The creature comes apart.
Bodies collapse separately this time. Limbs fall. Gold goes dull.
The glow drains from their eyes.
Beyond the breach, I hear the faint splash of coins striking water.
And for a heartbeat, the sea answers with a roar.
“I’m Brek,” he says, looking out the hole. “You threw them away.” Brek stares at me, chest heaving. “The cursed gold—you just?—”
“If I need them, I’ll get them back.” The words are steadier than I feel. “After we survive the night.”
He doesn’t get a chance to respond. More drowned are coming, climbing through the new gap the lieutenant made, and we’re back to fighting for every inch of ground.
NINE
ZORIC
The sea gate holds only for so long.
Aviora has disappeared toward the Eastern Wall.
I count the time by heartbeats and blade strokes, by the rhythm of combat that’s become as natural as breathing. The drowned pour against the iron chains in waves—pale bodies climbing over pale bodies, their luminous hands finding purchase on metal that should be too slick to grip. My blade takes heads, severs limbs, sends them tumbling back into the churning water. But they keep coming. They keep coming.
“Hold the line!” My voice carries over the chaos, rough with exertion. “Don’t let them breach!”
Thorne fights at my left, her blade moving with the precision of twenty years’ experience. On my right, two younger guards whose names I should remember but can’t—not now, not in the middle of this. Their faces blur into masks of fear and determination, lit blue by the ward fires blazing along the harbor walls.
A wraith lunges through the gap between defenders. I catch it with a backhand slash, feel my blade bite through rotting flesh and spine, and the thing drops. Another takes its placeimmediately—a woman this time, or what used to be a woman, her face preserved in an expression of endless want.
I don’t let myself think about who she was. Can’t afford to. Every corpse in Oreth’s army was a person once. A sailor, a merchant, a passenger on a ship that trusted the wrong waters. Thinking about that would paralyze me, and paralysis means death.
So I fight. Cut. Kill. Move to the next.
The chains groan.
I feel it before I hear it—a vibration running through the stone platform beneath my feet, a wrongness in the metal that’s held for centuries. The drowned aren’t just climbing the chains anymore. They’re pulling. Dozens of frigid hands working in concert, their unnatural strength focused on the weakest link.
“Fall back!” I grab Thorne’s arm, yank her toward the passage leading up to the keep. “The chains are going!”
We run. Behind us, the screech of failing metal drowns out everything else. I don’t look back—can’t look back—but I hear it: the crash of iron hitting water, the surge of bodies pouring through the gap, the triumphant shrieking of things that haven’t known victory in years of probing attacks.
The sea gate has fallen. Dreadhaven’s harbor belongs to the dead.
We retreat in stages, just as we planned. The corridors narrow as we climb, funneling the enemy into kill zones where three defenders can hold against thirty. Ward fires blaze at every choke point—blue flames that make the drowned scream and recoil, buying us precious seconds to fall back farther.
But seconds aren’t enough. The dead don’t tire. Don’t hesitate. Don’t feel the wounds that would drop a living fighter. They push through the pain of ward-fire, sacrificing their front ranks so the ones behind can advance.
“Captain!” A guard stumbles past me, blood streaming from a wound on his scalp. “The east tower! They’re coming up through the caves!”
My blood goes cold.
The sea caves. I sealed those passages years ago—collapsed the main entrances, blocked the secondary routes with rubble and ward-carved stone. But Oreth was there when we mapped them. He knows every tunnel, every passage, every way into Dreadhaven’s foundations.
Years are plenty of time to find another way in.
“Fall back to the Great Hall!” I shout the order even as I’m running toward the east tower. “Everyone, now! Seal the lower passages!”
