Omar gave the warrior a tired look. “Have you ever held a seireiken before? Do you know anything about them?”
“What’s to know? Blade is hot, don’t touch. This I know.”
Omar’s shoulders sagged. “Your mother never taught you how to contain and subdue a captive soul, did she?”
“No, why?”
Omar tightened his grip on the seireiken, wishing he had something precious to smash on the ground to express his true feelings about the situation. “Fine! Fine, I’ll stay and deal with this. Let’s just be quick about it, all right?”
Koschei smiled a hideous grin of cracked lips and broken teeth. “Whatever you say, Grigori!”
They jogged up to the graveyard gate and Omar saw that the corpse standing in their way was barely moving now, and its skin had none of the icy sparkle of the ones he had seen in Targoviste or at the north gate of Constantia.
The aether is melting after all. Just not fast enough for my taste. If only we had a chain for this gate! This is all so uncivilized!
Omar cut down the dead man and stepped inside the graveyard. It was a small place full of stone mausoleums and paved walkways, a tiny city for the wealthy dead. But most of the stone doors had been pushed open and several dozen crooked men and women stood scattered across the area, moaning softly and dragging their feet along the paths.
He rubbed his forehead to ward off the imminent headache. “All right, just grab a stone or brick or something and knock them down as fast as you can.”
“Of course.” Koschei jogged away to the left and snatched up a rock on his way to attacking his first corpse.
Omar moved more slowly. In broad daylight, the faces of the dead were far clearer and in the heat of the sun they were all in far worse states of decay. Their dried flesh hung in tatters from their cheeks and arms like shredded clothing. The immortal Aegyptian squinted and held a handkerchief over his mouth and nose as he worked his way down the paths, hacking apart the barely moving bodies at arm’s length as quickly as he could without getting bits of them on himself.
The dead people offered no struggle. They didn’t run to attack him or to escape him. They simple stood there and let him cut them down.
When he was done, Omar returned to the gate where Koschei was sitting, picking his nose. “You’re sure you got them all?”
The Rus man nodded. “Pretty sure.”
“Good enough.” Omar glanced back one more time at the quiet little necropolis of neatly built stone houses and neatly arrayed stone paths, and the dismembered corpses scattered all over them. “I don’t want to be here anymore.”
Chapter 23. Whirlwind
Wren stayed back as Tycho fired his gun again and again into the dark gap in the broken door. Every time a pale face or empty eye socket lunged into view, the little major’s revolver would bang and the rotting skull would burst apart and disappear.
“I’m almost out,” Tycho said.
There were two other soldiers beside them with rifles aimed at the doors, but neither of them had fired. Wren glanced at the young Hellans and saw their hands shaking and lips moving with silent prayers.
“We can barricade the door with the tables and things!” Wren pointed back at the office furniture in the middle of the room.
“Yes, a barricade!” Tycho fired again. “Go, go!”
Wren let go of his hand and ran back to the office area where the makeshift war room had frozen in the middle of its business as every bloodless face stared in horror at the doors slowly cracking apart from the outside.
“The tables! Get the desks, grab everything, use it to block the doors!” she shouted.
One by one, the clerks and servants blinked back to life, cast frightened nods at one another, and began lifting the tables and scrambling like drunken crabs to carry the furniture to the doors. The pale Italian slowly stood up, drew his golden rapier, and staggered after them.
“Miss Wren?” The Duchess stepped gracefully out of the way of four men with a chest of drawers. “I understood this particular crisis to be over. You subdued Baba Yaga, didn’t you?”
“I did, and this isn’t her fault,” Wren said. “Well, I mean it is, but it’s not a new problem. You see, Yaga did wake up the corpses from the graveyards for hundreds of leagues all around, that’s true, and she did twist up those poor souls pretty badly with her nightmares, but she didn’t create them, and she didn’t control them. She just woke them up, is all.”
“Ah.” Lady Nerissa nodded calmly. “So then, all of the dead souls that she woke up will continue to walk the earth on their own until something or someone stops them?”
“I’m afraid so.” Wren glanced at an over-turned chair by her foot. Part of her wanted to grab the chair and rush to help build the barricade, but the rest of her wanted to stay as far from the doors as possible.
And besides, one more chair won’t make any difference.
A young man shrieked, and the sound echoed through the dark hall, bouncing and bouncing again from every angle. Wren winced and spun about, trying to find the source of the cry, and she caught sight of a clerk on the far side of the office area pointing not at the doors where Tycho was directing the construction of the barricade but to another pair of doors at the opposite end of the room. The doors were open and three corpses stumbled through them, grunting as they clawed at the stale air.
Nine hells!
“Hey! We need that there, I mean, back there! Go, that way!” Wren waved and pointed frantically at the open doors as she tried to catch the attention of the servants still rushing to block Tycho’s doors. A half dozen of them saw her and turned to look where she was pointed, and a chorus of panicked curses and shouts erupted from their pale lips.
“Come on, there’s only three of them!” Wren grabbed the chair at her feet and rushed across the dark chamber, splashing through the cold puddles as quickly as her long black skirts would allow.
Two more corpses staggered out of the doorway. And then another.
Wren glanced over her shoulder to see if anyone was following her, and her heart dropped into her belly when she saw only two young men with chairs and candlesticks jogging halfheartedly in her wake. They were at least a dozen paces behind and falling farther behind with every step she took.
Oh gods, I’m alone.
Wren splashed to a halt in the middle of a puddle and threw her chair out in front of her, perhaps in the hope that it might make the dead men and women stumble for half a second. But the six corpses shuffled forward faster and faster, parting to pass around the chair on both sides, their rotting faces hanging apart on threads of skin and strings of muscle, their filthy bones exposed around their eyes and fingers.
All six of them reached for her.
All six of them stared at her with frozen black eyes.
All six of them moaned with frozen black tongues.
“No!” Wren threw up her arms, praying that there was enough aether in the sunken chamber to form a solid wall in front of her.
The thin wisps of white vapor on the floor rushed forward and upward like a wave, but instead of rising into a barrier, it swept on through the six corpses like a hurricane. Wren watched in wide-eyed wonder as the aether wind tore at her stumbling attackers, forcing them backward with their arms raised to shield their frostbitten faces. Then one of the corpses collapsed to the floor, and Wren, with arms still raised to guide the aether, stared at the pale ghostly shape that washed out of the fallen body.
Then a second corpse fell, tipping over backward very slowly and gently until it smashed into a puddle of filthy water in a depression in the floor, and again, Wren saw the dim face of a ghost flying away into the shadows.
Nine hells! I’m knocking the souls right out of their bodies? Is that even possible? I mean, it must be, obviously, but still, shouldn’t Omar have warned me I could tear a soul from a body? Unless, he didn’t know…
Wren dropped her arms to her sides for a moment to rest her shoulders and stumble back from the fou
r remaining dead men and women, who tottered uncertainly on their frozen legs and then began stumbling toward her again.
“Stay away!” She shoved both hands toward just one of the corpses and the resulting blast of aether knocked the fragile ghost of an old woman free of the body, which smashed down to the floor. The shadow form of the woman hovered above her desiccated corpse for a moment, and then vanished.
I can stop them. I can stop all of them!
Wren shoved her hands out toward the remaining corpses, her silver bracelets jangling as they slammed against her wrists, and she hurled the aether through the frozen bodies to yank the souls free and send them drifting into the darkness. The last three bodies slumped to the floor in a haphazard pile of black and white and blue limbs gleaming dimly with aether crystals in the torchlight.
She glanced over her shoulder and saw the two porters still standing a few paces behind her, clutching their chairs and candlesticks. “It’s all right,” she said. “They can’t hurt us now.”
The young men slumped forward with exhausted smiles and set their chairs down.
Wren looked out across the dark cavernous space to the far end of the room where Tycho and the others were still piling furniture up against a single pair of doors. She waved at them, knowing that they couldn’t possibly see her in the gloom, and called out, “It’s all right! I can stop them! We’re going to be all right! Don’t worry!”
“Miss!” one of the porters cried.
Wren saw him pointing over her shoulder and she turned to look over the bodies of the six soulless corpses to see three more dead bodies rush out of the open doorway behind her, with more shadowy forms rustling in the darkness beyond them.
“Everybody get behind me!” Wren shouted as she backed toward the office area.
If I can knock a soul free of a dead body, it can’t be much harder to knock one free of a living body, can it? I need to be careful. Very, very careful, or I might kill everyone in the room.
She kept her eyes on the dead people pouring out of the ancient doors. On and on they came, more and more frozen and rotten faces plunging out of the shadows.
Where on earth are they all coming from? There really must be nine hells after all!
The new wave of corpses moved faster than the last, stumbling and loping as quickly as their frozen legs would allow, their fingers fixed in icy fists and claws, their crystallized eyes locked open, their blackened tongues raised behind yellow teeth, and all of them moaning and grunting as they raced toward the warm bodies in the light.
“Stay behind me!” Wren yelled over her shoulder.
Woden, be my shield!
She swept her arms left and right, dragging thin waves of aether back and forth across the floor to knock the corpses from side to side, and occasionally ripping a ghost free to let its body crumple to the floor. But with each sweep of her arms, the aether drifted a bit farther away into the darkness, leaving it a bit thinner and weaker as it struck the oncoming wave of dead bodies.
The chamber was enormous and the distance between the doors and the torches would have taken a healthy man several long seconds to run across on warm, living legs. The corpses limped and ambled at a fraction of that speed, but still they moved faster than a mere walk, and they spread outward from the doors, slowly filling the vast ballroom with groaning, stumbling figures.
And the first of them were about to reach the torchlight.
Guns began to fire, some of them booming right in Wren’s ear, making her wince as her head filled with watery white noise. Men were shouting behind her and small objects began flying over her head toward the corpses. Chair legs, candles, pens, knives, ink wells, jars, and even a boot or two whizzed by her, nearly hitting her tall ears more than once.
Wren wrapped her fingers together, turning her hands into one massive fist, and she swung both arms together through the air, trying to coax all eight bracelets into resonating through the aether one last time, but the otherworldly mist was simply too thin now and it barely nudged the corpses sideways as they rushed into the light.
The body of a middle-aged man lunged at her, and she threw up both of her arms to shield her head as she closed her eyes and hoped…
Eight silver bracelets veined with sun-steel crashed together as she crossed her arms, and they resounded with a horrible metallic whine. Wren opened her eyes and jerked her face back from her arms and the noise coming from the trinkets on her wrists, and then she saw the corpse standing just in front of her, wobbling in place, stutter-stepping sideways.
The sound!
She crashed her arms together again and again, letting the bracelets ring out with their buzzing, hissing, growling whines. And with every crash, the dead bodies stumbled and turned and tripped and fell. But only for a moment. As the ringing died, the corpses recovered, crawling back up to their feet and turning back toward the clerks and soldiers gathered within the ring of torches.
“Wren!” Tycho appeared at her side, fumbling with the bullets for his revolver. He snapped the gun shut and pointed it at the dead men and women. “Get behind me!”
He fired twice and two corpses slumped to the floor. But in the shadowy corners of the room, Wren’s keen fox eyes saw the dead bodies still pouring in through more and more doors by the dozens, by the hundreds. She clutched Tycho’s shoulder to steady herself as she stared at the countless dead faces stumbling toward her out of the darkness.
Aether. I need more aether! How? HOW???
And a familiar voice whispered to her, “Draw it up from the earth.”
Wren’s eyes snapped to her finger where the slender ring of Denveller gleamed with coppery gold.
“Is that… Hrist?” Wren asked. She frowned at the ring, not certain when she had last heard Hrist’s voice. She had always been the quietest of the Yslander ghosts.
“It is I,” the dead vala answered. “Draw the aether you need up from the earth using the bracelets.”
“How exactly?”
“Sit on the ground,” Hrist said. “Place your palms on the ground, and shiver your soul just as you do when you move the aether around you. But this time, imagine the shivers rippling upward through your body, like ripples on the surface of a lake when the wind blows straight across it.”
“No, not straight across,” a second voice said from the ring.
“Kara?”
“Yes, Wren. Do as Hrist says, but picture the shivers spinning around you like a water spout, rising as it spins, faster and faster. Do it now!”
Wren jerked away from Tycho and ran to the center of the office where Lady Nerissa stood calmly, though very pale, surrounded by her servants. Wren dropped to the cold floor and placed her hands on the damp tiles. Closing her eyes, she tried to forget about the yelling and the shuffling and the gun shots.
Making her own soul shiver was easy enough. Over the last few months, it had almost become a comfortable reflex from her long hours of practice with Omar’s guidance. It then took several moments of effort to make the tiny ripples in her ghost start to turn, to revolve around her, sweeping over her skin from right to left like a wave of gooseflesh, faster and faster, until she was trembling uncontrollably as though she were standing naked on a glacier, her whole body shaking as her flesh tried desperately to stay warm against the freezing elements.
“Faster!” Hrist cried.
“Faster!” Kara ordered.
Wren bore down on her chest, tightening her muscles, making herself smaller so her shivering ghost could spin ever faster. And suddenly the trembling stopped and she felt strangely warm. She knew, dimly, that her ghost was whirling within her body, spinning like a top, but spinning so fast that she could barely feel it anymore.
Wren opened her eyes.
At first, all she could see was white. Then she blinked and saw that the white was moving, flying, whirling past her face, whirling around her body. She turned her head and saw through the tiny wispy gaps in the white wall to the faces of the men and women standing around her, sta
ring in at her in fear.
I did it.
She looked up and saw that the column of aether reached all the way up to the distant ceiling.
I really did it!
“Now use it!” Kara grumbled.
Wren rose to her feet, careful to keep her hands close to avoid touching the aether storm.
“Everyone get back!” She yelled through the white wall. “Everyone get down on the floor!”
She squinted through the whipping clouds, but couldn’t tell if anyone had heard her.
“Get down now!” she screamed.
Wren raised her arms over her head, letting the bracelets fall to her elbows. She could still feel her soul revolving within her flesh, spinning like the stars in the night sky, flying like the leaves on an autumn wind. She brought her hands together, feeling the humming vibrations in her ring and in her bracelets, and slowly she brought her hands down in front of her as she pulled the aether out of the storm cloud, drawing it in tighter and tighter into a ball of freezing white mist rolling between her hands.
As she pulled the aether down to her, the wall of the storm grew thinner, revealing a room full of people lying flat on the floor with their hands over their heads, and a few young men in the distance on their knees, still shooting at the dark figures out beyond the torches.
Wren inhaled and in one final gesture she pulled all of the aether into the whirling sphere of storm clouds trapped between her palms. Now she could see everything. The terrified people, the broken furniture, the guttering torches, and the sea of rotting faces clambering over the fallen dead to reach the huddled survivors.
Wren turned her hands so that one was below the storm-sphere and the other was above it, and with a silent prayer she ripped her hands away from each other. The aether exploded outward in a flat arc, tearing across the entire room like a pair of enormous white bullwhips snapping through the darkness. And everywhere that the aether whips struck a cold body, a soul would fly free up into the air as the corpses toppled over to the floor.
In an instant every dead body in the entire chamber was lying on the ground and a thousand pale faces and figures hovered in the air looking lost and frightened and sad, but also relieved and grateful. They looked down at her, a multitude of fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, farmers and soldiers and sailors and fishers, and the ghosts smiled gently as one by one they faded away into the darkness.
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