Being in such close physical proximity to Mak’s death throes, Lanie’s body produced its echo-wounds almost simultaneously. First, a sting sprang to her nose. Second, twin gouts of blood spurted from her nostrils. Bitter froth that burned like venom gathered at the back of her throat; she gulped hard as her air passages crushed closed. She had to get out of the gallery while she was still mobile—or Mak’s passing might take her with him.
They’re only echo-wounds, Lanie reminded herself, swallowing panic along with a mouthful of rotten fruit-, rotten egg-, horseradish-flavored saliva. They’ll heal faster than real wounds. They’ll only kill me if I remain too close to the source.
Stumbling to her feet, she lurched toward the nearest door. But in her haste, she had forgotten Mak, felled in his sprawl. She tripped over his feet. More echo-wounds flared up as she made contact with his body, and she collapsed to hands and knees beside him, feeling as though the top of her skull were sloughing off. Something not tears dripped from her eyes: something viscous and obscuring.
Mak’s jaw locked as unknown poisons gripped his body, foam welling from nose and mouth. The corners of his eyes bled darkly. But the eyes themselves were clear and cold and open. And he saw her.
Mak saw her, and he turned his face to the wall—just as Aba had when she died.
Well, Lanie would not stand for it a second time. Not from him, who was not even kin, no matter what Nita said.
“No!”
The guttural, gravelly voice that burst from her throat surprised her. She had thought all those passages squeezed shut. But it wasn’t an entirely foreign phenomenon; she had made similar noises a few times in her life now. They were what her screams had deepened into after Nita made her leap from that window; the noise she’d made the morning she found her kitten Katabasis dead in her little box (it was ricin that time—no animal lived long in Nita’s house, nor any vulnerable thing Lanie loved too visibly); and then, that time when Nita tore the cloth head off Hoppy Bunny’s sock body, Lanie had gone to bed muttering in a voice like ground-up rocks: how she would learn so much death magic that her sister would never, ever be able to harm her or anything she held dear, ever again.
“Live!” Lanie commanded now, and it seemed as if her voice had doubled in its deepening, that she was speaking both with her throat and with something else, a second voice that defied physiology. Grandpa Rad never mentioned anything like it in his journals—but Lanie knew that her second voice was the sound of her death magic, just as surely as the smell of her death magic was citrus.
Mak was not all the way dead, not yet, so Lanie’s death magic could not compel him to listen and obey. Even if he were dead, she knew that her voice alone could never do the trick of raising him back up. For that, she needed ectenica, and even ectenica—if he were well and truly dead—would not last long.
But one thing was certain: he was dying. Part of him was alive, but many tiny, invisible, vitally important parts of him were dead already. And as those parts of him were dead, Lanie could use them. She could mix her living blood with his partially dead matter, and make ectenica that would obey her. And maybe—just maybe—that would be enough to teach his living body how not to die.
Already Mak was beginning to buck and shudder. Lanie hastily spat a mouthful of blood into her gray left hand and smeared it onto the scarlet-flecked spume on his mouth. Flecks of their mingled fluids began to glow blue.
“Gyrgardi Iddin Quadiíb!” Lanie growled, still in that doubled voice. She set both her hands on either side of his face, her breath trembling on his copper-sparked eyelashes. “Live! Live, damn you!”
Moving her left hand from his cheek, she pressed it against his chest. The dark gray of her wizard mark seemed to rise from her skin, like a mist, like silvery dandelion fluff going to seed. His heartbeat scudded against her palm: erratic, weak, an exhausted fugitive pounding a barred door in a blizzard as a slink of wolves closed in behind him. Lanie’s tears burned like scalding pitch. These, too, she directed into Mak’s mouth, where they sizzled blue. Her own heart, mimicking his as it died, was an awkward butterfly fluttering feeble wings against a tightening net.
She lifted her fists and pounded his breast, as he had done. Three times. Her own chest ached in protest.
“Live!” she shouted, her voice huge now, filling Stones Gallery. “Live, damn it! Damn you duodecifold, Mak Cobb or whoever! You will not take me with you!”
From miles and miles away, she heard the ghost in the padlock shout, “Yes! That’s the way, girlie! You show him!”
And then, a bright pink smell trumpeted up from the floor. The taste of death magic poured into her, as if she had dashed beneath a roaring waterfall of freshly squeezed grapefruit and opened her mouth. The tang cleared the rusty filth from her nose, the poison from her palate, expanded her throat, let her breathe again.
Her eyes flew open as if sparked apart by lightning. The room around her had turned yellow: the walls sloped away from the carpet at crazy angles, peeling back like petals and oozing a distorting amber sap that hardened and shone like jewels. This was the world as she saw it on a high holy fire feast day, when the panthauma of the gods boosted her own mortal magic. But she’d never experienced such a thing off-surge before, and never when merely making a simple ectenica.
Except, Lanie had never tried to make ectenica out of a (slightly) living person’s matter before. Had she bungled something? Or did this phenomenon have to do with the proximity of tomorrow’s surge?
She dragged her gaze back to Mak’s envenomed body—and saw a lady kneeling across from her, right at his head.
The lady had a quiet brown face, cowled all in gray. The train of Her gray cloak was made up of thousands upon thousands of small, intersecting bones. It seethed out behind Her, swallowing the parquet floor with a faint clicking sound. She held in Her cupped hands a restless, wild, furious thing that beat and fanned its wings, that struggled and strained and strove.
Lanie had never met the lady before. But she had seen Her likeness in countless statues and murals and shrines. She knew Her. She knew that hoarfrost stillness.
“Back!” she growled, surprising herself. “You stay back. You’re not invited.”
Not the traditional way to talk to one’s god, perhaps. Certainly not to Doédenna, Saint Death. But Lanie figured the lady was probably only phantasmagoria anyhow, brought on by whichever hallucinogenic toxin Mak had taken from Delirious Stones’s poison cabinet and passed on to Lanie through her allergy.
And if She weren’t, why then, Saint Death had already seen and heard everything under the starry spheres, and nothing Lanie said or did could possibly surprise or offend Her. At least, Lanie hoped not.
The hallucination/god considered her.
“I mean it,” Lanie warned, speaking not only with her mouth but her other voice. “He’s not for you. Not yet. And—in case you’re considering it—neither am I.”
When the lady said nothing, only tilting Her head as if to invite further comment, Lanie relaxed a little. The hallucination/god did not look unreasonable. But neither did She look like She was leaving.
Lanie tried coaxing instead. “Oh, come on. You’ll get Your turn, Doédenna—eventually! What’s a few more years between friends, hey?”
Doédenna smiled at her. It was a fond smile, broad and sudden and friendly in Her otherwise still face. And it was so very particularly directed at Lanie—with a wry squint at the corners of Her eyes, and the barest hint of a nose wrinkle—that Lanie grinned back.
We really are friends! she realized breathlessly. What’s more—we always have been!
With a slight shrug, Saint Death opened Her palms and released the shadowy thing She held. The bird—if it was a bird; it certainly suggested a bird, one not unlike the peregrine falcon Mak became at Nita’s whim, only this one was made of smoke—flew free, passing right through Lanie’s breastbone and out the other side. It swooped three times around their heads, then dove straight down, through an invisible seam in Mak’s clamped lips, and funneled down his throat, where it disappeared.
Saint Death smiled at Lanie again. She gave her a slight wave of the fingertips, followed by an even slighter nod that slammed Her cowl over Her face, concealing it in a caul of bone. Her infinite cloak collapsed around Her in a clickery-clackering heap. Then it, too, vanished—along with the smell of wild pink grapefruit and the deep yellow tint and the many-petaled walls.
Gone.
The world’s rhythms resumed.
Mak’s heartbeat drummed steadily beneath Lanie’s left hand. The rigidity was fleeing his muscles. He sighed like a trusting child in his sleep.
“Well.”
Shaken, but a little smug, Lanie wiped blood from his face, and from her own. “That’s all right, then. We’re okay, Mak.”
She leaned over him, examining him for signs of consciousness. None so far.
“Next time you kill yourself,” she whispered in his ear, “do it when I’m not looking.”
Mak gasped, his eyes flying open.
Lanie reared back, reading in his face an indescribable horror at what she had done. She started to stammer an apology, hardly realizing why, but footsteps came thudding outside the gallery.
Lanie flung herself backwards and scuttled towards the plinth, where the deathly chill of the Sarcophagus of Souls awaited her.
On the floor where she left him, Mak was struggling to sit up, to meet his foe on his feet—but he was too weak; he had fainted dead away before Lanie had even reached the Sarcophagus’s shadow and disappeared into it, curling herself pillbug-small.
Nita burst into the gallery, the Bryddongard blazing on her upraised arm, lighting up the dark room. After that first silver flash, the blaze narrowed to a silver beam, which began moving, scanning the long dimness of the gallery from one end to the other, at first indecisively, as if unsure there was anything left to find, and then with more confidence. Finally, it focused on the supine figure on the floor in front of the poison cabinet.
For a moment, all Nita could do was stare—at Mak, at the broom beside him, the shattered panes of the cabinet door—and then she ran to him, and flung herself to her knees.
“Goody! Goody—help him. Do something! Make him better! That’s an order! A command! I conjure you, in the name of Even Quicker Stones!”
Goody Graves, compelled by the ancient spell that bound her to obey a Stones’s command, set her mop in its bucket, lumbered over, squatted, scooped Mak up into her arms, and slung him over one massive shoulder. Nita sprang to her feet.
“Yes. T-take him to my bed. Fetch him whatever he needs. I will care for him.”
At last—at last!—they were gone.
In the shadow of the Sarcophagus of Souls, Lanie rolled onto her back and expelled a shuddery breath. She was filthy, coated with blood and sputum and flop sweat. And she felt raw. Like someone had just skinned her with oyster shells4.
She was also irritated at her sister. What, did Nita think Mak could swallow a regiment’s worth of poison and survive it all by himself, suffering no worse a consequence than a certain poetic limpness? Yet Nita hadn’t—not even once—glanced around to see if her necromancer sister might be skulking around in the shadows, saving the day.
Lanie harrumphed quietly to herself, the gravel gone from her voice. Grandpa Rad loosed a low whistle.
“Bless my soul or what’s left of it. I must say, Miscellaneous Stones, for once in your life you’ve impressed me.”
The shock of pleasure Lanie took from this acknowledgement was so sharp it felt like panic. “I have?”
“You brinked him, that’s what you did.”
She filed away this new vocabulary for reference. “I did?”
If the padlock had had eyes to roll, it would have rolled them. “Brinking, stupid! It’s when you pull someone back from the brink of death. Very useful in my day. During the Northernmost War, we’d take any Skaki spy we’d seized and put ’em to the question. Sosha Brackenwild wanted information, certainly—but he also liked to toy with ’em. Didn’t like it to end, if you see what I mean. So he’d bring those Skaki bastards right to the point of bleeding out. Then—just when they thought they could die and get away with it—Sosha would have me brink ’em. Bring ’em all the way back. Let ’em recover a bit. Do it all over again.” The ghost chuckled dryly.
Lanie swallowed, tasting the after-echoes of the poison again.
“And so you’ve done today,” he congratulated her. “Yon bird-man lives, no thanks to his efforts. Thought he could escape a Stones! Ha!”
If he’d been corporeal, Lanie was sure Grandpa Rad would have pumped his fist in victory.
“You did all that—and off-surge, too!—and I never even taught you how! Well, of course, you probably read all about it in one of my treatises. Not that I’ll ever hear a word of thanks from you, ungrateful girlie that you are. But! Praise where it’s due and all that. I’d do no less for a dog who finally did a trick right for the first time in his pathetic life. Well done, Miscellaneous Stones. Well done.”
But, remembering the expression in Mak’s eyes when he woke inside his living body, Lanie was not so sure.
4 Decortication by oyster shell was the manner in which Delirious Stones ultimately met her untimely death. She was mourned by dozens of nobles from the royal court at Castle Ynyssyll but not at all by their spouses, whom she had cuckolded, boastfully, repeatedly.