled kindly. ‘Come, let’s go.’

  Lena took a few steps forward but hesitated on the edge of the staircase. It led into a darkness so deep it swam before her eyes. She hadn’t ventured into the crypts since that day, when the Duchess had grabbed her arm with hard, white fingers. She shivered. She was an outcast; she had prayed to a foreign god, accepted his presence for a time. But now – she rested her hand over her heart, where the spell lay – now she belonged to no one. Was that better or worse? Would the Ancestors hate her, or would they be indifferent?

  ‘Hurry,’ said Constance sharply from behind. ‘We haven’t much time.’

  She began to make her way slowly down the steps. Noises emanated from below – even more horrific than the sounds of fighting and death they were leaving behind – shuffles, the chink of old metal and hisses like whispers. Lena swore she heard hurried footsteps somewhere in the warren of the tunnels. Cryptlings? Morticians? She hoped so. She wondered what had happened to those trapped down there when the Ancestors had started to stir. Had they been able to escape? Halfway down she stopped again. Her palms prickled with sweat. Exactly how deep is this terrible mountain? How many Ancestors sleep here? Even as a cryptling, she had never truly found out. There were passages that had long been abandoned, Ancestors forgotten. Where would Constance take her?

  What was she doing?

  ‘We have nowhere else to go, Lena.’ Constance was standing very close to her, blocking the route back up the staircase, and Lena was painfully aware of her height, of the power emanating from the glowing cane. ‘Don’t you want to save our people? Don’t you want to save our home?’

  ‘It’ll be all right,’ said Winton softly from the step below. ‘Once the spell is gone, the people of Duke’s Forest will be saved, and you will be richly rewarded. Right, Constance?’

  Constance gave a slight, nearly imperceptible nod.

  A scream of terror rang out somewhere outside – the desperate ‘Please, please!’ of a woman. Were the people of Duke’s Forest truly her people? They had abandoned her to the dead. This didn’t feel like her home – it never had.

  But the spell … She had a terrible feeling about this – about all of it. But if she didn’t go with Constance now, she would never know what she might be capable of. Lena took a deep breath and continued to descend.

  The butterfly slipped out of her pocket.

  ‘Hey!’ She spun round, tried to catch it – but the creature flew far out of her reach, its little cloud heart puffing with the effort as it headed back out of the trapdoors. Lena tried to follow but Constance caught her arm.

  ‘It’s not important,’ she said firmly. ‘Come on. We have to go.’

  They reached the bottom, and Lena’s breath caught in her throat as Constance spelled the big trapdoors shut behind them, and the whole space was lit in the steady purplish light of her cane and Winton’s lantern.

  She reached for her pocket, but its emptiness set her heart racing. No butterfly.

  No butterfly, for the first time in six years.

  She felt completely lost.

  She stopped, her attention caught by the horror of the scene confronting her. The sarcophagi were open, the great tomb doors of the Dukes hanging on their hinges.

  Constance swept her cane in a broad, slow arc and a series of lamps sprang to life on the far walls, ignited by her magic. The ghastly scene was illuminated further. In the flickering firelight, Lena could see the shapes of skeletal bodies in the gloom – not lying in state on their plinths, but strewn around, fallen and unravelling. A weird tension hung in the air, as if they’d interrupted a drunken gathering. As if, moments ago, a revelry of the dead had been raging under the earth and their stillness was nothing more than a party game. Lena could see the eye gemstones scattered across the stone floor, glinting in the lamplight.

  She felt choked up with tears and nausea. She was glad Vigo had not lived to experience such a thing.

  Constance misinterpreted her expression. ‘No time for squeamishness – let’s just be grateful they’re not attacking us yet.’

  ‘Why are they attacking people anyway?’ Lena asked, as Constance led her further into the chamber, picking a careful route between the bodies on the floor.

  ‘The spell is fed by death, remember? Hence the Pestilence.’

  Lena’s eyes widened.

  ‘The Pestilence was linked to the spell?’ Winton asked from further behind.

  ‘Of course,’ Constance said – and despite everything, her voice quickened with enthusiasm as she explained. ‘Like a child growing in the womb, the spell has various stages of development.’ And then her voice took on a chanting tone, as if reciting a poem. ‘First year, a vapour, a mist. Second year, a fog, a storm cloud. Then three years in summer, it shall feast on death. In the sixth year, the sickness stops – the quiet before the storm. And then …’ She paused. ‘Then the contractions start. That’s the stage we’re in now. In a series of increasingly powerful and frequent contractions, the storm cloud is animating the Ancestors and filling them with its hunger for death. What it needs to reach its full potential, to loose itself on the world, is a lot of deaths very quickly.’

  Suddenly Constance hesitated beside a particular sarcophagus. The occupant was on the floor, face down, chestnut hair spilling over the flagstones. Her face was turned slightly to one side, and Lena could see the glint of her gemstone eyes still in place – almost lifelike. Except for the shrunken, skeletal hands, Lena thought, she could have been alive. Her time as a cryptling had taught her to judge the age of an Ancestor – she guessed from the skin that this woman had been between fifteen and twenty years dead.

  ‘You see, the spell’s not really bringing the dead to life at all,’ Constance continued in the same tone, but somehow changed. ‘It’s just turning them into tools for its own ends.’ Her voice sank to a whisper. ‘Only bringing the spell under a mage’s control can change that. Only a necromancer can bring back the dead’s very essence.’

  Turning abruptly from the Ancestor, Constance led them on, Lena and Winton walking side by side behind. Winton flashed her a small, sad smile. ‘I think that was her mother,’ he whispered very quietly, and Lena nodded in understanding.

  A narrow archway at the far end of the chamber
opened on to a spiral staircase leading down. Lena had heard of the chambers beneath, where dukes and duchesses of past centuries – millennia, even – were moved once the main accessible chamber had been filled to capacity. Nobody ventured down there any more, not even cryptlings – no one would until the main chamber filled again and the older bodies had to be relocated – and the staircase was thick with cobwebs.

  Lena heard Winton swallow nervously at her side. ‘Is this really necessary? I’m sure with the trapdoors shut and this far into the tombs, no one—’

  ‘You promised, Winton,’ Constance said firmly.

  The torches on the next level sprang to life with another wave of Constance’s cane. A small chamber opened out, a honeycomb of doorways leading off into darknesses beyond. The scene here was similar – the open tombs, the corpses on the floor – yet these were in a greater state of decay, barely more than bones and rotted clothes, and the skin on the skulls shrunken to a thin, brown film baring yellowed teeth. The preserving potions of morticians could not last forever.

  ‘Lie down here.’ Constance pointed to an unoccupied plinth set in the centre of the floor – the length of a grown man.

  Nothing repulsed Lena more than the thought of the cold stone sarcophagus against her back. ‘Whatever we’re doing, I’d rather stand,’ she said, her voice shaking a little with determination.

  ‘Too bad. You’ll have to lie down: I can’t restrain you standing up.’

  ‘Restrain me?’

  Constance nodded slowly. ‘You’ll need it, Lena. I told you this wouldn’t be easy.’

  She backed away, fear clenching in her gut. This feels wrong. ‘I … I don’t know …’ She felt something within her snap, some instinct springing to life. ‘I’m sorry but I’ve changed my mind,’ she said, her voice quivering. ‘There must be another way.’

  In a flash of purple light, she flew back against the plinth, knocking her head.

  ‘Constance!’ Winton stepped forward, his face pale with shock.

  As Lena sat on the floor, her head spinning, she watched Constance turn on her brother, her mask glowing gold in the lamplight. ‘I warned you,’ she said. ‘Now be quiet and watch the doorway.’

  Lena couldn’t see Winton’s reaction – but she guessed he assented as she heard no further argument, his footsteps retreating a few paces into the gloom. She felt winded and dizzy, as if she’d been punched in the stomach. Constance stood over her, strands of her long fair hair falling around her shoulders, her dark eyes glowing faintly violet through the eyeholes of the mask.

  ‘I’m sorry, Lena. Would that the spell had stayed where it was. Things would have been so much simpler.’

  She flicked her cane, and Lena felt herself lifted into the air, her limbs straightened out like a doll’s. She was dropped on to the empty sarcophagus, a cloud of dust rising from it. Her hair spilt over the ledge of old stone, and she felt the scuttle of some disturbed insect or spider across her brow. She tried to lift her arms, to summon her magic, but Constance was too fast: invisible bindings wrapped around her wrists and ankles, glowing purple in the darkness as the spell took hold.

  And suddenly it came to her: Lena remembered the colour of the butterfly’s magic the first time she had seen it.

  Yes, it had been pale – almost white.

  But certainly, without a doubt, it had been purple too.

  ‘It was you,’ said Lena slowly and dimly, as if through a fog. ‘You cast the spell.’ Her eyes struggled to focus as Constance leaned over her, the mask gleaming in the mage-light.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The Truth

  Constance smiled beneath her mask. Perhaps … at last … it was time for the truth.

  ‘What does she mean?’ Winton’s voice drifted weak and low out of the shadows near the staircase, like the voice of a child. ‘What does she mean, Constance?’

  She turned to face her brother. ‘She means I cast the storm spell. She means I am to be the necromancer. And I am here not to destroy it, but to reclaim it.’

  Winton’s face crumpled, and through her anger and annoyance and determination Constance felt a pull of love and guilt, her emotions woven so tightly together they felt inseparable, like the strings of a rope binding her, tugging around her neck.

  Cut the rope. You cannot be restrained any more.

  Emotions fought for ownership of Winton’s face too – confusion, anger, love, despair. ‘Why would you do such a thing? I don’t understand …’

  ‘Listen to me, Winton,’ she said softly, stepping closer to him. ‘I was four years old when my mother died, but I remember her. She was a mage too. She told wonderful stories, and she showed me little tricks, little games. She showed me books – atlases, storybooks, picture books … and other texts too. Magical books. In secret of course. In her own chambers. And I loved her, Winton, because she was wonderful, and magical, and she was my mother. She was like nobody else in this dark place – even as a small child, I knew that.’ Constance felt her eyes sting, and she turned aside. ‘I know I was young, but I remember everything so clearly. And when she died – so suddenly, even suspiciously – I knew there was a lot more she had to tell me. What stories, what knowledge had I lost in losing her? What secrets? What … love?’ Her voice cracked and she bowed slightly under the weight of the admission. And then she drew her shoulders back, her spine straight. ‘As soon as my powers started to manifest, I knew I had to find out how to bring her back.’

  ‘Oh, Constance …’ Winton shook his head. ‘I don’t know much about magic, but even I know that’s not possi—’

  ‘Who is to say what is possible?’ Constance snapped, interrupting. ‘What gives you the right? People never stop judging. This is allowed. This is forbidden. And what for? Isn’t all magic just a tool to be turned to a purpose?’ She stepped towards Winton, challenging him, her whole body alive with fire and energy and purpose. ‘All I know is that my mother did not deserve to die. I read all of her books over the years, scoured them. And there was one with such a spell. And I learned it. Who wouldn’t have done differently? Can you deny your heart leaped when you saw your dead mother move again?’

  A strangled noise emerged from Winton’s throat, a note of pure anguish.

  ‘You cast the spell in the crypts that night six years ago, over your mother’s body,’ the girl whispered from behind her.

  Constance turned, held her glowing cane over Lena’s stuttering heart. She could feel its rhythm – her own spell calling to her, begging to be possessed. ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘But I didn’t really understand what I was doing. How could I? I was so young, completely untrained. Spells that complicated take years to master – there are whole textbooks and treatises to explain its complexities, explore its possibilities. I had nothing but the spell itself and my own ability. I thought it was a spell to bring one person back from the dead, but it was bigger than that. I didn’t know it would create the storm cloud. I didn’t know it was a spell to create a necromancer. A spell I should have lodged inside my heart to grow alongside my magic. Instead, released into the wild, it found the nearest vessel: my mother’s butterfly.’ Constance shook her head. ‘I thought it was a brooch, but it was also a receptacle. Who knows what she originally intended it for? And then …’

  ‘The butterfly found me,’ Lena said. ‘It chose me,’ she added, her voice suddenly warm.

  ‘Chose you?’ Constance stepped closer and peered into the girl’s eyes, intrigued. ‘Yes …’ Why had the spell chosen Lena, a small, ugly cryptling? Could it not have found its way back to its creator? She turned the idea over. No, it was chance. Constance simply hadn’t known how to cast the spell properly – but now she would fix her mistake.

  ‘What?’ the girl breathed. ‘What do you mean, yes?’

  ‘It shouldn’t have been possible for it to lodge itself inside a person like that. Its willing creator, yes. An empty receptacle, yes.’ She pulled the long velvet glove from her left hand, exposing the metal beneath and flexing it
s fingers, the perfect hinges and wheels whirring, clicking in the half-light. She heard the cryptling inhale sharply. ‘But a girl?’ She shook her head slowly. ‘No, it doesn’t make a jot of sense.’ She smiled beneath her mask. ‘But that’s what happened, nevertheless. I guess you must’ve been empty too. Broken somehow. There must have been a space for a spell, right here.’

  Constance rested her cane over Lena’s heart, and the light on the end started to throb and grow brighter, whiter with every heartbeat. Faster and faster. ‘Perhaps it was because you were so unremarkable, so empty, that you were chosen,’ she whispered. ‘But now …’ She sent her magic flowing into the girl’s heart, searching for the spell. Yes, there it was – a pulse of cloud with its own flickering, rumbling beat, entangled in a prison of flesh and blood. She flexed her fingers again, flicked the cog on the side of her mask and saw it. And then, ever so gently, she started to pull it. Lena gasped in pain and started to struggle against her bindings.

  ‘Constance, what are you doing?’ Winton’s voice again. ‘Will she be all right?’

  ‘Shut up,’ she snapped. The light on her cane flickered and intensified. The spell’s heart rose up a few inches, hovered beneath the girl’s skin, a swirl of dark cloud, a growl of thunder, a stutter of lightning. She held her metal arm over it as she started to unpick the threads binding it to the girl’s quivering heart: she was ready to receive the storm. The spell had grown strong. She shut her eyes. She was so close … She unpicked it carefully, so carefully, so as not to damage it … The girl was screaming.

  Mother, Constance thought, remembering the sensation of her arms around her, the feeling of warmth and safety. I am coming.

  But Winton’s footsteps hurried close. ‘Constance, stop! Stop! You’re killing her!’ He laid a hand on her shoulder, tried to pull her away.