And he wasfurious, his teeth bared as he made Gabe turnaround, shoving his face so close that his mouth nearly collided with his cheekbone. He’d punched him, once, broken his nose all over the wallpaper and then healed it just as fast. It looked like he wanted to do it again.
“You are not going up there alone.” Every word punctuated by a shake, their chests pressed together like they had been this morning in that tiny bunk, a different kind of passion. “You don’t know what you’ll find, what you’ll have to do, and you will not do it alone.”
On the beach behind him, the ships were close enough to the shore for sailors to start jumping down, making their way to the island. What they’d taken as the sounds of fighting among three armies was instead those three armies taking on a common enemy—the dead were still rising, the dead were still coming, the dead were here.
Still, this was a safer place than the Fount would be.
They stood in the cover of burnt trees. The dead seemed only interested in the sailors, in keeping those on the beach from coming any farther onto the shore.
Bastian would be safe here, in the remains of the forest.
Gabe knew just where to press on a neck to steal away consciousness. Even now, with so much magic and so many voices tangling through him, he remembered being a Presque Mort. So he reached up, as if he would embrace this man he loved. And he did, for a moment, kissing him like he’d never get the chance to again, because there was just no way to know. Bastian kissed him back the same, their mouths opening like they could swallow the other down and keep them safe that way.
When Gabe stepped out of Bastian’s arms, they were limp. He caught his King, gently lowered him to the ground, hidden in the dry remains of underbrush.
Finally, Hestraon said as Gabe made his way up the Mount.I’ve waited for this for so long.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
ALIE
In every trial, You are with us. You are as inescapable as the sun.
—The Book of Prayer, Tract 54
She had no weapon. Not that it would help her much if she did; Alie didn’t know how to use a dagger or a pistol, had never been taught the finer points of self-defense. And now she didn’t even have her magic. Had that been a mistake? She couldn’t decide if she thought so or not. It felt both awful and necessary, a decision that wasn’t really a decision at all.
The ships were in the shallows; sailors stumbled into the water, fighting off the attacking dead. Alie wondered if they’d come to the same conclusions about who the winged being in the sky was, if they thought that reaching the shadows of those wings would somehow save them.
She envied anyone whose thinking could remain that simple.
“Here.” Val, always ready for a fight, had already turned toward the water in a half crouch, waiting for the first onslaught to hit the shore. She took a knife from her boot and tossed it to Alie, who nearly sliced her hand open trying to catch the hilt instead of theblade. “Looks like a gun won’t do you much good against living corpses.”
“Not unless you have lots of bullets and very, very good aim.” Mari pulled her own pistol from her belt, running her hands briefly over the fully stocked bandolier she wore on one shoulder.
“We should follow Gabe.” Even though she knew that would be no safer. Alie looked up again, at Apollius in the sky. At least, she thought it was Apollius, didn’t know how it could be anyone else. But there was a familiarity about the form she could see so clearly outlined in all that harsh light, a softness that didn’t seem like the god…
Lilia, next to her with her own dagger in her fist, also stared up at the winged creature. “We should,” she said quietly.
But at the moment Alie turned to run toward the forest, to hide from the horror on the ocean, something grabbed her ankle.
A corpse, bloated and rotting, seeping dirty water out of every orifice to stain the white sand. Its mouth hung open, a yawning void of stinking black dropped all the way to its chest, chin resting on exposed ribs. The hand gripping her ankle was the only one it had, the other arm ending at the elbow, dripping fluid.
Her vision went white with terror. Alie didn’t know whether any of the screams she heard were her own, though she tried; her voice seemed unable to free itself from her throat as she stabbed wildly at the undead thing’s fingers, horrifically strong, nicking her own skin in her desperation so that fresh blood mixed with fetid salt water. Alie didn’t feel it, driven only by the instinct to go get away escaperun.
The instinct was so strong that it took her a moment to realize the corpse wasn’t trying to hurt her. Just stop her.
The corpse that had tried to climb up onto the ship had been silent, and she’d heard nothing but screams through the soundscreen of her winds as Jax’s ship flew through the tangle of fleets to get to the Mount. But now, closer, the dead body was speaking.Not speaking, no—whispering, sound leaking from it as surely as water and rot, though the stretched-open mouth didn’t move.
“Keep away.” The words were stilted, as if the beginnings and endings had been shaved down, even this uncanny speech too much for a long-dead, unmoving tongue. “Keep away.”
And every corpse, all of them littering the shoreline and climbing over the railings of the ships, whispered the same thing. It was a low susurrus beneath the clamor of fighting, not so much a sound as a drumbeat in her ears, barely heard but undeniably there.
With another plunge of Val’s knife, Alie managed to finally sever the thing’s wrist. The fingers still wrapped her ankle, but the rest of the corpse fell away, flailing in the surf as she scrambled up the beach, ripping at her skin in her desperation to get the gripping fingers off her. They let go, finally, leaving brackish prints. The hand convulsed on the white sand, still grasping at empty air.
The horrible strength of the dead things was evident all around her. While Alie was trying to free herself from one raised corpse, sailors had stumbled up onto the beach, bringing the hordes of dead with them. A Kirythean soldier fell to his knees only a yard away, hacking at a corpse clinging to his back as if in a macabre wrestling match. The soldier bled profusely from his shoulder, his laurel-embroidered tunic clotted with red. Desperately, he pulled a pistol from his waist, barely bothered to aim. He hit the reanimated corpse, but he also hit the Auverrani sailor behind him, trying desperately to run for the burnt forest. The Auverrani soldier went down; the corpse did not. Alie could see the horizon line through the hole in its head.
Another soldier, in Caldienan emerald, flailed in the shallows, trying to scream and swallowing mouthfuls of sea. He choked, but it was due more to the corpse squeezing rotting hands around his neck than to drowning. Another corpse held his legs, tugging him back into the surf anytime he almost clawed his way to shore.
