We Are Blood and Thunder

by Kesia Lupo

  Anger and power flowed through her in an irresistible wave. She turned, raising her palm in a surge of violet light against her brother. He was flung violently through the air, landing hard against a sarcophagus with a resounding crack. He slumped sideways on to the floor. Blood ran down his face and into his thickly curled hair. He was quiet.

  Constance found she was panting, her breath fast and shallow. He would not disturb her again.

  She returned to the girl, whose wide eyes left no doubt she had seen what had occurred.

  ‘Why did you do that?’ Lena whispered.

  ‘He is not like us, Lena. He could never understand.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We are not like other people,’ said Constance softly, her glowing cane hovering over Lena’s heart, ready to continue her work. ‘I cast the greatest spell in the world, and you have held it, grown it for me all these years. Other people are flesh and bone and sinew, and they wander through life like cattle or sheep, aimless and happy. But we are different.’ She smiled a hidden smile. ‘We are blood and thunder.’ She leaned over, feeling the rush of the spell against her face, cool and electric. ‘We are the heart of the spell.’ And she started her work again.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Wings

  The sensation was … unbearable. It felt like Constance was reaching into her chest with sharp nails and grappling with her heart. She drifted in and out of consciousness, brief and vivid dreams finding her, dreams where she was running through the forest, in the crypts, even on the steps of the Holy Council, enveloped by the storm cloud. It was calling to her, clinging to her: its thunder was her heartbeat, its lightning her spark of life.

  It did choose me.

  Memories flickered in and out of her vision, punctuated by screams, intense moments of struggling against invisible bindings that pinned her to the unyielding tomb.

  She knew it instinctively: if Constance succeeded, this was the end. The spell and Lena were twined together, and she would die without it.

  Hot tears ran from her eyes and soaked her hair where it met her temples. And then, through her tears, a faintly glowing speck – like a ghost – slid over her vision, lit by purple mage-light and yellow fire. The butterfly fluttered around her head, spewing puffs of cloud. Another dream? It had left her to face the dark alone. And suddenly footsteps sounded on the stairs.

  ‘Lena?’

  She felt a stab of pain so deep her vision started to fade, the butterfly wavering before her eyes as if it had been plunged into water. Constance was easing the spell from her like a stubborn weed from hard ground. The blank mask remained focused on its task.

  The voice again. ‘Lena!’

  Emris?

  ‘Constance? What are you doing?’ His voice was tight with shock.

  But it was as if the masked lady hadn’t noticed. And that meant Lena was imagining it. A dream, just a dream. The spell’s heart was tethered to her by a thread, her own heartbeat wild and confused. The butterfly landed on her nose, flapping its wings slowly. She swore she felt the tiny impressions of its legs on her skin.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Hunting the Storm

  The girl had passed, at last. In seconds, Constance knew she would be in full control of the spell, her spell. Expectation flooded her body with a thrill so blissful it was nearly ecstatic. Again, she rested her left arm against the girl’s heart – now quiet – and the spell rose up, untethered. She felt the power start to flow inside her metal arm, the empty receptacle for which she had sacrificed her own flesh.

  Lena’s story was ending.

  Hers was just beginning.

  ‘Constance!’ A familiar voice pulled her aggressively from her trancelike state and the magic slipped through her fingers like sand. Her eyes flickered to the doorway.

  ‘Emris?’ she managed. She hadn’t realised how exhausted she was, but now the thrill had rushed away and left her panting and shaking, a cold sweat on her brow. Emris’s scarred face was twisted with rage. He raised a hand, and the power hit her like an anvil. She shot off to the side, landing on a corpse that let off a cloud of desiccated flesh, covering her in a film of greasy grey. She breathed and instantly coughed, choking on the foul dust trapped under her mask.

  She pulled it off and saw Emris at Lena’s side, shaking her. ‘Lena? Lena?’ The desperation on his face, the …

  The love.

  Constance’s vision cleared further as she blinked away the dust, and she saw the spell lingering above the girl. It had manifested as a dark cloud, flickering with green-blue lightning and hovering, curiously still, around two inches above Lena’s chest. The power thrumming from it was … extraordinary. Longing filled her with a sweetness so terrible it felt like grief. The spell was her creation. It belonged to her. And she had pulled it from Lena but not yet accepted it into her own body. So there was still time … but not much.

  ‘Emris,’ she said quietly, trying not to spit his name like a curse. ‘I’m sorry, but it’s too late for Lena.’ She tried to sound sorry but it felt like her voice was dripping with sarcasm. ‘You have to let me take control of the spell.’

  ‘What?’ When he turned towards her, his eyes were brimming – it was as if he wasn’t seeing her at all.

  Her heart twisted, but she forced herself to remain calm.

  ‘If the spell is loosed on its own … you know what that means, don’t you? It’s a Chaos spell, Emris. Without a necromancer to control it, it will go wild.’

  He shook his head dumbly. ‘I trusted you,’ he said. ‘You said you wanted to destroy the spell, but you’re the one who cast it, aren’t you? Was anything you told me true?’ He looked at her metal arm. ‘You said Chatham had done that to you. You said it was one of his experiments – and I’ve hated him for it ever since. But you did it to yourself, didn’t you?’

  She felt a spark of anger – he wasn’t the only one who had been disappointed. She tried to control her tone. ‘Yes. I did it. And I cast the spell.’

  In the cold silence that followed, she buried her face in a shaking hand that smelt of corpse dust. She forced herself to be calm. ‘Emris, we don’t have long. The spell doesn’t realise what’s happened yet. It’s used to Lena, so it’s clinging on to her for now. But once it realises it’s free—’

  The chamber was rent by a groan, a rattling of bones or jewellery. Constance saw movement from the corner of her eye. The dead were stirring.

  ‘The spell has been quickening for some time now – the gaps between the periods of activity are growing shorter.’ She stood up slowly, dust falling from her hunting gear. ‘If I accept the spell, I can stop this … and … I can bring Lena back, if that’s what it takes.’

  Emris hesitated, shook his head slowly as he lifted his ear from Lena’s chest. ‘She’s still breathing,’ he said, hope brightening his voice. ‘Her heart is beating.’

  ‘What?’ She blinked.

  ‘Stand back, Constance.’

  She stepped forward, instinctively disobeying his command, but was slammed against the wall and bound by invisible bonds. She thought to blast through the spell but Emris waved his arm in a broad arc and her cane flew from her hand, as if ripped by a strong gust of wind.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ she said, her voice tight and low.

  ‘As you refuse to, I’m going to destroy it,’ he said, his jaw set.

  ‘Emris, you can’t,’ she said, her eyes widening with fear. ‘You don’t understand.’

  ‘It’s Chaos, isn’t it? Haven’t I done this a thousand times before?’

  Nearby, an Ancestor started to lift its head, as if waking from a deep sleep. Constance watched, holding her breath, as eye-gems clattered to the floor – but then the head slumped back down and was still once again. How long before the spell untethered itself for good? Everything was slipping from her grasp.

  ‘Emris, it’s not the same. And you don’t have fifteen other hunters to help you. And, Emris—’ But with a sharp movement of his hand, his magi
c clamped her mouth shut.

  She would have said: If you destroy the spell, Lena will die.

  If you fail, the spell will destroy you.

  He reached out towards the storm cloud’s heart, invisible threads of power suspended between his fingers. He circled his palms around it – and even this simple act brought beads of sweat to his brow, his fingers trembling.

  She tried to shout out – but it was useless.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Cloud-heart

  Lena was searching, but the forest was empty. The trees stretched into the distance, cloud curling around their roots. Her boots disappeared into the mulch of the forest floor as she ran.

  ‘Where are you?’ she called, but her voice was swallowed in the silence. And what was she looking for anyway?

  She felt an aching pain between her lungs, and when she looked down she saw her chest cavity was open. Her heart was fluttering inside, grumbling and flickering with electricity. She frowned. A pair of wings separated from the tangle of blood and thunder, slowly, slowly. A butterfly crawled out. Lena watched with a kind of dispassionate fascination as it perched on her ribcage and flicked its wings.

  The butterfly flew from her chest and landed on a branch nearby, brass gleaming and wet with blood, a little cog whirring beneath each of its wings. It fluttered clumsily to the next branch off to the right, and Lena started to follow, pulling her old habit tight to hide her gaping chest.

  It felt like forever, but eventually she heard a voice.

  ‘Lena? Lena?’ It drifted from far above, like dappled light through the trees.

  There was a dead man slumped at the foot of a tree, his face hidden as if he had fallen asleep on his last watch. She knelt beside him – she wasn’t afraid. ‘What do I have to do?’ she asked. The storm cloud whirled between the trunks, the dead leaves rustling on the ground.

  He raised his head, and though his face was blackened and decayed, she did not turn away. ‘She who spins the cloud weaves the storm,’ he whispered, in a voice that smelt of sweetness and rot.

  And, at last, she understood.

  Lena woke to find the butterfly settled on her forehead, the realisation fresh in her mind. The butterfly fluttered out in front of her eyes, flapping and puffing wildly, as if trying to tell her something important. The pain in her heart and throughout her whole body was nearly unbearable – it was like someone had stretched her out, cracked her open.

  ‘Emris?’ She turned her head, grimacing at the movement.

  He was standing a few feet to her left, and she saw that he was holding a small storm cloud suspended between his hands, and sweat was pouring down his face, his three parallel scars shining in the gloom. The cloud growled and jolted, lashing out with streaks of blue lightning that threw ghastly light across the chamber.

  ‘By the power of Faul, I banish thee, Chaos,’ Emris said.

  The words, the rumbling cloud, spurred a memory. Lena looked down at her chest, expecting her heart to be bared – but of course there was nothing but her grey Faul’s uniform, dirtied and scorched by her adventures. The butterfly flapped over her heart, and fluttered pointedly towards the storm cloud.

  Then she realised. The cloud was her heart.

  ‘Emris, no!’ She managed to roll off the sarcophagus, landing hard and painfully on her stomach. She raised herself on to her elbows. Constance was unmasked and bound by some power to the wall, her lips apparently sealed, her eyes flashing angrily. Her cane – the pommel glowing – lay abandoned on the ground. The lamps flickered. All around, the dead stirred like restless sleepers.

  ‘By the power of Faul, I bind thee to the void,’ Emris said. Lena edged on to her hands and knees, her muscles juddering in protest, and pushed herself into a crouch. She could tell it was a struggle for Emris to force the words from his lips: the storm was restless, strong, flashing and bulging wildly between his hands. Lena staggered unsteadily to her feet. Her body screamed in agony and she felt her vision blur. She gasped, but clung to consciousness. The butterfly had settled on her shoulder and she felt with sudden certainty that her connection to the creature was the single thread that bound her to the spell, to life.

  ‘Emris,’ she cried. ‘If you destroy it, I will die!’ But he couldn’t hear her. He could sense nothing beyond his bubble of concentration; she could feel the surge of his power beneath her skin, fighting to master the storm spell. She had to do something – before he finished the incantation.

  ‘By the power of Faul, I bind thee—’

  Lena leaped at the storm cloud.

  It exploded at her touch, lightning arcing through the chamber in bridges of unstoppable blue-green light. Power surged through her, the pain that wracked her body disappearing under a jolt of pure euphoria. A heartbeat sounded in her ears. She felt whole again and breathed in deeply, absorbing the cloud back into her lungs. It settled inside her. And then the chamber cleared and she was standing over Emris, who lay motionless on the ground, his face frozen into shock, his eyes wide but unseeing.

  Constance fell to her knees, panting, the spell that had bound her now broken. ‘You fool, you stupid fool!’ she screamed, her voice faltering as she hurried to Emris’s side. She was not crying. If anything, she looked enraged. Lena couldn’t tell if she was shouting at her or Emris or herself.

  ‘Oh …’ Lena’s voice broke as tears streamed down her face unbidden. ‘What have I done?’

  But they didn’t have time. The dead were rising to their feet, and they had noticed the living in their midst. Lena turned round, quaking with fear at the haggard, fleshless faces, the collection of rattling limbs. The certainty that had filled her when she’d woken up was gone, but the dead man’s words still resonated in her ears.

  She who spins the cloud weaves the storm.

  Didn’t that mean … didn’t it suggest that she had to use the spell, to command it? But … how? How did she bring someone back from the dead? She didn’t want to animate a corpse – not like the rotting Ancestors who encircled them, closing in slowly like a knot pulled by hesitant hands. That was not life. That was the spell trying to feed itself by killing the living. She wanted Emris back, his smile, his spirit, his very self. She could barely believe she had lost him already.

  ‘Help me, Constance,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how to do it! Don’t you love him too? Please!’

  The woman’s face might as well have been masked for all it revealed. Doubt flickered across her eyes – and quickly hardened. And then she simply said, ‘No.’

  ‘No?’

  Constance rose to her feet, picked up her cane. The mask lay some distance away, surrounded by a clutch of the dead, and with a little quirk of her brow she appeared to accept its loss.

  ‘You have made your choices, all of you,’ she said, looking at Lena, her brother and the man she had loved. ‘There is nothing for me here any more.’ And, flitting past the few Ancestors rising in her path, she stalked out of the doorway.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Mother

  Constance ran up the spiral staircase and into the main burial chamber. Here the risen Ancestors walked in a slow procession up the steps – the trapdoors to the great hall already flung open. Once more, cries of fear drifted down into the darkness like the ghostly screams of owls. Constance hurried forward as she spied her mother’s hair, her long blue gown soiled but recognisable as she walked for the first time in eighteen years.

  Hope and horror tugged at Constance’s heart. Before she quite knew what she was doing, she had cried out ‘Mother!’

  To her surprise, the figure stopped. And when it turned, the last rays of daylight falling through the trapdoors from the great hall illuminated its face. The effect was different from mage-light somehow, as if the distant sun conferred a life of its own, even upon the dead. Constance could see her mother now. Although hollowed out and pale, a ghost of herself, the embalmers had done their work in preserving her likeness. The high cheekbones, the full lips, the skin a shade darker than Constance’
s, the hair a rich brown. The sapphires in her eyes even glittered a deep blue, lifelike. But it was false. This creature, gazing at her blankly in the semi-light, was not her mother.

  Constance cried out in renewed rage. Power drained from her in a torrent of grief. She had failed. And she was weakened: the effort of drawing out the storm spell had nearly brought her to the end of her resources. She held out her cane and pulled on her magic, a loose, churning thing inside her, as insubstantial as the foam on the sea around the islands of her mother’s home.

  In the moment before it was destroyed, Constance gazed one last time at the thing that had once been her mother. It almost looked as if it were about to speak. She let her magic loose, and the Ancestor crumbled to dust – the gemstones of its eyes clinking as they rolled on the stone floor.

  Constance hurried across the burial chamber, weaving in and out of the Ancestors and the empty graves. Tears streamed from her eyes, but she didn’t care. The masked priestesses had taught her how to lie, and be strong, and to hide her true self – and for what?

  Run faster.

  She dodged a grasping hand, stumbled, continued. She knew she could not fight every Ancestor in the crypts. She had to escape.

  Survive. Live.

  Meagre firelight from somewhere filtered down through the open trapdoors. The sun had vanished. Dusk had fallen. The Ancestors crowded around the stairs like a funeral procession in reverse, and Constance felt a needle of doubt.

  Can I really do this?

  But she hardened her determination.

  You have no choice.

  She spotted a small gap, barrelled through, choking as the impact with the corpses threw up foul-smelling dust into her face. She swung her cane at the Ancestor in front, allowing a little magic to weave through, strengthening the blow. The Ancestor fell and Constance surged up the steps. She was halfway to the top – but the Ancestors ahead of her were turning slowly, disapprovingly, as if she were an unruly child spoiling the sanctity of a funeral.