Since Gabriel’s involvement, the show had been revamped. Now there were things which Gabriel called batteries. He had about four of them that he and Nathaniel had constructed. They sat behind Nathaniel, and they powered light shows that Nathaniel would ignite throughout the show. Each was more impressive than the last.
But for the final image, Gabriel and Nathaniel had thought it best to go simple, and so after a waterfall of sparks and current bathed the stage, the entire area went dark.
It was pitch black outside by this time of the show, so no one could see anything.
Then, in the center of the square, a small light.
It was an electric powered lantern, something that Gabriel had cooked up. It glowed bright and yellow in Nathaniel’s hand. Nathaniel held the light up above his head.
“Light without flame,” he said.
The crowd oohed in response.
Nathaniel pointed at them. “It’s just like each of you. Each of your souls are lit up, but there is no flame in you.”
The audience was rapt. Nathaniel had them in the palm of his hand.
Don’t ruin it, Ezekiel thought. Thus far, Nathaniel was sticking to the script, but he might veer off any time.
“You are the light of the world,” said Nathaniel. “Shining out for everyone to see. These tricks that I do, they are impressive, but they are nothing compared to the power that is within each and every one of you.”
Tricks? Works. He’s supposed to say works. Ezekiel cringed.
“You have heard the holy men say that you must be a beacon in the dark world, that you must shine out your light to share the gospel of our Lord with all, have you not?” continued Nathaniel. “Well, we are in the darkest time we have ever faced. The revenants are looting our cities, and a necromancer sits on the throne.”
People in the audience were nodding in agreement. Good. This is the script.
“And you,” said Nathaniel, “you have suffered and toiled with no assistance. The emperor has sat in his mansion, dining on the best food, sleeping on silken sheets, and you have gone to bed hungry on straw mattresses.”
What? What’s this? He’s making this up. Ezekiel seethed.
“You have suffered, you have toiled, but you are still shining out your lights. You are the beacon of freedom in this world, and now we have a chance to make a difference. The necromancer is the most evil incarnation of the empire yet. We must tear him down. We must destroy the evil. We must shine our lights in the dark places. Who’s with me?”
A rousing roar came from the crowd.
Ezekiel buried his head in his hands.
But he raised his head at once when he felt a hand on his shoulder. It was Gabriel. He was smiling.
Ezekiel grimaced. “He’s rousing the crowd to turn against you.”
“No, he’s not. He specifically said ‘the necromancer.’”
“And after we take down the necromancer, he’ll sick them on you.”
“We’ll see,” said Gabriel. “One thing at a time, Ezekiel. Let’s remove the necromancer before we worry about my place on the throne.”
* * *
Michal was in the courtyard, walking amongst the revenants. They were still and quiet now, each standing at attention, staring forward. They were an army of silence and death. But she felt at home here. She could reach out with her essence and brush the essence of the revenants. She wasn’t as accomplished as Darius. She couldn’t meld them to her will. Not completely.
But she sensed that she’d be able to do that soon.
It was full dark except for the torches in the courtyard. Michal looked up at the night sky, at all the pin pricks of bright stars breaking through the inky blackness. The sky was vast, and she felt small. She had thought that she and Darius were big and powerful. She had thought that nothing could stand against them.
But now it seemed that the fabric of the universe was conspiring against them. Everything around them was breaking down. Everything was crumbling.
She wasn’t even sure who or what she was anymore.
Darius came outside of the mansion. He was coming for her. She could feel him before she could see him.
He walked straight for her, with a purpose. He didn’t need to look and see where she was. He could feel her too.
She waited for him.
He stopped in front of her, and the two faced each other, inches between their bodies. “Come inside.”
She tried to smile, but it seemed her face wouldn’t cooperate. “It’s nice outside.”
“It’s cold.”
“Is it?”
“Don’t you feel the cold?”
“Do you feel it?”
He sighed.
She looked back up at the sky, at the stars. They were glittering waves in a black ocean.
“I never wanted this for you.” His voice rumbled. “I should have known when you were starting to heal. I should have known I was changing you.”
This time she did smile. She lowered her gaze from the sky to his face. His gorgeous face. “I changed the moment I saw you. You woke something up within me.”
“That’s not what I mean, and you know it.”
She reached out and brushed his cheek with the back of her knuckles. “My beautiful Darius.”
He closed his eyes. “This can’t last, Michal.”
“It has to last.”
“No,” he said. “It’s all falling apart.”
“We’ll force it together then.”
He shook his head.
She closed the distance between them. Wound a hand around his neck. Kissed him deep and cold and long.
He sighed, his fingers tracing the curves of her body.
She pulled him down to the ground between the feet of the silent revenants.
They came together like a storm.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Leah stared out over the sea of tents that stretched out as far as she could see. They had an army, she realized. It hit her as she looked. An army.
They’d been traveling from city to city for weeks now. Every place they went, Nathaniel did a show. Every place that they went, more and more people joined their cause, following them to the next town, the next village. Always, they went south, back towards the capital.
There had been a few skirmished with roving crowds of revenants. One hadn’t been much—only ten or twenty of the things. They’d put that down fairly easily. The other had been a bit more complicated. They’d had some casualties. But mostly, they were doing quite well. And the revenants skirmishes were good practice for the real thing—which would be a huge battle at the capital city.
The men were being trained in fighting the revenants, which wasn’t quite the same as fighting another man. The revenants had to be killed by destroying the brain or by fire. The men would practice drills in the mornings. Gabriel led them usually, but sometimes it was Nathaniel or Ezekiel.
She was mostly relegated to an organizational role. Though no one had asked her to do so, she’d made it her business to make sure that the army was well fed and provisioned. She went to speak to the wives of farmers who were joining the cause. They donated food and livestock. Some of the women came along as well. Some to fight, some simply to help with the cooking and other tasks. They were an army, and there were so many people.
The success of Nathaniel’s campaign had placated Gabriel, but not Ezekiel. Gabriel seemed satisfied with the number of bodies. Ezekiel, on the other hand, was always trying to pressure Nathaniel to change his show and change his pitch. He wanted it to be more overtly religious and more overtly pro-empire. Nathaniel wasn’t having any of that. He didn’t want to be the messiah, as he’d explained many, many times. And he wasn’t pro-empire. If Ezekiel wanted things that way, then he’d have to run the show himself, Nathaniel would say. And—of course—that wasn’t an option. Ezekiel didn’t have an ounce of stage presence in his body.
Ezekiel was a grouch, Leah decided. She and Nathaniel sometimes sat up in their tent, giggl
ing together about how Gabriel could possibly find Ezekiel attractive. Nathaniel was completely flummoxed by it, but she could sometimes see it. Ezekiel was rather easy on the eyes, of course, which helped. But there was something else about Ezekiel that could be appealing, she supposed. He had a raw energy to him. It was fueled by anger, and it made him almost violent, but there was something untamed about him. Perhaps Gabriel wanted him the way that people wanted wild animals.
When she told this to Nathaniel, he thought she was crazy. Why would anyone want to be with someone like that? It wouldn’t be any fun.
It wasn’t about fun, though, she told him. It was about passion.
Of course, the conversation had ended rather abruptly after that, because Nathaniel had announced that he would show her passion, and then they’d been, well, busy.
For the most part, she agreed with Nathaniel, anyway. Ezekiel wasn’t really an attractive person. His attitude put her off.
At any rate, Ezekiel seemed to be having the last laugh about Nathaniel as the messiah, anyway. Everyone said it, even though Nathaniel refused to put it in the shows.
Nathaniel had theorized that the people must have thought he was the Son because someone in the gypsy traveling group was spreading the rumor. But no one was doing so now—not even Ezekiel, who’d been warned off it on Gabriel’s orders. And yet, the rumor persisted.
Leah heard it all the time. When she wound amongst the gathered men, checking to make sure that food and provisions were distributed, she heard them whisper that she was the wife of the Son. (She and Nathaniel hadn’t corrected people who thought they were married. They weren’t, of course, but it was easier to let them believe what they wanted.) She heard it when the men were huddled around camp fires in the evenings, when they watched Nathaniel prepare for his show.
They believed that Nathaniel was something special. They believed a complex web of mythology surrounding him. Some of it Leah thought traced directly to the teachings of the holy men. But other bits seemed to be wholly invented. She didn’t know where it came from.
They said that the first sign of God’s power was the revenants, who had conquered death and were still alive afterward. This was an inversion of the true story of the Lord, and his triumph over death. God had sent this message to the people so that they would know that they had inverted the true way of life, and that they must repent and change their ways.
Now, however, Nathaniel had come, which meant that God was done punishing his people. Nathaniel—the Son—would triumph over death in a truer way than the revenants had. He would bring a new life to all who died in the service of the Lord, so none who undertook this battle would truly die.
That kind of talk made Leah nervous. She didn’t talk to Nathaniel about it, because she knew it would only upset him. But she did go to Ezekiel and Gabriel. She wanted them to try to quell the rumors, tell the people they weren’t true.
Gabriel was all for it, but Ezekiel said that they couldn’t do anything that would shake their faith.
But the people would realize they’d had faith in vain when people actually died! Leah said.
Ezekiel pointed out that people had already died, and that hadn’t stopped anyone.
He was right, of course, and Gabriel grudgingly agreed with it.
So, Leah didn’t push the matter.
She went about her business, and each night, she came back to the tent that she shared with Nathaniel. Maybe she’d never officially forgiven him, but they were together now, the way she’d always wanted them to be together. And that gave her a sweet feeling of peace and happiness. She clung to him in the night when they slept, and he twined his arms around her. And that was all that she wanted. In those moments, she was whole.
* * *
“We’ll reach the capital tomorrow,” said Gabriel. He, Nathaniel, Ezekiel, and Leah were all in a tent, excluded from the rest of the army. It was late evening. The company had just settled in for the night to rest.
“Tomorrow?” said Nathaniel. “So soon? But we’re barely ready. And do we even have a plan? What are we going to do, just march up against the mansion and hope for the best?”
Gabriel raised his eyebrows. “Well, I’ve been giving that some thought. And unless one of you knows some secrets about the mansion that I don’t…?” He peered at Leah.
“Me?” she said. “Why would I know anything?”
He shrugged. “You’re the one who claimed to be snooping all over the mansion to help out the resistance, aren’t you?”
“I told you that I got too sick from my pregnancy to go much of anywhere. But I’m feeling better these days, so thanks for asking.” She folded her arms over her chest.
Gabriel laughed. “I was just checking. And I’m glad that your sickness isn’t so bad anymore.”
“It’s not funny.”
“Sorry.” Gabriel shrugged. “Anyway, if no one else has any ideas, I was thinking that we should sneak around the back.”
“The back?” said Ezekiel.
“Well, the city is surrounded by a wall,” said Gabriel. “But only on three sides.”
Leah furrowed her brow. “But the third side is the ocean.” The revenants didn’t ever attack through the water. No one was exactly sure why, but once they were submerged, that seemed to be the end of them. Whatever made them keep moving around after they were dead didn’t play nice with being under water. “We can’t get through the ocean.”
“We’d only have to be in the water for a few minutes to swim around the wall.” Gabriel spread his hands. “What do you think?”
“Well, how would it work?” said Ezekiel. “I mean, if we’ve got all these men descending on the capital, then we’re hardly sneaking, even if we do come in from the water. They’d see us.”
“Maybe we do it in batches,” said Nathaniel. “Maybe we divide up into smaller groups, and they don’t move until the other group has gotten clear.”
“Good,” said Gabriel. “And we move down the coast, not on the road.”
“The coast?” said Ezekiel. “But the revenants are roaming free there. We won’t have the protection of the fences.”
“I know,” said Gabriel, “but that’s almost better, because we’ll be cutting down Darius’s supply of revenants as we go. We’ll post guards, and we’ll keep watch. With so many of us, I think we’ll manage.”
“We’ll be fighting our way down,” said Leah. “It’ll be like the battle starts before we get there.”
“I don’t know,” said Nathaniel. “All the revenants are drawn to the necromancer, right?”
“Yeah.”
“So, they’ll be crowded up outside the capital, won’t they? They’ll be as close to him as they can possibly get. That means the path there should be relatively empty.”
“For our sakes, I hope you’re right,” said Ezekiel.
“So, does that mean you’re on board?” asked Gabriel.
Ezekiel nodded. “We’ll need to press any advantage we have. We can’t forget that the necromancer has an unlimited, untiring army of revenants. We’ve got a lot of bodies, but we’re human. I think we have a good chance, but it never hurts to stack the decks in our favor. So, surprising them from the water? I think it’s a good plan.”
“Me too,” said Nathaniel.
“Great,” said Gabriel. “So, what’s our next bit of discussion?”
“Does anyone care if I like the plan?” said Leah.
Nathaniel touched her hand. “Of course we care. What do you think?”
Ezekiel glowered at her.
She rolled her eyes. “It’s fine. You know, it’s just that you guys don’t pay any attention to me, and it’s not like I’m not going to be there.”
“No,” said Nathaniel, “you’re not. You and the other women will stay behind at the camp.”
“On the shore?” she said. “Without any men to protect us from roving revenants?”
Nathaniel rubbed his chin. “Well, that’s a problem,” he muttered.
; “I can fight too,” said Leah. “I killed revenants when Simon let them into the mansion, you know.”
“You’re pregnant,” said Nathaniel. “You’re not going into a battle.”
Leah sighed.
“The women can bring up the rear,” said Gabriel. “They’ll be in the last group, with enough men to protect them. They’ll basically just mop up whatever’s leftover.”
Nathaniel considered. “It’s not perfect, but I guess it’ll have to do.”
“It’s better than leaving them unprotected,” said Ezekiel.
“We’re not useless, you know,” said Leah.
“No one’s saying that,” said Nathaniel. “It’s a very important job.”
“Right,” she said. “So important that none of you will be doing it.”
The men all exchanged glances.
“I’ll do it,” said Nathaniel. “Like hell am I leaving you alone.”
That got a grudging smile out of Leah.
“So,” said Ezekiel, leaning forward, “when do we get started on this?”
“Tomorrow night,” said Gabriel. “We’ll get in position by the evening, and we’ll send the first group through after it’s full dark and everyone’s asleep.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Michal could feel things from the revenants, even when they were far away. She was more in tune with revenants that people these days. Being around the court made her nervous. She often had… urges when she smelled people. They all smelled so good.
She was becoming like Darius. They both knew it. She didn’t know if she’d contracted his virus from the times he’d bitten her or from the times he’d made love to her. Whatever the case, it had happened. She supposed she was lucky that she hadn’t contracted the illness the revenants had. She still had her wits about her. She wasn’t deteriorating into something mindless. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t unsteady.
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