Alie had never been this far into Dellaire. The southern Wards were a little larger than the northern ones, and this district was right at the edge, putting it nearly as far from the Citadel as you could get without leaving the city. She knew this was where Lore had lived before being caught by the Presque Mort; she supposed she understood the appeal.
This building was one of the outer entrances to the catacombs, according to Lilia. The house looked like it was barely holding together, like a stiff breeze might knock it over. Alie wasn’t quite brave enough to venture in on her own, on the off chance the whole thing might collapse.
At least, not until she saw the bloodcoats.
They came around the corner of the street, torches outheld, the flames reflecting off the polished ends of bayonets. Patrols out here near the city limits were common, but Alie assumed she’d missed them, not thinking they would be so close to sunrise. Apparently, she was wrong, and she desperately didn’t want them to see her.
She wore a cloak; she could just cower on the stoop, hope they mistook her for a beggar woman. But Alie had seen how bloodcoats treated beggar women. Best not to chance it.
With a curse in her teeth, she slipped into the house.
It didn’t immediately crumble, so that was something. Alie pressed her back against one of the graffiti-covered walls, eyes canted sideways to watch the bloodcoats pass. They were loud, shouting to one another, obnoxious and vulgar and some clearly drunk. She wrinkled her nose. Dellaire’s finest.
“Don’t be afraid to show yourselves, whores!” one of them yelled. “Apolliusloveswhores! The gods are on your side!”
“Apollius said you should give us a discount!” another roared, and all of them laughed, sharp and brassy in the predawn.
Alie deeply hoped every working girl in the district was safe in their beds by this hour.
“You’re one of them.”
The voice was close, right in front of her. Alie swallowed a scream.
In the hallway before the door, stretched out on the floor and half hidden in shadow, was a revenant.
She’d heard of them. She was even sure that some of the courtiers would qualify, had they been born into different circumstances, with less money and less access to things that could hide their diminishment. More than one noble family had a relative who’d taken too much poison secreted in a faraway estate, haunting the halls as their mind wasted away just as their body had.
But she’d never seen one up close. Not one this far gone.
Poison had ravaged out all markers of sex or gender. The revenant looked like an animated skeleton more than anything, the sharp jut of bones hidden beneath a shapeless gray cloak. Their eyes were sunken pits, glittering at her in the dark.
“A breeze where she was a storm,” the revenant said, with a dry chuckle like the rub of withered stalks. “The cloud to her coffin. All of them have awoken, then. I remember seeing her here, in this house. I remember sensing what she would become. Walk this close to death, and you recognize its queen.” The revenantstirred, the sound of dry leaves in wind. “She met destiny that day. Thick as syrup in the air. A fate you could breathe in.”
“Lore?” Alie asked quietly. “You’ve seen Lore?” Maybe her friend was more resourceful than she’d given her credit for. Maybe she’d somehow found a way off the Burnt Isles, away from the Golden Mount, back here to the city—
“Long ago,” the revenant said. “Before she knew what would become of you all.” The revenant sighed. “Being like this—thrown somewhere outside of mortality—makes time meld together. It’s a shore, you see, and I linger at its edge.”
“How does it end, then?” Alie whispered.
Another dry laugh. “It’s a river, not an ocean,” the revenant said. “There are many streams, many tributaries, and it flows ever on. The future is always changing. You could save the world or damn it, little breeze, and no one will know until the damning or the saving comes.”
A rustle at the door. Lilia stepped over the threshold, covered in a dark cloak. She pulled back her hood and furrowed her brow. “Were you talking to someone?”
The revenant had turned their pale face back toward the wall, back into shadow. The low light made them invisible, one more forgotten thing in this falling-apart house, lingering between life and death.
“No,” Alie said. “Let’s move.”
Lilia didn’t look like she believed her, but there was no time to waste with interrogation. With a nod, Lore’s mother started down the hall, picking her way over piles of trash and dust from the crumbling walls. At the hallway’s end was a gaping hole, leading into nothing but darkness. Someone had painted a face on the wall next to it withX’s over the eyes.
“Is that a direction or a warning?” Alie asked.
“A bit of both.” Lilia stopped at the lip of the hole. “Most people want to avoid the catacombs, but some—poison runners,mostly—use them to move undetected through the city. The rule that Presque Mort aren’t allowed to enter without priestly dispensation comes in handy.”
Alie had known that Lore’s familiarity with the catacombs went deeper than being born there, even before she’d become Nyxara’s avatar. It seemed she’d never managed to escape them.
Cool air blew from the hole, a dank scent of rock and deep places. The catacombs were safe now, no chance of leaking Mortem, but Alie still wasn’t excited by the prospect of traipsing through them.
Lilia said nothing. Just gave her an arch look and disappeared into the hole.