Covenant of the Undying

Soren’s mouth was twisted and red in reflection, though everything was red in reflection. She caught glimpses of it against her will in the sprawl of nacreous oil-spill puddles beneath her feet. It smirked. She tasted cherry liquor. She could not remember drinking it. She failed to recall herself.

Soren tugged her hood up over her face and rubbed fitfully at her mouth. Her cheeks burned, her left boot heel was going a little funny, and the rain — though light and innocuous enough now that she could still see the blood moon through tufts of sanguine clouds — was like a fleet of arrow-headed icicles in the midnight cold.

But it was the spirits that undid her as she launched into the street and away from Lila’s bar, towards the heart of the Asphodel. They teemed in masses so thick it was nearly impossible on first glance to tell the living from the dead.

And they were ravenous, as though they could sense their own wrongness. They infested Soren’s mind like rats.

She gathered her magic in the pit of her stomach and muttered protective incantations to herself as she walked, low and slow, inaudible against the arrhythmic drumming of rain against tin and tarpaulin. It did not stop a near-constant swarm of spirits from raking claws against her insides. This did not bother her. She only needed her mind clear. Her body had never been of much use.

Soren felt a familiar tug deep in her gut every time a decaying spirit husk lunged for her. But she was too used to this treatment to be afraid. Or shocked, or offended. She knew why they wanted her.

Soren charged forward against the tide, guiding her way forward more with her magic than with her eyes. She had always been able to feel the act of blood pumping through a heart. It was her gift and her curse.

In her haste, she heavily shoulder-checked a living thing by mistake, taking it to be a spirit in the confusion of rain. She caught only one fleeting glimpse of a cleverly crafted grey hood, sodden from the rain. It was tailored so as to completely obscure the wearer’s face — a necromancer’s hood. She barely had it in her to grind out a half apology before she was swallowed anew by the incoming tide of passerby.

Soren frowned into her own hood of identical design. There were so few unbranded necromancers in the Asphodel these days, and fewer still who she did not know. But this —

There had been no heartbeat beneath that hood. Soren knew it the way she knew she breathed in and out twenty times a minute. She knew it the way she knew her own heart hammered.

Ten, twenty, thirty metres past — Soren still could not seem to massage away the tingle on her shoulder left behind by that small contact between meat and bone and cloth. It was as though the stranger had imprinted something upon her. She felt the ghost of its touch even as she slogged through the arms, appendices, small intestines of spirits. She did it hunchbacked and sideways, unable to quit her hand from massaging her shoulder. She did not have a word for it. She wanted to say that it ached, but it did not. It pounded, but it was still.

The hordes of tourists that crowded the market passed through the tight press of the dead, too. But they did not seem to notice that every pointed finger sank through sightless eyes and every craning neck cut through foaming jowls.

Soren dodged into side alleys and picked-clean market streets every chance she got, avoiding them like a plague worse than the angry dead.

Although she hated them — if she were honest with herself, she hated more what they represented — she understood what they were here to see. It was true that the blood moon was sickeningly lovely in the rain. And it was true that the Asphodel sparkled beneath it. This was how she’d fallen in love with it, once, too.

Her first time to the market, the blood moon had performed this same strange and beautiful alchemy on the rain, rendering it into paradoxical, glowing ash. Burning and cooling, burning and cooling.

The vendors still used the same old tarpaulins she remembered from childhood. The soft glow from their candles and mineral lamps threw great spindly shadows across them in bloody, verdant tessellations.

She used to spend bottomless hours here. She would amble along, afraid of neither the living nor the dead, staring in abject want at sets of buttery brass scales and crystal vials of deadly nightshades and lovely bits of carved onyx.

At first glance, nothing at all had changed. To her right, a shopkeeper with a skeletal hand lovingly weighed rubies and amethyst. Just ahead of her, a street vendor dressed head to toe in wrinkled velvet stuffed a brown paper sack full to bursting with roasted nuts under cover of a great tin roof.

The caramelite, earthen smell of it ripped a hole right through her. If she closed her eyes, she might as well have stepped back into that sweet country of childhood.

But now, things were tainted. Unclean. Down the darker, narrower alleys that wound out from the main road like spindly fingers, wickeder and filthier things lurked.

Soren was exceptionally well practiced at self discipline. So when she found herself craning her hooded head down a painfully familiar close, it was more masochistic than it was careless.

She jerked her head away almost as soon as she let herself look. She could not make out much of the peddled wares. But one look was enough; her mind filled in the rest. The images lingered in seething, photographic imprints on her eyelids every time she blinked.

She felt ancient. As though she was a visiting creature from a bygone age of antiquity. Once, it was sacrilege to desecrate the bodies of the dead.

Soren swallowed and felt her heart go down with it. The spirits felt it, too, it seemed; a swarm of them dove through Soren’s chest like an angry hive of hornets. She stumbled on her bad boot heel a little in shock. It took all her concentration to refortify her defences against the roaring dead. She had to reach up under her hood to wipe a thick film of sweat from her brow, though her rain-slicked leather glove only left her feeling more damp and more foul than before.

The alley wound itself even narrower and stranger the further she went — inward, now. The market wares here thinned. They grew more useful than lovely; their proprietors, more dead than alive. Here the dead traded in knowledge more often than things. Here damned bargains were made.

Soren shrank back further into her hood. She darted into the close that ran across from the main alley. She took a narrow and mouldering staircase, which deposited her on the terraced half-street-balcony above. Everything was scarlet and obsidian and stone, flat as a painting. Soren stretched her legs a little and stared mournfully at her boot heel gone funny before she set off at a brisk walk.

Up here, unobstructed, she fancied the moon kept pace with her. It peeked knowingly from behind waifish rainclouds, trailing her like a lover. She felt better for it. The blood moon settled something inside her that was otherwise irascible and ceaseless. She was glad of its company.

Soren could tell when she’d hit her mark by the shape of activity in the alley-market below her. It was not really the Asphodel anymore, but there was nothing else to call it. Anyway, the few tourists who found themselves here — she did not know whether by accident or miscalculated design— generally never lived long enough to tell about it. This was no man’s land. No maps were made here. No topological studies done. These hungry dead did not trade nor barter. They took.

Soren skidded herself to a halt. She did not even realise she was out of breath until she heard her own ragged gasping like a death rattle against the caustic night. She felt split between her body and her magic.

Every second heartbeat below bore the cattle-branded energy signature of Ravel Blackthorn like an omen. Soren told herself this new army of guardsmen did not know the turrets and nooks and crannies of the Asphodel like she did. She told herself they could not see her. But her own heart, frantic and useless, refused to listen. She felt abominably conspicuous.

Soren threw herself neatly behind a great carved gargoyle and tried to settle her heartbeat. She had once been able to mould it to her will like putty. Now, it only flopped and tumbled hopelessly when she so much as approached it with her magic.

The rain heaved and surged again, as if in response. It drummed on the outstretched wings of the gargoyle above her, poised like an infernal umbrella. Through them she had an unobstructed view of the flickering world below. The rain and the moon rendered those familiar alleyways into bloody oil slicks. But the latticework of tunnels and closes and nooks here were just as lovely as those in the Asphodel proper, hewn from the same stone. The market stalls here, too, huddled beneath tarpaulins and makeshift tin roofs. They were stashed untidily in niches beside pubs or below staircases.

It was the wares in those stalls that betrayed them for what they were. They staggered under the the weight of stolen flesh and bone. Filthy magic, proudly trotted out on a leash. In the open where elsewhere it lurked slyly in narrow old closes.

Soren swallowed bile and got to work.

She tracked heart beats for several claustrophobic, hateful minutes. Soren did not relish the kill. This was her job only because it could not be done by anybody else. But god, how she wished it could be.

She found her mark almost by accident. It was no wonder her body knew before she did; she would have known the sound of this heartbeat anywhere. Branded, arrhythmic.

Its owner, she knew fairly well. He was only a courier, but he had always been well liked by the guard. He was one of the few left with any kind of tenure. She was surprised his boss would risk him like this.

And he had never liked coming aboveground to begin with. The tourists made him nervous. Soren had once considered him thoughtful and conscientious for this. Protective of the Asphodel, even, as she was.

Soren grimaced. There was nobody but the gargoyle to see it. She told herself that she had made her choice, and he had made his. And now they must both suffer the consequence.

She coiled, ready to pounce. With her eyes, she saw only the acute corners of him: a bit of railing obscured his eyes and hair. He did something with a black-gloved hand and what she presumed to be his temple. She could not make out what. A salute? A self-comforting gesture of exhaustion? She could easily imagine both.

And in the time it took to do so, he died without preamble.

With her eyes, she saw only a confusion of the gargoyle’s winged, stony veins. When she blinked they tripled. When she blinked again, everything went black — fuzzy — warm and drug-like and still.

With her ears, she heard only the rain. It sounded musical and ordinary; for a bizarre collection of seconds she might have been anywhere else at all.

She felt the wrongness in her hands, for a moment. She felt it in her magic, for a moment. It coiled within her like a spiked rope. And then it was nowhere at all.

Then she felt it with her heart: her already-beleaguered heart. It beat so fast she could have sworn it vibrated. But it did not hurt. Nothing hurt; she was numb and absent. If anything, she was gently warm, as though free floating in an enormous bath.

Her shoulder, however, tingled.