Corten saw the gleam of metal as the knife flew toward him, felt the wraith eater runes pulling at his bond. No. Not this again. He was not going to die again. He threw himself sideways and the world tore around him. Darkness and cold poured in and howling wind drowned out the sounds of fighting.

Corten fell back into the shadowy grasses of death.

“No!” He stood, his hands balling into fists. The knife hadn’t even touched him. How—

“Peace, spirit,” a raspy voice said behind him.

Corten turned and saw the shadow man standing among the grasses. “Peace?” he said. “Peace?” A humorless laugh tore from his throat. “Was this some sort of joke? Sending me back just so I could die again?”

“You are not dead,” the shadow man said.

“I—what?”

“Did you think we would invest so much in your return and not offer you any protection? We would not waste our power so. You did not die. You merely stepped into the fringe.”

Stepped? Corten looked down at his hands. He was still wearing Francisco’s borrowed clothes. Over the shirt he once again wore his vest of glass plates, and he could feel the weight of the sword tugging at his hip. Interesting. Had they somehow persisted in this place? Or had his mind re-created them upon his return?

So far as he knew, there were only two ways for a soul to enter death: either by traveling through a necromancer’s portal or by being thrown there by trauma great enough to separate it from its physical form. He had no body left to break from, and he was pretty sure he would have noticed if someone had opened a portal to death in the middle of the Talmiran palace. “How?” he asked.

“The details are beyond you,” the shadow man said. “My people have spent long in the fringe. We know it and have used our knowledge and our power to bind you here. The magic of the binding acts as its own portal, allowing you to slip between this place and the living world.”

Corten gaped as he tried to imagine the complexity of such a binding. “That’s impossible. How can I be my own portal? And what do you mean I’m bound to the fringe? Spirits have to be bound to a part of their body. You can’t just bind someone to a place, especially not this,” he said, waving at the gray-and-black expanse around them.

“I told you the details were beyond you,” the shadow man said blandly. “You should return to the other world now. If you stay here too long, your glow will draw the scavengers.”

“No,” Corten said. “I’m not going anywhere until I get some answers.”

“Then ask your questions quickly.”

“You said before that I was to be your agent. What did you mean? And what are you?” Corten asked.

The shadow man was silent for a moment. “It will be easier if I show you.” Before Corten could protest, the shadow man strode forward and placed one hand flat against his chest.

A flood of images filled Corten’s mind, flashes of runes, faces, voices. It was all chaotic and none of it felt as real as that first vision of the ritual. He stumbled away with a gasp. His head hurt. He felt like he had the first time he’d drawn too much aether, his body brimming with energy that threatened to tear him apart if he didn’t set it free. “What did you do?”

“I have given you what I know, and what my people have seen in the memories of the dead who pass through here. The one you hunt calls herself a queen. She seeks to claim sovereignty over all realms, even death. If not stopped, she will attempt the gatekeeper’s ritual. She will fail, just as those who tried before her failed. You saw the consequences.”

“What if she succeeds?” Corten asked, remembering the darkness that had spread in his vision of that ritual, withering flesh and cracking stone with the force of its passing.

“She won’t. The ritual is flawed at its very core. No mortal can control the doors of death. Trying warps the very fabric of reality.”

“What am I supposed to do about any of this?” Corten asked.

“We cannot touch the living world, so you must go in our stead. Find this self-proclaimed queen and stop her.”

“But if you can bind me like this, then why not do the same to yourself?”

“We have tried, but we are too deeply a part of the fringe now. We cannot pull ourselves back through the barrier.” A snarling roar sounded somewhere in the distance and the shadow man looked around. “You must go.”

The growl sent fear shivering through Corten. He had more questions but none he wanted to ask so badly that he would risk facing another scavenger. Besides, he had to make sure Naya and the others were all right. “How do I get back to the living world?” he asked. His head ached with the strange jumble of memories the shadow man had shoved into it.

“I have given you the answer. Think.”

“What? I—Oh.” One of the foreign memories flowed to the surface. Corten saw a set of runes in his mind, a binding that twisted around itself, echoing the patterns that now flowed through his own body. With it came an understanding that was more intuition than anything else. Corten raised one hand and focused his aether to draw a series of runes in the dark. Light trailed from his fingers to outline the shape of the runes in the air before him.

The runes felt familiar even though he was sure he’d never seen them before. As he traced the last line, he clenched his hand into a fist, as though to grab the last threads of energy and hold them tight. The darkness hummed with potential and Corten shivered at the sense of power. The energy he held didn’t feel like aether. It was almost as though he could sense it straining against his will, trying to break free.

Something was moving in the dark. It crawled on a dozen arms with joints in all the wrong places. No time. Corten tore his gaze away from the scavenger, then pressed his closed fist against the center of the floating rune binding and pushed. The runes burned brighter. They drew energy from him almost as fast as the wraith eater had.

For a moment it was as though he were straining against a heavy door. Weakness seeped into his limbs, but some part of him knew that light and life existed just on the other side of that door. He had to get back. He thought of Naya, of Lucia, of that terrible killing darkness the vision had shown him.

The door shifted—not by much—but enough to open a crack. Enough for him to slip through. Corten pushed forward. He felt himself stretching, straining against the pull of the fringe. Then he stumbled into a blood-soaked hallway and gasped in a breath of aether.

The floor was covered in corpses and the energy he absorbed stank of fear and death. But he was back. He glanced down. Though his sword and armor were gone again, he was relieved to see his clothes had remained. While they were talking on the ship, Lucia had mentioned creating a portal that let someone step physically into death. It seemed the shadow men had done the same with his new binding somehow.

Corten surveyed his grim surroundings. Soldiers lay broken across the hallway. He should have been horrified by the violence of the scene, but he felt only a sort of clinical detachment. Among the bodies he saw no sign of Naya or Francisco or the men who’d been fighting against the soldiers.

Those men. Another memory surfaced, this one of runes carved in flesh, glowing with aether. The runes on the arms and legs of the red-haired stranger and his companion weren’t exactly the same as the ones in the memory, but they were close.

Enhancement magic. Crude, but effective.

Corten blinked the scraps of memory away before they could distract him. Someone shouted from beyond the curve of the hallway. Corten looked around and spotted a small servant’s door. It had been left partway open and there was a smear of blood on the handle. Without giving himself time to question, Corten slipped through it and into the narrow hall beyond.