THE WORLD AROUND me melted into nothing.
This man’s soul didn’t just touch mine—it overwhelmed it. His soul moved like mercury, oozing more than glowing. It touched my skin, then sank past it, into my flesh, into me.
I felt him—everywhere.
It was a violation beyond any I could imagine. I could not move. There was nowhere to run. I could not escape him.
He was inside me.
My mind screamed and screamed. I tipped my head back, my throat still gagging, my stomach churning, trying to vomit him out, but this was not something I could control.
I was no longer something I could control.
My right hand rose. I did not will the movement. He did. I felt his thoughts—not in words, but the intention. I tried to jerk my face away, but I couldn’t so much as flinch as he raised my hand, stroked my cheek.
I felt his amusement inside me. His laughter.
I felt him settle into me, growing comfortable and at ease with this violation. With me as nothing but a vehicle. I felt his satisfaction. His pleasure.
Like a cat with a bowl of cream, my mother would have said.
I felt him reach out at that, my memory of my mother.
No! my mind screamed. I could not control my body, but my memory, my heart, they still belonged to me.
He pried deeper. I felt him there, looking through my soul, sorting out my feelings. Knowing me in a way I did not even know myself.
Mine, mine, mine, I thought. I felt warm tears trailing down my cheeks, leaving cold streaks behind. Mine.
I pushed back—hard. And it was then I realized that when he forced my mind to open, he left his mind vulnerable to me. I felt his memories. It was more than images. Traces of scent, feelings, sounds and whispers half-heard. It was not like being told what a moment felt like, or seeing a painting of a scene. It was as if he was giving me his memories, depositing them into my own brain. It was as if I had lived the life he showed me.
And it was then that I finally knew him.
“Bennum Wellebourne.”
The name escaped my lips before he realized how deep into his own soul I’d pushed. He pulled back so abruptly that for a moment, my body felt bereft. I crashed to my knees, not registering the pain as I fell prone among the disturbed graves. Grey cried out and swooped to help me stand.
“Ned?” he whispered, his hands warm and firm on my trembling arm as I staggered up.
“It’s him,” I struggled to say. “It’s Wellebourne.”
Grey’s eyes darted from me to the man before us, the man we’d both thought was Emperor Auguste.
I had barely skimmed his black soul, but the memories lived in my head as if I had experienced his life as well. Born in Miraband, sent by Emperor Aurellious to help settle the new colony on Lunar Island. I hoped and feared during the voyage, then had different hopes and stronger fears as the land proved difficult to conquer. I felt myself fall in love with Wellebourne’s wife. I married her, and I built a home, and we lived together.
And I felt the oppression of the Empire, and the desire—unquenchable as a house fire—for freedom. As my colony, my people suffered under terrible weather and sickness, as they died from lack of support from the Empire that had sent them, my desperation grew. I studied—not to be a necromancer, but to save my—his—people. I felt the echoing laughter, because the reason he became who he became was so similar to my own.
The desperation. The power.
The hunger.
I felt it all. I lived it all. And without being told, I knew. I understood. I even agreed with all Bennum Wellebourne had done.
I felt the bone saw and the blood splatter as I took my wife’s hand to form my first crucible. I raised the dead. I rebelled against the Empire.
And I lost.
“When you were finally defeated,” I said, twisting the last word like a knife, because I knew it would hurt him like one, “you sawed off your own hand.”
“What?” Grey asked, confusion dripping from his voice.
The Emperor—Bennum Wellebourne—smiled. “It worked rather well,” he said. “Centuries of protection.”
I didn’t take my eyes off Wellebourne as I filled Grey in. “Wellebourne was caught, and put in the iron prison at the castle.”
“Ironic, that,” Wellebourne said idly, “getting trapped there again, in this body.”
I ignored him. “Wellebourne sawed off his own hand. Everyone assumed he was trying to make another crucible, using his hand as the base. But that’s not what he made.”
“What did he make?” Grey asked.
“A reliquary,” Wellebourne answered. “It’s when a necromancer takes a piece of his soul and hides it in an object.”
“As long as the object isn’t broken,” I add, “the necromancer can’t die.”
I thought of all the shattered gems and cracked metal I’d seen on the Collector’s shelf. The necromancers who’d made those reliquaries had given their souls precious, showy homes. But there was genius behind Wellebourne’s reliquary.
It was protected there, safe. A crucible cage was hard to destroy; a crucible almost impossible. Destroying Governor Adelaide’s crucible had taken all my strength, turned my hair white, and left me weak and trembling, and that crucible had been cracked and old and almost lost to time anyway.
Wellebourne had left the crucible cage with his family, along with instructions for his descendants to protect it, giving them the task that, almost two centuries later, Master Ostrum would uphold. As long as that crucible cage existed, Bennum Wellebourne could never truly die.
It did not matter to him at all when they hung his body, when they burned his corpse.
His soul was free.
“How many?” I asked. I felt Grey shift beside me, so I added for his benefit, “How many bodies have you lived in?”
Wellebourne rolled his hand dismissively. “I’ve lost track. Emperor Aurellious was the first, of course.”
Of course he had—how had I been such a fool not to realize sooner? Hadn’t I seen the municipal building in Miraband, the one where Aurellious conquered death? That hadn’t been Emperor Aurellious at all. That had been Wellebourne. And he had been right. He had conquered death.
He had originally wanted Lunar Island to be free from the Empire, but once he ruled the Empire, his goals changed.
“I’ve been several emperors, and quite a few empresses,” Wellebourne said, a note of pride in his voice. “But politics grow tedious.”
Grey’s brow was furrowed. “That’s why the Empire is always expanding. You fight wars when you get bored,” he said.
Wellebourne smiled as if pleased Grey understood. “Exactly,” he said. “Sometimes I bounce between the sides, general to general. It’s more fun that way.”
My mind battled with my memories and his; touching his black soul had stained my own. I remembered, as Wellebourne, flitting between bodies. Sometimes a woman, sometimes a man. Gender didn’t matter to him; flesh was flesh. He took lovers. He married. He had children—those he sired, and those he bore.
And when he was done with that life, that experience, he disposed of the body and took another.
He learned. Languages, art, music.
War.
“That’s why you’re a war hero,” Grey snarled. “It’s easy to risk everything and charge into battle, knowing you cannot truly die.”
He can’t die, I thought. But like my revenants, he’s fading. He had more power than them, more control, but a soul was meant for one body alone, and once that body was gone—or once that soul was in someone else—it was an imperfect fit. The soul grew tired. It’s what Bunchen and the Collector had both warned me about. The trade-off of the immortality a reliquary provided was a soul that would grow weaker over time.
I could see it all in my mind’s eye. As time wore on, Wellebourne’s soul had grown thin. He pored over the books in his private library. His reliquary was safe—he even checked on it occasionally, ensuring that his descendants took seriously the responsibility of protecting the crucible cage that contained his soul. Even so, his soul was weakening, and with it, his power.
He needed replenishing.
Wellebourne cocked his head. “I tried, at first, to take younger bodies, even though that was foolish. No matter how young the body, my soul is old.”
I looked at the body he was in now, Emperor Auguste’s. So much about him made sense now. A celebrated strategist and war hero against some of the rebellious tribes—he was hailed as a prodigy by everyone who didn’t know he’d already had centuries of practice at war.
“How young was Auguste when you took him?” Grey asked, his voice tight with anger.
“A few years,” Wellebourne said. “Childhood is tiresome, but it can be entertaining. No one ever suspects the innocent toddler of sabotaging his playmates.”
I wondered then at what horrors his nursemaids had seen, and how they had to hold their tongues. Their young charge was richer and more powerful than they ever would be. The child they bathed could put them to death.
I felt Grey tense beside me. “You have everything. You’re the Emperor, for Oryous’s sake! And immortal. What more could you possibly want?”
My hand gripped the crystal knife.
Wellebourne saw.
“Yes, exactly,” he answered me.
“He needs power,” I said aloud for Grey.
“Especially after all my plans with Adelaide fell apart,” Wellebourne said. “I was . . . disappointed by the way she went rogue. But of course, I had learned long ago to never put all my hopes in one person.”
I recalled, as if it were my own memory, getting a letter from a poor book merchant who lived in a remote village in the northern part of Lunar Island. Papa’s letter, the one he’d written about me, begging for a chance to send me to Yūgen Alchemical Academy. Bennum saw the potential in me even if my father didn’t. No. He saw the desperation. Because that was what he had been when he became a necromancer. Desperate.
What struck me the most was that I wasn’t the first. There were others—a boy in Siber, a teenager in Enja, a rebel leader on the mainland near Roc Wynt. They had all shown my same potential. They had all been tested.
And so had I. The alchemists who came through the village with their golden crucibles and entertained my curiosity had been sent by the Emperor. One of the village Elders was interviewed and paid for his assessment of me.
And I had been found lacking.
Bennum had focused on Adelaide. He’d given her everything she needed to become a necromancer. My stomach twisted with rage. She had not had to sacrifice anything, anything at all. Knowledge, guidance—even a crucible had simply been handed to her.
“The plague,” I gasped.
“Of course,” he said.
I looked around me, at the graves sprinkled with iron rings, forcing the souls of the dead to lie waiting beneath the earth. All those iron rings—they had been Wellebourne’s idea, not Governor Adelaide’s.
All those trapped souls were for him.