But he couldn’t think about where Soren was, not when spore-driven revenants lurched through the starfire burning across the garden pathways, becoming nothing but dangerous ash the wind caught and carried, drifting over the crowd.
No one was equipped with gas masks, but many placed the sleeves of their robes over their noses and mouths as they desperately tried to enter the palace.Praetorialegionnaires corralled as many guests as they could and directed them inside, trying to keep people from being trampled. Javier and a dedicated group stayed by Vanya’s side as he kept the curved wall of starfire burning between the revenants and his people.
But the revenants had been his people once before, long ago.
Embalmed and buried for decades, centuries, even thousands of years—the royal dead of Solaria filled the snaking crypt beneath the palace, and now they’d crawled out of their prisons to walk the world again. Spore-driven, fast in the way of the long dead, the revenants would not be stopped.
“We need to barricade the palace,” Vanya said, arms outstretched before him, fingers curled as if he could grasp the starfire he wielded from a distance.
“We’ll secure the doors and windows once you’re inside, Your Imperial Majesty,” Javier snapped.
Vanya let himself be led backward to the palace entrance, unwilling to fully spread the starfire out until he knew the last of the Houses were safely inside. He didn’t know if anyone else was trapped in the gardens and couldn’t risk setting fire to it all. When he made it to the palace doors, he drew down the starfire until he could see beyond it, and what he could make out in the half circle he’d burned around the area made him go cold.
Dozens of revenants surged their way. Some were little more than dried, cracked skin over bone, while others could have been recognizable in the oil paintings lining the palace hallways.
He wondered if his parents were in that horde.
If his brother was.
Some part of him knew they must be.
Javier yanked on his shoulder, hauling him through the doorway. “Get inside, Your Imperial Majesty!”
Vanya let the starfire die out, but not before some revenants lurched past the burning line of defense, flames licking up their dry, dry bodies. They staggered forward as pillars of fire, unbothered by what consumed them, driven in pursuit of the living by the spores that never let the dead rest.
The doors slammed shut. Apraetorialegionnaire locked it with only seconds to spare before the sound of bodies hitting it from the other side made the doors rattle on their hinges. Vanya looked to the side at the glass windows, staring at the revenants beyond the flimsy defense.
The Imperial palace didn’t have the metal shutters and defensive attributes found in way stations throughout Solaria or any of the other pockets of civilization where walls were foregone. Calhames had walls. It was supposed to be safe behind them.
Only it wasn’t.
Perhaps it never had been.
The window on the left shattered when a revenant head-butted it and crawled through, glass shards sticking out from its skull. Vanya wanted to throw starfire at the damned thing, but he risked weakening the palace’s walls if he did so.
Javier grabbed his wrist and dragged him away from the door and farther down the hallway to get beyond a rank ofpraetorialegionnaires. The men and women behind them took aim and fired, targeting the dead, for what little good their bullets would do against things that wouldn’t ever stay down, not without a warden’s intervention.
“We need to get you to the family wing,” Javier said.
Vanya nodded jerkily, starfire sparking at his fingertips. Raiah would be there, he knew. He’d sent Alida on ahead, and he knew his majordomo would keep his daughter safe. They just needed to find a route through the maze of a palace the walking dead were hunting in.
He just needed Soren and the warden’s skill with eradicating the dead.
Seven
SOREN
The sound of something clawing at the coffin made Soren’s jaw twitch, teeth tingling.
He swam toward consciousness by sheer will alone, forcing himself to ignore the hideous throbbing in his skull. He opened his eyes, darkness greeting him in the tomb he was trapped in. He turned his head to the side, the motion sending sharp agony spiking down his neck and jaw, pulsating behind both eyes.
He squeezed his eyes shut, able to feel the world spinning in his gut. Soren swallowed bile, breathing slow and deep to keep the nausea at bay. When he managed to pry his eyes open again, he found the thin sliver of space between the lid and coffin edges that let in cold crypt air was blocked in places where bony fingers had shoved their way through.
Revenants.
His fingers twitched automatically for weapons he no longer had. Soren drew in a shaky breath, pressing his palms against the side of the coffin. He slid them up slowly to the lid covering him, knowing that it wouldn’t move. The Blades had welded it shut, intent on hiding him away until whatever horror came to pass aboveground.
Vanya, Soren thought bleakly.Raiah.
